Meat kills you slowly and painfully

More bad news this week: Red meat gives you arthritis.
This is only bad news if You're one of the people who live in Rich Industrial countries where there's a plentiful supply of red meat and you're not suffficiently troubled by the waste and cruelty of the meat industry to make the choice to become a vegan.
The science behind this study seems pretty sound, though I'm no expert on that sort of thing by any means.

I'm a guy who's pretty in touch with his feminine side, and I prefer to intuit things.
My grandfather used to be a construction worker, and used to eat a lot of red meat. It was hard to blame him, as I worked on buliding sites for two summers and the sheer volume of veggie food I had to eat just to keep from starving to death used to stun everyone I used to live with. Working in as a construction labourer (My title was actually "general operative") you need to get over 3,000 calories a day and this is quite a challange for a veggie, though to be fair the Hindus who built the Taj Mahal seemed to do a pretty good job.

Eating meat effectively outsources the the job of converting carbs to protein to animals. Like all recipients of outsourced jobs, they get treated pretty shittily, being forced to eat far more than they need to, fed food that their bodies aren't designed to digest, to have children every year till their bodies give out after which they are brutally slaughtered.

None of this ever bothered my grandfather. When he'd go into a restaurant he'd always order the biggest steak. He'd have red meat for dinner almost every day, sometimes more than once a day. When he found out I'd become a vegetarian, he was critical, telling me that when he was my age he was grateful for every little bit of meat he got.
Grandfathers often come out with stuff like that, but mine was more honest than most, leaving the exagerated tales of poverty to my father. In addition, he grew up in Ireland at a time when the country was horribly poor, so I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

While my grandfather didn't consider the environmental or ethical consequences of eating meat - at least if he did he never discussed it with me - his years of steak-chewing did come back to haunt him in horribly painful ways. For the last few years of his life he lived in almost constant pain and for the last two he was virtually paralytic from the neck down. He also had gout, which many people think is a disease that decadent 18th Century aristocrats got from drinking too much gin, but is actually one of the most painful things that can happen a human being. When he died of a massive heart attack last year it was probably a happy day for him.

In a way his life mirrors the history of the Human Race. When we were hunter-gatherers, the only way we could get protein and some micronutrients from eating animals, but there were so few of them around that it was impossible to ever eat enough to develop any health problems as a result. Now, those of us who live in the west can eat as much meat as we want, but our bodies are still wired to crave more of it, and there's plenty of it there. This time of plenty won't last forever as the meat industry is heavily dependent on limited fossil fuels, but for the meantime meat is cheap for consumers and this is why obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and now, it seems, arthritis have all skyrocketed in the last 50 years.

My family's own horrible experiences with meat-related diseases incline me towards believing this latest piece of research, but others are sceptical. A couple of days earlier, I was reading a columnist in the Examiner complaining that contrary information about which foods are good and bad for you comes out every week. Well, there's a reason for this. Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics, shows how the big food corporations - in the US, five companies control around 90% of the market - deliberately fund research that produces wildly contrary results so that many consumers just say to hell with it and eat whatever they want.

I wasn't that shocked to hear that an industry that does unspeakable things to animals, destroys the environment, emacites biodiversity and contributes massively to global warming would do something so underhand. Needless to mention, the Meat industry has massive wealth and in the US in particular it's easy for wealth to buy influence. The Food and Drink administration would love to tell people to eat less meat, but the meat industry will only let them give coded messages like "eat less saturated fat".
Like the tobacco industry with which it has links, the meat industry cleary can't handle the truth. But they have such massive power that poor old consumers like myself who want to stay healthy without destroying the planet have to deal with a barrage of contradictory information. For example, I drink blackcurrant juice that's sweetened with saccharine. One is an anti-carninogen, the other a carcinogen. Who wins? Does anybody know?

On the other hand, though new information seems to be published every week, I've never heard a bad word said about Quinoa, Wholemeal Bread, Linseeds, or almost any type of organic fruit or vegetable. And those of you who think the Atkins diet is based on reputable science have to admit that that can't be said about Beef.