The F-Word Today's Health and Diet Gurus Can't Say

(Purple Passion Stew from Macrobiotic Community Cookbook)

Take a stroll down to the nutrition/diet section of your local bookstore, and you'll quickly deduce that no one seems to agree on what is good for us or what is healthy for us or what we should eat. The main division seems to lie in whether or not we should eat animal products, in other words, dairy, eggs, and red and white meat (and let's not forget fish, which J. S. Foer points out in Eating Animals is also farmed, even if it's wild.) Some self-professed health gurus think we should drink milk, eat eggs and eat meat, and others say we shouldn't eat them at all or have very little, about 10% of our daily intake.

It should be no mystery where I stand on this issue, but I cannot imagine any doctor or any nutritionist out there who could look you in the eye and say that eating today's commercially-sold, factory-farmed animal food would be good for you. I could understand if they were referring to local, wild game and insects like today's hunter-gatherers eat that you'll see on Beyond Survival, or past tribes and civilizations of yore, but not today's government-sanctioned and subsidized factory-farmed meat or dairy where antibiotics and all sorts of disease runs rampant, causing death and viral outbreaks such as H1N1 or Listeria. Honestly, who could possibly tell you that eating sick animals is healthy? (Oh, just cook it and it'll be fine! goes the typical and utterly ignorant response.) And yet, this is exactly what all these diet and health-related books are telling you to do or not do: eat lean meat and drink milk, the former for protein and essential fatty acids, and the latter, for calcium, all of which careful vegans can get in ample quantities.

What all of these books and knowledgeable authors are leaving out is that factory-farmed meat and dairy is absolutely NOT GOOD FOR YOU and they know it, but they simply CANNOT SAY IT. They'd be fired if they did, and they know that, too.


This all vastly depends on which lobbyists are paying their checks as we all know, or should know, since many of these doctor/scientists are paid off to slant the data in the food industry's favor. The China Study, though I agree it seems to be biased, is a great look into how these academic "experts" are paid by or invested in the modern food industry. Yes, the standby rule, follow the money, applies here greatly. Just see who pays their checks.

So this seems to be where all nutritionists part company, whether you should eat meat, fish, and drink dairy or not. But if they just wrote "Make sure you eat plenty of factory farmed meat, fish and dairy," it'd be a whole different ball game--one that none of these health experts are willing to play. They cannot go there, even if they want to. Factory farmed food is their triple F-word. It is simply unspeakable, it is the line they are not willing to cross. And for a second, let's imagine if they were to write this. Who would buy it? Who would believe anyone who told you to eat factory farmed meat and dairy? That's right. Nary a soul. We'd all see their bullshit for what it is. Which is exactly how we need to start viewing this entire health food and diet industry: it's all smoke and mirrors, and piles of factory-farmed pig cow and chicken shit--which just happens to keep them all so happily employed. It's also what seems to be in our food. But that's okay, just cook the shit out of it, and it should be fine.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy