Vegetarian Diet Issues
Acknowledgement:
This article on vegetarian issues are based upon copyright materials from
the outstanding health website Mercola.com
©Copyright 2003 Dr. Joseph Mercola. We recommend this website.
The author of this article is Stephen Byrnes:
see References
Vegetarian References:
Numbers in brackets refer to vegetarian references. See References
Meat and Saturated Fat Consumption Have
Increased in The 20th Century, With a Corresponding Increase in Heart
Disease and Cancer
Statistics do not bear out such fancies.
Butter consumption has plummeted from 18 lb (8.165 kg) per person a year
in 1900, to less than 5 lb (2.27 kg) per person a year today (52). Additionally,
Westerners, urged on by government health agencies, have reduced their
intake of eggs, cream, lard, beef and pork.
Chicken consumption has risen in the past
few decades, but chicken is low in saturated fat (chicken skin contains
primarily polyunsaturated fat).
Furthermore, a survey of cookbooks published
in the last century shows that people of earlier times ate plenty of animal
foods and saturated fats. For example, in the Baptist Ladies Cook Book
(Monmouth, Illinois, 1895), virtually every recipe calls for butter, cream
or lard. Recipes for creamed vegetables are numerous as well.
A scan of the Searchlight Recipe Book (Capper
Publications, 1931) also has similar recipes: creamed liver, creamed cucumbers,
hearts braised in buttermilk, etc. British Jews, as shown by the Jewish
Housewives Cookbook (London, 1846), also had diets rich in cream, butter,
eggs, and lamb and beef tallows. One recipe for German waffles, for example,
calls for an entire pound of butter! A recipe for Oyster Pie from the Baptist
cookbook calls for a quart of cream and a dozen eggs, and so forth and so
on.
It does not appear, then, that meat or
saturated fat consumption has risen in this century. What has gone up,
however, is consumption of margarine and other trans-fatty acids, lifeless,
packaged "foods," processed vegetable oils, pasteurised/homogenised
milk, commercially raised livestock and plant foods, and refined sugar.
These, along with exposure to a growing number of environmental poisons,
are our real culprits in the modern epidemics of cancer and coronary heart
disease (and other chronic illnesses) [53].
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