Meat: To Eat or Not to Eat? - Health - Nutrition

Nothing generates more controversy in nutrition than meat consumption. Is it safe to eat? Is it immoral to eat? There are seemingly more questions than answers.

Health experts in the 50s and 60s declared that red meat was bad because it was high in saturated fat, which was linked to heart disease and other health ailments. In recent times, high protein, low carb fad diets such as the Atkins diet have reversed this claim, calling for as much meat consumption as your heart desires. And on yet another tack, vegetarians disapprove of meat consumption on moral grounds.

All of these conflicting views leave us not knowing what to believe. Should we stick to meat and potatoes like Mom taught us? Should we do the "right" thing and begrudgingly give up our beef for tofu burgers?

In answering these questions, it behooves us to consider how the human body was actually designed to fuel itself. A relatively recent, yet growing contingent of scientists and health experts have started promoting The Paleo Diet, otherwise known as The Stone Age Diet. This new body of work takes the view that millions of years of evolution have shaped our dietary needs, and that we can gain a better understanding of what those dietary needs are by studying the diets of our ancestors.

From cave paintings of the wild bulls and boars that are the ancestors of modern cows and pigs to the hunting to extinction of the woolly mammoth, along with a good heap of archeological and anthropological evidence, it is quite clear that our ancestors ate meat. Lots of meat. In fact, human evolution has developed an intimate relationship with meat consumption. It is widely believed that a dietary shift to high volumes of nutrient dense animal proteins is what fueled growth of the human brain to over three times the size of our more distant ancestors--which in turn gave rise to art, civilization, technology, and many of the aspects of modern life that we consider distinctly human.

Wait a second. Cavemen?! Meat consumption causing the rise of civilization?! Woolly mammoths?!

It's very easy to dismiss The Paleo Diet because of how different it is from everything else we have heard. And there was probably a little bit more at work in the rise of human civilization than a few steaks.

However, the undeniable fact remains--our ancestors ate meat, and for millions of years. Our bodies are designed to fuel themselves on meat. We live in a modern world of offices lunches, fast food, and fad diets, but we have the dietary needs of a paleolithic hunter-gatherer. Not only is it okay to eat meat from a health perspective, but the evidence suggests that we should probably be eating meat on a regular basis.

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