Mad Cow and the Real Risks of Meat
By Colman McCarthy
These anxious days for meat heads. With each chomp into the flesh of a dead cow—in whatever form, from a cheap hamburger to a slab of sirloin—there is the unappetizing thought, is this part of a mad cow? Will I die?
With more than 30 countries banning American beef since the recent discovery of a diseased Holstein in Washington state infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), it’s not enough to dismiss the health threat as one more overreaction from food- police alarmists. Nor, going the other way, it isn’t reassuring to be told by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to pass the ketchup and eat away: America’s meat is safe.
British officials hawked that line in the late 1980s, only to have about 150 people die from infected meat. Among the British, mad cow disease created a mad public—ticked off that it was duped by public health experts.
As the predictable scenario plays out in the U.S.—farmers slaughtering suspect cattle, George W. Bush announcing he’ll keep eating animal flesh, the meat industry damning the media for hyping the threat—the other and immensely greater dangers of meat eating are ignored. Sagging shelves of research studies have documented the links between eating meat and the number three killers of Americans: heart disease, cancer and stroke.
Dr. Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington DC, reports that Americans suffer about 4,000 heart attacks a day, with one in four being fatal. Doing the math, this means that approximately 66 times more people die everyday from heart disease in the U.S. than people have died of mad cow disease globally in 15 years.
Barnard, a prolific writer whose new book “Breaking the Food Seduction” (St. Martin’s Press) follows the earlier “Eat Right, Live Longer” and “The Power of Your Plate,” says that “people who imagine that meat is safe because the government and the meat industry say it is are forgetting not only the risks of heart disease, but also stroke, cancer, high blood pressure, obesity, e coli and salmonella.”
Barnard, from a North Dakota cattle ranching family, is a vegan—and one with a sense of humor. A few years ago when actor James Garner appeared on television commercials touting beef as “real food for real people,” Barnard quipped, “yes, and live real close to a real good hospital with a real good coronary ward.” When finished making bucks from the commercials, meat-eating Garner went on to have a real fine heart attack.
Barnard, along with physicians Dean Ornish, Michael Klapper, John McDougall and others, is aware that up against the advertising might of companies and industries that push high-fat and cholesterol-rich foods that come from the flesh and fluids of animals , his cries for the sanity of vegetable and fruit-based diets are voiced from a wide wilderness. In the summer 2003 issue of Barnard’s magazine, “Good Medicine,” he reports just how dedicated meat-lovers can be. Out of 1,244 surveyed adults, “one in four said they would not give up meat for a week even if they were paid $1,000 to do it.”
After a week of abstinence, the money could go toward paying the inflated and soaring costs of prescription drugs to fight illnesses caused by meat consumption. When politicians denounce the greedy pharmaceutical and insurance industries, none dare denounce those citizens whose irresponsible dietary bents caused them to get sick in the first place. Nor do the politicians go near another economic reality: corporate welfare lavished on the meat industry. Howard Lyman told Satya magazine: “Meat in America would cost $48 a pound if it were not for the American taxpayers subsidizing the grain, the irrigation water, the electricity, the grazing on public lands.”
If politicians cower from straight talk, so do the clergy. How many dare preach sermons on the health risks of eating meat, of keeping a healthy body for the soul to indwell? Probably as many with the courage to condemn the daily cruelty of killing millions of animals for food in the first place.