“…a healthy brain requires a meaty diet”
In a nutshell
It is refreshing to read about the importance of meat-based diets in an excellent article in a recent Sunday Telegraph
The article highlights important nutrients, their function and recommended level
I take issue with the description of dietary cholesterol and salt
This is a short article to highlight a recent piece in the Sunday Telegraph entitled “Why a healthy brain requires a meaty diet”. The article is noteworthy because it is exceptional. Mostly the traditional press describe plant-based diets and often denigrate the real food that we have evolved with and are adapted to benefit from.
I’ll highlight three aspects of the piece:
The important nutrients we get from meat
Nutrient bioavailability in real food
Meat, cholesterol, and blood pressure
Important nutrients we get from meat
The article highlights the importance of protein, vitamin B12, zinc, selenium, and docosahaenoic acid (DHA). It does a good job of describing their importance and I’d add the following:
Protein, one of the three macronutrients, is present in complete and bioavailable form in meat. The only plant containing complete protein is soy. To get the equivalent meat-based benefit from other plants requires that we either combine sources (e.g., legume and grain) or we consume supplements
Vitamin B12 as the article points out can only be obtained naturally from a meat-based diet
Zinc appears in a number of studies as a priority nutrient that is commonly lacking and measurably in decline in real food. Lack of things like zinc leads to stunting in vulnerable people with serious deleterious knock-on effects that can last a lifetime
Selenium is important to help avoid age-rated muscle loss (sarcopenia)
DHA is a type of omega-3 fat (fatty acid, actually) that is essential and most abundant in seafood such as bivalves and fatty fish. It is also present in land-based meat, just in smaller amounts
I consider seafood to be a type of meat. Bivalves are the most reliably dense source of priority micronutrients.
Nutrient bioavailability in real food
This is my favourite quote from the article:
“Animal-sourced foods contain nutrients that are wonderful for our grey matter, but difficult to obtain from plant sources”
That quote touches upon the concept of bioavailability, perhaps the least understood of many important aspects of real food nutrition. Because of the way we evolved, humans are adapted to get adequate nutrition from a meat-based diet. A plant-based diet may on-paper offer the potential for decent human nutrition but often the nutrients in a plant cannot be accessed by human digestion because they are not bioavailable.
Meat, cholesterol and blood pressure
The article mistakenly links meat consumption to cholesterol and salt intake, contributing to heart and circulatory disease. My regular reader (who are you?) will know that I don’t believe in either concept.
Firstly, cholesterol is necessary for a healthy life and our body produces 80% of what it needs in organs such as the liver and brain.
Heart disease is unlikely to be caused by healthy cholesterol. Instead, at least in my case, the root-causes were likely seed oil toxicity compounded by industrially processed carbohydrates inducing chronically high blood insulin and insulin resistance.
There is good evidence that eating salty food is unlikely to be the cause of high blood pressure (BP). Instead, our old nemeses chronically high blood insulin and insulin resistance from eating too much industrially processed carbohydrates cause kidney dysfunction that prevents the elimination of too much salt, which leads to high BP.
Summary
It’s refreshing to read a well-sourced, informative article about meat consumption in a British newspaper. In future, I hope we’ll also read about the importance of avoiding seed oils and how to avoid them in meats like chicken and pork.
I have issues on the subjects of dietary cholesterol and salt but those don’t detract, for me, from the net positive of this kind of writing in a popular news outlet.