People may be curious: why did I make such a 180° change after living for well over a decade as a vegetarian? 

Well, when I got serious about boxing, my energy reserves were inadequate to sustain the demands I was making of my body. I had my iron level, thyroid, etc., checked, and everything was within normal clinical ranges. Then I tried acupuncture, and the practitioner suggested that I needed to be eating red meat.

Turnabout…

Fast forward another two and a half decades, and now I’m firmly convinced that eating meat can be a pillar of a healthy diet for almost everyone.

(Meat allergies, including those due to Lone Star tick bites, would be one notable exception; fortunately they are still rare. And please don’t feel that I’m pushing meat onto others who don’t eat it for their own ethical or religious reasons. This is my own decision-making path, and it may not be anyone else’s.)

Why am I so convinced? Short version, it’s our same operating system, as it were. Meat has a much higher bioavailability for us than plants do, especially regarding protein, iron, and Omega-3 fatty acids. (The ratio of Omega 3s to 6s improves even more with grass-fed/finished animals.) I feel this moves our nutritional paradigm from surviving into thriving.

I also personally feel that my vegetarian years were truly not good for my own health. Okay, full disclosure: I didn’t do a great job of nourishing myself. For example, I’ve really had to work my way out of the carboholic’s slippery slope — and it seems I’m not alone with that!

If you’d like delve in a little further with personalized input on your own eating habits, feel free to contact me.

…But My Own Way

Since returning to eating meat, at home I only cook meat that is grass-fed, organic, or at least hormone/antibiotic free, and hopefully animal-welfare certified whenever possible. (See below for budget tips.)

I may have moved to putting my own well-being above taking animals’ lives, but I can still support their well-being throughout the entire process.

I have a fairly starry-eyed ideal: smaller farms that use polyculture and interplanting with minimal or no chemical usage. I’m not into factories pushing animals through as fast as possible, and especially following a field trip to a hog farm, I’m not into gestation crates or farrowing cages either. For me, the health and welfare of animals ties in with our own. We’re all interconnected — and humans wouldn’t get so darn sick if we took care of ourselves better, including improving our eating habits.

 

As Up Close As It Gets

I recently took a huge step toward getting really up close and personal with animals as a food source by taking a meat processing certificate. I’m still not really even sure yet how I managed to steer myself into the slaughter elective — but I’m very glad I did.

I’m fully aware how bizarre this may come across, but participating in this part of the cycle reinforces my commitment to animals; now I can work to minimize distress during their last minutes and provide them with the quickest send-off possible.

The Two Kingdoms

The whole plant vs. animal debate has opened up even more lately with new research on lectins. Lectins are considered to be the self-protection method of many plants. They’re often known as anti-nutrients, and that can create digestive issues especially for some people. (You can read about them here.) 

On the other end of the scale is the zero carb tribe, following in the footsteps of famed Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson by eating exclusively meat. (For more on this subject, including some wonderful vintage photographs, click here.) Cynics could consider the carnivore diet a way of “outsourcing” difficulties that our bodies may have in processing plant foods, and it’s proven particularly beneficial for people with certain autoimmune disorders.

Striking a Balance

Either way, finding the right individual balance is key. This is particularly true for an optimal mix of amino acids. Vegetarians have long known to eat complementary proteins together, thus mitigating the lack of certain essential amino acids in one food or the other. 

Ideally, meat eaters would jump on this train also. For example, eating exclusively muscle meats may lead to an unbalanced ratio of methionine to glycine, which is found in ligaments, tendons, skin and bones. (Why care? Too much methionine can cause neurological symptoms or liver distress, and too little glycine can adversely affect sleep patterns. For more on that, click here). Expanding one’s palate to include tougher, collagen-rich cuts or even offal is a worthwhile venture, as is including shellfish in your diet occasionally. (And hey, as a bonus, they’re more budget-friendly — again, see below for more on that.)

Overturning a Few Ideas

One kicker for me when I considered returning to eating meat: I discovered that a key reason long cited to support becoming vegetarian has now been disproven. The appendix was long considered “vestigial” in humans, just an evolutionary relic that showed we had somehow managed to transcend the need to digest meat. Then it was recently discovered that it actually plays important roles in the lymphatic and digestive systems. (For more on that, click here.) 

Another was discovering that much of the research regarding the relationship between unprocessed meat and cancer is severely flawed – seriously, injecting rats with carcinogens before subsequently announcing that (surprise) they’ve developed cancer? Here’s the best scientific rundown I’ve found on that.  

And finally, another was realizing that eating vegetarian doesn’t necessarily mean eliminating collateral animal deaths related to producing any type of food for humans, especially on a larger scale. Similarly, meat production can dovetail closely with smaller-scale regenerative farming practices. Resources such as Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth, Robb Wolf and Diana Rodger’s Sacred Cow, and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma  are invaluable. They all highlight ways to simultaneously eat well-raised meat while keeping our entire planet as healthy and sustainable as possible. 

I was happily surprised to see lately that even the Canadian Cattlemen Beef Magazine has stated that cattle can be “fattened up” with grasses rather than grains, based on good pasture management and access to high-quality forage. This is truly exciting news. It shows that even mainstream sources endorse something that could reduce the use of antibiotics, which are often preventatively administered to get around so many liver abscesses that occur in grain-fed cattle.

And remember those plant anti-nutrients? Grains, while delicious and readily available, are very high in them. Cows are born to eat grass; that’s why they have more stomachs than we do.

 

When We’re in the Kitchen

Without getting into processed meats or additives (another health-related rabbit hole, and one that I’ll ignore entirely here because I typically prefer to stay away from both of those), the way that we cook our fresh meat is significant.

The TLDR: save high heat and smoke for treat occasions, and use certain marinade ingredients liberally. For more background, click here, and for practical tips, here.

Do be aware that some education may be required around grass-fed/grass-finished beef tasting a little different than grain-finished. It boils down to our priorities, and our openness to trying something new. You may even find (as I did) that it ends up tasting much better to you pretty soon.

The Budget Bit

Not gonna lie, it costs a whole bunch more to eat “ethically.” Yes, it’s a big choice in our world where cash flow seems to get tighter by the minute, but our consumer dollars support whatever system we funnel them into. I feel strongly that meat that is organic, grass fed/finished, or at least labelled as antibiotic and hormone-free is better for our health as humans and for that of the planet.

Here are some ways that I keep my own dollars and cents under control:

• More cooking is a big one. I tend to save eating out for special occasions, and even then, I sometimes prefer to pick up fancy ingredients and tackle making something myself. Eating a meal at home that would cost easily double in a restaurant can actually be pretty satisfying.
• Get to know your local meat departments. In Vancouver, that could include places like Famous Foods or Beefway Meats.
• Buy a chest freezer so that you can buy in bulk, and learn how to freeze and store meat properly. A couple of tips:
  • Don’t get caught short: a little pre-planning goes a long way, especially as far as what will have to be thawed in advance.
  • When freezing my meat, I usually create smaller packages so that future cooking batches are more manageable. This especially applies to liver, because really, who wants to eat too much of that at once? 😉
• Find — or even create — some sort of meat co-op.
• Learn now to cook the cheaper cuts. Hint: it’s usually all about the “low and slow” approach, often with moisture, as with braising.
• One super easy method is to use a slow cooker. One of mine is larger (for those times it’s worth the extra dishwashing when I realize that I didn’t pre-plan and I need to stuff a lot of weirdly-shaped frozen bits and pieces into it). It also has a timer, which makes it easy to just pop in the food, maybe even overnight, and then not worry about having to keep an eye on anything.

Onward and Upwards

Well, there we go. Again, my approach may sound all starry-eyed, and I admit flat out that it’s a more expensive one than within a mass-production model – but I do feel it’s possible to integrate our own health with that of the meat industry, and I hope I’ve given you a little food for thought, as it were, on that topic. As always, stay in touch!