Bittman on Read Meat

Last week I posted about a study linking red meat consumption to early death.  I thought it was an interesting study and went to prove the point that eating less meat is an overall good idea, for both your weight and your health.

Today, I went over to check out Mark Bittman's blog at the New York Times, and it turns out that he has quite a thoughtful piece written about the study which you may want to check out. 

As he usually does, he asked some good questions and had a few good thoughts worth pondering.  Such as:

There are two things wrong with focusing too closely on meat in the diet. One, meat is not the only problem with how we eat: we eat too many animal products in general (more than a pound a day, all told) and we eat too many grains stripped of all their value. And — as everyone in this great big room has been told since they were old enough to listen — we don’t eat our vegetables. Finally, from a strictly dietary perspective, meat is not our biggest problem: junk food is.

Secondly, industrially produced meat’s effect on our morbidity and mortality and the associated infamous health care costs are not the only problems with meat. Industrial agriculture damages the environment too. (Whether it’s the No. 2 factor in climate change, as the United Nations has suggested, is debatable. That it’s generally been an enormous contributor to environmental degradation is not.) It’s made it difficult for small-to-medium farmers to hang on. And industrial meat producers haven’t exactly been loyal members of the A.S.P.C.A.