Why we should all be vegetarians
Dear Friend,
As you know I neither endorse nor denigrate the vegetarian diet.
There are a lot of people who do very well on it and many who do it for at least some parts of their lives and claim they feel a lot better.
There is also a lot of talk about longevity and vegetarian diets as well.
A recent article on the consumption of red meat and breast cancer caught my eye the other day and started me thinking, reading and searching for the truth.
In the past I had pretty much used the Gandhi vs. Lalanne argument to sum up my feelings.
Was their new evidence that proved me wrong?
The reason I wanted to tell you about the breast cancer / red meat association is because I am pretty sure it will be messed up in the lay press so here it is:
1) Hormone receptor positive Breast Cancer is on the rise in premenopausal women in America.
No one is sure why.
2) The highest amount of consumption of red meat was associated with an increase in hormone receptor positive breast cancer in premenopausal women in this country, BUT…
…did not increase the chances of hormone negative breast cancer or the total numbers of breast cancer in these women.
So please understand that eating lots of red meat does not increase your chances of getting breast cancer overall, just a particular form of cancer and your overall odds are the same for getting cancer no matter how much red meat you eat.
Put another way, if you see a headline that says eating red meat increases breast cancer, the people who wrote it are either lying to get you to read the article and scare you, or don't know what they are talking about.
I say this because of the infamous "Fish oil not good for your heart?" headlines.
3) The risk of premenopausal breast cancer in women (and breast cancer in men under 45 as andropause is also a risk for male breast cancer) is tiny compared to the risk of breast cancer after menopause and postmenopausal breast cancer incidence is more closely correlated to low Omega 3 fatty acid intake than to red meat consumption in population based studies.
In other words women get most of their breast cancer after menopause.
3) If you look at countries that do not allow bovine growth hormone injections, you do not see the increase in cancers,
4) If you look at the ratio of good to bad fat (good fat specifically being fish derived, by the way) in countries with low breast cancer rates, they eat a lot of fish oils!
5) I suspect Trans and saturated fats derived from feeding beef, corn and other grain based commercial feeds are the cause of the problem along with other environmental factors like pollution, stress, sleep deprivation and of course low fish oil intakes.
The use of Growth Hormone could also be a factor as the amounts used are not subject to regulation like they are in people.
In other words when I treat someone for a low growth hormone I am not trying to make their levels 4x normal where as a beef farmer will use far more than a normal level of hormone to get more beef from his herd if that is what it takes.
The health of the animal is secondary to the yield and we are not going for longevity here.
6) For this reason all the beef I consume is free-range, grass fed, organic whenever possible. I think if this were the case for most Americans we'd have a lot less disease overall.
|
