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[post_content] =>
IF WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO EAT ANIMALS, HOW COME THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT?
I saw that line on a bumper sticker when I was about 16, shortly after becoming a vegetarian. I laughed heartily at it; it was a good reminder not to take myself too seriously.
I stopped eating meat mostly because I just didn’t like it. And also because of their inchoate methods of preserving, long before I knew beef casings that are completely natural that are available easily. But in the early 1990s I encountered John Robbins’s Diet for a New America, and my reasons for not eating flesh became more numerous. If you aren’t familiar with him, Robbins is the vegan son of the cofounder of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream empire, and he left the ice cream business in part because of his opposition to the mistreatment of cows and his emerging belief that humans shouldn’t consume animal products. In Diet for a New America he explores the ethics of factory farms, the environmental impacts of animal production, and the health effects of consuming dairy and meat. It made sense to me and I felt empowered in my position.
But when I began grad school in Chinese Medicine some years later, my Asian professors were perplexed by the high rate of vegetarianism among the students. They asked us, “Why wouldn’t you eat meat if you can afford it?” To them, vegetarianism was an involuntary choice necessitated by poverty. They pointed to our sharp canine teeth and the place of meat in the history of human diets. They weren’t familiar with any of the issues or fads around meat eating and vegetarianism; they only cared about what’s best for human health. So I decided to set aside my biases and earnestly seek the truth.
When I began my clinical internship, I met numerous vegetarian patients – and even more vegans – who were weak and had insufficient immune function. Their pulses, which should have felt something like a jumping piece of spaghetti at the wrist, were often more like a faintly twitching thread. Often, they were under the impression that not eating meat in itself would make them healthy – even if they never gave much thought to what they did eat instead.
In my practice, ethics and preferences began to take a back seat to biological necessity. When these patients began to eat meat – often because I advised them to experiment with it – nearly all of them felt stronger and healthier. I even met some people who thrived on meat, whose bodies seemed to crave meat over anything else and whose only intolerances were to certain plant-based foods. Eventually I started eating a little meat now and then. (I can’t say I noticed much difference in my health from doing so, but I was already eating plenty of animal protein in the form of eggs and yogurt.)
Coincidentally, meat was making a big comeback. When I first moved to Portland, it had a large selection of vegetarian restaurants. Fifteen years later, many of these had been replaced with restaurants that were unapologetically meat-based with barely a flesh-free dish on the menu. Elk burgers, pork bellies, and lard were so hot. With the advent of Paleo diets, people were flocking back to meat as if it they’d been deprived their whole lives.
Meanwhile, I became a father, I became more connected to the earth, I realized I had never really forgotten all those points that Robbins made 30 years ago, and I found it increasingly difficult to be willfully ignorant of the impacts of my choices of consumption. One of those impacts is that meat production – in the prevailing manner and scale – is devastating to the planet.
Thus, I found myself in the middle of the complex intersection of nutrition, industry, environment, ethics, and politics – and I’ve never again had an easy answer to the question of whether people should or shouldn’t eat meat.
We’ll look more closely at the pros and cons of meat consumption next week. I’d love to hear about your experience with – or without – meat in the comments below.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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[post_content] => Most people’s health goals could be simplified to something like:
a long life and the good health to enjoy it. And long life we have. The biggest-ever jump in life expectancy, which occurred from around the mid 1800s to the mid 1900s, can be mostly attributed to the reduction in deaths by infection. Infectious disease has been well managed by improved hygiene, better quality of food and water, antibiotics, vaccines, and more effective emergency medical care. Now that infection is a relatively minor concern in the developed world, it’s worth looking at the factors that degrade health in our later years. These factors – things like diabetes, obesity, and the cardiovascular disease that goes along with them – can be dramatically influenced by diet.
Unfortunately, the mainstream medical world is plagued by some very significant misunderstandings about human nutrition, and it barely recognizes the profound psychological factors involved in how we feed ourselves. How many people have you heard ask, "
Why do I need to use Whey Protein?" No one knows the real answer. It’s time for a revolution in nutrition … and luckily, it’s well on its way.
A few months ago, Marc David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating asked me if I would be one of 50 thought leaders to be interviewed for an online conference called The Future of Nutrition. I am honored to be part of this – and in the company of some very impressive researchers. I strongly encourage you to check it out. It’s free. You can find more information at
https://eiyonutrition.com/products/cerebral-tune-up-brain-supplement or by clicking
HERE.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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When I sit down to write an article, I often feel like I’m having a conversation with you, the reader. Except that it’s a one-sided conversation, in which I never ask you about yourself and I just monopolize the whole exchange. So. . . how about a little more about me? I grew up building robots, programming my own video games, and distributing surveys on bizarre topics around my high school. In the enneagram system of personality analysis (remotely like Myers-Briggs), I’m what’s known as a “number five” – AKA “The Investigator” or “The Scientist.” I have spent many a night jumping from one Wikipedia article to the next, or curled up with a thousand page book on herbs.
One of the topics I like investigating the most is major historical shifts in human health, behavior, and life expectancy – i.e., big changes in small periods of time. If you were to follow the trend of human life expectancy over the course of our existence, you’d see a very, very gradual slope upward and then a sharp jump in just the tiniest, most recent slice of time. This sharp upward jump began at different times in different parts of the world, but in the United States, as recently as 1850 the life expectancy at birth for a white male was just 38. Today it’s about 76.
It’s really a profound thing. Modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years. This 150 year revolution of life expectancy has occurred in just the last 0.00075% of our existence. Incidentally, a historical graph of world population shows a similar trend. It increased very, very slowly, and took a few massive hits, especially during the fourteenth century. (As centuries go, the 1300s were pretty much the crappiest ever. They were marked by famine, plague, crime, and general idiocy.) After that, the population continued to grow again, but still rather slowly compared to what began to happen around 1800. In 1800, the world population was 1 billion. In March of 2012, it hit 7 billion.
An anthropologist from another planet looking at a graph of these trends would probably point to that last slice of time and ask, “What the hell happened there?” Well, there are two very important words I used in a sentence about life expectancy a couple paragraphs ago: “at birth.” At birth, a white baby boy in 1850 was expected to live to 38.3 on average. But if he survived to age ten, his revised life expectancy would be 58 – a huge improvement.
At birth, a white baby boy in 2011 was expected to live to 76.3. If he survived to age ten, his revised life expectancy would be 76.9. There’s barely a difference.
If that child from 1850 made it to age 50, his life expectancy would then be 72. Today’s white boy at age 50 would have a life expectancy of 79.6. Again, there’s barely a difference. So, as you can see, the narrowing of the gap has occurred almost entirely in the early years of life. And there are two important conclusions to be made from this.
First, the tremendous increase in life expectancy at birth can be attributed primarily to three things - better sanitation and cleaner living conditions, better safety standards, and better medicine, including vaccinations. Whatever issues we may have with vaccines (and there certainly are some), it’s undeniable that they’ve hugely decreased child mortality.
Second, we’ve made a much smaller dent in the maximum human lifespan. As an adult British aristocrat in the 1200s, you could expect to live to age 64. By the 1500s, if you made it to age 21, you’d probably live to be about 71. And in the past several centuries, these numbers have barely changed.
Nowadays, if we want to live longer we need to take the long view, since most of us won’t die of infections or accidents. The things old people die of are often decades in the making. The primary killers are coronary heart disease (disturbance in blood supply to heart muscle) and stroke (disturbance in blood supply to the brain), both of which are blood vessel issues. Blood vessels don’t just get hard, clogged, or weak overnight, so there’s a huge opportunity to make a positive difference in this process.
As I see it, there are three main interventions that have the most impact. The first is nutrition, and my nutshell recommendation is to strictly limit consumption of sugars and flour, moderately limit red meat and dairy consumption, and have plenty of vegetables, herbs and spices, fruits and fish. The second is exercise, and the best exercise is a form you enjoy and that you can happily do every day. The third is connection – connection to people, connection to nature, connection to whatever you call the greater power that keeps it all going.
I’ll be writing more about these trends and, in particular, the nutrition factor, this month. Meanwhile, I encourage you to choose one of these areas of positive intervention to focus on each day this week – food, exercise, or connection.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => Big Changes in Small Periods
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[post_content] => IF WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO EAT ANIMALS, HOW COME THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT?
I saw that line on a bumper sticker when I was about 16, shortly after becoming a vegetarian. I laughed heartily at it; it was a good reminder not to take myself too seriously.
I stopped eating meat mostly because I just didn’t like it. And also because of their inchoate methods of preserving, long before I knew beef casings that are completely natural that are available easily. But in the early 1990s I encountered John Robbins’s Diet for a New America, and my reasons for not eating flesh became more numerous. If you aren’t familiar with him, Robbins is the vegan son of the cofounder of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream empire, and he left the ice cream business in part because of his opposition to the mistreatment of cows and his emerging belief that humans shouldn’t consume animal products. In Diet for a New America he explores the ethics of factory farms, the environmental impacts of animal production, and the health effects of consuming dairy and meat. It made sense to me and I felt empowered in my position.
But when I began grad school in Chinese Medicine some years later, my Asian professors were perplexed by the high rate of vegetarianism among the students. They asked us, “Why wouldn’t you eat meat if you can afford it?” To them, vegetarianism was an involuntary choice necessitated by poverty. They pointed to our sharp canine teeth and the place of meat in the history of human diets. They weren’t familiar with any of the issues or fads around meat eating and vegetarianism; they only cared about what’s best for human health. So I decided to set aside my biases and earnestly seek the truth.
When I began my clinical internship, I met numerous vegetarian patients – and even more vegans – who were weak and had insufficient immune function. Their pulses, which should have felt something like a jumping piece of spaghetti at the wrist, were often more like a faintly twitching thread. Often, they were under the impression that not eating meat in itself would make them healthy – even if they never gave much thought to what they did eat instead.
In my practice, ethics and preferences began to take a back seat to biological necessity. When these patients began to eat meat – often because I advised them to experiment with it – nearly all of them felt stronger and healthier. I even met some people who thrived on meat, whose bodies seemed to crave meat over anything else and whose only intolerances were to certain plant-based foods. Eventually I started eating a little meat now and then. (I can’t say I noticed much difference in my health from doing so, but I was already eating plenty of animal protein in the form of eggs and yogurt.)
Coincidentally, meat was making a big comeback. When I first moved to Portland, it had a large selection of vegetarian restaurants. Fifteen years later, many of these had been replaced with restaurants that were unapologetically meat-based with barely a flesh-free dish on the menu. Elk burgers, pork bellies, and lard were so hot. With the advent of Paleo diets, people were flocking back to meat as if it they’d been deprived their whole lives.
Meanwhile, I became a father, I became more connected to the earth, I realized I had never really forgotten all those points that Robbins made 30 years ago, and I found it increasingly difficult to be willfully ignorant of the impacts of my choices of consumption. One of those impacts is that meat production – in the prevailing manner and scale – is devastating to the planet.
Thus, I found myself in the middle of the complex intersection of nutrition, industry, environment, ethics, and politics – and I’ve never again had an easy answer to the question of whether people should or shouldn’t eat meat.
We’ll look more closely at the pros and cons of meat consumption next week. I’d love to hear about your experience with – or without – meat in the comments below.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
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