BeanDiet

When I tell people to cut way back on animal protein - and the myriad reasons why - a oft-asked question is this: "If meats, eggs and dairy are so bad for us, why is it that our great-grandparents weren't vegetarians, yet they were so much healthier than we are today?" This is a GREAT question. Why is that?

As someone who was raised by her very old (born before the turn of the 20th century!) grandfather, I can tell you right off our "elders" didn't eat nearly as much animal protein as we do today. In fact, my grandfather was from a wealthy family, which was a much smaller proportion of the United States at that time. Believe it or not, in the early 20th century, only the wealthy could afford to eat meat daily. Subsidizes for meat and dairy didn't exist back then, and to eat meat, poultry or fish regularly would require an "ice box" for storage - which most people did not have. (An ice box means you paid someone to haul ice to your house every day. Hardly inexpensive.) Same for dairy products.

Also, in U.S. history, you will find most people had gardens. Even very poor people. They didn't use pesticides or artificial fertilizers. Processed foods didn't exist until mid-20th century, or exist to such measure until the last 20-something years.

You can also throw in the fact that people were much more mobile back then, but again, even the "wealthy" who weren't so mobile were healthier than the average American today. So back to animal protein intake...

Here's a quote from the "Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler" article in the NYTimes (Jan. 27th)

"Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources."

So even if we take out eggs and dairy, today we're eating 50 pounds more meat than just half a century ago. Do you think that might have something to do with it?