1y ago

Say it ain’t so

You're viewing a single thread.

233 comments

I know it's a shipost and this meme is at least 15 years old. But meat, cheese, and white bread (especially the ones in the US with added sugar) were never healthy
- Since when is meat unhealthy?
  
  Although high in nutrients, the difficulty in digestion makes it a carciogen. Particularly red meat - bird and fish (pre omnipresent plastics and heavy metals) are relatively healthier.
  
  That's sorta half the story. The official statement is that consistently eating more than 1.5lbs (500g) of red meat per week "probably" (their word) increases your cancer risk. The real story is that eating more than 50g of processed meat per week dramatically increases your cancer risk. To the extent that processed meat is ranked as a "Group 1" carcinogen.
  Flip-side, grains and legumes have been tied to cancer as well. I can't find exactly what category, but they seem fairly convinced they are carcinogenic.
  It is, sadly, like the California Cancer joke, where almost everything causes cancer if taken to excess.
  
  If it is hard to digest meat, why do carnivores have shorter guts than herbivores?
  
  "Hard" doesn't necessarily mean "requiring many resources" in this case. It has more nutrients, and as such it's usually not digested as fully as herbivores digest plant matter.
  It's harder on the system doing the digestion.
  
  I'm not getting it. Meat is hard to digest, but you can do it with a short gut, and produces very little excretion (the military "low residue diet" is meaty and low in fibre)
  But vegetables are easy, yet take a longer gut and produce enormous amounts of shit
  There's nothing about difficulty in digestion on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat#Nutritional_information
  Have you got a source - ideally one not produced by a vegan or vegetarian source?
  
  I think it's more the industrial farming and food processing practices that make it carcinogenic.
  
  It's not. Remember that evolutionary incentives don't care if you tend to live very far fast 32.
  
  It actually is. Most carcinogenic evidence on meats come from processed meats. Per cited references, eating way too much red meat is "probably" a cause for cancer, but eating processed meats is definitely a cause for cancer.
  And by "way too much", that's 1.5lbs/week. I love a good steak, but don't really eat 1.5lbs/week of it.
  
  Yeah I just don't believe you bud.
  
  https://www.mdanderson.org/publications/focused-on-health/your-guide-to-eating-less-red-meat.h26Z1590624.html
  Well good thing science doesn't give a shit what you believe lol. We've known this for decades at this point.
  
  “That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now, I know some of you are going to say, ‘I did look it up, and that’s not true.’ That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works.” - Stephen Colbert, 2006
  
  Would you happen to know any papers with compelling evidence of this?
  
  They use "can" and "probably" in scientific sources because it's not entirely confirmed. The best citation I could find was "probably" an increased risk if you eat more than 500g of meat per week.
  
  Fr meat is the reason we have big brain.
  Now if you wanna argue that we should have never left the trees and created civilization then you may have a point.
  
  The dose is the poison. Meat in the amount we consume today is unhealthy. In the past people didn't eat meat every day or even close to it.
  
  That doesn’t inherently make it unhealthy. We have the means to not have to eat the animals we slaughter immediately due to refrigeration.
  
  The frequency and serving sizes are what make it unhealthy. Coupled with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and one of the best/easiest decisions you can make to improve your health is to cut back on meat, especially processed meat products. Proccessed meat is definitely, 100% unhealthier than cuts from your local butcher.
  
  Processed meat is a Group 1 carcinogen. We should be treating it like we treat cigarettes.
  
  Dude I can breathe air and get cancer.
  
  That does not mean air causes cancer if that's what you are saying. Processed meat actually does.
  
  While that's true, some things are definitely worse than others.
  You can ignore them and smoke if you want. And if you're lucky, you'll still die of something that isn't caused by your smoking.
  
  Yes, but all these points were not mentioned by the user I’m responding to. He stated that our ancestors didn’t eat meat as frequently as we do now. That was his argument against red meat.
  
  That's also true of almost any food. Grains and legumes cause liver cancer. Eating too many plain vegetables can lead to nutritional deficiencies. All carbs, even fibers, need to be eaten in moderation. This site suggests no more than 3-4 servings per day.
  
  Everything in moderation
  
  Since the grain industry gained power in the 1940s. They funded much research to say
  Meat is hard to digest (when in fact carnivorous animals have the shortest gut; we're omnivores and have a medium gut, we also have the most acidic stomach acid of the mammals which is an adaptation to eating meat)
  Grain is the healthiest food (the only type of animal that does well on seeds is birds, they don't have teeth for bread to get stuck between and rot. The ancient Egyptians lived on bread and had the worst dental health)
  That humans need a balanced diet of many different things - which we do when we're eating nutritionally poor foods like bread, but many thrive on simple diets of fatty meat (Inuit before they adopted the standard American diet; Buffalo hunting native Americans; modern followers of lion, carnivore, zero carb)
  The standard diet as recommended by science (much of which was bought by the wheat peak bodies) has made us fat. Getting fatter is the most unhealthy state, it leads to diabetes, hypertension, bad cholesterol and early death
  
  This is a common explanation but is unfortunately propaganda in itself.
  https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Weston_A._Price_Foundation
  Long story short on what you wrote - meat is a nutritionally rich food option and kind of nutritionally acceptable if your people have been living in the tundra for a few thousand years & have actually managed to genetically accommodate it, since there isn't much else food the further you go north (although it's very much overly simplistic to depict Inuit diets as entirely meat-based). But for modern people, in temperature or tropical regions, it makes no sense at all, plant-based diets give you the best balance of nutrients without extremely high fat and cholesterol content...there's a real anti-scientific hubris going on with people trying to brush away this basic fact.
  
  If you eat it more than 2 - 3 times per week.
- Specially processed meat, cheese and bread. In the case of fast food these ingredients are basically "hacked" to make us crave more and consume more. These industries have "food scientists" working on exactly that.
  Meat, cheese and bread in their more natural form is definitely healthy when consumed in moderation.
  
  Hacking implies a lot more than simply adding fat and sugar, and that's all you gotta do.
  I've seen several threads where chefs confess that all they do to make their dish(s) popular is load it down with butter and sugar.
  Wouldst thou like the taste of butter, wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
  In related news, this American finally figured out why Europeans find our bread sickening sweet, why I love sourdough and why it's called "sour". You're only gonna need one guess.
  
  Hacking implies a lot more than simply adding fat and sugar, and that's all you gotta do.
  In principle yes, but in reality it extends much farther than that and there is a whole industry built around this.
  For example, the "Subway Sandwich smell" is something desired but not easily replicable, and is a guarded secrecy that corporate is pretty shush-shush about. It not only accentuates the flavor but can get people into the shop from blocks away.
  
  It's... Just just the smell of baked bread and yeast. Anyone that makes their own bread knows what's going on with the smells in subway and can easily replicate it. I worked at one when I was younger there's absolutely nothing nefarious or secret about it lmao. I personally think it's the yeast more than anything. It's a smell that used to be really common but is much less so these days so it sticks out. A lot of subways have the bread proofing/rising right up by the front too
  
  I’ve seen several threads where chefs confess that all they do to make their dish(s) popular is load it down with butter and sugar.
  Not "confessed". That's a part of what they teach in culinary school. Restaurants strive for increased flavor, and the most effective flavor profiles are sweet and umami. Sugar and butter (or meat or MSG etc).
  But yeah, we definitely use more sugar (instead of, or as well as umami) in America. However, there's a lot of that going on in Japanese and Chinese (real, as in eating in China) cooking as well. When I was in China, everything that wasn't meat was shockingly carb-loaded. These weird (yummy) sweet cheese breads I swore had simple syrup slathered all over them with what tasted almost like American Cheese.
- Especially the US white bread which contains a carcinogen.
  
  Which carcinogen?
  
  Can't you read? "A" carcinogen. Doesn't matter which one!
  /s
  
  I don't know exactly, but it's one of the preservatives. It's banned in Europe.
  
  How profound. Clearly, you have a lot of important things to say.
  
  I said all of that in my other comment, replying to someone else.
  
  Take care not to make statements so inaccurate they are effectively meaningless.
  "US white bread" isn't a singular brand and most brands don't "contain[s] a carcinogen"...
  You never mentioned what the carcinogen was. Probably because it would compromise your argument that "US white bread" as a whole contains it when it does not. (It's Potassium Bromate/Bromide (it's used interchangeably online sometimes), for those wondering.)
  It's not limited to white bread in where it can be used. It was an additive to flour in general.
  A lot of the fear mongering blogs, written by 'influencers' whose research consists of 10 seconds of Googling but not verifying a single fucking thing they write about, name brands that contain potassium bromate... but actually don't. Example: Wonder bread (https://wonderbread.ca/ourproducts/white-bread-675g/) Chex Mix. Looking up their ingredients list shows the item in question is not used at all. https://www.chexmix.com/products/chex-mix-traditional/
  TLDR: Think before you repeat vague, meaningless shit next time.
  BTW, You should look into the horrors of Dihydrogen Monoxide.
  
  My statement is far from meaningless. Mild carcinogens are still carcinogenic. Sure, a small dose as a one of will not cause problems short term, but long term build up is a thing.
  It's a preservative widely used in US white bread, but banned in Europe and other places.
  I don't know the specific carcinogen off the top of my head, I've never bothered to remember it, and didn't look it up earlier while I was half snoozing being driven home.
  So you do know what I'm talking about.
  My source was Dr Joel Fuhrman. I'm not sure if you'd call him an influencer. While I do turn my nose up at some of his preaching, I think much of what he says is backed up by solid science. Not that I follow it myself. If it's since been removed from most products then good for you and other people in the US.
  Your link to Wonderbread is from Canada.
  Chex Mix doesn't contain azodicarbonamide (I'm guessing this is the one we're talking about? I wouldn't be surprised if there are others), but it does use butylated hydroxytoluene, which is also classed as GRAS (Generally Recognised As Safe) by the FDA based on a study from 1979. Yet both chemicals have since been called into question for their links to cancer. From a cursory glance, azodicarbonamide has a more proven link, while butylated hydroxytoluene has yet to be properly studied and the link is questionable.
  Too much dihydrogen monoxide can kill you.
  Alcohol is also carcinogenic - more so than bread additives - but I'm definitely having some of that tonight.
  Also, Joel Fuhrman had a podcast talk about lemmy's favourite, BEANS.
  Edit: Bloody kbin users, breaking lemmy threads. Supposedly there's a comment underneath mine, but it won't load, and there's nothing on kbin.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=4C9i9LMG_5c
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
  
  Only if you live in California!
  
  Exactly lol.
  But in all seriousness mild carcinogens are still carcinogenic.

233 comments