Can meat work for fat loss and health?....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 8-4-2016

I.  There were two recent studies reported.

1.  One said that meat increased your risk of death -- which doesn’t sound too likely that meat can be a good food for health:

Does eating meat increase risk of death?

http://mnt.to/l/4FY9

Eating animal protein increases risk of death, whereas eating plant-based protein is linked to a lower risk of death, suggests a new study.

2.  The other I didn’t save; but I think I saw it featured on Yahoo.  It said that eating meat caused as much excess fat in Americans as eating excess sugars.

That certainly doesn’t sound like meat could be a good food for fat loss.

Both conclusions are provably false.

But there ARE some problems with meat some of which could help researchers get such results.

People in the Southern and South Eastern United States and in Southern counties in what were the border states in the Civil war, DO have a higher risk of death and way more obese, very fat, people.  The men there eat a lot of meat and even have a typical fat necked look.

Those folks certainly make those studies sound accurate!

But hundreds of thousands of Americans have also adopted a Paleo or modified Atkins diet and immediately lost a lot of fat.

And, many of these people have their health and heart attack risk indicators radically IMPROVE after they eat this way for some time.

These people are some of the people showing the researchers in those two studies didn’t know the subject well enough to do research about it.

Dr Al Sears sent an email which had this:

“Your ancestors didn't suffer from the diseases that plague us today.

We know this because we can look at the health and diets of indigenous tribes…

The Masai tribe in East Africa still has a diet rich in red meat and raw milk. They eat very few vegetables and almost no grains. Yet their rate of heart disease is almost zero. They don't get cavities. They're all lean and strong… there's no obesity. And they don't suffer from chronic aging problems like our culture does.

The same is not true of other indigenous peoples…

The Alaska Native population once thrived on a diet rich in fresh-caught salmon, moose, seals, ducks, geese, ptarmigan, caribou, and berries, when they could get them. As they shifted to a modern Western diet, their health deteriorated.

From 1991 through 2007, the rate of obesity among Alaska Natives rose 63%.1 Diabetes — once virtually unknown in indigenous people — is also on the rise.

The Native Americans ate a diet that was stable for millennia. They were hunter-gatherers. Then the European settlers introduced farming and processed grains.

When the Native Americans sacrificed quality protein for quantity grain, they went from eating tough, hard foods to softer foods like bread and processed corn. Their jaws didn't have to work as much to chew these softer foods. Over time, their skulls started to shrink.

This evolutionary change resulted in tooth crowding, tooth decay, fat gain, arthritis, heart disease, inflammation, shortened stature, and shorter life spans…

You've been led to believe that modern humans are healthier, stronger and taller than our ancestors. But here's the truth… modern humans are about 10% shorter than our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Our brains are about 10% smaller, too.2

The changes that destroyed the physical health of your ancestors are still taking place today. To YOUR body.

But it's not too late to undo the damage grains are doing to your body. Your best bet for optimal health is to plan your meals around healthy protein and fat sources. Grass-fed beef, free-range poultry, wild salmon and eggs are among my top choices.”

What explains this paradox?

Some people who eat meat are fat and prone to heart attacks and early death.

But some people who eat meat are lean, unlikely to have heart attacks, and likely to live longer than normal.

If you know the answer, you know why the two studies we began this blog with are flawed.

Simply put, they did not control for or may have not even known these other factors:

The most important keys are in Dr Sears email:

a)  The meat the ethnic peoples ate who had extremely good health came from animals eating only their natural foods.

b) The meat eaten by current people living in the Southeastern states of the United States is from factory farmed animals fed grains and antibiotics and forced to stay in pens to fatten them. 

The book Anticancer explains how this is one of the main reasons people eating this way have extremely too high levels of omega 6 oils and the very high level of chronic inflammation that causes. 

Such inflammation causes heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, osteoarthritis, and helps cause many cancers or makes them worse for people who get them.

As we’ve posted here, the residual antibiotics that fatten the cattle and the bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotics which are fattening are in such meat.

The meat is fattier and higher in calories than the far leaner meat of animals that are NOT penned up and eat only their natural foods.

And, the factory farmed meat has herbicides and pesticides that were sprayed on the grains they were fed bioconcentrated in their fat.

(Such meat and poultry has a better health effect when the very leanest most fat-trimmed versions are eaten. 

This is NOT due to removing saturated fat; but because of removing excess fat calories, removing much of the excess omega 6 oils; and removing a good bit of the herbicides and pesticides that were sprayed on the grains they were fed bioconcentrated in their fat.)

The meat eaten by these two ethnic groups and by people eating Paleo by eating only meat from animals fed their natural foods in natural conditions doesn’t have these harmful ingredients to begin with.

So, meat from naturally fed animals is dramatically less likely to be harmful or fattening than factory farmed meat.

c)  The people today who eat meat and stay lean and healthy, eat close to zero grains; close to zero oils made from grains such as soy, corn, and canola -- and no hydrogenated oils. 

Neither of the ethnic groups that ate meat and remained healthy did either!

The people living in the Southeastern United States eat a good bit of all these things.

Each of those foods are heart attack starters and fatteners.  So this is critical to know.

d)  The percentage of people who eat a lot of meat and live in the Southeastern United States who smoke or are heavily exposed to tobacco smoke, is quite high.

People who eat a lot of meat and stay healthy and the two ethnic groups in Dr Sears’ email do not and did not smoke nor were they exposed to tobacco smoke second hand. 

Since tobacco and its smoke may cause half of all heart disease and DO cause half of all cancers, particularly the fatal ones, it’s easy to see why one group eats a lot of meat and is healthy and another group is not!

e)  People in the Southeastern United States who eat a lot of meat and are fat and unhealthy are almost all totally sedentary.   We just posted on how this makes harmful blood clots much more likely.  It also makes it easy to get fat and very hard to get rid of it.

People who eat a lot of meat today and stay healthy and the two ethnic groups in Dr Sears email are and were active or even intensely active almost every day.

The health benefits enjoyed by the healthy group from regular vigorous exercise include slowing aging and preventing mental decline in addition to preventing heart attacks and helping them stay lean.

The bottom line is that it’s possible to eat meat quite often and be fat and sick – and some people do.  But it’s also possible to eat meat quite often and be lean and in great health.

It all depends on how the animals the meat is from are fed and treated – and whether or not the people who eat it eat and do other things that make them fat and sick OR whether they never eat those unhealthful foods, avoid tobacco and its smoke, and get regular vigorous exercise.

II.  That said, the optimum way to eat can be done without eating any meat or only eating it sometimes.

a)  Wild caught fish are easier to buy and prepare and often much less expensive than meat from animals only fed grass and organic sprouts.

Meat from wild caught fish is naturally tender and easy to eat.  Meat from naturally fed animals tends to be tough and chewy – unless it is pretreated with one of the two effective multiple needle tenderizers, Jaccard & Butchers Kitchen.

Meat from naturally fed animals apparently has some omega 3 oils and DHA.  But wild caught fish have more.  And those nutrients are so brain and health protective it’s better for health to eat more fish than meat.

b)  Similarly, the Mediterranean diet foods, many kinds of organic vegetables, nuts for those not allergic, and extra virgin olive oil have such powerful health benefits it IS a good idea to eat so much of these that you leave less room for meat, even naturally fed, in your diet.

c)  Eating many kinds of organic vegetables each day, 4 to 10 a day, is perhaps the most effective way to lose excess body fat and keep it off.

So doing that and eating some meat from naturally fed animals WILL keep you leaner than doing the opposite.

d)  Even meat from animals fed their natural diet uses more water and releases more carbon than eating organic vegetables.

Here again eating these other foods abundantly or some naturally fed meat and those other foods abundantly is a better choice than eating LOTS of naturally fed meat and less of those other foods.

Note that both the original diet of the Eskimos and the foods Dr Sears reflect this:

“The Alaska Native population once thrived on a diet rich in fresh-caught salmon, moose, seals, ducks, geese, ptarmigan, caribou, and berries, when they could get them.”

“Your best bet for optimal health is to plan your meals around healthy protein and fat sources. Grass-fed beef, free-range poultry, wild salmon and eggs are among my top choices.”

Wild caught salmon, and small fish high in omega 3 oil such as small mackerel, herring, and sardines all work well.

Besides 100% grass fed beef, 100 % grass fed New Zealand lamb works.  But they both need to be needle tenderized AND cooked in a Crock pot very slowly to be tender and most healthy for you to eat.  And, they are expensive besides the extra preparation needed.

Eggs from pasture fed chickens are now available and are far easier to cook and eat than meat.

Whey is far more effective to support keeping or adding to your muscle mass than meat.  And, it’s dramatically easier to use powdered Grass Fed whey than to cook meat.

It’s far harder to find poultry and pork from 100% naturally fed animals.  And, I recently found out that 2/3 of chickens are fed with a feed that contains enough arsenic to make eating chicken a source that is far less desirable than its reputation in some circles.

Conclusion:

These two studies that suggest meat is harmful to eat and fattening clearly came to false conclusions by not controlling for the key factors at all well.

Meat can be eaten and is eaten by people who have wonderfully good health and can even help people become LESS fat and keep it off—and is doing so in many cases.

But there are other good sources of protein that can be used; and eating even naturally fed meat on occasion rather than daily or more often is the best strategy.