Hi, I’m Karen Bartle and I’m your host of Whole & Healthy. In todays episode I’ll be sharing my story about being brought up on a full-on meat and dairy diet, what a key game changer it was to transition to a plant-based lifestyle and why ingesting meat can be harmful for our health.
Back in the early noughties Paul and I were gradually reducing our reliance on meat and fish. Even though we were both brought up omnivores, neither of us were ever big fans of the look, feel or smell of meat and fish, especially the smell of burning animal fat, and we hated the mess of washing all the excess fat from the tray down the sink afterwards.
Every dinner in my house growing up had to have some form of meat on the plate and we were strongly encouraged from eating it before anything else. Being a low-income family, it was seen as a luxury almost, especially since it was the thing that cost the most and took the longest and most effort to buy and cook. We were a family of 5 and mum used to cook for everyone and every Sunday she always cooked a family roast.
I remember the condensation building up on all the windows in our house where the only source of heating was a gas fire in the living room, and the smell of burning animal fat roaming into every corner of our 3-bed terrace seemingly lingering for hours.
Dairy and animal fats were a huge part of our diet, we would always be eating something containing cheese, eggs, milk, butter, lard, and the fat from the Sunday roast would be refrigerated for our suppers and snacks to put on white bread as dripping with plenty of salt piled on top.
When Paul and I made the decision to reduce our reliance on animal products it led us to eventually eliminate all meat and fish, but not dairy. This somehow wasn’t something Paul and I felt the need to eliminate at the time, in fact not until much later after surviving our world traveling for 9 months as vegetarians and had settled in Australia around 2014.
Whilst we did care a lot about preventing and addressing cruelty to animals when we saw it, we didn’t perceive ourselves to be avid vegans. We just didn’t like the idea eating and cooking dead animals!
Travelling for that 9-month period as vegetarians wasn’t easy for us at all. We ventured to all corners of the globe where a few places were very accommodating especially where we organised it in advance and had guides supporting us, but it was very challenging most of the time when we had to forage for our own food.
We can’t remember what the trigger was to decide to go fully plant based, but we do know that we were getting more and more concerned about finding that we were eating foods containing animal derivatives such as animal rennet, gelatine, Isinglass, crustacea, and milk. Once we realised that animal rennet was produced in the stomach of ruminant mammals including cattle, goats, and sheep, gelatine was manufactured by processing animal bones, cartilage, and skin from dead cows or fish, Isinglass is a form of collagen obtained from the dried swim bladders of fish, we could wait no longer and we had to go all in with a plant-based diet!
We started paying a lot of attention to ingredients listed on the back of products, and since Australia, we realised that products that you would ordinarily perceive to be animal free on the front of the packet or bottle, showed as containing dairy or animal derivatives in the ingredients, or didn’t actually mention it at all when it did turn out to contain it. There was only one purely plant-based cheese we could find in Australia that didn’t contain animal rennet and it tasted pretty disgusting.
The game changer for us in eliminating meat in the early noughties was the smell of burnt animal fats spitting around the oven or grill and lingering in the house for hours afterwards, and the amount of fat that was left on the tray when it came out of the oven. We knew this couldn’t possibly be healthy and good for us, but neither could we bring ourselves to eat it raw or rare due to the health risks of eating undercooked meat.
I remember the controversy in England in the 80’s and 90’s when the cows were being culled in high numbers and piled high ready to be incinerated due to contracting CJD and mad cows disease. It was appalling to watch it on TV and learn how preventable these conditions could have been with the right animal husbandry. It was a worrying time and it no doubt planted many a seed for so many people worried about how eating this meat could have implications for impacting their own health and well-being.
I sensed as a child that the aroma of meat fats infusing the house for hours didn’t feel good, neither did the dripping we ate on white bread piled with salt either. Paul and I were pretty repulsed by the time we decided to eliminate meat because of the amount of fat coming out of the meat on to the tray. We used to say well at least it’s not in our bodies, but of course it was, and much worse than that, cooking meat at high temperatures can be carcinogenic due to the formation of harmful compounds which have been linked to an increased risk of various cancers, including prostate cancer and colorectal cancer.
Ingesting animal fats has long been known to be associated with health risks due to their high content of saturated fatty acids and cholesterol, which are linked to conditions like atherosclerosis and cardiovascular diseases, both of which significantly contributed to my parents demise.
Studies have shown that increased intake of animal fats, particularly from sources like butter, can lead to elevated levels of blood cholesterol levels ultimately contributing to metabolic disorders (such as obesity, high blood pressure, total cholesterol and triglycerides, insulin resistance, and decreasing HDL (good protective cholesterol), which puts us at increased risks of developing strokes and heart attacks both of which severely impacted my parents health, causing suffering over many years.
We hope and feel sure that by eliminating all meat and fish in 30’s and then dairy products in our 40’s and 50’s, we are significantly mitigating our risk of traversing the same trajectory of my parents, their parents, and no doubt their parents parents, to prevent premature death and disease from the same non-contractable lifestyle diseases they unfortunately succumbed to.
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