OPINION:
Remember Weston A. Price? He was the dentist who traveled the world in the early part of the 20th century to decipher the influence of diet on dental health (“Who says you can’t eat red meat? Food advice questioned anew,” Web, Oct. 13). Price searched for vegan cultures, but all he found were cannibals — they ate the livers of the omnivores they killed. He never found any pure carnivores, either. The mostly carnivorous stockpiled various plants for those long periods when nothing but animal foods were available. So you might view the human food spectrum as bracketed by vegans and carnivores, neither of which actually existed as part of human evolution.
This brings us to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the World Health Organization, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association), and apparently the New York City public school system via “meatless Mondays.” If you thought there had been any good evidence behind dietary policy in the United States and around the world, you would be dead and diseased wrong. What the meta study regarding meat consumption showed was that government and institutional policy has been totally driven by nothing other than cultural or religious preferences, and of course financial and political considerations. Any claim to the contrary has been a complete lie.
Chronic disease is rampant in the United States, and at this point throughout the world. The biggest single environmental factor is food. Unfortunately what has been established without any doubt by this latest meta-analysis is that you are on your own. There is no evidence to back up any of the U.S. food-policy recommendations of the past half-century. It has all been a complete fraud, so if you value your health and the health of your children, you better get serious about figuring out where you fall on the omnivore spectrum. The institutional recommendations never had any scientific evidence behind them, and the U.S. population has suffered the consequences.
SAMUEL BURKEEN
Reston, Va.
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