Health and Wellness: Animal Foods
Blog 2.0: What’s so bad about animal foods?
The list below is by no means exhaustive, but touches on the more common harmful effects of animal foods. We will explore each of these categories in greater detail on future posts. As always we would love your feedback–comments or questions.
Increase risk for heart disease: Animal foods are high in saturated fats and cholesterol. The link between heart disease and a diet high in saturated fats and cholesterol has been clearly established. https://healthyforgood.heart.org/Ea…
Increase risk for Cancer: Animal foods contain cancer causing compounds such as dioxins, HCA, PAH. These compounds have been linked to various forms of cancer. Most potent links to date have been found with colon cancer, breast cancer, and prostate cancer. http://www.pcrm.org/health/cancer-r…
Calorie Dense: Animal foods are high in calories, low in nutrients & contain no fiber which increases the risk for obesity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ar…
Consequences of obesity include increased mortality, high blood pressure, Diabetes, heart disease, gall bladder disease… https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult/c…
Cause Inflammation: Increased risk for chronic diseases such as arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, heart disease. Inflammation also plays a role in Type 1 diabetes, acne, asthma, and ear infections in children. https://nutritionfacts.org/2012/09/…
Contain hormones– primarily in meat and dairy products which have been linked to early puberty in girls, increased risk for breast cancer, and prostate cancer. http://www.livestrong.com/article/9…
Factory farming: crowded and unsanitary conditions in factory farms result in bacterial and viral outbreaks, such as swine flu. https://www.wired.com/2009/05/swine… Moreover, the unsanitary conditions require routine use of antibiotics which leads to antibiotic resistance.
Damage to the environment–Air pollution: 37% of methane (compound which has 20x the warming potential than CO2) emissions come from factory farming. Animal waste at CAFO (Concentrated animal feeding operation), pollutes the ground water and nearby rivers and streams. https://www.iatp.org/news/pollution…
Food borne illnesses: CDC estimates that each year roughly 48 million people gets sick from a food borne illness. These bacteria are usually transmitted to humans from food contaminated with animal feces. https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/foodborne-germs.html
Going forward, we hope to publish a post every 2 weeks. Before we look at each of the harmful effects of animal foods in greater detail, our next post will focus on the beneficial effects of plant foods.
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