Partial Repentance of a Carnivore

I grew up in the Rocky Mountain west among ranchers, hunters, and meat eaters. I knew people who subsisted almost entirely on beef, lamb, and wild game and eschewed vegetables except for potatoes. I like meat. No, I love meat. Since I became aware of the world around me, and especially since I became a doctor, I recognized the health issues associated with transfats and a heavy fat and carbohydrate diet. My father died when I was fourteen of a massive myocardial infarction; my grandparents all suffered one or another complication of atherosclerosis. I started to drink diet drinks and skim milk, and to eat low fat, low carbohydrate, and low glycemic foods and thought, “what a good boy am I!”

In recent years I have tried to be objective about my own nutritional habits, and the more I learned, the more repentant I became. I still love meat and can still rationalize eating it. It’s natural, you know. There is even a fairly recently discovered fifth basic taste—umami (in addition to and separate from sweet, sour, bitter, and salty). Umami is a savory taste—a pleasant savory perception described by its discoverer as “delicious, and like carefully cooked meat”. So, there you are: meat is natural; its taste is part of human biology; it has been consumed for millennia. It must be good for you.

As unrepentant as I have been, I have been dragged into an understanding that my rationalized concept that meat must be good for you could well be wrong. That’s just another one of those tastes or activities that falls under the rubric of “if it is fun or tastes good or gives you pleasure; it must be bad for you.” Consider this evidence:

1. Cardiovascular disease and stroke are the leading causes of death in Western civilization and have been so for as long as the causes of death have been studied. Citizens of sophisticated Western countries consume more meat per capita than anyone else on earth.
2. A study done in 1999 of adults who died of accidents, homicides, and suicides revealed that 100% had evidence of coronary artery atherosclerosis.
3. A 2007 study concluded that all men over 65 and all women over 75 years of age who have consumed a traditional Western diet have cardiovascular disease and widespread atherosclerosis and should be treated vigorously for that diagnosis.
4. In a 20-year follow-up study of all Jewish patients in a clinic, doctors found that concentration camp survivors who lived to 65 had a longer life expectancy than the other patients. All of them had survived near starvation conditions and were extremely thin, even emaciated, when they were released. The prime example is a man named Leopold Engleitner who died of causes incident to age at 107.
5. World War II provided a graphic example of how the ravages of these athersclerotic-based diseases could be totally halted.  Norway was one of several western European nations occupied by Nazi Germany during the conflict between 1939 through 1945.  The Germans removed all animal livestock from these occupied countries. The native population subsisted on whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruit. Almost immediately death from heart attacks and strokes in Norway plummeted.  With the cessation of hostilities in 1945, animal products became available once more as well as an immediate return to the prewar levels of deaths from these illnesses.
6. Cardiovascular disease and stroke are virtually nonexistent in rural China, Viet Nam, and Korea, central Africa, Papua New Guinea, and among the remarkable Tarahumara Indians of northern Mexico. All of those people live almost entirely on a plant-based diet. Fatty meats are largely unavailable; so, such meat as comes the way of such people is fish, scrawny sheep and pigs, and an occasional lean wild animal. Of the 5.5 billion people on earth, 4 billion will never have heard of heart disease.
7. Autopsy studies were done on the deceased combatants in the Korean and Viet Nam wars from both sides of the conflicts. The studies looked at soldiers between the ages of 17 and 34. 80% of American KIAs had highly evident coronary artery disease. 1-3% of Korean and Vietnamese soldiers had the condition.
8. For all of the educational efforts of Western governments and media to encourage plant-based and low trans-fat diets, obesity remains a significant problem in the West. Compounding that is the seductive sedentary life style encouraged by television watching, spending time seated in front of a computer screen, and spectator sports as entertainment. The meat deprived peoples of the world also have a second characteristic which separates them from Westerners—of necessity they have to walk, often long distances, to accomplish their daily tasks. Their children are deprived—they do not have the marvelous electronic devices that keep Western children glued to their chairs; so, they play and work at physical efforts outside their homes.
9. High blood values of HDL—the “good cholesterol”—is associated with a 16% lower mortality rate in people who eat a plant-based diet, but that benefit is erased in people who consume the traditional Western meat-protein based diet.
10. The value of cholesterol treatment is almost nullified by cigarette smoking.
11. The United States has 5% of the world’s population, uses 95% of the world’s cardiovascular interventional procedures—stents, bypasses, angiograms, etc.—has the world’s most expensive medical care system, and ranks well below the top 15 developed nations in terms of mortality, infant mortality, rates of smoking, stroke and heart attack. Cardiology spends over a quarter of a trillion dollars per year. The Netherlands medical system costs less than one third of what the United States spends (in terms of GDP) and offers a far superior health care system—much of which is dedicated to preventative medicine, nutritional education, and encouraging vigorous physical activity.
12. Western countries have all demonstrated that cardiovascular procedures can be avoided even in fairly severe cases of coronary artery disease by reversing the traditional fat-food, fast-food, high-carbohydrate diets and sedentary lifestyles of patients. Careful studies reveal that the narrowing effect of atherosclerosis in coronary arteries can be reversed. Control patients—those who continued to follow the traditional nutritional and sedentary lifestyle of Western civilization—had the expected high rates of heart attacks, limb vascular occlusion events, and strokes. Among treated patients—who were found to have the expected high rate of untoward events prior to treatment—almost no new events occurred over the next decade.
13. 50% of Americans have dementia by the age of 85. At the age of 50, American brains begin to show evidence of small strokes on MRI studies. People who have a plant-based diet have a markedly better outlook.
14. Diabetes mellitus is a serious and growing health issue for Americans and other people living in industrialized nations and who eat the animal protein-based diet. Diabetes is interrelated to obesity, high sugar intake, and a sedentary lifestyle. Abrupt and consistent change in diet to a plant-based one and increasing physical activities has proved to lower heart attack, stroke, limb ischemic, and visual arterial damage attacks. As a consequence people who make the changes require less insulin, less hospitalization, significantly fewer procedures and have fewer angina pains, myocardial infarctions, strokes, crippling peripheral and retinal vascular events, amputations, sexual dysfunction, renal failure, and transplants—20-30% reduction in strokes and 40-fold reduction in CVD events, mortality and morbidity. They live longer and better.
15. All the benefits described above of a plant-based diet and a physically active life can be accomplished in the great majority of people without pills, procedures, or operations. The reduction in costs on the over-strained American health-care system would be dramatic; there are sub-systems including the Kaiser and IHC           systems that have demonstrated that fact conclusively.

This is what we, as individuals, and as citizens of nations, should do:

1. Make the wrenching change in lifestyle to have an almost entirely plant-based diet.
2. Eat less. The vast majority of us would be healthier if we were to reduce our weight to the recommendations of the nutritional societies, the AMA, etc.
3. Increase our level of physical activity to 30 minutes a day, at least, of vigorous physical activity.
4. Avoid dairy products, sugar containing soft and alcoholic drinks, white rice, white bread, white sugar, pasta, potatoes, oils, animal fats, fish, fowl, beef, lamb, pork, caffeinated coffee, and nuts.
5. Eat a diet predominately consisting of whole grains, vegetables—especially the green leafy variety like spinach, Swiss Chard, arugula, beet greens—raw fruits, and chew them all thoroughly to activate the antioxidants contained in them.
6. Avoid all use of tobacco.

Aficionados of the above restrictive rules—i.e. vegans—would also include the avoidance of medications, procedures, and operations except in extremis. As the title of this blog post suggests, I am not an entirely repentant carnivore. I view myself as having an educated and objective Greek type golden mean when it comes to how I am going to live. I have, in fact, reduced my intake of meat, increased my intake of fruits and vegetables, especially eaten raw, and of fiber—almost in keeping with the wise admonitions contained in the LDS church’s Word of Wisdom. That remarkably prescient document, written in 1833, made all of those recommendations. The advice regarding meat was that it be consumed sparingly—an advice I can live with—and in times of winter. I confess that I will probably continue to eat meat in other seasons as well.

So, this is what I am going to do in my golden mean compromise lifestyle and with due confession that I am not entirely repentant:

1. Eat lots of raw vegetables, beans, fruits and whole grains—limited by gas diarrhea which afflicts me when I overdo.
2. Drink skim milk and the occasional piece of cheese. I will drink the occasional diet drink. Try as I might, I cannot feel very guilty when I do. I will continue my lifelong habits of avoidance of alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea.
3. Eat lots of fish, a little very lean beef, lean pork, and the occasional lamb chop.
4. Eat only what it takes to maintain my presently fairly lean physique and weight.
5. Walk in the mountains that surround me, bicycle, ski, grapple with my Jiu Jitsu students, body surf and swim, and do my own physical work on my land.
6. I have somewhat high blood pressure, pre-diabetes, and without medication, moderate dyslipidemia. My ancestors had a bad history of strokes and heart attacks. Therefore, I take medicine and am entirely unrepentant in doing so. With pills, my ECG, cholesterol values, sugar levels, blood pressure, and weight are right on normal. In good faith, I cannot recommend an extreme vegan diet—which is boredom personified—or the absolute avoidance of medicines—which are often crucial to the achievement of internal health. I plan to live forever, to enjoy every moment I can, and not to worry overmuch if I break a rule or two.