Although high in nutrients, the difficulty in digestion makes it a carciogen. Particularly red meat - bird and fish (pre omnipresent plastics and heavy metals) are relatively healthier.
That’s sorta half the story. The official statement is that consistently eating more than 1.5lbs (500g) of red meat per week “probably” (their word) increases your cancer risk. The real story is that eating more than 50g of processed meat per week dramatically increases your cancer risk. To the extent that processed meat is ranked as a “Group 1” carcinogen.
Flip-side, grains and legumes have been tied to cancer as well. I can’t find exactly what category, but they seem fairly convinced they are carcinogenic.
It is, sadly, like the California Cancer joke, where almost everything causes cancer if taken to excess.
If it is hard to digest meat, why do carnivores have shorter guts than herbivores?
“Hard” doesn’t necessarily mean “requiring many resources” in this case. It has more nutrients, and as such it’s usually not digested as fully as herbivores digest plant matter.
It’s harder on the system doing the digestion.
I’m not getting it. Meat is hard to digest, but you can do it with a short gut, and produces very little excretion (the military “low residue diet” is meaty and low in fibre)
But vegetables are easy, yet take a longer gut and produce enormous amounts of shit
There’s nothing about difficulty in digestion on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat#Nutritional_information
Have you got a source - ideally one not produced by a vegan or vegetarian source?
I think it’s more the industrial farming and food processing practices that make it carcinogenic.
It’s not. Remember that evolutionary incentives don’t care if you tend to live very far fast 32.
It actually is. Most carcinogenic evidence on meats come from processed meats. Per cited references, eating way too much red meat is “probably” a cause for cancer, but eating processed meats is definitely a cause for cancer.
And by “way too much”, that’s 1.5lbs/week. I love a good steak, but don’t really eat 1.5lbs/week of it.
Well good thing science doesn’t give a shit what you believe lol. We’ve known this for decades at this point.
“That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now, I know some of you are going to say, ‘I did look it up, and that’s not true.’ That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works.” - Stephen Colbert, 2006
