Protein is essential for your wellbeing and most of us simply aren’t getting enough in the autumn of our lives.
Our future regarding food accessibility looks grim. By 2050, experts predict there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish, that is if there are any fish at all given our present rate of consumption, which is diminishing fish stocks at a rapid rate. This is the reason they are now being farmed in non-natural environments. Compared with a more sustainable plant-based diet, eating animal based foods with gay abandon devours huge swaths of agricultural land, soaks up limited supplies of water and generates excessive green-house gas emissions. The way we eat right now, which is mostly habitual and unconscious, is essentially unsustainable, and it will drive deforestation, species extinction, pollution and climate change, together with internecine conflict on a grand scale, dwarfing contemporary global hostilities, the end result being a ravaged planet that is no longer habitable.
But these aren’t our everyday concerns. The vast majority of us aren’t engaged in the meat-vs-plants future-of-our-planet debate.
Not long ago, vegetarianism was the go-to diet for health seekers. Aside from the obvious environmental advantages (cultivating beans discharges less carbon than flatulent ruminators), vegetable munchers have less heart disease and bowel cancer and live longer than their carnivore compatriots. Then along came the rejoinder that vegetarians don’t get enough protein and the resultant ascendancy of the paleo movement whose devotees asserted that meat eating was the pathway to a healthier and, more importantly, resplendently ripped torso, the model enjoyed by our neanderthal ancestors.
According to the paleo club, it makes no sense to eat roots and shoots that have poorly bio-available protein when you can get all the sustenance you need from a nutritious quadruped. It turns out that this is a rather jaundiced take on what our Neanderthal ancestors were up to.
According to a diverse range of scientific data derived from genomic, archaeological and paleontological records, our primitive forbears subsisted on a mix of meat and plants, as well as fish, fruit, nuts, seeds and honey. Eating only red meat would have led to an early demise and possible extinction, with research showing that trimethylamine-N-oxide, a little-talkedabout chemical, clogs up our arteries and significantly increases our risk of heart disease. Red meat is its primary source.
Meat may be the enemy of your heart and our natural environment but, as carnivores correctly assert, it is our best source of protein, a substance essential for your wellbeing that most of us simply aren’t getting enough of in the autumn of our lives.
Protein requirements
Nutritionists claim that we need 1g of protein per kilo of bodyweight daily as we age. One piece of steak provides 30-40g of protein. Depending on your bean preference, one can will only give you somewhere between 16-25g of protein and few of us would ingest this amount of beans in one sitting.
Some longevity pundits even contend that we need much more than 1g of protein per kilo as we age, citing studies which show that merely aiming for this amount of protein leads to loss of muscle and heightened infirmity and decrepitude, while eating more helps to preserve your lean mass and improves your lower limb performance and walking speed. They assert that to prevent your muscles from shrinking, which accelerates frailty, you need to be wolfing down a reasonable serve of chicken, fish or meat four times daily or the bean equivalent that would probably reignite Vesuvius.
Aside from this being a Herculean task, feeding mice, which the high-protein meat endorsers would affirm are not humans, substantial amounts of protein hastens their demise as repair and maintenance pathways become overwhelmed and dysfunctional. Protein limitation does just the opposite and is lifespan extending.
While we do-gooders chow down on plants and beans while lamenting our plummeting protein status, assessed by nutrition-savvy health practitioners, the rest of us can dine out on a future banquet of insects and mealworms as protein-rich foods. Anything to prevent the demise of a disintegrating planet.
Article Featured in WellBeing Magazine 210
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