The Harmful Myth: Meat Isn’t Necessary for Optimal Health

Pork bacon for breakfast, turkey sandwich for mid-day meal and chicken roast for supper are few of the most favored meals of America where a protein of meat is an inalienable component of everyday food intake.

 The motivation of people especially the America has been manipulated and forced to think that they should consume the products derived from animals such as meat in order to be strong and healthy. This belief was programmed in the minds of most Americans the moment they were born. The food industry has actively promoted these products through advertisements which said, “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner,” and “Milk. It does a body good. ” An article in the Nourish by WebMD extols the health benefits of chicken and chicken has been featured in all the food guides produced by the United States Department of Agriculture since 1940s. People in America were somehow convinced that if they omit these products of the so-called ‘westernized diet,’ they would turn into lifeless anemic wretched souls.

 To be more precise, not only do people do not need meat in their diets to be healthy but consuming it may indeed be dangerous. Think of how it is associated with cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and certain types of cancer. Or the millions of individuals who get food borne diseases such as listeriosis, E. coli and salmonella infections, which are largely as a result of consuming contaminated meats. It was the case for more than 2. Antibiotic-resistant infections that are an unwanted consequence of the wide use of antibiotics among factory-farmed animals affects 8 million Americans who contract them.

 As more data from the World Economic Forum noted, Americans consume more meat per capita than people of any other country based on the data of OECD FAO Agricultural Outlook 2017/2016 but it wasn’t complementary to the health of the American society. Obesity and diabetes rated very high while cancer rates are among the highest among the American population.

Regrettably however the ideas that we cannot survive without meat and that our meat is above reproach have been further reinforced during the current COVID-19 pandemic. During the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States in 2020, meat processing companies successfully influenced the U. S. government to declare that meatpacking and processing plants workers were ‘‘employees with essential jobs’ ’ In the midst of the increasing infections and deaths in meatpacking plants during the peak of the pandemic in the United States in 2020, the federal government insisted that the slaughtering facilities had to remain open, and small businesses A single Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls was found to have been responsible for 1,294 cases of coronavirus in the company and the community, and four deaths in the company in the early months of last year as reported by National Hog Farmer. In Louisa County of Iowa where a Tyson plant is situated, among the residents who took the Covid-19 test, 1,301 out of 11,223 people tested positive for the disease by July 2021.

 In fact, the excessive consumption of huge amounts of meat is one of the trends that directly threaten the existence of humanity. In our mad dash to curtail the virus and develop vaccines at warp speeds, we’ve overlooked—perhaps intentionally—one foundational, inconvenient fact: COVID-19 as we know it originated at the live animal market in Wuhan China is but the latest in the series of pandemics that are caused by our continued proclivity for meat consumption:

  • Measles which caused millions of deaths, measles according to the world health organization before the introduction of measles vaccine in 1963 is thought to have evolved from a virus in Cattle and then transferred to human beings through domestication.
  •  H1N1 is a subtype of swine flu that is a result of amalgamation of virus from three species: pigs, birds and humans and came into existence when bird flu virus infected the pigs under farm. Such severities were the so-called Asian flu which was in circulation during the year 1957-1958 and the Hong-Kong flu 1968 which led to 1 to 4 million human deaths. Unfortunately the 2009 H1N1 swine flu virus outbreak resulted in almost 300000 fatalities.
  •  Accidently in 1989 a new virus, HIV, which is the virus causing AIDS, was isolated from a chimpanzee in West Africa; it is believed to have crossed species when people hunted, butchered, and ate HIV-positive chimpanzees. AIDS alone has taken over 32 million lives so far, says WHO.
  •  Then in 1998 the Nipah virus crossed transmission from fruit bats to humans through intensively raised pigs in Malaysia with human case-fatality ratio of more than 50%.
  •  Ebola virus that has killed over 11, 000 human beings in west Africa from 2014 to 2015 has been linked to fruit bats and primates that are slaughtered for food.
  •  SARS, a mutation from civet cats, through bats, which came from a wildlife market in Guangdong, China attacked over 8,000 people, claiming 774 lives, and costing the world economy an estimated $40 billion in that year 2003 alone. This used to be big thinking; COVID-19 may cost the global economy between $5. 8 trillion and $8 trillion. Eight trillion US dollars, so it states the Asian Development Bank.

 To summarize, almost all epidermis and pandemics on the history of the human civilization are animal borne and transmitted to people due to the core need for meat by people.

But with the increase in industrial farms that stuff tens of thousands of chickens in a single shed, things have been made worse. “If you actually want to create global pandemics, then build factory farms,” says Dr. Michael Greger, in his book “Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching. ” The situation has reached extremes and the threat to human health is deemed so significant that in the spring of 2020, a group of doctors from Chicago demanded a “global moratorium on meat. ” It is thus difficult to fault them given the situation that is in front of us.

 While now, when considering what can be done to improve our quality of life in the future, it should be admitted with no irony or distortion of facts how much harm the consumption of meat has on our body and even our species as a whole. A plant-based diet – which is fortunately becoming increasingly popular today – can provide us with every nutrient we require, including protein, fat and calcium, and at the same time, has the added benefit of lowering the likelihood of cancer, heart disease and diabetes – three of the main fatal diseases in America, which have all been proven to be tied to meat consumption. If implemented across the world, it can even prevent the next pandemic from occurring.

 It is an actual myth that one needs meat and that it is fatally dangerous not to consume it. For a future that is healthier and even safer for all of us, perhaps it is high time that we eliminate chicken, beef, fish and other products of animal origin from our system.

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