Dr. Vernon Coleman Archive: https://earthnewspaper.com/category/dr-vernon-coleman
August 12, 2022
For decades the meat industry, ever deceitful and mercenary, has created a good many myths and misconceptions to promote meat eating.
These myths (let’s be honest and just call them lies) are regularly paraded by bent doctors and journalists – in the same way that bent doctors and journalists promote vaccines.
The shills spew lies with the same enthusiasm as the insane global warming cultists – the lunatics who fervently claim that if we all live on avocado and bean-shoot salads then we’ll save St Paul’s Cathedral from drowning.
Today, the meat industry shills are (probably to their delight and intense surprise) aided and abetted by a few hundred campaigners who, mistakenly and naively assume that because the conspirators and the architects of the Great Reset are determined to close down all farms (and shut down allotments and vegetable patches) and to force-feed us a diet of laboratory created fake food then we must all protest and eat more meat.
The argument that we should avoid meat to save the planet is manipulative bollocks designed by the conspirators who are behind the Great Reset, the covid fraud and various social credit schemes. And I believe that the argument that we should eat meat in order to defy them is ill-informed and self-destructive nonsense.
You can safely ignore them all.
The truth is that human beings are omnivores not carnivores. The sharp teeth give us a choice not a compulsion. Eating meat is an option not a necessity. You don’t need to eat meat any more than you need to eat marzipan or those multi-coloured sprinkles people put on birthday cakes and trifles.
Here are 21 carefully argued reasons to be vegetarian.
The shills say that without meat we won’t get enough iron. But there is plenty of iron in green, leafy vegetables, nuts, cereals and beans. Foods rich in vitamin C eaten at the same time as iron-containing food will considerably increase absorption – increasing it by a factor of five. A good, well-balanced vegetarian diet will contain plenty of iron. Although it is true that meat contains iron, the irony is that meat eaters are often more likely to develop iron deficiency anaemia because they tend to eat less fruit and vegetables.
Avoiding meat is one of the best and simplest ways to cut down your fat consumption. Modern farm animals are deliberately fattened up to increase profits. Eating fatty meat increases your chances of having a heart attack or developing cancer.
There are millions of cases of food poisoning recorded every year. The vast majority of all those cases are caused by eating meat.
‘Meat’ can include the tail, head, feet, rectum and spinal cord of an animal, and a sausage may contain ground-up intestines. How can anyone be sure that the intestines are empty when they are ground up? Do you really want to eat the contents of a pig’s intestines?
If an animal has cancer when it is killed, meat eaters will eat the cancer. Do you really want to sit down to dinner and eat a large chunk of cancer?
The world’s fresh water shortage is being made worse by animal farming. And meat producers are the biggest polluters of water. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat. If the meat industry in America wasn’t supported by the taxpayer paying a large proportion of its water costs then hamburger meat would cost $35 a pound. Run-off water from farms does massive damage to rivers and underground water supplies and, therefore, to drinking water supplies.
If you eat meat you are consuming hormones that were fed to the animals. No one knows what effect those hormones will have on your health. In some parts of the world as many as one in four hamburgers contains growth hormones that were originally given to cattle. Attempts to outlaw the use of hormones have proved remarkably ineffective.
The following diseases have been proved to be commoner among meat eaters: anaemia, appendicitis, arthritis, breast cancer, cancer of the colon, cancer of the prostate, constipation, diabetes, gallstones, gout, high blood pressure, indigestion, obesity, piles, strokes and varicose veins. (My book Meat causes Cancer and other Food for Thought, which I wrote in 1994, contains extracts from 26 scientific papers beyond argument proving that eating meat causes cancer.)
Lifelong vegetarians visit hospital 22% less often than meat eaters – and for shorter stays. Now that we have poorly managed hospitals, long waiting lists and a dead or dying health service, this is incredibly important.
Vegetarians have 20% lower blood cholesterol levels than meat eaters. (I’m not sure how much cholesterol levels really matter – but a naturally lower level won’t do you harm.)
Some farmers use tranquillisers to keep animals calm. The result is that when you eat meat you are eating the residues of those drugs. And those residues are often very powerful.
Considerably more than half of all the antibiotics sold are given by farmers to healthy animals so that they will produce more meat. The percentage of infections resistant to antibiotics such as penicillin has risen dramatically as a result.
Every minute of every working day thousands of animals are killed in slaughterhouses. Many animals are bled to death. Pain and misery are commonplace. In America alone, 500,000 animals are killed for meat every hour. Animals who die for your dinner table die in terror, in sadness and in pain. The killing is often inhumane. Some religions insist that animals are killed inhumanely by having their throats cut. Conditions in abattoirs are often disgusting.
Vegetarians are fitter than meat eaters. Many of the world’s most successful athletes are vegetarian.
You don’t have to eat meat to be strong. The world’s strongest animals (elephants, rhinos, gorillas) are vegetarian.
African countries — where millions are starving to death — export millions of tons of grain to the developed world so that animals can be fattened for the dining tables of the affluent nations. If we all ate the plants we grow — instead of feeding them to animals — the world’s food shortage would disappear virtually overnight. One hundred acres of land will produce enough beef for 20 people but enough wheat to feed 240 people. This year, hundreds of millions will die of starvation in Africa and Asia. Most of those deaths will be unnecessary.
Every day tens of millions of one-day-old male chicks are killed because they will not be able to lay eggs. There are no rules about how this mass slaughter takes place. Some are crushed or suffocated to death. Many are used for fertiliser or fed to other animals.
It is much easier to become — and stay — slim if you are vegetarian. By ‘slim’ I do not mean ‘abnormally slender’ or ‘underweight’ but, rather, an absence of excess weight.
In a lifetime, the average meat eater will consume 36 pigs, 36 sheep and 750 chickens and turkeys. Do you want that much carnage on your conscience?
Animals suffer from pain and fear just as much as you do. How would you like to spend your last hours locked in a truck and then cruelly pushed into a blood soaked death chamber? Animals being transported sometimes spend days packed into two-storey lorries. Some of the animals die of starvation before they reach their destination. The animals on the lower level are subjected to a constant shower of faeces and urine from the animals above them. Anyone who eats meat condones and supports the way animals are treated.
Animals which are a year old are often far more rational — and capable of logical thought — than six week old babies. I once kept four sheep as pets – they were intelligent and sensitive. They knew their names and could pick me out of a crowd. Evidence suggests that pigs and sheep are brighter than dogs and brighter than small children. If you wouldn’t eat a dog or a small child then you shouldn’t eat a sheep, a pig or a cow.
So, that’s it.
Eat meat if you can’t live without the taste or the texture. (And I readily admit that most of the fake meats produced in laboratories don’t much taste like the real thing.)
But don’t kid yourself that meat will keep you healthy. It won’t. All the available evidence proves that eating meat will do tremendous damage to your health. Vegetarians are healthier than meat eaters and they live longer too. Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn’t studied the medical literature properly.
There are two very good, straightforward reasons to avoid eating bits of dead animal.
First, because you like animals, disapprove of the way they are farmed and transported, and would rather be friends with them than eat them. (And animals can make very good friends.) That’s why I’ve been a vegetarian for decades. It has sometimes proved difficult and expensive. Back in the 1980s I was commissioned to write a series of books for a major British publisher. The books were due to be produced as co-editions around the world. I was half way through the fifth book in the series (about food) when I was told that the German publisher wanted a big section extolling the virtues of eating meat. I refused and insisted that the book should advocate a vegetarian diet. It was an impasse and so I bought back the rights to the book and the rest of the series and published the book myself as Food for Thought’. I believe that one of the German editors disagreed with my statement thatmeat causes cancer’, but there are some straightforward medical truths which are beyond debate and that is one of them – to attempt to argue that it isn’t true would be as daft as trying to argue that the earth is flat, not spherical, and is bordered with high stone walls to stop the seas falling over the edge.
Second, because you want to stay healthy.
It’s your choice.
And we all have the right to have access to accurate, independent information to enable us to choose for ourselves whether or not we eat meat or follow a vegetarian diet.
Vernon Coleman’s book Meat causes Cancer – and more food for thought is available as an eBook and a paperback.
Source: https://vernoncoleman.org/articles/twenty-one-reasons-being-vegetarian
Dr. Vernon Coleman:
https://VernonColeman.com
https://VernonColeman.org
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