Own Your Health: How to Live Long and Avoid Chronic Illness by CHEF AJ & Glen Merzer

Author:CHEF AJ & Glen Merzer [Merzer, Glen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Hail to the Kale Publishing
Published: 2020-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

And then we argue ad nauseam about who should pay for our health insurance. Chimpanzees eat correctly and don’t even bother with health insurance. They’re saving a fortune.

The diets of our ape cousins should serve as a giant, screaming clue to humanity to tell us what we should be eating—although I can imagine an objection from Creationists. And so to Creationists I would say this: if you believe that we were designed by God in Her image, then all we can say with certainty, and all that it is important for you to understand, is that God must be a vegan. Because all the scientific evidence tells us that humans were designed to eat plants. And, after all, it’s pretty hard to picture Her grilling hot dogs, much less toiling in a slaughterhouse. If You were God, would You want to deal with caging animals, pumping them up with antibiotics, slaughtering them, slicing them up, refrigerating them, and making sure You cook them above 145 degrees Fahrenheit? Surely You would have better things to do.

Perhaps, dear reader, you recognize the validity of the arguments made here but you are one of those folks who can’t seem to imagine giving up animal foods entirely and going vegan. Maybe it’s because you have a mental image of vegans and always thought of them as “other,” and you’d just hate to join our team. Or maybe it’s because you so dearly love the taste of salmon or some other flesh food. Perhaps the problem is your living situation—the perceived resistance of those with whom you share your life, the difficulty of proposing a whole new style of eating that might sound radical to him/her/them. Could you therefore just become “vegan-ish,” you wonder? Would that be good enough? Would your health be badly compromised if you ate, for example, one serving of salmon per week, or per month?

The short answer is probably not. No study has ever compared the health outcomes of one cohort of folks on a low-fat, whole-foods vegan diet with another cohort of folks on a low-fat, whole-foods, plant-based diet supplemented by one serving of salmon per week. I’ll wager that that study will never be done. (We have few enough studies in which any cohort at all is actually on a healthy diet.) First of all, it’s expensive to conduct nutritional research, and nobody’s going to pony up for a study that targets a hairsplitting dietary distinction. Moreover, there are limitations to the sensitivity of nutritional research.

We know, for example, that potato chips are unhealthy, but no researcher ever has or ever will do a study of the effect of eating three potato chips a week. So all we can do is extrapolate. It’s inarguable that potato chips are terribly salty and fatty and devoid of nutritional value. But the effect of three potato chips per week? Probably just a tiny bit bad for you. Maybe in a way that isn’t even measurable.

Similarly, one serving of salmon per week? Probably just a tiny bit bad for you.

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