Why Meat is Essential: The Health Benefits You Can’t Ignore
Is meat really necessary for optimal health? Episode 3 of ReThink Meat dives into the fascinating history and undeniable health benefits of meat, showing why it’s not just important—but irreplaceable—for human well-being.
From its role in human evolution to its impact on modern health, this 23-minute episode uncovers why meat has been essential throughout history and why no culture has ever survived without it. Learn how meat supports appetite control, fat loss, muscle growth, and provides critical nutrients you simply can’t get elsewhere.
We’ll also explore: Why animal products were critical to our evolution The research behind a meat-only diet and its surprising health benefits. How a woman reversed her autoimmune condition with a meat-inclusive diet backed by clinical trials. The weight loss, cardiovascular, and longevity benefits of whole food diets that include meat. Why meat is key for appetite control and building muscle in a way plants just can’t match. And how much meat you should eat for best results Walk away with a new appreciation for meat as a modern-day health tool and discover how much meat you need for optimal results.
Meat in human evolution, Why humans need meat, Meat and brain development, Evolutionary diet science, Carnivore vs omnivore, Meat-eating across cultures, Traditional diets and meat, Animal protein and growth, Is meat natural for humans?, Anthropology of eating meat
Summary:
The video discusses the essential role of meat in human health and evolution, challenging the prevailing notion that meat is unhealthy. It emphasizes that meat provides crucial nutrients and benefits that are difficult to obtain from plant-based diets alone, highlighting the historical significance of meat consumption in human evolution and contemporary health issues related to the decline in meat consumption.
Key Points
Meat’s importance in human evolution
The video explains how meat consumption was pivotal for human evolution, contributing to brain development and overall health. It posits that our ancestors thrived on diets that included animal products, which were critical for their growth and health.
Historical dietary shifts and health effects
It discusses the adverse health impacts observed in humans transitioning from hunter-gatherer diets to agricultural diets with lower meat consumption, showing that those who ate primarily meat were healthier compared to those who later adopted farming.
Quality of animal proteins vs plant proteins
The documentary highlights that animal proteins are of higher quality, containing all essential amino acids necessary for human health, whereas plant proteins often require combining different sources to achieve the same effect.
Nutrient density and deficiencies
It reveals that many common nutritional deficiencies can be attributed to a lack of animal products in the diet, emphasizing that animal foods are often the richest sources of essential vitamins and minerals that are crucial for maintaining health.
The impact of processed foods
The video stresses the dangers of ultraprocessed foods which comprise a significant portion of modern diets, arguing that these foods are linked to numerous health problems, contrasting them with the benefits of whole animal foods.
Misleading food rating systems
It critiques food rating systems that unfairly give low rankings to animal products compared to ultraprocessed foods, raising questions about the integrity and biases behind such assessments.
Animal products and health claims
The discussion includes studies indicating that meat can improve various health outcomes, including weight management and cognitive function, countering the arguments that deem it harmful to modern health.
Emphasizing the need for animal products
The conclusion reaffirms that animal products are irreplaceable for optimal health, especially in supporting growth and repair processes in the body, suggesting that modern dietary guidelines should reconsider their stance on animal foods.
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It’s definitely putting human nutrition on hard mode -
- India (a major PBF country) has the highest rate of T2 Diabetes at 26% in 2022 - https://hackertalks.com/post/7645480
- Getting sufficient nutrition from PBF tends for people to consume more calories and carbohydrates then optimal.
- People going PBF for environmental reasons may not be looking at the entire picture - http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023-00945-9 Levelling foods for priority micronutrient value can provide more meaningful environmental footprint comparisons
references
ReThink Meat: And Your Health | episode three Claim: Maybe you’ve seen the Food Compass that rated Lucky Charms and Almond M&Ms higher than beef and eggs (Mozaffarian et al., 2021) (Noren). Sources: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00381-y https://sites.tufts.edu/foodcompass/research/data/
Claim: And since there’s never been a fully vegan culture (O’Keefe et al., 2022), eliminating animal products is essentially an experiment… Sources: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0033062022000834?via=ihub
Claim: Let’s take it back to over 3.5 million years ago, when our ancestors stood four feet tall and began consuming meat (McPherron et al., 2010) (Will et al., 2017). Sources: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.171339#d1e1062 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20703305/
Claim: Fast forward to the agricultural revolution - the transition from primarily hunter gatherers to agriculture when meat consumption declined (Paley, 2023) (Williams & Hill, 2017). Sources: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/hunter-gatherer-culture/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5417583/
Claim: Two other major shifts occurred in the late 1700s with the Industrial Revolution when food manufacturing began, and in the 20th century, when processed foods became a staple in American diets (Ramsey & Graham, 2012) (Huebbe & Rimbach, 2020).
Sources: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/how-vegetable-oils-replaced-animal-fats-in-the-american-diet/256155/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7466326/#B23-foods-09-01056 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10885101/
Claim: First, Arctic explorer Dr. William Steffensen was forced to consume an exclusively animal-product diet on an expedition (Oddsson, 2018).
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT7u2GlEfxs
Claim: Stephanson maintained an animal-heavy diet, following the lead of cultures like the Inuit & Massai of Africa with good health, until his death at 82 -a time when the average life expectancy was around 40 (O’Neill, 2022) (Rea, 2023) (Henighan, 2009, 106).
Sources: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-united-states-all-time/ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vilhjalmur-Stefansson https://books.google.com/books?id=6WgecW9Ho_IC&printsec=copyright#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Claim: Around the same time, Doctor Weston Price, an American dentist, took a trip around the world to discover an ideal diet that might help his patients overcome the dramatic increase in cavities.
Sources: https://books.google.com/books/about/Nutrition_and_Physical_Degeneration.html?id=RD-TygAACAAJ
Claim: Dr. Price was also able to witness what happened when modern foods like wheat, sugar and vegetable oils infiltrated traditional diets. He observed detrimental changes like the crowding of teeth, the narrowing of the face and reduced immunity (Price, 2009).
Claim: Today, almost 60% of American adult calories and. 67% of children’s calories come from ultra processed foods (Steele et al., 2016) (Wang et al., 2021), which may be causing unintended consequences.
Sources: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26962035/ https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2782866?guestAccessKey=f3e0c73c-6e37-4261-a465-ab155d5f3b30
Claim: There are 20 amino acids that make up protein in the body, 11 that our body can make and nine we need to get from our diet called essential amino acids (Nelson et al., 2021).
Sources: https://books.google.com/books/about/Lehninger_Principles_of_Biochemistry.html?id=5Ek9J4p3NfkC
Claim: Proteins, often animal products like beef and eggs, that contain all nine essential amino acids in high enough quantities are complete, while those that do not, often vegetarian sources, are incomplete (Mikstas, 2023).
Sources: https://www.webmd.com/diet/difference-between-complete-and-incomplete-proteins
Claim: For example, to get about 20 grams of protein, you would need to eat half a chicken breast for about 140 calories or five tablespoons of peanut butter for 477.5 calories (FoodData Central Search Results, n.d.).
Source: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/171477/nutrients
Claim: And given that today ⅔ Americans are overweight or obese (Yang & Colditz, 2015), I talked with two Times bestselling author Robb Wolf - about why high quality, low calorie protein can be important…
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625533/
Claim: Research has shown that increasing the percentage of protein in your diet can reduce nighttime eating and cravings by half. Reduce daily calorie intake by 441 calories per day and encourage up to 10 pounds of weight loss in 12 weeks (Weigle et al., 2005).
Sources: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16002798/
Claim: The current dietary reference intake for protein for women and men is 46 and 56 grams respectively (When It Comes to Protein, How Much Is Too Much?, 2020), which many experts believe is far too low.
Source :https://www.health.harvard.edu/nutrition/when-it-comes-to-protein-how-much-is-too-much
Claim: Dr. Beal created a rating system that identified foods containing the largest amounts of the nutrients many people are deficient in (Beal & Ortenzi, 2022). Nine out of ten of the most nutrient dense foods are animal products, and only one plant based food group, leafy greens, made the top ten.
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8936507/#!po=30.0000
Claim: And though vegetables are often lauded for their nutrient density, when you compare carrots to liver for 100 gram portions, liver contains 14 times the iron, 13 times the zinc, 150 times the copper and 83 times vitamin B12 (Beal & Ortenzi, 2022).
Sources: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8936507/#!po=30.0000
Claim: And B12 deficiency is common for those who do not consume animal products and can result in a number of abnormalities, including death and irreversible cognitive impairment (Vitamin B12 Deficiency: Symptoms, Causes & Treatment, 2022) (Moore et al., 2012).
Sources: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22831-vitamin-b12-deficiency
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22221769/
Claim: This 2020 review also discussed the weight loss, cardiovascular and overall benefits of often-overlooked animal-based nutrients like taurine, an essential nutrient for kids, carnosine, carnitine and anserine (Wu, 2020).
Sources: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7088015/
Claim: Take the Food Compass Rating system I mentioned at the beginning of the video, created in 2022 by researchers at Tufts University (Noren.). In this rating system, foods were ranked from 1 to 100 and processed foods like Lucky Charms, Frosted Flakes, Almond M&Ms and ice cream cones with nuts received higher scores than beef and eggs.
Sources: https://sites.tufts.edu/foodcompass/research/data/
Claim: As you may have guessed, many people questioned the legitimacy of this rating system and even Dr. Beal published a critique in Nature stating the algorithm was not well justified and exaggerated the risks of animal sourced foods and underestimated the risks of ultra processed foods (Ortenzi et al., 2022).
Sources: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/eu578/
Claim:. It might surprise you to know that eating a food doesn’t guarantee your body can use all of its nutrients. Bioavailability refers to the fraction of the nutrients your body can use which is not always equal to the numbers on the nutrition label (Gibson, 2007).
Sources: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17521121/
Claim: Anti Nutrients found in plants can inhibit our ability to utilize some of their nutrients. For example, a recent study showed that for meat substitutes, the zinc and iron bioavailability is very low due to the high anti nutrient content (Mayer Labba et al., 2022).
Sources: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/19/3903
Claim: The form of vitamin A found in plants, for example, is not the active form our bodies require and it’s estimated you need 12x more of the plant-based form. Like in animal products. In other words, you could eat about one ounce of beef liver or over 5 cups of kale to get the recommended daily amount and for some people, genetics and health status can still limit the conversion. (Nutritiondata.Self.Com Calories, Carbs & Nutrition Facts).
Claim: Because of these unique nutritional benefits, animal source foods have been shown to reduce stunting and improve cognitive performance in children and the World Health Organization describes them as “the best source of high-quality nutrient-rich food for children aged 6–23 months (Adesogan et al., 2020) (World Health Organization, 2014).”
https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/149019/WHO_N?sequence=1
Claim: Several trials have shown their ability to reduce stunting and improve cognitive performance and one trial revealed that children whose diet was supplemented with meat had test scores 45% higher than baseline whereas those supplemented with milk (28%) and oil (7%) had much smaller improvements. (Hulett et. al., 2013)(Adesogen 2020)
Sources: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211912419300525#bib52