Eating Meat

By Alan Caruba

I am having a beautiful, thick steak tonight. I love meat.

It got me thinking, however, of the thousands, if not millions of studies and articles that have been published that associate meat with various cancers and a quick Google tour will impress you with the fact that there is virtually an anti-meat industry out there, forever churning out more studies about and against meat.

When you actually read what many have to say, what you discover that various things found in meat "are suspected" of having a link to colorectal, breast or prostrate cancers and that people who eat meat "may be particularly exposed."

I suspect I could commission a similar study on chocolate or asparagus and the study would find the same connections.

I also suspect that, in some families, there is a long history of genetically predesposed people who, while eating meat, fish, pork, vegetables, or the bark off of trees all encountered some kind of cancer.

Where you live, what kind of work you do, and a whole range of other factors likely play a role in whether you encounter some kind of cancer during your lifetime.

The particular animus toward meat, however, seems to take a lot of its motivation from the efforts of vegetarian groups who devote a great deal of time to advocating a vegan diet.

All this ignores the fact that humans are physically designed to eat meat, from our teeth to our digestive system, our bodies function as meat-eating machines. Red meat provides high quantities of iron as opposed to plant foods. There's phosphorus, too, and B12.

So we need to relax a bit when it comes to the torrent of anti-meat propaganda that the mainstream media loves to slap on the front page. It sells newspapers. It keeps people watching the TV or listening to the radio.

And a lot of it may be quite dubious, have a hidden agenda, and well worth ignoring.

Rates of cancer, virtually all kinds, have been falling for decades now. That's the good news.