Update To My Diet

After a long period of deliberation I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to make a serious change in my diet in regard to my meat consumption.

Some people oppose eating meat due to purely ethical concerns.  Others do it for personal health reasons, believing that a meat-free diet is a healthier diet.  Still others stop due to environmental concerns, citing the impact of raising animals for food on the surrounding land.  I am in none of those groups.  Both our teeth and our digestive tract are flexible enough for us to be omnivorous. 

Debates rage about how much meat a person should eat.  How the animal was raised and what it was fed has also been considered.  Are free-range or even wild animals more nutritious than meats that come from mass-production farms?  How much does the quality and type of feed matter?  While scientific research has not shown any clear nutritional benefits of eating organic or free-range animals over their conventionally raised counterparts, there is certainly a flavor difference.  The white meat of free range chicken actually has some flavor as opposed to the flavorless mass-produced boneless skinless chicken breasts which only seem to be a vehicle to carry the flavor of some marinade or sauce.

There is one thing that we know for certain: people should not eat animals that eat other animals.  Toxins tend to build up in predators at the metaphorical top of the food chain through processes known as bioaccumulation and biomagnification.  Bioaccumulation is just the accumulation of chemicals through ingestion whether by eating, drinking, or breathing.  Water soluble chemicals are fairly easily flushed out with the rest of the waste.  Fat soluble chemicals, however, are not.  The more hydrophobic the chemical, the less likely it is to be flushed out of your system and it will end up accumulating in, you guessed it, your fat cells.  Other chemicals, such as lead and a variety of radioactive materials accumulate in your bones. 

Biomagnification occurs when a higher-level predator eats another organism ingesting the substances in it, which in turn contains the chemicals accumulated from everything that thing ate, and everything those things ate, and everything those things ate, and so on, all the way down the food chain.  The livers of predators can be particularly dangerous as eating them can lead to vitamin A poisoning.  Other types of bioaccumulations can occur in the tissues of top-level predators.  As much as I love shark, it is important to stop eating it.  Beyond the overfishing which is decimating populations worldwide, sharks contain high levels of accumulated mercury and lead.  The same is true of swordfish and mackerel. 

Heck, even mad cow disease is caused by suspect animal proteins in the animal’s feed.  For these very real reasons you should only eat meat that has been raised on a diet of fruits and vegetables.

Therefore, after much reading, deliberation, and soul searching I have decided to add vegetarians and vegans to my diet.  I can’t imagine anything that could be healthier to eat than a vegetarian who has been raised on fresh, locally sourced, pesticide-free, organic fruits and vegetables.  I’m off to the farmer’s market to pick one up.