why should we eat meat?

Plant based diets are all the rage these days and for good reason; Americans' health and the planet's health are in trouble.

For starters, Americans eat way more meat than is necessary for good health. According to this Forbes article, Americans eat an average of 10 oz of meat per day, which is double what nutritionists recommend. Americans simply overvalue animal protein, specifically, and in general, are often not aware of the actual recommended daily allowance for protein. You can get the details here.

Then, there's the fact that raising animals requires more water than growing plants, they produce more methane gas, and animal products often require more transportation to get them to market, all of which takes a definite toll on our environment, as discussed in this National Geographic article.

In Healing with Whole Foods, a nutrition book based on Asian traditions, Paul Pitchford defines a plant-based diet as a diet that is two-thirds plants. I think this is important to point out, because when people say they’re “plant based”, that almost always means they’re vegan; whereas, the true meaning of these words is not that we don’t eat any animal products but that the bulk of what we eat is focused on plants. I think this is a smart way to think about our diets while considering the environment and our health, specifically our blood.

When Chinese medicine talks about blood, it doesn’t just mean the red liquid in our veins and its physiological purpose as we understand it from a biomedicine perspective. From the Chinese medical perspective, blood provides nutrients to the body, but it also has a interdependent relationship with qi, our energy. It helps our physical body function, just like we think about in western medicine, but it also facilitates emotional experiences, thinking, and memory.

In Chinese medicine, when we say someone is blood deficient, this refers to the quality of a person's blood, based on signs and symptoms used to make differential Chinese medical diagnoses. When we use this term in CM, it does not mean that you lack the appropriate volume of blood, as in biomedicine, or that you have an actual blood disease, though people with diagnosed blood diseases will usually present as blood deficient from the Chinese medicinal perspective. Ultimately, what blood deficiency means is that your system needs rest and support in order to revive itself, because being blood deficient is a component in nearly every complaint.

The very, very basic concept of CM is yin and yang; yin is rest, while yang is activity. Blood is a part of yin, and yin supports yang. We can’t have yang activities without yin; it’d be like running a company without a support staff. But in today's go-go-go, hot yoga, HIIT workout world, over-reliance on coffee and screens kind of world, where we measure our success by how much we check off our to-do list and by how much we accomplish, our yin is going to take a hit, because it's supporting such extreme demands on the yang.

Autoimmune diseases, migraines, anxiety and depression, infertility, insomnia, skin and memory problems, thinning hair, vision issues, dizziness or tinnitus, and even joint pain have a connection to blood deficiency. Getting off our screens at least an hour before bed and going to sleep before 11PM are two simple things you can do to help restore your blood.

So why should we eat meat? Meat contributes energetically to our blood since its very nature is that it was a living animal. (I know. It makes me a little queasy too; after all, I used to be vegan and only started eating meat because my migraines got so bad that I had to do more to build my blood). Fat is also valuable for building yin, so when you’re choosing meat, skip the leanest cuts of beef and choose darker meat chicken, too.

We can also build blood with herbs, but because we all eat multiple times a day, food is a wonderful way to help yourself at home. If you are vegan or vegetarian and experiencing health problems, I would strongly recommend adding some meat to your diet. Even a little meat can go a long way to improving your health.