Eating Meat is as bad for you as Smoking
Dr Vernon Coleman
The meat industry, ever deceitful and mercenary, has created a good many myths and misconceptions to promote meat eating.
These myths (let’s be honest and just call them lies) are regularly paraded by bent doctors and journalists – in the same way that bent doctors and journalists promote vaccines.
The shills spew lies with the same enthusiasm as the insane global warming cultists – the lunatics and psychopaths who fervently claim that if we all live on avocado and bean-shoot salads then we’ll save St Paul’s Cathedral from drowning.
You can safely ignore them all.
The truth is that human beings are omnivores not carnivores. The sharp teeth give us a choice not a compulsion. Eating meat is an option not a necessity. You don’t need to eat meat any more than you need to eat marzipan or those multi-coloured sprinkles people put on birthday cakes and trifles. And the mortality and morbidity figures show clearly that eating meat is as bad for you as smoking.
Here are 21 carefully argued reasons to be vegetarian.
1. The shills say that without meat we won’t get enough iron. But there is plenty of iron in green, leafy vegetables, nuts, cereals and beans. Foods rich in vitamin C eaten at the same time as iron-containing food will considerably increase absorption – increasing it by a factor of five. A good, well-balanced vegetarian diet will contain plenty of iron. Although it is true that meat contains iron, the irony is that meat eaters are often more likely to develop iron deficiency anaemia because they tend to eat less fruit and vegetables.
2. Avoiding meat is one of the best and simplest ways to cut down your fat consumption. Modern farm animals are deliberately fattened up to increase profits. Eating fatty meat increases your chances of having a heart attack or developing cancer.
3. There are millions of cases of food poisoning recorded every year. The vast majority of all those cases are caused by eating meat.
4. ‘Meat’ can include the tail, head, feet, rectum and spinal cord of an animal, and a sausage may contain ground-up intestines. How can anyone be sure that the intestines are empty when they are ground up? Do you really want to eat the contents of a pig’s intestines?
5. If an animal has cancer when it is killed, meat eaters will eat the cancer. Do you really want to sit down to dinner and eat a large chunk of cancer?
6. The world’s fresh water shortage is being made worse by animal farming. And meat producers are the biggest polluters of water. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat. If the meat industry in America wasn’t supported by the taxpayer paying a large proportion of its water costs then hamburger meat would cost $35 a pound. Run-off water from farms does massive damage to rivers and underground water supplies and, therefore, to drinking water supplies.
7. If you eat meat you are consuming hormones that were fed to the animals. No one knows what effect those hormones will have on your health. In some parts of the world as many as one in four hamburgers contains growth hormones that were originally given to cattle. Attempts to outlaw the use of hormones have proved remarkably ineffective.
8. The following diseases have been proved to be commoner among meat eaters: anaemia, appendicitis, arthritis, breast cancer, cancer of the colon, cancer of the prostate, constipation, diabetes, gallstones, gout, high blood pressure, indigestion, obesity, piles, strokes and varicose veins. (My book ‘Meat causes Cancer and more Food for Thought’, which I originally wrote in 1994, contains extracts from 26 scientific papers beyond argument proving that eating meat causes cancer.)
9. Lifelong vegetarians visit hospital 22% less often than meat eaters – and for shorter stays. Now that we have poorly managed hospitals, long waiting lists and a dead or dying health service, this is incredibly important.
10. Vegetarians have 20% lower blood cholesterol levels than meat eaters. (I’m not sure how much cholesterol levels really matter – but a naturally lower level won’t do you harm.)
11. Some farmers use tranquillisers to keep animals calm. The result is that when you eat meat you are eating the residues of those drugs. And those residues are often very powerful.
12. Considerably more than half of all the antibiotics sold are given by farmers to healthy animals so that they will produce more meat. The percentage of infections resistant to antibiotics such as penicillin has risen dramatically as a result.
13. Every minute of every working day thousands of animals are killed in slaughterhouses. Many animals are bled to death. Pain and misery are commonplace. In America alone, 500,000 animals are killed for meat every hour. Animals who die for your dinner table die in terror, in sadness and in pain. The killing is often inhumane. Some religions insist that animals are killed inhumanely by having their throats cut. Conditions in abattoirs are often disgusting.
14. Vegetarians are fitter than meat eaters. Many of the world's most successful athletes are vegetarian.
15. You don’t have to eat meat to be strong. The world’s strongest animals (elephants, rhinos, gorillas) are vegetarian.
16. African countries — where millions are starving to death — export millions of tons of grain to the developed world so that animals can be fattened for the dining tables of the affluent nations. If we all ate the plants we grow — instead of feeding them to animals — the world’s food shortage would disappear virtually overnight. One hundred acres of land will produce enough beef for 20 people but enough wheat to feed 240 people. This year, hundreds of millions will die of starvation in Africa and Asia. Most of those deaths will be unnecessary.
17. Every day tens of millions of one-day-old male chicks are killed because they will not be able to lay eggs. There are no rules about how this mass slaughter takes place. Some are crushed or suffocated to death. Many are used for fertiliser or fed to other animals.
18. It is much easier to become — and stay — slim if you are vegetarian. By ‘slim’ I do not mean ‘abnormally slender’ or ‘underweight’ but, rather, an absence of excess weight.
19. In a lifetime, the average meat eater will consume 36 pigs, 36 sheep and 750 chickens and turkeys. Do you want that much carnage on your conscience?
20. Animals suffer from pain and fear just as much as you do. How would you like to spend your last hours locked in a truck and then cruelly pushed into a blood soaked death chamber? Animals being transported sometimes spend days packed into two-storey lorries. Some of the animals die of starvation before they reach their destination. The animals on the lower level are subjected to a constant shower of faeces and urine from the animals above them. Anyone who eats meat condones and supports the way animals are treated.
21. Animals which are a year old are often far more rational — and capable of logical thought — than six week old babies. I once kept four sheep as pets – they were intelligent and sensitive. They knew their names, would come running if I called them and could pick me out of a crowd. Evidence suggests that pigs and sheep are brighter than dogs and brighter than small children. If you wouldn’t eat a dog or a small child then you shouldn’t eat a sheep, a pig or a cow.
So, that’s it.
Eat meat if you can’t live without the taste or the texture. (And I readily admit that most of the fake meats produced in laboratories don’t much taste like the real thing.)
But don’t kid yourself that meat will keep you healthy. It won’t. All the available evidence proves that eating meat will do tremendous damage to your health. Vegetarians are healthier than meat eaters and they live longer too.
And the argument that we should avoid meat to save the planet is manipulative bollocks designed by the conspirators who are behind the Great Reset, the covid fraud and various social credit schemes.
Finally, there are two very good, straightforward reasons to avoid eating bits of dead animal.
First, because you like animals, disapprove of the way they are farmed and transported, and would rather be friends with them than eat them. (And animals can make very good friends.) That’s why I’ve been a vegetarian for decades.
Second, because you want to stay healthy.
If you want to know more about food and diet you will find everything you need to know in my book `Meat Causes Cancer and more Food for Thought’.
I originally wrote the book for an international publisher. They wanted me to include a section on eating meat for the German market. I refused because I believe meat is an unnecessary unhealthy food which involves much cruelty to animals. I then took the book back and published it myself.
The book is packed with information about vitamins, proteins, fats and essential fluids. There is a list of my 101 superfoods. There is a chapter dealing with the common diseases which are caused or made worse by what you eat. There is advice on healthy eating and information about food irradiation and genetically altered food.
And since I used to be medical consultant to one of the UK’s biggest slimming organisations my book contains everything you’re ever likely to know about losing weight and keeping it off. The book contains a dirty dozen dieting myths, my 39 steps to slenderness, ten dieting excuses you should forget, 48 quick tips for losing weight and my slim-for-life programme.
`Meat Causes Cancer and more Food for Thought’ by Vernon Coleman is available from Amazon.
Copyright Vernon Coleman May 2023
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