Why Our Ancestors Started Eating Meat#

Alright, let’s talk about meat. Way back, about two million years ago, when our ancestors who were mostly veggie-eaters started munching on meat, it wasn’t just because animals tasted good. It was actually out of need. You see, climate change made a lot of the plants they depended on harder to find. Meat stepped in and filled that gap. By the time they figured out fire, or maybe even earlier, meat became a regular part of what humans ate.

The Modern Question: Is Meat Unhealthy?#

Fast forward to today, and eating meat has gotten a reputation for potentially causing health problems. We hear about links to things like:

• Heart disease
• Certain cancers
• An early death

So, the big question is, how unhealthy is meat really?

Just a heads-up: This chat is only about meat. Dairy stuff is a whole different topic and needs its own video.

Why We Need to Eat (The Basics)#

Biologically, we eat for a few key reasons:

1. To get energy.
2. To get the materials needed to build and fix our cells.
3. To pick up special molecules our bodies can’t make themselves.

Most of the energy and building materials come from the three main macronutrients: fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. Proteins are super important for fixing and renewing our cells. The special molecules are a bunch of different vitamins and minerals that help our bodies’ processes run.

What Meat Gives Us#

Meat actually provides a lot of these essential things.

• It has all the essential amino acids our body requires.
• It’s packed with minerals like:
  • Iron
  • Zinc
• It contains essential vitamins, some of which are tough to find in plants, like Vitamin B12.

One essential nutrient that’s usually missing in most meat we eat is Vitamin C. Almost all plants have it, and it’s important for your immune system and building connective tissues. Go a few months without it, and you’d get scurvy.

Meat’s Bioavailability Advantage#

Meat also has a big plus: high bioavailability. This means some nutrients in meat are broken down and available for your body to use faster than those from plants.

• Take spinach, for example: It has more iron than meat, but your body absorbs that iron much slower, and it takes more energy to digest the spinach in the first place.

We’ve even seen health benefits in groups who historically ate only meat.

• The Inuit, for instance, can live in super harsh climates thanks to a diet purely based on meat. They eat the whole animal, including the organs, which gives them every single nutrient they need, even Vitamin C.

So, meat by itself isn’t necessarily bad for you.

Meat’s Health Effects: It Depends#

The health effects of meat really change depending on two things:

1. How it’s prepared.
2. What animal it comes from.

When people in places like the US or Europe talk about “meat,” they usually mean the muscle tissues. These are nutrient-dense but don’t have all the vitamins you’d need to survive just on muscle meat, like the Inuit did by eating organs.

Let’s look at different types:

Red Meat: Where Things Get Problematic#

Things start getting a bit more complicated when you eat a lot of red meats. This includes:

• Beef
• Veal
• Pork
• Lamb
• Horse
• Goat

One recent study, for example, suggested you eat a maximum of 23 grams of red meat per day. That’s seriously tiny – like, maybe one small steak per week.

Looking at big studies that combine lots of research (called meta-analyses), eating 100 grams of red meat every single day has been linked to increased risks:

• Diabetes: +19% risk
• Strokes: +11% risk
• Colorectal cancer: +17% risk

This sounds pretty concerning, right?

Understanding the Studies#

But before we start panicking, let’s quickly look at how these studies were done. This brings us to a big challenge in figuring out if meat is unhealthy.

Most studies that tied health risks to red meat were case-control studies.

• How they work: They look at a group of people who have a disease and then check their eating habits. The idea is, if people who ate more red meat were more likely to have certain diseases, there might be a link.

The problem here is that it’s really hard to separate out other things people do.

• People who eat less meat often live healthier lives overall.
• They tend to eat more veggies and fruit.
• They’re often less likely to smoke or drink a lot of alcohol.

Most studies try to account for these other factors, but it’s incredibly difficult to say for sure that only the meat caused the difference.

Processed Meat: Even More Concern#

Things get even trickier when we look at processed meat.

Processing meat means doing things like:

• Curing
• Smoking
• Salting
• Fermenting

Basically, adding chemicals or treatments to make it last longer and, well, taste delicious. Examples include:

• Bacon
• Ham
• Salami
• Sausages
• Hot dogs

These often contain chemicals that aren’t great for us, like nitrates and nitrites. These can potentially damage the DNA in your digestive system and might lead to cancer.

The WHO (World Health Organization) looked at 800 studies over 20 years and concluded that processed meat is strongly linked to a higher risk of colorectal cancer.

• Their finding: Eating an extra 50 grams of processed meat per day (that’s like two slices of bacon or one hot dog) increases your risk of cancer by 18 percent.

When it comes to the risk of causing cancer, the WHO put processed meat in the same category as things like plutonium, asbestos, and smoking. The WHO did point out that this grouping is just about whether something causes cancer, not how much it increases the risk compared to other things in that category.

But processed meat might also significantly raise your chances of having:

• Diabetes
• Strokes
• Coronary heart diseases

Other Factors: How Animals Live#

It also matters how the animal lived before it became meat. It’s common practice to give livestock large amounts of antibiotics to prevent diseases, and this can contribute to the problem of antibiotic resistance, which affects us all.

Putting the Risks in Perspective#

Looking at high consumption of both red and processed meat together, it could potentially increase your chance of dying sooner (premature death) by up to 29%.

• What does this percentage actually mean? If your chance of dying this year is normally 3%, a 29% increase means your chance goes up to roughly 4%.

This might not sound like a massive jump for one person, but tiny percentages like this can have a huge impact when you look at societies with millions of people. And, let’s be honest, these risks seem small until they’re the ones affecting you.

It’s Not Just Meat#

It would be unfair to blame meat alone for bad health outcomes, though. There’s no clear evidence that the very core nature of meat itself has negative effects, except maybe its high fat content. And even that point is widely argued among scientists.

Just like with lots of other things we enjoy in life, sometimes having too much of something good can end up being harmful.

Moderation and Recommendations#

Most public health groups suggest cutting back on meat consumption to about 500 grams per week. Studies often suggest cutting down on processed meat as much as possible.

So, if you’re eating meat just once or twice a week, you’re probably doing pretty well for your health.

For many people, though, this means making a pretty big change to what they usually eat.

• The average person in the United States eats around 1600 grams of meat a week.
• The average person in Germany eats about 1100 grams a week.
• And many people eat even more than that.

If you’re not sure how much you eat, try writing down every time you eat meat for a week or two. You might be surprised by the total!

So, yes, most people watching that video would likely benefit from eating less meat.

Beyond Health#

Aside from health worries, let’s not forget that the meat industry is a huge contributor to climate change. It’s gotten so big that providing millions of tons of meat makes it really hard to treat the animals with the dignity they deserve. (We talked about this in detail in another video).

The Takeaway#

All things considered, eating meat in moderation doesn’t seem to be unhealthy. You don’t have to suddenly become vegetarian overnight to make a real difference for your health and for the planet. But the choices you make about your lifestyle do matter – for yourself and for everyone else.