You need to stop eating beef, not for religious reasons neither for peer pressure, but for your own health which is far more important than indulging your taste buds in a finger licking beef preparation. There are a bundle of reasons to stop eating beef and the health concerns are certainly one of the major factors in the list. By eating beef, at one hand you ruin your health and run the risk of contracting a bunch of other severe diseases, on the other hand you also add to your carbon footprint on the earth. We have reached a point when it has become really important for every human being to be cautious about the environment and not to miss even the smallest step one can take to save the nature.
If you are planning to stop eating beef but you are still not convinced enough, read on to know why you should skip it altogether right from today.
Beef causes chronic diseases
Eating beef has been marked as one of the primary triggers for developing a bunch of serious chronic diseases. By skipping beef from your diet you can simply reduce the risk of these diseases which can hamper the quality of your life in every way. By eating beef you make yourself prone to the following chronic ailments that can even cost your life,
Cardiovascular diseases
Beef essentially comes with high amount of saturated fat and cholesterol, which works as the major ingredients to clog your arteries stealing them from their usual flexibility. Apart from these, beef also contain a compound named Carnitine, which is broken down in the human gut to produce Trimethylamine-N-Oxide. This compound is directly related with atherosclerosis or deposition of fat in the arteries. So, eating beef increases your risk of having cardiovascular diseases, including high blood pressure and even heart attack to as much as 50% compared to the non-meat eaters.
Cancer
If only the name of the disease is not enough to scare you off, let us make it clear that eating beef increases your risk of getting cancer to as much as 40%. Consumption of beef has been directly linked to the increased chance of improper cell division and cancerous growth in the body. The presence of Dioxin in beef, which is one of the most toxic organic compounds, is believed to be one of the primary reasons for inducing cancer in the human body.
Alzheimer’s disease
Eating beef is risky for your brain too. Currently the number of patients suffering from Alzheimer’s is increasing rapidly across the world, and eating too much beef might be one of the major reasons behind it. Studies have shown that accumulation of iron in the brain can cause Alzheimer’s and beef being extremely high in iron it certainly increases your risk of iron overdose, which can lead to Alzheimer’s.
Type 2 diabetes
Type 2 diabetes is the other deadly chronic disease which has been linked to beef consumption. According to studies, consuming beef even three times a week increases your risk of getting type 2 diabetes by as much as 50%. By skipping beef from your diet, you can easily take down the risk of contracting this deadly and chronic disease by half.
Beef weakens your immunity system
A healthy immunity system is the key to a healthy life and eating beef can be a major daily blow on it that can weaken your immunity system over the years, making you more susceptible to other diseases and infections. Beef contains a sugar named Neu5Gc which is not very friendly with your immunity system. As this sugar gets into the body, the immunity system treats it as bacteria and begins to fight against it, which results into inflammation and also weakening of the immunity system. So, skipping beef is the right way to ensure that your immunity system is not overloaded to fight the sugars that it do not recognize.
Beef can work as a major source of infection
At the current scenario, commercial farm houses do not actually maintain the best environment for rearing beef cattle, which makes them prone to many infections and by taking beef you can directly become the host of these infecting strains. The germ e.coli O157:H7 which can easily thrive in the body of the cow without causing any symptom can result into serious food poisoning in humans. The Mad Cow Disease is the other menace that can affect your health severely if you consume beef with the infection.
Beef eating makes you antibiotic resistant
We are very well aware about the importance of antibiotics; they are the marvels of medical science that has made life easier by helping us to fight diseases quickly. While the right use of antibiotics can cure many diseases, misuse of the same medication can make you resistant to antibiotics, resulting into no response on antibiotic treatments, which can be actually deadly. In order to ward off the effects of the unhealthy conditions in which the cows are reared, they are given bunch of antibiotics that are not even regulated by any authority. When you consume beef, all these antibiotics enter your body in little amounts and as you continue eating beef over the span of your life, the concentration of these antibiotics in your body keep on increasing, resulting into antibiotic resistance, which can be deadly, making all the antibiotics ineffective for you.
Beef consumption can affect the hormonal balance in your body
Hormones play a very important role in our body; in fact they work as one of the major driving forces that perform some of the most crucial tasks in the body. A proper hormonal balance is the key to a good health. In order to grow more muscles and also to produce more milk from the cows they are fed with high hormonal diet. In most of the cases they fully lack natural organic forage, and what they are provided with is a low quality yet high protein food added with loads of hormones. When you eat beef these hormones get into your body, and over time as the amount of hormone build up increases, it can tend to disrupt the natural hormonal balance in your body, leading to many conditions and diseases.
Beef consumption reduces the span of your life
According to studies, having processed beef can seriously affect the life expectancy of a person. By increasing the risk of getting a range of deadly diseases like cardiovascular ailments, diabetes and cancer it increases the risk percent of death by as much as 13%. So, by staying away from beef, you can easily add some more years to your life.
Eating beef can make you fat
A diet filled with red meat like beef can be one of the primary reasons of gaining weight quickly. The high amount of fat present in beef, can easily add up more kilos to your weight. So, if you are cautious about your figure, staying away from beef is certainly going to give you great results.
Commercial rearing of beef is harming the environment
Beef rearing in commercial scale is also affecting the environment in the worst possible ways. It is more water and land intensive to rear beef cattle than any other livestock. Beef cattle rearing has also been linked to topsoil loss and in order to create more and more ground for beef cattle rearing often the rain forests are cut down by the local farmers, which is affecting the environment in the worst possible ways. Moreover, the gaseous emissions of meat-producing cows contains a huge amount of methane, which is one of the most deadly greenhouse gases with 25 times more ability than carbon-dioxide to harm the environment. High amount of reactive nitrogen is also produced through beef farming, which is again a major source of environmental pollution.
Animal cruelty
Beef cattle rearing and slaughtering is directly related to animal cruelty. It is not only an unhealthy and unhygienic environment where the beef cattles are reared, but they are also fed with hormones and antibiotics that are harmful for their health too. Moreover, the process of production of beef is extremely inhuman and as it is said, if the slaughterhouses had walls of glass, everyone would have been a vegetarian. Once people like you start skipping beef from their diet completely, it will reduce the demand for beef cattle rearing, which can be the only way to stop the cruelty that are inflected on these animals.
Its low quality meat that you buy with lots of money
Beef is expensive and more importantly it is not a very healthy diet that you are buying with that bunch of money. The way beef cattle are reared in the farms, they are hardly left with any real nourishment, and usually the cows are sold for slaughter only after they have passed their productive young age and have started to grow old. So, at the end what you are buying with your money is low quality meat filled with toxins and other elements that can harm your health in the worst possible ways and can increase your chance of diseases to a great extent.
Cows are not ours to eat
Cows are one of the most gentle and social animals. Just like dogs, they are able to recognize their master and other people who take care of them. Studies have shown that cows have the ability to remember and recognize up to 100 other cows, making them a social animal just like us. It has also been observed that cows grieve the death of their friends and family and hence killing these animals just to make our dinner plates more tasty, is not certainly the right thing to do.
