DANGER!
High meat consumption and the expanding use of grain as feed can cause damage in the human realm. Medically, nutritionists believe that a diet rich in animal products contributes to a variety of maladies. Economically, middle-income developing countries that have attempted to provide urban dwellers with cheap meat too often have given the rural landless short shrift, while devoting growing shares of trade earnings to pay for imported feed. And socially, modern grain-based livestock production has become a major industry controlled by a handful of firms--driving small producers out of the market.
The Great Protein Fiasco:
The adverse health impacts of excessive meat-eating stem in large part from what nutritionists call the "great protein fiasco"--a mistaken belief of many Westerners that they need to consume large quantities of protein. This myth, propagated as much as a century ago by health officials and governmental dietary guidelines, has resulted in Americans and other members of industrial societies ingesting twice as much protein as they need. Among the affluent, the protein myth is dangerous because of the saturated fats that accompany concentrated protein in meat and dairy products. Those fats are associated with most of the diseases of affluence that are among the leading causes of death in industrial countries: heart disease, stroke, and breast and colon cancer. (Lipton 1983; WHO 1990; Kummer 1991; Pimentel et al. 1991; NRC 1989)
The U.S. National Research Council, the US Surgeon General, the American Heart Association, and the World Health Organization are among the organizations now recommending low-fat diets. From the current US norm of 37 percent of calories from fats--typical for Western nations--they recommend lowering fat consumption to no more than 30 percent of calories. (NRC 1988; Byrne 1988)
Recent scientific findings indicate that even that level may be too high. One study of 88,000 American nurses found daily red-meat eaters are two-and-a-half times as likely to develop colon cancer as near-vegetarians. Based on these findings, Walter Willett, director of the study and a researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, commented, "the optimum amount of red meat you eat should be zero." (Willett et al. 1990; Kolata 1990)
A Landmark Study of Diet and Health:
A landmark study of diet, lifestyle, and health in China--the largest such survey ever conducted--suggests that lowering fat consumption to 15 percent of calories prevents most cases of diseases of affluence. This study, known as the China Project, a joint effort of Chinese, British, and American institutions, tracked the diets of thousands of Chinese in dozens of countries. It showed that as fat consumption, protein consumption, and blood cholesterol levels rise, so does the incidence of heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. (Junshi et al. 1990; Vines 1990)
Surprisingly, Chinese villagers on low-fat, low-meat diets also suffered less anemia (iron deficiency) and osteoporosis (a bone disease associated with calcium deficiency) than their urban compatriots eating more meat. Both conditions are commonly thought to result from a diet too low in animal products. Study co-leader Colin Campbell of Cornell University told the New York Times: "We're basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant foods and minimizing our intake of animal foods." (Junshi et al. 1990)
Squandering Resources:
If a diet rich in animal products is not an appropriate goal of public health policy, neither is it a wise development strategy. It creates dependence on imports for food and can widen the gap between rich and poor. Yet dozens of middle-income countries import livestock feed.
For a poor country where people eat few animal products, reaching self-sufficiency in food grains requires just 200 kilograms of cereals per person per year. But that number quickly rises when people switch from a grain-based diet to a meat-based one. Rapidly industrializing Taiwan, for instance, increased per-capita consumption of meat and eggs sixfold from 1950 to 1990. To produce those animal products required raising annual per-capita grain use in the country from 170 kilograms to 390 kilograms. Despite steadily growing harvests, Taiwan could only keep up with the demand for feed by turning to imports from abroad. In 1950 Taiwan was a grain exporter; in 1990, the nation imported, mostly for feed, 74 percent of the grain it used. (Vocke 1986; Sarma 1986; Bailey 1990; USDA 1990)
Mainland Chinese are following the Taiwanese up the meat consumption ladder. Since 1978, when agricultural reforms boosted production, meat consumption has more than doubled to 24 kilograms. The growth has been particularly marked in cities, where the government has helped create pig and poultry plants using Western-style grain-feeding technology. Though the country's farmers have been able to grow sufficient feed grain for the swelling meat industry so far, few observers expect them to keep pace for much longer. The share of Chinese grain fed to livestock rose from 7 percent in 1960 to 20 percent in 1990. (Bishop et al. 1989; Bailey 1980)
