The me of a few years ago would have laughed at the idea of going on a plant-based diet. Crossing over into my mid-30s and starting to think about health for the long haul, and learning a bit about the potential health benefits as well as the real costs of factory animal farming, and here I am writing this article!
My wife and I used to eat meat with nearly every meal, mainly out of habit. Meat, eggs, a ton of dairy...all kind of mindlessly, but hey, it is all quite tasty to the human pallet! Now we're committing to buying one meat item, one fish item, and half a dozen eggs between the two of us every week. When you add it up we're shifting our diets to be about 75% plant-based.
So why the shift? Well, Netflix and their darned documentaries plus some light reading! The first documentary to get us thinking was Forks Over Knives, which introduced us to The China Study, which links significant meat consumption to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and stroke.
And then came Food, Inc. that highlighted inhumane industrial animal farming practices and how ecologically harmful they tend to be.
So there you have it: migrating away from meat can maybe make us healthier, reduce animal cruelty, and help the environment! Win-win-win...
Here's a good way to ruin your morning seeing cows lined up for slaughter, but everyone should see something like this at least once.
As an economist, I can't help being skeptical of...well, basically everything! I know how research works and I know how statistics can be used to prove the point you want. Non-findings just don't get published, which makes the journal literature biased towards the sensational. On top of that, studying complex systems like large groups of humans (economics) or even the intricate system that is a human, requires ruling out thousands of potentially correlated contributing factors, many of them unseen.
That said, all diet prescriptions should be treated as hypotheses with the humility to acknowledge that we're all different with potentially unique sensitivities to the same inputs. Also realize that there are a number of things going on in your life and environment that can effect your health. For instance, those who care about their diet are also more likely to exercise, which, itself, contributes enormously to your health; which contribution dominates is TBD.
For now we're just decreasing the amount of meat, fish, eggs, and dairy in our diets. I'm still supplementing with my favorite organic grass-fed proteins so maybe that's cheating, but benchpress, squat, and deadlift are important aspects of manhood!
Should the new routine work out well, we'll certainly consider cutting back further. Stay tuned!
Do any other Steemians have plant-based diet stories to share?
For more super interesting #life, #freedom, and #economics posts, you can follow@cylonmaker2053 or my less restrained alter ego @finpunk.
Image source: http://whats--hot.net/2014/05/film-review-food-inc.html/
