Posted by Diane on May 13, 1998 at 13:22:29:
In Reply to: Deadly Feasts, or why I am a vegetarian now posted by Carlos on May 11, 1998 at 13:30:14:
I can only claim to be semi-vegetarian for about a year now because I do fall off the wagon. (Can't seem to be fanatical about anything these days.) John Robbins (as in his family owns Baskin & Robbins) wrote a book called Diet for a New America that received a lot of publicity in the 80s that was, granted, a bit sensationalistic but I believe true. Think that's where 60 Minutes and other shows got the idea to expose conditions of chicken factories/farms, for example.
Even if you don't give a damn about chickens being jam-packed in these cages (or cows stuck in a standing position, unable to turn around or move (less marbling in the meat if they exercise), there are serious health implications for all of us due to the practice, in that these animals are diseased and then shot full of antibiotics and hormones we all ingest. The practice is only from about the 60s, I think, so we're just now getting to an era where it's possible to get the historical perspective of possible effects on humans. Early puberty (due to growth hormones in meat) is one effect that a friend's pediatrician mentioned. (I think Robbins' book was too early to cover prions, but I've read about it elsewhere. We ate a lot of imported beef in Russia '95-'97, and on a trip to England during that time. Most of it was from Scandinavia, but...it's easy to scare yourself! Like AIDs, it can take years to show up.)
Dr. McDougall, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be a vegetarian activist type so much as someone who came to it purely for health reasons. He cites studies that show vegetarian athletes have better endurance. He also cites a study from WWII Denmark, where heart disease dropped dramatically while they had a severe meat shortage and then rose again after the war. It just makes a lot of sense healthwise.
One unimportant bit of trivia. The activists try to appeal to your vanity, too. They say meat eaters smell. One book mentioned how in the Korean War the N. Koreans said they could smell our soldiers coming.
I'm taking a big chance of getting intellectually thrashed here, but I'd like your and rpcman's opinion since you've obviously read a lot about evolution. A lot of vegetarians claim that humans don't have the digestive system (too long) or teeth that a carnivore does, and that humans probably only started eating meat due to scarcity of food in the last ice age. Of course, since we're actually omnivorous, I guess you have to have a digestive system capable of handling both...(just musing out loud here). ???
If you believe the activists, the thread about the overpopulation on the RfM BB is another reason vegetarianism makes sense for the future. Saw something on TV about how, for ex., pig farms contaminate water. (These factory farms generate huge amounts of waste that create large cess pools or run into rivers. They also say it makes more sense for us to eat the grains that we're plumping up the animals with.
One last thought, if you're serious about avoiding beef and your family is picky about typical rice and bean-based meals, Yves (out of Vancouver, but I get it here in Texas) has a fake ground beef (precooked and crumbled) that my children love in spaghetti sauce, lasagne (tried veg. lasagne, but they're hooked on "meat"), Shepherd's pie, or whatever. We actually ate a lot more chicken before, but these faux beef products make a quick veg. dinner easy. Just a thought--your kids are older than mine. My kids even like the baked vegetarian "chicken" nuggets just as much the real thing (Morningstar Farms), and they're so much lower in fat.
: I acquired and read Deadly Feasts by Richard Rhodes this weekend. I had previously read Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth About a Food Chain Gone Haywire, by Nicols Fox. Between the two books, I think I have now sworn off meat (at least beef) for good.
: Deadly Feasts recounts the search for the cause of diseases which at first were believed to be unrelated, and then turned out to be virtually the same. "Kuru", a disease of New Guinea cannibals discovered in the 1950's, "scrapie" a disease of sheep (mainly in England), and Cruetzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD) a disease of humans discovered in Germany all are apparently caused by prions (pronounced "pree-ons"), which are rogue proteins that replicate without DNA or RNA. It is hypothesized that they replicate through a crystallization process. In any case, the class of diseases caused by prions are Transmissable Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSE's), and they are uniformly fatal to whatever species they infect.
: BSE (aka mad cow disease) was almost certainly caused by feeding cattle the ground up bones of scrapie-infected sheep. There are documented cases of CJD among very young people in England, which were almost certainly caused by eating BSE-infected beef. There is no cure, no treatment - the disease turns brains into mush (hence "spongiform"), and victims gradually lose physical control and mental faculties until they die.
: I recommend both books highly, but only if you have a strong stomache!