Is it Wrong to Eat Meat? What if Veganism is Unhealthy?

Vegan? Carnivore? Who's right and who's wrong? Is meat evil? Or is it necessary for your health?

Join Dr. James Mohebali as we take a deep dive into the positives and the negatives of a plant-based diet, and the possible spiritual consequences from meat consumption.

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COOL STUFF I MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:

ZUO YUE ZI/SITTING THE MONTH BOOKS
"The Postpartum Recovery Plan: How to Adapt the Ancient Practice of Zuo Yue Zi to Your Patients" by Dr. Lia Andrews — This is an excellent book, with lots of very tasty recipes. The book is very detailed, and geared at practitioners—but the recipes are accessible for anyone. My #1 book for organ meat recipes (mostly liver and kidney).
"Zuo Yue Zi: An American Mother's Guide to Chinese Postpartum Recovery" by Guang Ming Whitley — A very nice little book written from one mother to another. It gives a great overall sense of the practice of Zuo Yue Zi, and has great images detailing helpful, gentle postpartum exercises.
"Sitting Moon: A Guide to Natural Rejuvenation after Pregnancy" by Dr. Daoshing Ni and Jessica Chen — A great book that is written by very knowledgable two practitioners of Chinese medicine, but geared towards patients and laypeople with no knowledge of Chinese medical theory. The most comprehensive introduction available for laypeople. Good recipes too!
"The First Forty Days: The Essential Art of Nourishing the New Mother" by Heng Ou, Amely Greeven, Melisa Belger — A very stylish and modern approach to traditional postpartum recovery. It has great information about different traditional cultures and their practices. A beautiful book with lots of useful information. Aimed at and written for the modern woman.

ULTRA NOURISHING SOUP RECIPES
Silkie Chicken Soup Recipe
An Herbal Pill Version of Silkie Chicken, to fit into your hectic life
Pork Foot and Peanut Soup Recipe
Herbs for a Postpartum Recovery Soup

"Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings" — The source of the story of Zahhak, the snake-shouldered king. This 10th century epic poem details the history, genealogy, and mythology of the Persian people.

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Music Credit:
"Let Yourself Be Huge" - Cloudkicker (under Creative Commons License)

Transcript

Greetings and welcome to “Classic of Difficulties: Difficult Questions in Medicine, Acupuncture, and Beyond”. I am your host, Dr. James Mohebali. I’m a doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine, and I will be your armchair-philosopher-in-residence and your tour guide as we try to ask some difficult questions about medicine, health, alternative medicine, and maybe the meaning of life. My goal in this podcast is that, by asking and unpacking these tough questions, we will maybe leave with a couple of answers, but we will definitely leave with more questions than we had at the start.

This is episode 9: Is it wrong to eat meat?

Let’s hop right to it. The question today is: should we as human beings, especially as human beings who are trying to be healthy, eat meat? Should we eat flesh? Should we eat animals?  Is that a cool thing to do? Or is it really totally not okay at all?

There’s a lot going on here in this discussion. There’s some ecological considerations—like, is it SUSTAINABLE to eat meat. This is a discussion we’re all familiar with, and is a big reason why this topic is such a big deal nowadays. There’s a TECHNOLOGICAL aspect to this discussion too, which goes hand in hand with the sustainability thing. See, for maybe the first time in human history we have managed to turn hum-drum plant products into very, very accurate meat substitutes. Like Impossible burgers, beyond meat, these new highly-engineered products that have taken the food landscape by storm. Even your average plant-based protein shake represents a level of technological advancement that is unparalleled in most of human history. But, this raises the question, what is the role of technology in the human diet? And what is the role of technology in human health? Should we embrace it, or should we reject it? Are we supposed to act like and eat like cavemen, a la the paleo diet? Or is technology just part and parcel of what it means to be a human being?

On top of all that, there are some spiritual considerations in the discussion—like, is it OK to kill another mammal? And of course, there’s the question of straight up physical health. Like, is it healthy or unhealthy to eat meat? Or, conversely, is it possible to be healthy on a purely vegetarian or vegan diet?

Before we get into this, before I tell you what I think, I want you to tell me what you think. I know that many of you viewers have put a lot of thought into this issue, and I want to hear from you. Leave a comment down below letting me know whether or not you personally eat meat, and why you’ve made that decision for yourself.

When we’re dealing with big issues like this, especially when they have tones of moral responsibility and social responsibility, it can be really easy to accidentally focus too much on OUTWARD things. Not that there’s anything wrong with an outward focus, it’s part of being human and an important part of living in the world. It’s just that inward and outward are two sides of the same coin. So if we’re looking at a problem that seems unresolvable, and we’ve mostly approached it with an OUTWARD focus, often we’ll find the solution we’re looking for if we switch to inward.

So how to do we turn our focus inward? First things first, we ask ourselves: who am I, what am I like, and what do I want to use my body for? This last one is huge. We’re talking about purpose, and meaning. We’re talking about what your life is about. As I have said before, when we talk about health, we’re NEVER just talking about cold-hard facts and biochemistry. These things can be useful, but in the end, we are always talking about human beings. Our goal in the practice of medicine is that human beings function optimally, right? This raises the question: what is the FUNCTION of a human being? What is the GOAL of a human being? For all my Aristotle nerds, what is the being-at-work-staying-at-self of a human being? What is the meaning behind your life?

As you can see, this meat discussion gets pretty deep pretty quick. So what are your goals? What do you want your life to be about? What do you think is important?

Are your goals more spiritual? Do you want to find some kind of deeper truth, some kind of deeper meaning? Or are your goals more physical? Do you want to be physically healthier? Do you want to overcome chronic disease? Do you want to lose weight? There’s nothing bad about either of these categories, physical and spiritual, it’s just where you’re at. And, usually, these two categories tend go hand in hand, that is, you can’t work on one without working on the other.

After all, human life is both physical and spiritual. They are two ends of the same spectrum and they are both equally valid and necessary, to varying degrees at different times in your life. There can be certain consequences that do happen when we focus excessively on the physical alone, and we start to neglect the spiritual, but we will talk more about that later.

For now, let’s talk about physical stuff first, and physical goals. And, in order to do that, we need to, once again, return to the foundations of Chinese medicine, and talk about yin and yang. 

How do we understand yin and yang in relation to food? Well, yin is cool, and yang is warm, so therefore cold food is yin, and hot food is yang. Grilled food is REALLY yang, because grills are really hot, they’re much hotter than your toaster oven. And raw food is the most yin, because it hasn’t been cooked at all, it hasn’t touched flame at all. So, that’s cooking processes, but what about the foods themselves?

We can make a broad generalization about the plant and animal kingdoms respectively. So yin is when things are more stationary, more sedentary, more receptive, more feminine, you could say, more substantial, and more cooling. Yin, since it’s feminine, has some relationship to when things are estrogenic, think: phytoestrogens, think: soy. Yang is when things move a lot, when they’re very active and energetic and warm. Yang is masculine. So Testosterone is yang.

Plants, in general, are considered yin. From seaweeds to veggies to fruits to nuts to mushrooms (yes, mushrooms are included); none of these things MOVE very much by themselves, they all kind of stay put, and all of them are, relative to animals, considered to be Yin. There are obviously plants that are relatively more yang, and plants that are relatively more yin, but as a whole the plant kingdom is pretty yin. Pretty cooling. Pretty estrogenic. On the other hand, animals, they tend to move around, they tend to be warm and energetic, they are all Yang, relative to plants. Some animals are more yin than other animals. For example, a clam, which lives deep down underwater, will be quite a little less yang than a monkey, which lives way up in the trees, but as a whole, the animal kingdom is generally yang.

So what are your goals, are they yin goals or are they yang goals?

Let’s talk about yin goals. Maybe you like books. Maybe you’re introverted, you’re generally kind of a shut-in. You like to read a lot at home, in the dark, and are kind of afraid of going out. When you look in the mirror, looking at your introverted self, you might see that you’re a little fleshy; not fat, per se, but just kind of soft. Squishy. Yin, we would say in Chinese medicine. Your body is built like the bookworm that you are. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just what happens when you spend more time reading books than you do working out. If you’ve got yin goals, it only makes sense that you start to look more yin.

So what would yang goals be? Well suppose you’re still naturally an introvert, but you’re tired of it. You want to be an extrovert now. You want to be the life of the party. You want to be like those fitness models that you see on Instagram – you want to be a hard-body. No squish allowed. You want to lift really heavy stuff. You want to jump really high, like a deer, or run really fast, like a horse. You want to work crazy long hours in the office and be ultra-productive the whole time. What’s more, when you’re done, you want to go and do a bunch of cross-fit afterwards. So how do we facilitate these goals? You turn up the yang. 

So what kind of diet that will make you ultra super yang? It would be a carnivore diet. Remember animals are yang. So you eat lots and lots of meat, lots and lots of yang, lots of heat and testosterone, is what you would need to offset your natural introverted tendencies. To be introverted is to be yin, and to be yin is to be like a plant. You are what you eat. It’s a common phrase that we all know; we even have a whole clip on that. That’s linked above and below. So if you want to be like a plant, you should eat plants, if you want to be like an animal, then eat animals. By following a heavy duty carnivore kind of diet, then you can achieve the yang goals and you can become what you want to become.

The problems arise when our physical goals are at odds with our diet. Think: vegan bodybuilding. I know that it’s totally possible for some people, and there’s a lot of content out there about how you can still look ultra crazy muscular on a purely vegan diet. But think about it: the whole reason why that type of content is so popular is because it goes against common sense. It goes against what we know. It goes against the built in order of nature. At its core, it goes against yin and yang. If the natural order of things is a river, then vegan bodybuilders are always trying to swim upstream.

Similarly, if your goal is deep prayer, deep meditation, and you want be as stationary and calm as possible for the longest amounts of time, then eating a high meat diet would be total sabotage. It would give you lots of explosive energy that you wouldn’t know what to do with. As a result, you see a variety of monks, the whole world over, eating a primarily vegan diet. Orthodox Christian monks, Buddhist monks, Daoist monks, they all eat mostly vegan diets. There is some variation, depending on your sect, depending on your location, but in general, we see a lot of veganism and vegetarianism.

At the heart of this discussion is a question about lifestyle and goals. The monastic lifestyle tends to be very different than the one that we, as people in the world, tend to be aiming for. In general, in our current society, with the way we do things, most people are trying to be as yang as they possibly can. We need to do this just to keep pace with how rapidly our society is changing, and how much it demands from us on a daily basis. Like I said earlier, yang isn’t just for weightlifting and athletic feats, it’s also for those long hours at the office, and for the fact that, when we get home, we often don’t even rest then. In the few hours we have left, we try to pursue our hobbies and our activities.

This yin-yang thing also helps us understand why things like gluten and phytoestrogens and soy are getting such a bad name nowadays. As a rule, modern people don’t want to be yin, we want to be as yang as possible. Look at those Buddhist monks, they love gluten – they even make it into a vegan meat substitute — seitan. They love seitan because it makes them yin, it makes them able to sit for long periods of time in meditation, it makes them calm. Gluten does not, however, render them able to lift weights, compete in triathalons, or keep up with a fast-paced, high-intensity workplace; it’s actually really bad for that. So there’s nothing wrong with either of these diets from a physical perspective, both the yin diet and the yang diet, as long as we work with these diets in accordance with our goals. It’s simple: The correct diet is the one that allows you to do what you want to do.

Immediately we can see, that a lot of people are eating the wrong diet for their body. The cardinal example in the Chinese medicine clinic is one that we see very, very often, especially in urban areas. Into the clinic walks a young, athletic woman of menstruating age that eats a vegetarian or vegan diet. She’s health conscious, that’s part of why she’s vegetarian in the first place, and, the fact that she’s health conscious is also what brings her into the clinic. The thing is, recently, she hasn’t been feeling like herself. She feels a little hollowed out. She’s been tired lately, moreso than usual. Her hair has been getting a little thinner, her skin a little drier, less lustrous. Maybe she’s trying to conceive a baby, and she’s having a bit of a hard time. She can tell something is wrong, but she can’t put her finger on it. She thinks everything is probably just caused by increased stress at work. But it’s been building gradually, and it doesn’t seem to get any better.

From a Chinese medicine perspective, she has BLOOD DEFICIENCY. Why? Because she’s eating a diet that doesn’t match her lifestyle. She NEEDS the deep nourishment from animal foods. Women lose a lot of blood every month with their period, and then, after that, they use a lot of blood to rebuild their uterine lining afterwards. Couple that with moderate to high levels of physical activity, moderate to high levels of mental activity, and very easily, the demands start to overwhelm her meager supply of blood.

So what’s the solution? Well, for a long time, women in China have known about this issue, so they have traditional practices to prevent it. After the period, the time of the month when a woman is most depleted, many Chinese women eat a very special soup. It’s a chicken soup, but it’s made from a very special chicken. It’s made from Silkie chickens, which are famous for their white, fluffy feathers and for their black skin. Underneath that black skin, they have black muscles, black tendons, and even black bones. Because of these unusual physical attributes, silkie chicken is considered to be extra nourishing, and nourishing in a very deep, penetrating way. So when women are at their most depleted, it’s important to notice that, and honor that, and one way to honor that is by serving her silkie chicken soup.

You see the same wisdom about women in the Orthodox Christian church. People are generally supposed to fast, supposed to be vegan, for certain days of the week and certain time periods in the year. But guess who doesn’t fast? Pregnant women and breast-feeding women. These phases in a woman’s life put extra strain on her body, extra strain on the blood supply in particular, and she needs that deep, deep nourishment to replenish her. In China, silkie chicken soup is often used in these instances, too, but there’s an even better soup for breastfeeding. It might sound a little shocking to Western ears, but it’s actually quite good: it’s pork foot and peanut soup. Usually served with a hard boiled egg. And it’s even better and even stronger if you make the broth with Chinese medicinal herbs. Trust me, it’s tastier than it sounds.

Perhaps the biggest depletion in a woman’s life happens in the postpartum period, right after giving birth. At that time, women are so yin, and so depleted, so cold that they absolutely NEED meat. There’s a very special practice for this time period in Chinese culture, called Sitting the Month or Sitting the Moon, or Zuo Yue Zi, where postpartum women are deeply cared for and nourished and replenished. This kind of thing isn’t just in Chinese culture, it’s in Asia, it’s in Africa, it’s in South America, it’s everywhere. In order to properly sit the month, women need to be put in a situation where they can rebuild. So what do they do? They do nothing, nothing at all, except eat, sleep, breastfeed, and hang out with their new baby. It’s very cozy and very enjoyable once you get used to it. Traditionally, the diet for this period involves lots and lots of meat, especially organ meats, like liver, kidney, and heart, in order to rebuild her system after pregnancy and birth, which both take a huge toll on women and their bodies. What’s more during this time period, women are traditionally not supposed to eat any vegetables or any fruits at all. See, vegetables and fruits are considered to be COOLING, and she’s already so cold, so yin, that she really needs to avoid them entirely. If you are interested, there are a couple of books on postpartum recovery that I love that are linked in the description below. Sitting the month makes a HUGE difference, by the way. We did this for my wife after each of our daughters were born, and she was able to make a tremendous recovery. Our friends, our families, and our medical support team were all very impressed how well she was doing and how healthy she looked in the postpartum period. And it’s made a big difference in the life of our little one, too.

So, according to Chinese medicine, there are certain times in life when meat is pretty much indispensable. You need to eat it if you want to be physically healthy. I will say, as with anything in Chinese medicine, there is a bit of variation on this point. For example, Buddhists tend to avoid meat, so if your medical lineage comes from a Buddhist tradition, then they might not consider meat to be totally essential. On the other hand, if your lineage is very Confucian, then you might think meat is 100% essential. There’s a very funny medical text written by one of the great masters of Chinese medicine, who is a staunch Confucianist, and many of his case studies actually involve taking sick, emaciated, withered up Buddhists and force feeding them meat until they’re healthy. And then, once they’re finally healthy, since he’s a Confucianist, he makes them go pay respects to their parents and do your standard Confucian stuff.

As far as Daoism, in certain sects, you’ll often see people, monks in particular, being more vegetarian and vegan. So if your medicine happens to come from a Daoist monk, you might also have a bias towards vegetarianism, depending on the monk.

It is very important to mention, however, that in the case of Chinese Buddhism and in the case of these Daoist monks, their diet incorporates are a tremendous amount of “superfoods.” Like, their idea of trail mix involves medicinal herbs that we consider to be deeply blood and jing nourishing, like goji berries and longan fruit. And there’s a ton of other superfoods that they incorporate into their diet in high doses so that they are able to stay healthy and have ample blood and qi without eating meat. In order to be physically healthy and be vegan at the same time, it takes a lot of thought, a lot of effort, and a lot of the right types of food.

However, a really big question here is whether we care about physical health. Is the health of your body the most important thing to you? Or do you have other goals, like spiritual goals, for example?

All of these monks that we’ve been talking about, they’re not vegetarian for purely physical reasons. They’re not vegetarian for their health. They’re vegetarian because, for some reason or another, it’s not part of their spiritual path to eat meat. They find that something spiritually better, something spiritually enlivening about being vegetarian. They’re more able to pray, more able to meditate, more able to connect with deeper truth, and do all of the things that they want to do.

Different traditions have different rationales about why they’re vegetarian. Some sects of Buddhism, for example, suggest abstinence from meat for two reasons. The first reason is that they say that you shouldn’t take away life, you shouldn’t kill. This is called the first precept. The second reason they give is that you should refrain from anything that clouds the mind, any kind of intoxication. This is the fifth precept. This category includes drugs, alcohol, smoking, and all kinds of things like that. But they also decide to include meat in this category. Very interesting! Meat is an intoxicant, meat is a drug.

The Orthodox Christian perspective as to why Orthodox monks abstain from meat is that man was never intended to eat meat. Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden, were actually vegetarian. There was no death, there was no killing, before the Fall. These monks, their goal is to become like Adam, to return to paradise, to return to heaven. So they try to eat like Adam, they don’t eat any meat. Of course, tied up in that, there is also this element of asceticism, of mortifying the flesh, mortifying the passions, ignoring the urges of our physical body, so that we can become a little less physical, a little less earthly. They want their body to become lighter, so to speak, so that they can more easily reach up to heaven.

All of this can sound a little abstract to us laypeople living in the world, so, to clarify, I want to tell you a story. It’s a traditional Persian story, from the Shahnameh, the book of Kings. The Shahnameh is a huge epic poem that preserves Persian history, tells the story of the Persian people, and is full of ancient Persian traditional wisdom.

This story is about Zahhak. The story takes place quite a long time ago. This is before the Flood, this is ante-deluvian.  Zahhak is an EVIL KING. Definitely not a great guy. The way that he ascended to power in the first place was by killing his own dad.

So after he ascends to power, Ahriman appears to him. Ahriman is like Zoroastrian Satan. Crash course in Zoroastrianism: there’s a good deity, and there’s a bad deity, and they’re both kind of equally in charge of the world, and they’re in constant battle. Light against darkness. Ahriman is the bad one.

So Ahriman appears to Zahhak and presents Zahhak with many, many days of sumptuous feasts. One after the other. And what kind of feasts are we talking about here? Well, before this time, the human diet was purely vegetarian. No one had ever tasted meat before. So put yourself in Ahriman’s shoes: if you’re Satan, and you’re really trying to win one of these humans over, what do you feed them? You feed them meat. So Ahriman introduces meat to mankind, he introduces the consumption of flesh. It’s not man’s idea, it’s Satan’s idea to eat meat. But once Zahhak tastes meat, he loves it. He loves it so much that when all the feasting is over, he says to Ahriman, “Because of all of this feasting you provided, I will give you whatever you want.”

Ahriman asks for one thing. He asks to kiss Zahhak’s shoulders. One kiss on each shoulder. Seems pretty innocent, right? Well, after he kisses Zahhak’s shoulders, out of each shoulder grows a giant black scary snake. One on each side. Definitely not an ideal situation.

At this point, Zahhak does what any reasonable person would try to do, and he tries to cut off the snakes. He tries, he has his doctors try, he has everyone try. And the snakes come off just fine, but there’s one big problem. Once you cut them off, the snakes just grow right back. They regenerate right there on his shoulders, no matter how many times he cuts them off.

So now what? Well, Ahriman, who takes many different shapes, shows up as a doctor this time. Zahhak asks his opinion, and doctor Ahriman says “Don’t even bother trying to cut them off. It’s not going to work. The only solution that you have is to placate them, otherwise the snakes will turn on you and they will kill you.” So how does one go about placating two demonic shoulder snakes? As it happens, Doctor Ahriman has the perfect prescription. These snakes, they like a particular kind of stew. This stew has to be made with brains. Not just any brains, they like to eat human brains. And there needs to be two of them. Two snakes, two brains. So every day thereafter, until Zahhak is ultimately dethroned, Zahhak needs to kill two people, cut out their brains, cook them up in a stew so that he can serve it the snakes on his shoulders. And all of this happens simply because Zahhak ate meat! Because mankind starting eating flesh.

There seems to be cross-cultural agreement about meat. There really is something spiritually objectionable about eating meat, and about killing. You literally have blood on your hands.

But does that mean that we shouldn’t do it? Should we all just be vegetarians? My personal answer is no. And in order to understand why, we have to look at childbirth again. Early Chinese traditional beliefs, Early Hebrew beliefs, Orthodox Christian beliefs, and, I’m sure, plenty of other beliefs the world over have a particular view of childbirth. In Chinese terms, it’s inauspicious. It’s unlucky. Childbirth often implied death, either for the mother or the child, or both. There was a reasonably good chance that someone wouldn’t make it out alive. We’re going to do a whole episode on childbirth, later on, by the way. What’s more, even if both parties managed to make it through the birthing process okay, there was still a chance that your infant would die in the month after birth. Hence, to  prevent that, women would sit the month, they would do those post-partum recovery practices I was talking about earlier. Some scholars argue that these practices have their origin in the fact that, in ancient china, postpartum women were kept in isolation. Just like in Hebrew tradition, they were considered to be unlucky, unclean, and they needed a period of purification. This happened in a separate hut, away from the rest of the village, that just had women and their babies. The female caretakers were also allowed in. Often, in this hut, at any given time, there were multiple women from the village and multiple babies, all in there together. Definitely a unique and incredible bonding opportunity.

But like I was saying, this isn’t just in China. There’s a period of purification in the Hebrew tradition, and in the Orthodox Christian tradition as well. The reason why this purification is needed is because the pains of childbirth and the mortality associated with childbirth is considered to be a consequence of man’s fall from paradise. In fact, women’s menstrual cycles are thought of in the same way. All of this happens because we’re not perfect anymore, we’re not like we used to be. We face suffering and death in our lives because we are no longer the perfect spiritual beings we once were.

So remember what I said about post-partum women NEEDING to eat meat for their health? And what I said about menstruating women NEEDING to eat meat to sustain their bodies, especially around their cycle? Well, it’s all related. We have to eat meat because our bodies aren’t perfect anymore, our life isn’t perfect. Eating meat might not be ideal, but it’s really a stopgap measure. It’s making up for the fact that we’re falling apart, that we’re slowly dying, that we’re not what we used to be. We eat meat because there are things in our life that aren’t heavenly. Childbirth isn’t heavenly. Sex isn’t heavenly. That’s why monks and nuns don’t do it.

Nowadays, there’s a lot of things that we do that wear down us, things that, maybe we weren’t built to do. Just thinking about how many hours per day we use our eyes, taking in artificial light, staring at our computer monitors, and our phones, and our TVs. Think about how fast we are now capable of moving, with our cars, and our planes. Think about how much we are capable of getting done in a day. There’s a whole lot more WORLDLY STUFF than there used to be. And a lot less heavenly stuff. A lot less time for connecting with your family, for praying and meditating, for engaging with the beauty of nature, for all of these things that build us up and make us better humans.

The world is different now than it used to be. And it’s a definite possibility that the way that we have to eat, the way that we have to support ourselves, is entirely different than anything that people have done in the past. This is a big question nowadays: if people ate bread at every meal, rice three meals a day, how come when we do that now we often see issues with diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and more? There’s a lot more that we have to keep up with nowadays, and a lot more going on. One might argue that the world is more IMPERFECT and more FLAWED than it ever has been before, and that could account for what appears to be an increased NEED for meat. The more worldly things are, and the less heavenly, the more we need meat to fuel it.

But alongside this uptick in mental activity, and job activity, and global interconnectedness, alongside the increased demands of life, we see an uptick in a different type of activity: physical activity. Exercise is now more intense than it has ever been in the past. Athletic achievement now far exceeds anything imaginable for the majority of recorded human history. World records are being broken every day. Think about running the marathon, for example. A little bit of history: The marathon is named after the city of Marathon in Greece. There was a messenger, during the war between Persia and Greece, who had to run to deliver a message from Athens to Marathon. He had to run 26.2 miles. And what did he do after he delivered the message? He died! Running that distance was generally accepted to be impossible, so impossible that the person who did it would probably die, so impossible that when you hear this story you think to yourself, “wow, what a hero he was.” Now we have people running marathons like there’s nothing to it.

Intense exercise has become the norm. Cross-fit and interval training, and things like that, were only a few years ago, reserved for the most intense of athletes. Now, they’re common practices. Even the average person nowadays is accomplishing tremendous things, both physically and otherwise.

But in order to do these things, we need to eat more meat. You can’t accomplish these championship physical feats without eating a championship diet. But remember, meat is spiritually questionable. It’s a stop-gap. So, if doing something makes us need to eat more meat, does that mean that we shouldn’t do it?

I’m not just talking about exercise, that’s important, but I’m also talking about our work life, and our mental life. Across the board, we’re achieving things that have never been possible or even imaginable in human history. We’re kind of super-humans, in a way. But, what if, because meat isn’t GOOD for us, what if we’re not actually becoming super-humans? What if all that worldly achievement isn’t what we think it is? What if, instead of becoming super-humans, we’re actually becoming sub-humans?

It’s a big question. And you can really only answer that question for yourself, and for your diet.

That brings us to the end of this episode on the big question of whether or not you should eat meat. In case you zoned out in the middle of the episode, the short answer to the question is, “it depends!” It depends on your physical health, it depends on your lifestyle, it depends on your physical, mental, and spiritual goals, and above all, it depends on you. We didn’t have time to get into the ecological aspects and the technological aspects of meat vs. non-meat, but I anticipate that those questions will come up in some episodes in the near future. We have episodes planned for discussing the role of technology in medicine, as well as how man’s relationship with nature might affect our understanding of medicine. So stay tuned for more Classic of Difficulties!

As always, keep asking questions, and stay difficult!