Meat And Poultry
WHAT shall we have for dinner? Generally this question means "what kind of meat course?" and only occasionally do we think of fish or eggs as alternatives for the central place in the meal. Beef, mutton and pork together with bacon supply around 30 per cent of the total fats and close to half of the saturated fatty acids in the usual British diet at present. Chicken, veal, lamb, and the "variety" meats ("offals", including liver, heart, kidney, sweetbreads, etc.) and sausages add to the total. Obviously, then, these foods pose a major problem if the diet is to be adjusted in regard to fats in an attempt to control the cholesterol of the blood.
Of course an easy solution to the problem of fat in the diet would be vegetarianism, but this would be both impractical and unnecessary in our opinion. A diet without meat is extremely dull for most people, and with such a diet there is always the danger of protein inadequacy unless other sources of good proteins - eggs and dairy products - are included. As a matter of fact, most so-called vegetarians are "lacto-vegetarians" or "lacto-ovo-vegetarians" and so manage to escape nutritional deficiencies. But the substitution of milk, butter, and eggs for meats does not help us in our effort to reduce the intake of the kind of fats that elevate the blood cholesterol.
"Natural" Diets Arguments both for and against the custom of eating meat can be supported by appealing to what is known of the natural history of man. The anthropoid apes and most of the monkeys are vegetarians, and it is probable that man, too, like his closest relatives in the animal kingdom, was herbivorous over most of his evolutionary history. On the other hand, in relatively recent times, say the last 50,000 years, man seems to have been as much carnivore as herbivore; his prehistoric habitations are marked by the debris of a carnivorous life - heaps of molluscan shells, animal bones charred by a cooking fire and cracked to allow the extraction of the marrow, and the remnants of hunting and fishing implements. Man, like the rat, is "naturally" omnivorous, if anything.
But such arguments about what is natural and what we, therefore, ought to eat are meaningless unless we believe that whatever man has been doing for many generations is, ipso facto, "good" for him. Even if we argue along elementary Darwinian lines, natural selection would not necessarily force man to evolve towards a diet that is best for his later adult health. That man successfully increased his numbers for a thousand generations on a diet containing as much meat as he could get is no proof that he needs meat in his diet or that he would not do better by a more scientific choice of the amounts and kinds of foods to eat. Finally, the diet of civilized people today is far from the diet of their ancestors, even those of the last century. Our modern diet has not been tested by natural selection operating over a long series of generations. Before us no adult population subsisted on a diet providing several hundred calories daily from butterfat, an equal amount of the fat of domestic animals, large amounts of refined sugars and starches, and appreciable amounts of hydrogenated fats.
In evolutionary history, carnivorous man is represented primarily by man the hunter who ate the meat, and fat, of wild animals. But wild animals are generally much leaner than their domestic counterparts, and their fat tends to be less highly saturated.
This brings us to the Eskimo, who is pictured as living almost entirely on seal fat and walrus blubber and seldom falling ill unless he is exposed to the infectious diseases of civilization. Actually, only very few Eskimoes now eat the primitive arctic diet and nothing is known about their tendency to develop atherosclerosis and heart disease. The primitive Eskimo does not know his own age, but few of them ever attain the "ripe old age" of 50 years. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, and the accidents of hunting and fishing in the frozen North eliminate them before the age when coronary heart disease might be a problem. Moreover, the primitive Eskimoes never eat beef, pork, or dairy products, and most of the fat they eat is of the highly unsaturated type in fish and marine mammals. Even the land mammals they eat, the caribou and reindeer, are not comparable to the meat animals of warmer regions. For example, the fat of the arctic land animals tends to have a low melting point, which suggests it is unusually low in saturated fats. So primitive Eskimoes teach us little.