Where's the beef?

Recently, Pierini Fitness read an article with a clever clickbait title Eating meat has ‘dire’ consequences for the planet, says report.  It said that a new report, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, offers a solution to feed a rising global human population expected to be 10 billion people by 2050.  Apparently, the way we’ve been eating can’t be sustained in the future with 10 billion hungry people.

This report, compiled by a group of 30 scientists from around the world who study nutrition or food policy, was three years in the making and its authors deliberated with the intent of creating recommendations that could be adopted by governments to meet the challenge of feeding a growing world population.  The bottom-line recommendation is to follow a largely plant-based diet, with small, occasional allowances for meat, dairy, and sugar.

The article reported how this report weighed different side-effects of food production, such as greenhouse gases, water and crop use, nitrogen or phosphorous from fertilizers, and the potential for biodiversity to take a hit should a region be converted into farmland. By adopting the recommended plant-based diet, the report's authors say climate change-inducing gases could be reduced and enough land could be reserved to feed the world's growing population.

This isn’t the first-time news like this has been reported.  Upon reading this, Pierini Fitness was curious who these researchers were and who funded this research study.  You know the saying, follow the money.  It provides clues so that after we’ve taken everything into account, we can say, borrowing what the late and great Paul Harvey would say, “And now you know the rest of the story.”

According an January 20, 2019 article published at https://www.beefmagazine.com, obviously representing ranchers and others delivering us middle-aged men our beef, this research study was funded by “vegan billionaires” and “screams of centralized control of our dietary choices with a globalized system that mandates what we can and cannot eat. What’s worse, these recommendations are elitist and ideological, lacking in science and common sense.”

Elsewhere, one obesity researcher recently carried out an analysis into the effects of eating this new suggested plant-based diet and found it’s deficient in several important nutrients.  For example, comparing it with the current authoritative US diet recommendations, this recommended plant-based diet would only provide 5 percent of vitamin D recommended, 17% of vitamin A (retinol) and just 55% of the calcium recommendations.

What’s the Pierini Fitness recommendation to all middle-aged men?  Do your own research and make your own conclusions but when hungry you may very well ask as Pierini Fitness does, “Where’s the beef?”

Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum