You said in your response to Tom:
>This is an interesting argument. It is always interesting how we in the
>west seem to have all the health answers for the world but have an
>extensive list of disease which are only common in our society ie Heart
>Disease, Mental Illness Etc...
Who, or what medical professional group, has made statements or
completed studies that support that theory? Many other countries,
including soem of the so-called "underdeveloped" or "Third World"
countries have an incidence of mental illness that equals or exceeds that
of the US. Heart Disease, if you are including those conditions closely
related to a high colesterol diet, is higher in the US than many of these
countries. But heart Failure is still common everywhere. These two
types of diseases are not always diagnosed correctly in areas where you
have one or two cardiologists and one specialist in mental disorders per
one hundred thousand population. But that does not mean they don't
exist.
I have personally seen cases of serious mental illness in some of the
less developed parts of western Africa. And I have attended a couple of
funerals for people who died "because their heart stopped". They were
not admitted to any high tech emergency room, nor was there an autopsy to
determine precisely why the person died. The religious beliefs of the
families would not permit such an act. I know because the reason I
attended the funeral is the family members were friends and associates of
mine.
A lot of people in these areas do own cattle and do consider them a
part of their family wealth. But they do slaughter them for food. So it
is a symbol of capitalism. What is so wrong with capitalism? Is there a
social order where the people are better off generally than here in the
western world? Someone (may have been you) mentioned one religious group
in India that revere their cattle and do not use them for food. Are the
people who are members of this cultural group better off than us? Are
they even close to being able to feed themselves and their children? Do
they have some strong resistance to disease in general?
If the premise is "We should not eat meat because to do so is the
result of cruelty to animals." then let's carry that false premise to its
logical, but erroneous conclusion. To eat plants (which after all are
living things) is bad because it constitutes cruelty to plants. Then
what do we eat? Artificially manufactured foods made from inert
minerals?
Of all the religions practiced around the world, there is one small
minority religion that condemns the eating of meat. They are not even a
majority in their own country. So if the source of this belief is
religion, it is a minority view. If it is from some other source, it
might be interesting to discuss it in some forum other than the Sanet-mg
list. But it will take some powerful arguments to convince me, and I
suspect others as well.
--Dan in Sunny Puerto Rico--