Don't eat eggs or steak!!

Not a chance. A few Muslims have tried giving me a hard time over how much I love bacon. I give them the same response I give any other religious nut: "My god has a bigger [phallus] than yours!" which is a joke at the arbitrariness of ritual and religion. Occasionally I add in something like "all hail Cthulhu!" thus far none of them have understood... The people watching have.

Honestly though there are always these scares and flip flops over things giving you cancer, being bad for you and so on. Enjoy your life. Make a steak and bacon sandwich and EAT YOUR HEART OUT!!

 

Classy.

 

This level of mockery is only reserved for the truly, truly stupid. With anyone who can engage in a rational discussion I would never stoop to something like this.

 

I highly encourage people to not eat eggs and steak.

This way there's more for me.

 

Problem is that's both anecdotal data and commits the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Consider both of these true facts:

I haven't eaten tofu for over ten years.
I haven't lost my job for the past ten years either.

I've made my example deliberately silly in order to emphasize the point.

In order to say with any degree of certainty that eggs steak and organ meats are bad for you, we'd need a good standard of evidence first. If you know of any such evidence I'd be curious to see it.

 

It's not the meat or eggs which are bad for you it's the fat in a diet where most already consume too much and amounts of cholesterol and salt in much a similar vein where folks consume too much. Generally if they had higher activity levels it wouldn't be a problem.

 

I'd ask for evidence for that claim as well. I've heard the assertion many times but I've only ever seen poor evidence presented in support of it.

 

With the higher activity levels it would hold true to a point. Sodium and cholesterol are necessary nutrients and your body will use more or less depending on activity levels, again to a point and keeping in mind how much of the different kind of cholesterol your body can take depending on age etc. Fat is an energy source and while saturated, unsaturated and polyunsaturated fats all have different effects on the body you can ingest a fair amount of fat without a whole lot of I'll effects.
Take the native Canadian food pemmican for instance. It's a finely ground meat mixed with animal fat. It was essentially the native super food.

 

No. Not really.

 

More like vegetating.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX6CUOT-ojI"]Statler and Waldorf DOHOHOHOHO - YouTube[/ame]

 

I guess we'd also need to define "too much" more carefully, too, before we could discuss it in detail. I see it being asserted a lot the we should cut our intake of these things as low as possible. I won't disagree that it's possible to eat too much sodium and become unhealthy from it, but I'm suspicious that we need to cut it quite as much as we're told. As for cholesterol, I forget where I saw the study now, but I recall one that showed that different ranges of cholesterol consumption had no effect on overall serum levels, strongly implying that the liver's own production up or down-regulated in order to keep things constant. This is in line with the observation that a good number of the body's systems are homoeostatic.

 

Here's a bit that speaks exactly to the myth that Sketco is trying to shore up:

On the same topic and very extensively researched and referenced is the
Gary Taubes book:

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Science/dp/1400033462"] 'Good Calories, Bad Calories - Fats, Carbs and The Controversial Science of Diet and Health'[/ame]

Essentially Sketco is parroting what several generations were led to believe via public health campaigns that originated in the USA. The actual science however doesn't really back this up. Taubes book is one hell of an eye opener into how public health policy is developed in general and how specifically the whole concept of cholestoral being the big, bad wolf was put out there.

So much shoddy/selective/biased science behind the whole concept you don't know whether to laugh or to cry. :bang:

 

Framingham study - that was the one, cheers! Also of interest, and I know this study gets thrown about a lot, but it's worth repeating here:

http://www.ajcn.org/content/91/3/535.long

Also, an even newer one:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2753.2011.01767.x/full

 

As I recall the Director of the Framingham Heart study, the largest and longest lasting heart/dietary study ever (still ongoing) said something along the lines that "dietary cholesterol is not causative factor in heart disease."

Cholesterol is only an issue if the blood vessels are inflamed. So far as I am aware one of the single biggest causes of such inflammation is high insulin levels.

 

I've heard the same in many places. Also, what is interesting is that statins also have an anti-inflammatory effect. This is now being taken seriously as an alternate hypothesis for how they might work to reduce CHD.

 

It's the food that people feed chicken and cow that may cause problem. I had visited a chicken farm before. Those chicken had never seen any daylight and had never exercise in open space. When the light is turned on, the chicken are fed. When the light is turned off, the chicken are forced to sleep.

We may not be able to link it directly to the modern day our physical problem, but to "avoid problem" is always a smart thing to do.

 

I'll agree that the quality of the feed given to most animals, especially mass-reared ones isn't great but we don't know exactly how much of an effect this will have on the end-product meat and eggs that we consume. I'd actually love to see some good science done on that point myself.

We all draw our own line in the sand where we feel comfortable. If that works for you then cool. Personally, that would be going too far for me.

 

BSE (mad cow disease) has been linked to ration that contained infcted sheep parts

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/zoology/all-about-animals/mad-cow-disease1.htm

 

I liked the quote from the book, but I do want to point out that female Zebu Cattle are cows, so their milk is cow's milk. Brahma cattle are a Zebu type.(Bos primigenius indicus). Writer obviously was never a farmboy.

 

Yeah I don't think he's ever tried to claim that he is. He's pretty explicit in his book as to what his background is and how he's approaching the issue. Every description I've seen of Zebu is usually compared to or mentioned in the same circles as Taurine cattle... It has me wondering what the difference is. Just a species difference? Both cattle but genetically from different breeds? Old world vs new world cattle? /farm nerd convo