‘Man is an omnivore, best adapted to fat and protein. Just as man’s basic mental drives which determine much of his behaviour have not changed in millions of years…so his physical adaptation to his food has remained unchanged and there is ample evidence to show that he can avoid obesity and keep his nervous system intact by sticking to the food which helped to determine the change from ape to intelligent man: fat meat.’

Born in 1916 in India, Mackarness interestingly began his career as an artist training under Mervyn Peake at Westminster Art School. After moving on to study at the Westminster School of Medicine, he served as an army medical officer and then took various hospital posts. General practice followed, with Mackarness moving into hospital psychiatry in 1965 and later setting up an allergy clinic to treat mental illness. Richard Mackarness died in 1996 and you can read an obituary for him here.

Eat and Grow Slim

His first book Eat Fat and Grow Slim (1958) was a best seller and advocated a high fat, low carbohydrate diet based upon pre-cereal, hunter gatherer diets which is described as the ‘Stone Age Diet’. Dr Mackarness discusses the history of high fat, low carbohydrate diets including the story of William Banting (I first read about Mr Banting in Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes). He also looks at the work of his (then) contemporary physicians such as Professor Kekwick and Dr G.L.S. Pawan at the Middlesex Hospital in London. Their research studied Banting’s diet and concluded that reduction of carbohydrate rather than fat was the key to treating obesity (their work was also an influence on Dr Atkins).

Dr Mackarness disputes the calorie hypothesis with some wonderful arguments. He stresses the importance of eating food that we have evolved to eat over millions of years, with an emphasis on fat and meat together with a reduction in carbohydrates.

The work of several pioneering physicians who warned against the excessive consumption of carbohydrates is discussed (some of whom were also mentioned by Gary Taubes in GCBC). These physicians linked a high carbohydrate, low fat diet to many diseases – diseases that we are still struggling with in the 21^st Century.

Interestingly, Dr Mackarness recounts an interview with Dr Blake Donaldson, a Scottish cardiologist who moved to New York in the 1920s and who treated 17,000 people over 40 years. In 1919, faced with a growing number of patients suffering from heart disease and other assorted ailments Dr Donaldson went to the American Museum of Natural History and studied the teeth of ancient skulls. He was particularly fascinated with their apparent lack of caries and the excellent condition of their teeth:

‘Donaldson thought that the cells of which we are made might have common nutritional needs. The same food that keeps teeth healthy might prevent cataracts from developing in the eyes, and might also be good for the cells involved in the mysterious diseases like duodenal ulcer, migraine, high blood pressure and obesity…’

Dr Donaldson went on to treat many patients using a diet based around pre-agricultural foods and Dr Mackarness interviewed him in 1964:

‘Dr D: ‘I now have a group of about 1500 patients over the age of 75, who from five to forty years have avoided flour and have kept primitive food as their basic way of maintaining health.

Dr M: This is what I call a Stone Age diet. Would you agree with that description? It is a pre-cereal diet.

Dr D: Well, I should say that it is perhaps 6000 years old and twenty years ahead of its time. I think this will be a popular idea in twenty years; that flour is a bad thing for about 80% of the population.’

Dr Donaldson wrote Strong Medicine in 1963 and I would be very interested to read it.

Another notable pioneer that Dr Mackarness discusses is the cardiologist Dr Alfred Pennington. Dr Pennington placed executives of the US Chemical company Du Pont on a diet that eliminated starch and sugar and increased fats and protein, with excellent results. The work of Dr Wolfgang Lutz, author of Life without Bread is also mentioned and Dr Mackarness quotes the following observation from Dr Lutz:

‘I arrived at the conclusion that only by returning to the nutritional habits of our ancestors would people be able to overcome the diseases of civilization.’

Towards the end of the book, Mackarness makes the following very interesting observations on why the medical industry continues to promote a low fat, high carbohydrate diet in the treatment of disease.

1. ‘the medical education is still, in spite of attempted reforms, among the most authoritarian and hierarchical in the world, partly because of the mass of facts that have to be crammed into the unfortunate medical student’s head in a short space of time.’

2. ‘…because of the ladder structure of advancement in hospital medicine, the junior who questions the dogmas of his teachers and seniors is branded as a trouble-maker and his progress to consultant status made that much more difficult.’

3. ‘Textbooks take a long time to write and publish, and bringing them up to date is a formidable task.’

4. ‘Finally, more perhaps than people in any other profession, doctors are conventional and hate changing their ideas. Also, in common with the rest of humanity, they are lazy and nothing is such hard work as constructive thinking. But to be fair, there are shining examples to this rule and it has been my good fortune to know and work with some of them. It is really the middle-echelon consultants who are stuffy. The real big boys are not.’

I wonder if this still holds true today? Why is it that the work of Dr Mackarness and others like him has seemingly no influence on mainstream dietary advice? Why is the myth that saturated fat causes heart disease still pushed by many nutritionists and doctors?

Not All in the Mind

The second book that Dr Mackarness wrote Not All in the Mind followed 17 years after Eat Fat, Grow Slim. It proposes a connection between diet and mental illness due to allergic reactions to certain foods. Again, Dr Mackarness advocated a return to the foods that we have evolved to eat – the Stone Age diet – as a way of treating many of the neurological problems presented in the modern world.

He asks:

‘If wrong food can make people fat and rot their teeth, why should it not, in some susceptible people, injure their brains as well and make them appear mad?’

Dr Mackarness was particularly influenced by the work of Dr Theron Randolph, a Chicago physician who pioneered the study of allergies and is considered as the godfather of environmental medicine, as well as Dr Albert Rowe of San Francisco, who created the concept of the elimination diet in the 1920’s.

In Not All in the Mind we learn about some of the patients that Mackarness has successfully treated by removing certain foods from their diet. The case of Joanna, a 27 year old woman who had tried to slash her wrists and was subsequently been treated with ECT is particularly striking. She is placed on an elimination diet with dramatic results and is able to live a normal life at last. The foods that she particularly reacted to were bacon, egg, porridge, veal, tongue and instant coffee.

We also hear of ‘Mrs A’ whose story Dr Mackarness reported in his article ‘Stone-Age Diet for Functional Disorders’ in Medical World July 1959*. Displaying an array of symptoms and after undergoing many tests including barium follow-throughs and x-rays (rather like myself!) she approached the doctor for help. Upon testing, Dr Mackarness found that cereal foods caused the most extreme reaction and after removing these from her diet, Mrs A was able to live a symptom-free life. Dr Mackarness notes that it is not always the foods themselves that cause trouble, but their chemical contaminants such as monosodium glutamate.

What is particularly interesting is the way in which Dr Mackarness talks of adaptation, evolution and stress. Here are some fantastic quotes:

‘It is a rule of ecology that living creatures show better adaptation to those things to which they have been exposed the longest: it is very much rarer to find a patient disabled by eating meat or by normal exposure to sunlight (I am not talking about sunburn), than it is to find one made ill be eating wheat or inhaling the petro-chemicals in the air on a street full of heavy motor traffic.’

‘Man’s diet has evolved over millions of years, from the monkey-type vegetarian diet of the forest-dwelling gatherers to a carnivorous one. Meat has been man’s main food for over nine-tenths of the time since he learned to walk upright and use his hands as tools. Starches and sugars as a basis for nutrition are a very recent introduction: they have been part of our diet for 10,000 years at most, as against 2-3 million years on meat, fat and protein.’

‘The primitive hunter in pursuit of food uses exactly the same nerve signals as the NASA scientist programming the computers which guide a landing on the moon. The difference is only in complexity. In both cases the work is done by the same sort of nervous system built of the same basic materials, chiefly animal fats. No nervous system has ever been built of starch and sugar and to base a diet on carbohydrates, as millions do today, is to invite the problems of inadequately constructed and malfunctioning brain and nerves.’

Adaptation in relation to the rate of change is clearly a concern:

‘The adaptation of a species can fail in two different ways: the organism may not be able to reproduce quickly enough to evolve in the face of new stress; or it may be subjected to unrelieved exposure to too much stress over too long a period’

This theory of stress was heavily influenced by Professor Hans Selye who defined stress as ‘the struggle to adapt to a noxious agent’. Read more about professor Selye here. Stress was not just a mental manifestation but a wider disease defined as ‘the rate at which wear and tear is induced in the body by the process of living.’ Certain foods are one of the many potential stressors and the struggle of the body to adapt to these causes an array of symptoms, of which psychological factors may be only a part of the whole story.

The stress response is divided into distinct stages; that of alarm, apparent adaptation, exhaustion and death. Dr Mackarness notes that patients do not contact their doctor until entering into the stage of exhaustion and herein lies the problem. This leads to diagnosing the symptoms as the cause for the illness (as in the case of the patient Joanna) rather than dealing with the exhaustion brought about by constant exposure to allergic foods.

In relation to the concept of adaptation, I was reminded of ‘Adaptation to the conditions of existence‘ a very interesting paper posted recently by Robb Wolf. The author, F.A.J. Muskiet states:

‘Many, if not all typically ‘Western diseases’ derive from cultural trends that have changed our environment and by which we have voluntarily pushed the conditions of existence beyond our evolutionary-established flexibility to adapt’

Dr Mackarness develops the theory of a ‘masked’ (delayed or chronic) allergy as put forward by Dr Herbert Rinkel. The victim actually feels better after exposure to the allergen and consequently continues to – in the case of food – ingest the offending substance on a regular basis (perhaps with every meal) over many years, believing it to be beneficial. Symptoms of any allergic reaction are reduced or eradicated to such an extent that the person never suspects that the allergy exists until they reach a stage of exhaustion.

Dr Theron Randolph was influenced by both Selye and Rinkel and adapted Seyle’s three stages to the problem of addiction. This included food addiction, such as carbohydrates. The victim resorts to increasing amounts of the offending substance in order to remain ‘normal’ before eventually succumbing to exhaustion.

Believing that allergy (after infection), is the number one cause of illness in Western society, Dr Mackarness quotes Sir James Mackenzie in his call for the ‘simplification of medicine.’ He admits that he does not know why the allergic ‘target organ’ is ‘in the gut in one patient and the nervous system in another’, but current research into the human biome would suggest that there is a direct relationship between the two and that problems in the nervous system may have direct causation in the gut. This reminded me of the extremely interesting passage in The Wahls Protocol by Dr Terry Wahls, in which she discusses the possibility that there may be a single underlying cause to many of the diseases we face in the 21^st Century. Currently, we treat the myriad of symptoms classified as separate diseases but not this primary cause. She states: ‘In a very real sense, we all have the same disease…’

The work of Dr F. Curtis Dohan of Pennsylvannia University and his research into the possible causes of schizophrenia is also discussed by Dr Mackarness. You can read more about Dr Dohan’s work here.

Towards the end of the book, Dr Mackarness gives a warning:

‘We are not infinitely adaptable animals, and there is mounting evidence that many of us have already adapted as much as we can to today’s increasingly sophisticated and chemically contaminated diet. It is time to call a halt to this appallingly risky experiment in human nutrition and to look again at the relationship between the food we eat and the changing pattern of disease in industrialized countries.’

He notes with amazement that everything that he has talked about in his book has been written in medical books and journals dating back to the 1920s, yet only a handful of doctors have used these methods. Reading this book 38 years later, (and 56 years on from the first edition of Eat Fat, Grow Slim) I wonder if anything has changed much. Are we finally recognising the critical importance of food (and gut health) in dealing with a myriad of conditions, including neurological diseases? Is nutrition given the status it deserves in medical education? Have we realised that returning to eating the real food that has sustained us for the majority of the time on this planet will not cause diseases such as cancer and atherosclerosis? Are we closer to successfully preventing the diseases of Western civilization, rather than treating symptoms? These are all questions that Dr Mackarness may have pondered decades ago and still we go round and around in circles. If we were losing the ability to adapt in the era of Dr Mackarness, what is happening now? In 2014, his books are a wonder to read but did his call for action fall on deaf ears? Let’s hope not.

‘Time is running out for us; a complete reappraisal of environmental and dietary politics in Europe and Americais literally a matter of life and death, and long overdue.’

*I have tried to locate the article by Dr Mackarness entitled ‘Stone-Age Diet for Functional Disorders’ but cannot get access to it. If anyone has a copy – do let me know.

Should I Eat Meat? How to Feed the Planet

The second of the Horizon series presented by Dr Michael Mosley on meat-eating proved to be much more interesting than the first – see my review of Epidode 1 here. This programme asked ‘Is there a way to eat meat without destroying the planet?’ A loaded question if ever there was one. Let’s get to the arguments…

Dr M began by talking about statistics on UK meat consumption and then confusingly swapped to talk about worldwide consumption (a habit that continued throughout the programme). Globally, humans ‘consume nearly twice as much meat as they did 50 years ago’. Worldwide we eat 60b chicken, 3.5b ducks and turkeys, 1.4b pigs, 1b sheep and goats, 300m cattle, 5m horses and 2m camels. The average Briton eats 80kg of meat per year (which works out to roughly 219g per day or ½ pound). You can see how this compares to other countries here (statistics updated 2012). The UK is 22 in the table.

Dr M admits that the amount of earth’s resources dedicated to raising these animals is ‘difficult to measure.’ According to the report from United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (see here) 26% of the earth’s surface is given over to grazing animals. Of the 11% arable land on the earth’s surface, a third goes to feeding animals (3.7%). Dr M concluded that a third of the entire land mass of the earth is given over to animals that we eat or milk. I have to say here that for many people in different parts of the world, the land is shared with the animals that they raise. Herding animals from one area to another does not always mean ‘giving over the land’ to livestock and preventing other uses. As Dr M stated, it must be very difficult to determine these figures. Beginning your argument by depending on figures that are ‘difficult to measure’ is not ideal, but on we go.

Methane

Dr M explained that the US eats more meat than any other country (this is in total; according to the table linked to above, per capita the US is behind Denmark). We learn that cows eat 50kg of grass a day that is converted into 1kg of muscle. Dr M strolls around with a methane detector and we learn that one cow is ‘the equivalent of a family car in terms of the effect on global warming’. This statement needs careful unpicking and I have to say that I will need more than Dr M and his methane detector to convince me of this.

But Dr M wonders if we could reduce the amount of methane the cow produces. He visits the University of Nebraska to see a cannulated cow. Observing how the cow digests grass may help scientists to address the ‘problem’ of methane. There is an embarrassingly pointless clip in which Dr M inserts his hand into the cannula. We learn that microbes in the cow’s rumen digest the cellulose in hay and convert it to nutritious, energy-dense molecules that the cow absorbs. Some microbes actually bypass the rumen and end up in the small intestine where they are digested as microbial cell proteins. That is why the cow has no protein requirement – because the proteins are actually provided by the microbes. This is amazing to hear and Dr M states that this is a ‘brilliant adaptation’. However, he then goes on to suggest that by changing foods that the cow eats (and thus the microbes) we can reduce methane. Feeding the cattle corn and other carbohydrates in concentrated animal feeding operations may be the answer. In one fell swoop we have moved from the wonder that is the cows digestive system, evolving to make super-efficient use of the grass that it eats (and producing the gift of manure to enrich the soil and feed other animals in the food chain), to tampering with that same digestive system in order to affect microbes and thus methane production. This doesn’t bode well.

Feedlots

Dr M visits a huge, incredibly depressing Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) feedlot in Texas. He notes that ‘this could put you off eating beef altogether’, as if there is no alternative to such systems. The cattle that are fed corn and other carbs fatten up in fewer days than if fed on grass and so have the following advantages:

• For the farmer, it gets the cow to market quicker thus translating to a bigger profit
• From an ‘ecological’ viewpoint, the life cycle of the cow is reduced thus reducing methane emissions.

Therefore, so the argument goes, cattle fed via this system are ‘greener’. Dr M states that this ‘seems to be the very antithesis of ecological farming.’ He adds that he has no idea how to tell if a cow is happy but observes that they don’t seem any less happy than the cows he has seen in a field (is this for real?).

We hear that 40% of corn grown in the US is fed to livestock (do watch the wonderful King Corn film). The cattle are fed corn flakes to fatten them up (‘much like we eat’ Dr M observes) and also food containing by-products of High Fructose Corn Syrup and by-products of the Ethanol Industry. As well as this concoction, Dr M notes that there is one thing that worries him: growth hormones and antibiotics. He notes that this is: ‘the one thing that has disturbed me’. Really?! Only that one thing? The rest of it hardly seems ideal. We learn that the feedlot is not designed to be ‘eco-friendly’ but that economic efficiency can equate to ‘environmental efficiency’ as cows fed this way produce 40% less emissions per kilo of meat than grass fed cows.

Chickens, fish and artificial meat

Dr M explains there may be no right answer to what is the greenest system. He talks about overgrazing in parts of Africa and the problems in South America where rainforests are being ploughed up to grow soya. If you eat chicken or pork, the chances are it has been fed soya.

We look at the comparisons between different animals and how much food they need to convert to meat. As chickens’ ‘carbon footprint’ is about a quarter of that of cattle, it’s looking like chickens are the winners in all this (so just forget about those rainforests for a minute).

Dr M then visits a huge chicken farm in which the birds are reared in large numbers (5-6 million birds per year) in sheds. He is incredibly upbeat about this in comparison to the intensive cattle feeding operation and talks about them being ‘remarkably well-cared for’. A Life Cycle Assessment (used to assess environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a product/animal life) concludes that chickens raised intensively are the ‘greenest form of meat.’ What the hell does that really mean?

Dr M suggests that we should look to mussel farming as part of the solution. In many parts of the world fish farming is not without its problems (see for instance Richard Manning’s brilliant Against the Grain pp. 116-119, this article by Mark Sisson, this article in the NY Times). We are back to the problem of crowding, unnatural food sources, infectious disease, chemicals, and environmental destruction. As with all farming methods, we need to seek out and support those producers that are raising their fish in a responsible and sustainable way.

Artificial meat grown in the laboratory may also be the answer according to the expert from Compassion in World Farming. Words fail me on this one but Dr M notes that the ‘alternatives’ to artificial meat are ‘apocalyptic’.

Small-scale farming and less meat eating

Lastly, Dr M visited Simon Fairley, author of Meat: A Benign Extravagance, farmer, previously Co-Editor of The Ecologist magazine and now Editor of Land magazine. At last the subject of manure was mentioned and the possibility of integrating livestock into a more holistic agriculture system, using traditional farming methods. Simon explained how ruminants convert grass, leaves etc. into a range of useful products such as wool, leather, dairy, meat, and most importantly fertility for the land via manure.  Simon explained that 85% of what goes into a cow is turned into manure and this enriches the soil: ‘the best way of using grass is via ruminants.’ When raised in small numbers, Simon believes they can be beneficial to humans and to the environment.

We move on to the subject of pigs and their ability to feed on our scraps and waste. In view of the amount of food we throw away each year, pigs would seem an excellent way of providing meat. Suddenly we jump to a warning about the risks of swill not being adequately treated and the causes of the Foot and Mouth outbreak in which a farmer was found guilty of feeding his pigs untreated waste (see here) – cue foreboding music and depressing clips. How did we leap from a very positive view of small-scale pig farming to this? Pig farming is not mentioned again – that seems to have wrapped it up.

Simon draws a hockey-stick graph to illustrate that there is a critical point of meat and dairy consumption, beyond which we need to feed animals grains, acquire more land, use chemical fertilizers and more water. Dr M tells us that it is difficult to come up with figures for this critical point but economists have tried to work it out:

• Cattle and sheep fed only on grass: 40m tons per year
• Pigs and chickens fed only on food waste : 110m tons per year
• Animals fed on other by-products: 40m tons per year

This works out at 40kg which translates to around 100g per day for each person on the planet. Therefore everyone on the planet should cut their meat consumption to 100g per day.

We finish with Prof Tim Benton from the UK Global Food Security Programme telling us to eat less meat (favouring grass-fed meat and then eating chicken for most of the time) and Dr Tara Garnett from Food Climate Research Network at University of Oxford  telling us to ‘explore plant-based substitutes.’

Closing recommendations

Dr M leaves us with the reminder that intensive farming ‘can be the best option when it comes to minimizing greenhouse gas emissions’ and that intensively farmed chickens are probably the best choice. No mention again of their soya feed or the problem of the rainforests being ripped up to grow it; that all seems to be forgotten about.

Although Dr M explains that it is ‘impossible to give a completely accurate figure of how much meat we should eat’, that’s not going to stop him and again we are urged to eat 100g per day. I remembered last week’s programme where Dr M stated that ‘The average meat consumption in the UK is 70 grams of red and processed meat a day, with a quarter of men eating 130 grams.’ That doesn’t include chicken or any other poultry. If the average Briton eats 219g per day then I assume the extra 149g is chicken and other white meats.

Some thoughts…

The conclusions of this programme obviously chime completely with the health findings of the first programme. What a coincidence and I can see why they were aired in that order. The entire premise of this programme depended on the assumption that eating red meat and offal (beef, pork and lamb) is bad for our health and should be limited (conveniently ‘proved’ in last week’s programme). If eating red meat can be extremely beneficial to our health and provides a myriad of nutrients that are hard to find elsewhere, then being asked to cut back on it just wouldn’t work. Asking us to reduce our consumption of something so beneficial just wouldn’t make sense. Hence we had last week’s protracted and desperate argument to show us that eating less red meat and more vegetables will make us healthier.

What do we actually eat?

I was still left confused about how much meat we really eat in the UK and how this is broken down into carcass meat, processed meat, and meat-derived products.

According to the Office for National Statistics, in 1974 people in the UK bought 393g of carcass meat per person per week + 630g of non-carcass meat (sausages, bacon, other meat products) per person per week, giving a total of 1023g per person per week. Fast forward to 2012 (latest figures) and the average per person per week bought 196g of carcass meat and 793g of non-carcass meat giving a total of 989g per person per week. That is a modest reduction overall but definitely a move away from traditional carcass meat. I assume that the rise in meat consumption that Dr M talks about must be due to eating outside the home (in addition to expenditure on groceries). I contacted the ONS (Office of National Statistics) and they only have data going covering 2001-2012 showing expenditure on hotels and restaurants which has declined in that period from £47.30 to £40.50 per week for the average household. Obviously it is impossible to calculate how much of this spending is strictly on food and further still on meat or meat products alone.

What we can ascertain is that people have sadly moved away from traditional cuts of meat towards meat ‘products’. In many of these products, we have no knowledge how that meat has been raised, what it has been fed, where it has come from etc., so unless we do, cutting those back certainly seems like a good idea. What we need is a return to buying carcass meat and offal more often from livestock raised responsibly. No unnatural feeding, no pitiful conditions, no overcrowding into huge sheds.

Additional problems

1. There was no mention in this programme of holistic farming methods such as those practised by the Savory Institute on both a small and large-scale. What about the beneficial effects on the soil using such methods such as increased carbon storage and increased biodiversity? There was no discussion about how we can make more efficient use of the land that we farm.  Read my notes on the Savory Institute conference here.

2. How much does the methane produced by cattle change the climate of the earth? There are conflicting opinions and figures about a) the importance of methane in changing the climate and b) the amount of methane produced over time c) the amount of methane produced by other activities.

‘Methane is a red herring regarding our changing climate’ – Richard Teague, Texas A&M at the Savory Institute Conference 2014.

There are around 88 million cattle in the US at present. Just how many ruminants wandered the Great Plains hundreds of years ago (at least)? In the case of just bison alone:

‘Just two centuries ago, between 30 and 60 million bison roamed the continent’s grassy, shrubby plains and prairies, and their range extended from Mexico to central Canada’  – Wildlife Conservation Society.

I think that the methane argument is far from settled.

3. How can we conduct LCA (Life Cycle Assessments) on livestock without taking into account their place within a holistic framework?

‘Any LCA (life-cycle assessment) that does not include top soil is not an LCA’  – Richard Teague, Texas A&M

4. The devastation caused to the land by growing mono-crops that require the obliteration of the soil and the creatures that live on it was completely ignored by this programme. See Against the Grain by Richard Manning and The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith for more on this.

‘Down below the ripening ears, on the bare earth, no bugs or insects are visible among the forest of stems. Nothing lives here; the pesticides have seen to that. Those that don’t kill the insect predators directly destroy the smaller invertebrates on which they feed. They also wipe out the fungal life on which the smaller creatures feed in their turn. The end result is the same; a barren earth.’ – Graeme Harvey: The Killing of the Countryside.

In addition to this, how does the growth of these mono-crops affect the carbon stored in the soil?

‘In Iowa, for every 1lb corn grown there is a soil loss of 1lb’  – Peter Byck, Producer of Carbon Nation.

5. The population will continue to grow based on current projections. Therefore following the argument put forward in this programme, the logical conclusion is that we will need to give up meat eating altogether. It would be helpful to have also had a discussion on the amount of land mass needed to farm mono crops for this future population growth, and the ensuing damage to the environment that this may cause.

6. One of the most important factors in choosing grass-fed meat is the health benefits. Increased Omega 3s, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), Vitamin E and other vitamins & minerals, all of which decline as animals are fed on grain – even for as little as 3 months. See this excellent article at Eat Wild.  I will be writing more about grass fed meat shortly. These health benefits are not limited to ruminants: see also the slides from Daphne Miller’s presentation at the Savory Institute Conference 2014 here that illustrate the nutrient benefits of pasture raised eggs and also the conditions that can qualify for the ‘free range’ label.

Making things simpler

It seems we have lots of confusing terms here. We have to take a step back here for a minute and question what we really mean by ‘green’, ‘ecologically-friendly’, ‘environmental efficiency’ and all those other words that get used in the debate about what is good for our planet. Ruminants evolved to eat grass. We have evolved to eat a mixture of (naturally-fed) meat, fish, fats, vegetables, roots and tubers and some fruit (with a few geographical variations). A penguin has evolved to eat fish. A lion has evolved to eat meat. Why mess with it? Haven’t we realised by now that messing with things like this usually end up in disaster? If we looked at what is really good for us as human beings on the most basic level – eating nutrient-dense food, interacting with nature, caring for our environment, sleeping well, forming social bonds, moving and playing, reducing pollution and waste – many of those things are also good for the planet. I don’t believe that we can extricate ourselves out of the equation. Generally, if we follow what is good for the planet, it is usually good for us.

Finally, in the context of this website, raising a cow to eat is obviously something our Paleolithic ancestors did not do. We are no longer hunters and gatherers, but the best we can do is to raise the food that we eat as naturally as possible. Attempting to change a cow’s digestive processes by feeding it alien foods and forcing it to spend the end of its life in a feedlot is not conducive to this. Such drastic deviations have knock-on effects to our health. We cannot escape the consequences of our actions. Raising animals for food in a responsible way connects us to our environment, to a respect for the earth that we live on, to a respect for the animals we eat and ultimately to a respect for ourselves through the nutrients we feed our bodies. Eating meat is not the problem.