Facts About Eating Meat

The following are facts that I stole from various pages on the web. These sites, while independent, match the research I've made on my own. These facts add up. Find them for yourself if you don't believe me. Also, do not trust information distributed by the government and the meat industry. You need to look hard because many corporations set up a research facility and call it something unrelated to the corporation in order to pass it off as independent research. Most of these sources are unwilling to discuss their findings:

• The risk of contracting breast cancer is 3.8 times greater for women who eat meat daily compared to less than once a week; 2.8 times greater for women who eat eggs daily compared to once a week; and 3.25 greater for women who eat butter and cheese 2 to 4 times a week as compared to once a week.

• The risk of fatal ovarian cancer is three times greater for women who eat eggs 3 or more times a week as compared with less than once a week.

• The risk of fatal prostate cancer is 3.6 times greater for men who consume meat, cheese, eggs and milk daily as compared with sparingly or not at all. 

• Heart attack is the most common cause of death in the U.S., killing one person every 45 seconds. The male meat-eater's risk of death from heart attack is 50%. The risk to men who eats no meat is 15%. Reducing one's consumption of meat, dairy and eggs by 10% reduces the risk of heart attack by 10%. Completely eliminating these products from one's diet reduces the risk of heart attack by 90%. 

• Ninety-nine percent of U.S. mother's milk contains significant levels of DDT. In stark contrast, only 8% of U.S. vegetarian mother's milk containing significant levels of DDT. This shows that the primary source of DDT is the meat ingested by the mothers.

• Contamination of breast milk due to chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides in animal products found in meat-eating mothers versus nonmeat-eating mothers is 35 times higher. 

• There are numerous claims today about saturated fat. Some claim that we do not need any saturated fat to survive, or that all saturated fat is bad, while others tell us to eat freely and that this substance is essential for our health.While not all saturated fat is bad, saturated fat from animal products like meat appears to directly affect the function of our cardiovascular system in many negative ways. Not only is it linked to putting a strain on one’s heart through possible fat deposits in the arteries, increasing one’s blood pressure and causing artery damage, but it is the major fat responsible for dangerous weight gain. Today’s meat is even higher than ever in fat because of how the animals are raised, with no exercise or natural grazing capabilities. Hence they sit in a cage and are over fed, which leads to higher than normal unhealthy fat deposits.

• Besides the increased chances of colon cancer, meat can cause a lot of digestive disturbances for the very same reasons. Meat takes a long time to pass through the intestines, where during this time it putrefies. Putrefaction produces toxins and amines that accumulate in the liver, kidneys and large intestines, destroys bacterial cultures and causes degeneration of the lining of the small intestine. Over a few years of a regular meat diet, putrefied meat is going to adhere to the lining of your intestines, where it often causes various digestive problems such as IBS, stomach cramps, prolapsed colons, haemorrhoids, constipation and many other problems that are not even directly linked to the intestines.

• Due to the fact that some animal proteins are very closely related to ours, the body responds to a lot of these as foreign particles and tries to destroy them. (Not very different from how some organ transplants get rejected.) When the body does this on a regular basis, after some time it begins to turn on itself due to some auto-immune processes that end up resulting in things like arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis and others.

• Imagine how much water is wasted each year to grow the food to feed these animals and how much water is wasted to keep them hydrated while they are growing. In order for land to be made suitable for animal production, land must be properly cleared and this usually involves the chopping and clearing of many trees. Livestock production accounts for 30% of the entire land surface of the planet. Just think of how many people can be fed in the world and have clean drinking water, if it wasn’t all going to the billions of animals.

• Animals produce natural gas, mainly methane. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, in that it traps heat even more readily and abundantly than carbon dioxide. In fact animal production is responsible for about 18% of the world’s climate change and to put that in perspective that is even more than all of the world’s transportation.

• Think about yourself and what happens to you in times of stress. The number one thing that happens to all animals under stress is an elevation of stress hormones, which initialize a whole slew of other biochemical reactions that lead away from an animal’s healthy balanced state. This of course leads to various diseases. When we consume this meat, whether you embrace the Eastern views of karma, energy changes and thus disruptions or not, eating meat from stressed animals has been shown to be linked to various negative mental and emotional states of being in us as well.

• Homocysteine is an amino acid. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. The only source of homocysteine for use in our bodies is that which the liver forms after the ingestion of another amino acid, methionine. Methionine is found in protein foods. Animal protein contains two to three times the amount of methionine as does plant protein. Homocysteine levels can be lowered very effectively by avoiding meat and dairy consumption. In fact, a recent study performed at Harvard Medical School showed that subjects who adopted a vegan diet had their homocysteine levels drop between 13% and 20% in just one week.

• Depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia can be connected to meat consumption. The amount of tryptophan (An amino acid necessary for normal growth in infants and for nitrogen balance in adults.) in the foods that are eaten has only a small influence upon the amount of tryptophan that enters the brain. The most important factor determining the total amount of tryptophan that does enter the brain is the concentration of other large-molecule amino acids concurrently present in the blood. Large-molecule amino acids, among them tryptophan, compete with each other to enter "gates" between the circulating blood stream and the relatively confined brain fluids. A high-protein meal (full of meats, dairy foods, and eggs) provides many other amino acids that compete with tryptophan for entry into the brain; the end result is less tryptophan passing into the brain and a decrease in the synthesis of serotonin (a phenolic amine neurotransmitter that is a powerful vasoconstrictor and is found especially in the brain, blood serum, and gastric mucosa of mammals). Conversely, a low-protein, carbohydrate-rich diet (full of starches, vegetables, and fruits) results in the highest levels of serotonin in the brain, because fewer large-molecule amino acids are competing with tryptophan to enter the brain. For most this means less hyperactivity, anxiety, depression, and insomnia-provided they eat a vegetarian diet.