With the exception of butter, no other food has been subjected to such intense demonization in recent years as red meat, particularly beef. The juicy hamburger, that delicious marbled steak and the Sunday roast have been accused of terrible crimes. Beef causes heart disease, say the Diet Dictocrats. Beef causes cancer, particularly colon cancer, beef causes osteoporosis, beef causes autoimmune diseases like asthma, beef harbors E. coli leading to food-borne illness, beef causes Creutzfeldt Jakob disease.
Recently a vegetarian group called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals placed billboard ads warning men not to eat beef because it causes impotence! Red meat is an acid-forming food, say the vegetarians, which putrefies in the gut because humans can’t digest meat. Beef production destroys the environment, according to the zealots, and takes away land that could be dedicated to grain for starving millions. Let’s examine these accusations one at a time.
Does beef cause heart disease?
First is the notion that beef causes heart disease. This actually dates back to the 1950’s when the lipid hypothesis was &taking hold on the American consciousness. At that time, scientists were grappling with a new threat to public health—a steep rise in heart disease, especially myocardial infarction (MI)—a massive blood clot leading to obstruction of a coronary artery and consequent death to the heart muscle. MI was almost nonexistent in 1910 and caused no more than three thousand deaths per year in 1930. By 1960, there were at least 500,000 MI deaths per year in the US.
Many scientists believed that the culprit was cholesterol and saturated fats found in animal foods like butter, eggs and beef. They reasoned that saturated fat and cholesterol raised the level of cholesterol in the blood which in turned caused the deposition of cholesterol as plaques in the arteries, leading to obstructions and heart disease. This, in a nutshell, is the lipid hypothesis.1
This theory was tested in 1957 when Dr. Norman Jolliffe, Director of the Nutrition Bureau of the New York Health Department, initiated the Anti-Coronary Club. With great media fanfare, a group of businessmen, ranging in age from 40 to 59 years, were placed on the so-called Prudent Diet. Prudent Dieters used corn oil and margarine instead of butter, cold breakfast cereals instead of eggs and chicken and fish instead of beef. Anti-Coronary Club members were to be compared with a “matched” group of the same age who ate eggs for breakfast and had meat three times a day. Jolliffe, an overweight diabetic confined to a wheel chair, was confident that the Prudent Diet would save lives, including his own.
The results of Dr. Jolliffe’s Anti-Coronary Club experiment were published in 1966 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.2Those on the Prudent Diet of corn oil, margarine, fish, chicken and cold cereal had an average serum cholesterol of 220, compared to 250 in the meat-and-potatoes control group. However, the study authors were obliged to note that there were eight deaths from heart disease among Dr. Jolliffe’s Prudent Diet group, and none among those who ate meat three times a day. Dr. Jolliffe was dead by this time. He succumbed in 1961 from a vascular thrombosis, although the obituaries listed the cause of death as complications from diabetes.
The truth is that in spite of all the propaganda you have heard, the lipid hypothesis has never been proved. In fact, inadequate protein intake leads to loss of myocardial muscle and may, therefore, contribute to coronary heart disease.3
There are many societies where the populace consumes high levels of animal food and saturated fat but remains free of heart disease. Dr. george Mann, who studied the Masai cattle herding peoples in Africa, found no heart disease, even though their diet consisted of meat, blood and rich milk. 4 Butterfat consumption among Masai warriors, who consider vegetable foods as fodder for cattle, can reach one and one half pounds per day. Yet these people do not suffer from heart disease. Mann called the lipid hypothesis “the greatest scam in the history of medicine.” It is a scam that has been used to convince millions of healthy people that they are sick and must take expensive drugs with serious side effects, a falsehood that has persuaded Americans to adopt a bland, tasteless diet simply because their cholesterol has been defined as being too high.
It is true that beef consumption in the United States has gone up during the last eighty years, the period of huge increases in heart disease. Today we consume 79 pounds of beef per person per year versus 54 in 1909, a 46% increase—but poultry consumption has increased a whopping 280%, from 18 pounds per person per year to 70. Consumption of vegetable oils, including those that have been hydrogenated, has increased 437%, from 11 pounds per person per year to 59; while consumption… http://www.westonaprice.org/myths_truths/myths_truths_beef.html
