Dr. Nancy Dunne
Naturopathic Physician
200 East Pine St. Missoula, MT 59802
406-728-8544

Naturopathic Physician Missoula Montana

Making the case for eating meat

Vegetarian diets are ultimately not an optimal choice

Many people are surprised to learn that I am not in favor of a vegetarian diet. There is an assumption that because I am a naturopathic physician, I am going to tell everyone to stop eating beef and learn to love tofu. Actually, I consider a life-long vegetarian diet to be inevitably nutritionally inadequate. I encourage daily consumption of clean, lean animal protein.

You can live on a vegetarian diet. You‘ll remain mostly upright, basically functioning, but eventually the vast majority of people will not be in optimal health on even a “perfect’ vegetarian diet. You will lack energy, feel sluggish, have hormonal derangements, foggy thinking, aches and pains, frequent infections that take forever to go away and you will be baffled, wondering why the heck you feel so lousy when you eat such a good, pure and politically correct diet!

Even more surprising, depending on how much of what you eat, and your exercise level, you may be astonished to find yourself overweight and threatened by diabetes and heart disease. Diets with not enough animal protein to balance the carbohydrate intake are responsible for setting in motion the development of what is called Metabolic Syndrome, a cascade of chemical events in the human system that begins in childhood and over decades eventually develops into diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Some cancers are also implicated. Along the way Metabolic Syndrome can show up in young women as irregular menses, infertility and polycystic ovary syndrome. Young men can have excessive acne and possibly mood disorders related to hormone imbalances.

It’s true that I encourage everyone to stop eating what is sometimes called “Mystery Meat”. Mystery meat is beef, pork, poultry, lamb, fish, whatever, that you do not know the origin of. A lot of us have eaten this stuff; depending on the recipe. School lunches, or hospital food, come to mind, but your own kitchen has almost certainly hosted Mystery Meat. At many restaurants, especially the drive-through kind, you may not even be sure if that is beef, pork or chicken on your plate, never mind where and how it was raised.

If you are lucky enough to be able to hunt and fish for your food, or share the bounty with someone who does, you can eat wild game animals. That’s some of the best food there is. Just as good, in part because you are supporting a vital way-of-life for small farmers, ranchers and fishers, is to buy locally raised, organic feed- or grass-fed animals or wild-caught fish that are hormone and antibiotic free.

Commercially raised feedlot cows and pigs, factory farmed poultry and farmed fish plied with Purina pellets and regular doses of antibiotics are not good food. The meat of commercially mass-produced animals is a significant source of profoundly polluting chemistry. The animal-food industry as now practiced is not good for anyone. It fills your body with harmful chemicals. It has altered the soil of the countryside in disastrous ways. It is destroying farming and fishing as a way of life for families. It is an obscene existence for the animals themselves and it provides only a tainted product of poor quality.

Why do we have to eat meat?

It’s true the meat industry puts out a product many people find themselves unable to stomach, and rightly so. However, not eating animals at all is not the solution. Humans are designed to function optimally with animal protein fluctuating between 20% and 60% of our daily calories. There is no magic, perfect numerical formula for the percentage of this or that that we all should strive steadily for in our diets. Food is the fuel for what you are doing. You’ve got your basic functions, breathing etc, and from there your actual metabolic needs are dictated by details of age, gender, musculature, immune- and other system requirements, genetics and how you are using yourself. The day you spend digging a 40-foot bed for your tomatoes is a day you’ll need more food than the day you spend sitting in a chair typing a term paper. For a young mother, chasing your 3 and 5 year-old while breastfeeding their baby sister takes a lot of fuel. Maybe as much as you needed when you were climbing rock walls or running marathons —and, you’ll need to tolerate carrying some extra fuel (also called fat), to boot, for as long as you are the nutritional transfer station for that bundle in your arms. All this is different again from what you’ll need to eat when you are sashaying to the stage to receive your Biker of the Year award for alternative commuting in the 70 years-and-older category.

The point is we all need fresh, whole, clean foods, including fats, protein and carbohydrate, in amounts that serve the demands of our day, demands which change, always, inevitably over time. And we cannot eliminate a whole category of basic nutritional elements- that which we receive from animal food- and be optimally healthy.

It’s important to keep in mind that the original design for the human system included surviving, even thriving on a somewhat unreliable food supply. Original humans had to have broad and eclectic tastes, to essentially be willing to eat anything and everything. We ate something because it was there, ripe in season or because someone risked his or her life to run it down, kill it and drag it back to share. The rule was, eat it now, whatever it is- bug larvae, fish eyes, a four-legged carcass stolen from under the noses of dozing hyenas, whatever! because it is not certain where the next meal will come from or when.

We pretty much eat that way now— that is, we eat what is there, now now now and what is usually in front of us is too much of something highly refined and full of toxic synthetic chemistry and especially carbohydrates we don’t need. We don’t need those carbs because we aren’t using them. Carbs are our muscles favorite right-now food. Also, our mouth and brain-pleasure-center’s favorite! Over 60% of Americans are over weight because we have a relentless supply of calories that we do not use up in abundant muscles that are regularly active. A vegetarian diet rich in complex carbohydrates and good quality fats is ok for some people, some of the time, in some very special cases. However, as a regular diet, as a commitment for life, a vegetarian diet will always lead to inevitable nutrient deficiencies. A person can get more than enough calories on a vegetarian diet in most of privileged society. But the lack of appropriate proteins, amino acids, fatty acids, the resulting acid/base imbalance in the gut and innumerable other more or less subtle but essential nutritionally based chemical cascades in the body will go awry.

What about plant proteins as complementary amino acids?

Protein is a big concept. Kind of like ‘love’ or ‘stress’, protein is a word that covers a lot of related but not equivalent items. The way you love your mother is not the way you love your girlfriend- or, if it is, you are in for some trouble on down the line. The stress of getting packed for a month in Thailand is different from the stress of divorce- and they are both big. There is chemistry in plants that is called protein, and indeed it is a kind of protein. But you only have to look at a chicken, and look at a soybean and you know the basic stuff they are made of is fundamentally different. The proteins in plants do not and will never do the same job for you that animal protein does.

Francis Moore-Lappe did a great job raising awareness of the fragility of our ecosystems, in her book Diet for a Small Planet, published some thirty years ago. Vegetarianism got a big boost thanks to her hypothesis about the amino acid combinations available in plant foods. With the science of the time, she described her idea of how the human digestive system breaks down and then recombines these amino acids into ‘whole’ proteins. She famously pointed out something like 50 people can live for a year the grain it takes to feed one cow, and reasonably asked wouldn’t it be better if we just all ate lotsa pasta.

It seems like a great idea, but there are a couple problems with Moore-Lappe’s hypothesis. The main problem is simply that the science of the time as she understood it was inadequate. There is more to what we get from meat than a jumble of simple, re-assignable amino acids. Plants simply do not hold, cannot provide, all of the necessary nutritional elements, including enzymes and fatty acids, in the combinations and proportions that animal food does.

We don’t have two stomachs, like cows, to digest grain into perfect food

The second, bigger, problem is that grain is not essential human food. Think about it. Agriculture is a human invention that is ten to twelve thousand years old. Humans were human for thousands of years before we invented farming. Original humans had no need for daily doses of grain. We did eat those few ripe seed heads we walked by in the late summer, when the grass was tall and bending with these plump, inviting nuggets. We plucked those and chewed a few and shared the rest around. This is a very different biochemical experience than toast for breakfast, bagel for lunch and spaghetti for dinner, decade after decade! We can eat grains, but we don’t have to, and the way we have come to eat them turns out to be not good for us. Not good at all.

Recently there has been a lot of research attention to the role of whole grains in the diet. Fresh, organically grown, unrefined grains like flax, brown rice, oats and even wheat can have a positive effect on cholesterol levels (by escorting it out of your body via your bowels) and thus heart disease. There is also a protective effect for the bowel; people who eat whole grains have less bowel cancer. This is great news and shows how grains might be useful in our diet.

However, these studies looked at whole grains, which is not what most people eat. Most people eat breads, cereals, crackers, cookies, pasta and the like made from refined flour products. Refined grains provide the food industry cheap, belly-filling, easy to ship and store material for value-added products. These are very profitable products as well. We have turned grains into amazing things- seitan, baguettes, cheez-doodles, ramen noodles and apple pie. Tell people oatmeal will bring down their cholesterol (it will, science proves it) and we’ll go out and buy it. We’ll buy individual servings, little packets of the add-water-and-stir, chocolate-chip-and-cinnamon version and wonder why we keep getting fatter, our cholesterol is still threatening and we feel like – cold oatmeal. These studies do not account for the fact that while the fiber in grains helps escort excess cholesterol out of the body, the starch in the grains actually increases how much cholesterol we make!. So, whole oats, with the bran still present, may bring your cholesterol down, but it wouldn’t have gone up as high in the first place it you were eating less starchy food! And it is adding calories we don’t burn up in muscles we don’t have.

We like cheap, we like easy and we may not be aware of the complex connection between those kinds of food choices and the inevitable health consequences.

How can grains be so bad?

Grains have become a problem because we eat too much of them, and we eat them too far altered from their natural state. The inevitable health consequences of a diet that is high in refined and chemically tainted grains are all around us. The consequences of 50 plus years of eating this way in America are skyrocketing numbers of people who are over-weight and suffering diabetes and heart disease. A case can be made for increased rates of certain cancers being related to over-exposure to the kind of environmental pollution we swallow when we eat the commercial food industry’s products. Polycystic ovary syndrome affects the fertility, the cardiovascular and endocrine health and the mental and emotional well being of at least 10% of all women, and it is firmly related to a high carbohydrate diet.

A vegetarian diet that means you eat less toxic chemistry by avoiding the toxins in commercial meat has that point in its favor. However, without the protein meat provides you become less and less able to muster the body chemistry to protect and restore your system with appropriate, basic nutritional elements.

Carbohydrates from any source, and especially from simple sugars and refined grains, will increase your insulin levels. The carbohydrates and the insulin will affect certain enzymes. These enzymes are control points for the production of chemicals that cause inflammation, increase swelling and pain in your soft tissues and joints. They also instruct your liver to produce more cholesterol, your blood cells to form clots and your blood vessels to constrict- all of which are the logical steps to high blood pressure, heart attacks and stroke. These interactions also suppress immune response while allowing cell proliferation (out of control cell proliferation is cancer). Increased insulin over time leads to Type 2 diabetes and hormone derangements that impact women’s menstrual cycles. Organic whole grain products are better than those full of chemical residue- but your organic oat, nuts and maple syrup granola is still going to push up insulin levels.

If you have enough animal protein, you balance insulin production and all those enzymatic instructions actually move in the opposite direction. Eating enough animal protein, (especially when you include 5 t 7 meals per week of fish, or fish oil supplements), will reduce hunger and cravings for sugar and starchy foods. Your insulin levels will normalize; you will have less cholesterol production and thinner, clot-free blood. Your immune system will be responsive and cell proliferation will be controlled. You will have much less achy pain and edema from inflammation. You will use up stored fat. Your hormones will balance out.

What if it’s a spiritual thing?

I have been privileged to with quite a few long-term vegetarians, people of deep social conscience and committed to values like sustainability and global health. But after a couple decades of malnourishment they find their energy levels are pretty low. They become very occupied with their personal health challenges and find it difficult to concentrate on other things that used to matter to them. This is of course my own experience and I would not claim it is unfailingly universal among long-term vegetarians. However, in my medical practice it is a common outcome that after years of devotion to non-meat eating, people’s more or less subtle health problems make the less energetic and less able to work for things they believe in, or have fun the way they want to.

Some of the folks I work with are committed to a religious or spiritual system that forbids animal food. Over many years now we have worked with diet and supplements to help them maintain their health. Our conclusion every time is that they have accepted a different degree of health; they expect and tolerate more frequent upper respiratory infections every winter for instance, and longer recovery periods. They understand their reduced energy levels and foggy thinking are related to their food choices. Once we take away the mystery of why they feel the way they do, they are satisfied they are doing their best in all chosen arenas. It is worth it to them to sacrifice certain elements of physical health for their spiritual commitment.

What is Right Relationship to Animals as Food?

For those who are not committed to a particular spiritual path, but have an idea that it may be somehow wrong to be part of the death of animals for food, I invite you to consider the following: there is a natural food chain that humans are a part of. We are animals ourselves, and we are as well, as far as we can tell, unique in our ability to think and feel and make adaptations and choices. I wonder if refusing to eat animals for food is not in some way defining them as lesser beings. Literally, that is, as nothing more than an inferior life form that we are graciously allowing to live or not according to our intellectual, chosen philosophy.

If we have the understanding there is not a hierarchal, up/down relationship between humans and our food animals but rather a relationship of profound mutuality; if we can relate to the spirit of the animal as it were, apart from it’s physical body, then our respect as expressed in how we support the animal’s life, and our gratitude for it’s death in service to our life, has meaning. A respectful relationship that includes continual awareness and gratitude, that includes a commitment to eating just-enough, that is not gluttonous or wasteful, can be a worthy spiritual practice.

If your concern is for the well-being of all animals as well as the whole environment, the global economy and equal rights and the best use of the human imagination and intellect, consider a serious commitment to a practice of awareness, of respect and gratitude for the animals you eat. Consider the discipline of regular attention and consciousness of what some would consider the sacred relationship between us. We eat them, and some of them sometimes eat us. Pausing with each meal to be aware of this gratitude is a discipline that requires real efforts and raises a consistent sensitivity and alertness that is then carried through many other activities and choices. “Saying grace” can be a meaningful and health enhancing custom to incorporate into daily life.

Simply not eating animals does not alter the circumstances of the hundreds of thousands of animals passing through the industrial agriculture processing system. If you choose not to eat animals, possibly a few less animals will be processed through the industrial food system over your lifetime. However, I believe that a commitment to the life-long well being of everyone- food animals and humans alike- means you may have a level of activism in your shopping and food choices that is more likely to have real impact on the whole environment.

You might budget your grocery money so you buy your meat from growers who raise and process food animals with conscious concern for the animals. You can arrange your shopping priorities so that you financially support the segment of the food industry with values closest to you own. You make it possible for small, often family-based farming and ranching enterprises to continue to exist, and you eat what’s best for you. You are well nourished, energetic and thinking clearly, which means you are more likely to be able to be part of creative solutions for the environmental and spiritual welfare of the planet, as well as your personal health.

dr nancy dunne naturopathic physician missoula montana