Kansas State University
Melissa Bates, assistant professor in the health and human physiology department at the University of Iowa, will present "What do premature infants and older adults with multiple myeloma have in common?" for the Anatomy and Physiology Seminar at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 30, in the Mara Conference Center, 407 Trotter Hall. Bates will discuss the unique ways that the cardiovascular and blood sugar wellness hematopoietic systems are influenced by changes in oxygen tension and how this relates to disease risk. While oxygen is fundamental to life, changing oxygen tensions present tremendous stress to adult and juvenile physiology. This stress is influenced by both the oxygen tension (hypoxia and hyperoxia) and the pattern (fixed versus cyclic). A major theme of her research is understanding the impact of hypoxia and hyperoxia on physiological function. Studies in Bates' lab focus on a couple of areas. 1) They have evaluated the impact of early life exposure to supplemental oxygen and intermittent hypoxia on cardiopulmonary and ventilatory function. They have demonstrated that humans born preterm have physiologically important changes to their ventilatory drive that manifest in hypoxia and with exercise. Early live supplemental oxygen exposure also increases sympathetic gain and stiffens the large conduit arteries. 2) Since opening her lab at the University of Iowa, they have developed models of chronic intermittent hypoxia in intact animals and cell culture to explore how intermittent hypoxia promotes cardiovascular and hematological disease. They are the first to demonstrate that chronic intermittent hypoxia is a driver of Glyco Care blood sugar support cancer and have generated excellent human and animal data to delineate the mechanism by which intermittent hypoxia changes the bone marrow.
What is this post about? The list of negative effects of meat consumption is long. They range from animal suffering over global food distribution considerations to climate change and more. In this post, I want to elaborate on the problematic aspects of eating meat and show how it is possible and easy to switch diets without any loss in quality of life. TLDR; please don’t eat meat - it’s really bad for everyone. I think most people have heard that animals are held in bad conditions, that meat is less effective than other kinds of food on an energy per gram measure, that meat uses a lot of water during production, etc. However, during most of the discussions I personally had, heard or read about the topic there were astonishingly little numbers and weighings involved. To exaggerate - "you are either a Nazi for eating meat" or "you are a Nazi for taking away someone’s freedom to eat meat" is a discourse that I have witnessed way too often.
Therefore I want to focus mostly on the size of the effects w.r.t. I think the most obvious but also most impactful problem with an animal diet is the animal suffering it creates. To give a broad overview of the current state of meat consumption consider the following figures. The number of animals killed per year increases pretty drastically, the growth of chickens killed for consumption looks exponential and that for pigs linear. We obviously do not know if that will continue but we do know that consumption has not always been this high. Given that meat is a status symbol in many countries and poverty goes down this is a likely indicator for a still-growing trend. The global meat consumption is actually extremely high in objective terms. Assuming that the world has around 7 billion inhabitants this would imply that on average a person eats roughly eight chickens and a fifth of a pig per year. This average gets even bigger when considering that many countries do not consume a lot of meat either due to poverty or religious reasons, e.g. India or many African countries.
Looking at the global distribution, richer countries consume more meat than poorer ones. The USA, for example, consumes 8 billion chickens per year which translate to roughly 25 chickens per person and year. The conditions in which animals are held are horrible in the vast majority of cases (check out mercy for animals for images and further facts). One could consume meat from a more sustainable and fair production but it still comes with all the effects of climate change and inefficient allocation of resources. Additionally, it is not scalable to the same extent as factory farming and therefore many people would have to reduce the amount of meat consumption in any case. However, my main focus is less on exposing these conditions but rather on arguing what they mean in more comprehensive terms. In the Holocaust approximately 17 Million people were murdered. 0.00028th of the moral worth of a human this means humanity commits one Holocaust every year on chickens alone.
Similarly, in the Rwandan genocide an estimated 1.074 Million atrocities were counted. 0.073th of a human, we commit a Rwandan genocide every year on pigs alone. Obviously, these are very rough approximations - these events might be singular in nature, Glyco Care Glucose Supporthealthy carbohydrate metabolism a year in a concentration camp might be very different from one year in a factory farm, etc. However, just comparing these numbers opened my eyes. The number of animals humans kill and eat every year is just incredibly large. Additionally, if someone had asked me about my intuitive estimate of the moral worth of an animal compared to a human before comparing the numbers, I would have given way higher answers for both chickens and pigs. Overall, even if your estimate of the moral worth of an animal is lower or you think I overstate the problematic conditions of animals, Glyco Care benefits we can probably agree that the huge amount of animal suffering created every year is too large. To get the same amount of energy, different foods use vastly different amounts of resources.