I seem to remember us discussing and learning a lot about gut microbial community. We talked about crohns disease and diet. We talked about how gut microbe environment affects other diseases or conditions within our bodies. I have thought a lot about this lately as I am in a life period of making changes to my diet and learning a new lifestyle relating to health and nutrition. I have been plant-based on/off for years. My sister has an allergy to lactose or more specifically, whey protein. I have done some reading about lactose in our diets and come to some pretty concrete impressions and opinions about intake of dairy products. Lately, those thoughts have been challenged as I work to become more lean and find that dairy and meat products seem to be the best or easiest way to do that. I think that one of the most approachable ways to maintain gut health is through yogurt which is dairy but injected with probiotics. This is an approachable to ingest probiotics and feel like yogurt is the thing we use to do that. We’ve associated them together. So there are so many conflicting thoughts currently with me about this topic. I also read the china study, which is a book that talks about animal protein in human diet. After reading that book, I was polarized against the meat and dairy industry. It seemed to paint such a clear picture. Humans stop drinking their mother’s milk after we mature to a certain age. Animals do the same. So then why do we take animal’s milk, meant for baby animals (or in our case, baby humans) and culture it, cultivate it, make it into other products and consume HUGE amounts of it in the form of cheese, yogurt, butter etc.
Animal Protein in the Human Diet
Just reading the so-called title of this next portion makes my mind jump right into conspiracy theory because I go to how the lobbyists for dairy and meat industries have invested so much money and time into promoting dairy and meat as our main source of diet. There are people who think of a meal as the meat and then whatever else. If a meal doesn’t have a meat, it means they are poor or something is lacking. I do live in Oregon so I think I have some separation from that. Also, I was raised in a religion where most people are vegetarian. These things make it easier for me to wrap my head around a lack of meat and dairy in our diets. I don’t mean to pick on meat and dairy but both as products, they are problematic. Dairy so because so many people seem to have sensitivity towards it, and I believe it is truly only meant for babies. Meat so because it is so expensive to produce per square foot and per dollar invested, but also because it seems inhumane. We don’t live outside in the wilderness and kill one cow for 6 months of meat and products. They live in little stalls and stand in the same spot for 2 years until they’re fat enough to kill. They are pumped with fake nutrition, or waste from other stuff. Yuck. There are quite a few expose type shows or movies, try Netflix, that expose the conditions in meat yards. That makes it hard to support meat industry. It’s not like it’s the best quality meat anyway. I read once somewhere how their hormones upon smelling death, release into their bodies as they approach their own death, fear etc. That is has not been proven through research, but suggested, that those hormones affect as upon eating their meat. I have wondered more than once if when you eat steak, you get nightmares because your body is breaking down the steak in your gut while you sleep and you get those fear hormones in your body while your subconscious runs your brain at night.
