Why You Should Avoid Red Meat
Adventists have an organized teaching on health that focus on the four facets of human life and this is spiritual, mental, physical and social. On physical, emphasis are on eight sure ways that a man can be spiritually fit without taking in a lot of diet prescription and dos and donts found in most of the health guidance we come across from other spheres of life. The eight sure steps to health and happiness are given as Nutrition, Exercise, Water, Sunlight, Temperance, Air, Rest, and Trust in Divine Power whose acronym is NEW START.
On nutrition, the importance of consuming a lot of vegetables and fruits is emphasized with warning against consumption of meat and meat products. Special emphasis is laid on the advantages of abstaining totally from red meat.
Causes of tumor and cancer cells have been greatly attributed to the presence of such cells in the red meat that we consume. Though it has been found that meat protein is good for you health because meat provide you with the eight essential amino acids, it has been shown by scientific studies and research that those who consume a lot of red meat are more likely to contract cancer than those who major their diet on vegetables and fruits. Other research areas on functional foods have considered that more than 98% of foods considered functional foods are from the plant kingdom.
Reasons why red meat is not healthy for humans is due to the fact that a lot of meat sold in the market are not ‘natural’ meat but meat that come from ranches kept under ‘artificial’ conditioning for good muscles. Feeding and chemical treatment given to the animals meant for slaughter makes the animals grow big, fat and huge within a very short time, with the chemicals (hormones, antibiotics, and enzymes) depositing on the muscles and get their way to the human body. These chemicals react with the human body physiological functions in many ways some of which are yet to be fully understood and appreciated.
Even if red meat is consumed from a domesticated animal through the traditional way, there is risk of zoonotic disease transmission due to improper care and animal husbandry. A lot of dieses are shared between the animals and man, and since the proper level of hygiene to totally isolate these ailments from the tissues of the animal by chemical or/and heat treatment would sometimes mean denaturisation the animal protein, it would be prudent just to forgo consumption of red meat (or even all kinds of meat if so considered) for the advantage of your own well being.
Recent studies have also shown that overcooking of meat (if you might just want to overcook it in order to get rid of all kinds of diseases associated with improper cooked meat) would also be a major cause of cancer. And even to under do the cooking poses your health to risk of acquiring the cancer you would want to avoid by overcooking.
And finally, some logical reasoning; if we did not tend thousands and thousands of slaughter animals, especially those that feed on a lot of green vegetables, and cultivate just enough greens for human consumption, we would save a lot in resources and everyone would get sufficient food since one animal consumes quantity of greens that could feed over 10 people. Don’t you think that being a vegetarian could reduce the rate of global warming?
