We seem nearly incapable these days of addressing any aspect of nutrition without a bizarre excess of passion and nearly religious zeal. The result, inevitably, is a great deal more heat than light, with far more overcooked than ever actually understood. Meat is no exception. It, too, is on the spit — in this bonfire of competing claims and contrary vanities.
Many of my friends and colleagues are vegans for very good reasons. But they will at times go beyond those very good reasons and assert categorically that meat is toxic.
The defensibility of that contention depends, of course, on the meat. Perhaps they mean the modern meats that prevail, from mass-produced patties to assembly line lunchmeats. If so, their assertion is valid. Processed meat has been robustly, if not definitively, associated with adverse health outcomes.
But such meats as those are nearly as far from the versions truly native to the Homo sapien experience as is diet soda. If the assertion is meant to pertain to antelope or venison, or wild salmon, it is almost certainly wrong.
Why? Because there is nothing intrinsically toxic about any given potential food. What determines toxicity is not so much the food, as the feeder — or better yet, the interaction between the two, and the environmental context. Eucalyptus leaves are considerably toxic to cats, dogs and horses — yet clearly rather the contrary for koala bears. If fish accumulate toxins because we have adulterated our oceans, the fault lies not with the fish, but our environmental abuses. Toxicity is defined by adaptation and physiology. Famously, one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and that much more for comparisons across species.
Exactly the same is true of essential nutrients or foods. The limits of biological adaptation, and any given species’ expression of them, define what is essential. Universal assertions about “necessary” sustenance suffer the same liabilities as such declarations about toxicity.
The ardent advocates of our Stone Age hunting, or at least the modern mythology built around it, often go so far as to contend that eating meat is essential for optimal health. One argument is that meat eating was a factor in the marked increase in the size of our brains, and is now vital to feed those large brains. Another argument is that meat and its high-quality protein are essential to optimize the form and function of our own muscles. Both arguments are more prevalent and prominent since the meme that eating more meat (and butter and cheese) took hold of the ever fickle, popular imagination.
Both contentions are, in a word, baloney. Just consider gorillas, who build their massive muscle from a diet that is 97 percent vegetarian, the small remainder coming from termites and caterpillars. Or for that matter, consider a horse, such as the magnificent American Pharoah: a mountain of sleek muscle built entirely from plants. Meat is not required to build muscle. Rather, animal muscle can be built from any fuel that kind of animal is adapted to burn.
As for brains, there are predatory animals with far smaller brains (or, more importantly, brain size to body size ratio, which is the defining metric of species intelligence) than ours, and others with large brains; and the same is true of plant-eaters. The animals with intelligence most approximating our own are vegetarians, or nearly so.
The argument that our big brains arose in the context of eating meat and therefore we must eat meat now is no more valid than the argument that our big brains arose in the context of dodging large predators and hitting rival clan members over the head with cudgels — so we should release lions, and tigers, and bears into every suburb, and hit one another over the head routinely. Environmental associations do not cause-and-effect requirement make.
We are neither carnivores nor herbivores. We are constitutional omnivores, with clear evidence in our physiology of specific adaptations to both plant and animal foods. That means meat is neither essential to us, nor intrinsically toxic to us, and that its place in our diet is a matter of choice. That choice would be far better served by data than diatribe; by thoughtful reflection, rather than throwing gasoline on the fire.
Meat is not intrinsically toxic to our natively omnivorous species. Claims that it is are at odds with the elegant logic of evolution by natural selection; the two are unavoidably in conflict. But even so, we may reasonably decide that any dietary choice that places on the menu the perpetration of cruelty upon our fellow species- is toxic. We may reasonably decide that any dietary choice unsustainable by more than 7 billion Homo sapiens is now, in that context, toxic. We may reasonably conclude that accelerating the depletion of aquifers is toxic. These ancillary considerations about meat are worth chewing.
Meat is not essential for Homo sapiens either. There are vegans among the world’s most elite athletes. There are vegetarians among the world’s great intellectuals. There are entire populations raised on plant-based diets who are as strong and smart as the rest of us, and decisively healthier. But the most ardent vegetarians might constructively concede that we have no true evidence that an optimal diet of only plants (e.g., vegan) is better for human health than an optimal diet of mostly plants (e.g., Mediterranean).
As for me, I practice just what I preach — and I preach a temperate gospel. I am neither a rancher, nor a member of PETA. I have no diet, cows nor cauliflower to sell.
What makes meat essential, or toxic, is not the popular palate, a prevailing meme, wishful thinking, revisionist history or ideology. What makes anything essential or vital in any biological system is physiology.
We Homo sapiens are neither constitutionally carnivorous, like cheetahs; nor constitutionally herbivorous, like the impalas they pursue. We are constitutionally omnivorous, and that means we have choices to make. We have ample information and robust reasons to make sensible choices — based on our own health; the treatment of our fellow species; the sustainability of resources; and the fate of our planet.
We may, however, be too busy propagating myths in accord with our preconceived wishes, and overcooking everything in that bonfire of contrary vanities — to see much of anything through the smoke.
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Myths About Meat originally appeared on usnews.com
