Will Meat Be Banned?

Meat has been a celebrated food staple since the dawn of mankind.¹ Never has anyone needed to justify the eating of animal protein — until now. According to the globalist cabal that is working toward a complete monopoly of the food supply, the eating of meat is at the core of manmade climate change and must stop in order to “save the planet.”

Back in September 2019, a British barrister (trial attorney) went so far as to call for new laws to ban the eating of meat to protect the environment, and as time goes on, this kind of insanity will likely only intensify. As reported by The Guardian at the time:²

“The barrister Michael Mansfield has suggested that we should have new laws against ecocide — practices that destroy the planet — and that under them, meat could be targeted. ‘I think when we look at the damage eating meat is doing to the planet, it is not preposterous to think that one day it will become illegal,’ he said.”

Aside from an outright ban on meat consumption, a number of other coercive strategies have also been proposed, such as changing agricultural subsidies and trade laws, changing diets in hospitals and schools, adding warning labels, education (read, propaganda) and implementing various taxes, including specific taxes on meat and more generalized carbon taxes.³

Human Health To Be Sacrificed for the Environment

The Guardian cited research^4,5,6 from Oxford University, published in the summer of 2018, which claimed meat and dairy production are responsible for 60% of the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the agricultural sector, and that cattle use 83% of available farmland while delivering only 18% of calories and 37% of dietary protein.

But are environmental concerns the only valid factor in this equation? What about human health? Is it reasonable to intentionally doom all of humanity to poor health and low cognition just because a small power-hungry cabal claims food production has a detrimental climate impact?

Many of the activities pursued by these globalists have detrimental impacts on the environment, but you don’t see them addressing those. Instead, they’re going after food!

The most infuriating part of this debate is the fact that human and environmental health can be simultaneously optimized. If the global cabal really had good intentions, they’d incentivize farmers to transition to regenerative farming practices and holistic livestock management.

Problem solved. We’d have healthier, more nutrient-dense food and the environment would rapidly regenerate. Climate normalization would soon follow. To learn more, see “Regenerative Food and Farming: Survival and Revival.”

But no, regenerative farming is not even part of the discussion. It’s being intentionally ignored, and that’s how you know the globalists have no intention of solving an actual problem. Their intention is to control the food supply by making sure all foods are patentable and owned by them.

Study Warns: Meat Ban Would Harm Human Health

On the other side of this debate, we have research⁷ showing that removing meat and dairy from the human diet would result in significant harm to health. As reported by Nutrition Insight in mid-April 2023:⁸

“Among a growing body of research linking decreased meat consumption to various health benefits, a new study concludes that removing or reducing meat consumption from diets is risky as meat is a nutrient-dense food that ‘continues to have a key role in human health and development.’

The researchers explain that meat offers a source of high-quality protein and nutrients that are not always easily obtained with meat-free diets and are often suboptimal or deficient in global populations.

‘Animal-sourced foods are superior to plant-sourced foods at simultaneously supplying several bioavailable micronutrients and high-quality macronutrients critical for growth and cognitive development,’ notes co-author Dr. Adegbola Adesogan, director of the University of Florida’s Global Food Systems Institute. Dietary recommendations to eliminate animal-source foods from diets ignore their importance …”

Indeed, as noted in this paper,⁹ human anatomy, digestion and metabolism indicates that the human race is not only compatible with but also reliant upon relatively substantial meat intake, and disconnecting the entire population from our evolutionary dietary patterns raises rather than lowers the risk for nutrient deficiencies and chronic diseases.

Meat Is More Than the Sum of Individual Nutrients

We already know that the preponderance of processed food in the Western diet is responsible for our current disease burden and removing one of the few remaining whole foods — meat — will undoubtedly only worsen the situation.

Specific nutrients found in meat that are not easily obtained in meat-free diets include B vitamins, especially vitamin B12, retinol, long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, iron and zinc in bioavailable forms, taurine, creatine and carnosine, all of which have important health functions. As noted by the authors:¹⁰

“As a food matrix, meat is more than the sum of its individual nutrients. Moreover, within the diet matrix, it can serve as a keystone food in food-based dietary interventions to improve nutritional status, especially in regions that rely heavily on cereal staples.

Efforts to lower global meat intake for environmental or other reasons beyond a critical threshold may hinder progress towards reducing undernutrition and the effects this has on both physical and cognitive outcomes, and thereby stifle economic development …

Leaving aside the degree of negative impact that meat may have on a variety of factors that relate to human and planetary health … the purpose of the present article is to summarize the positive nutritional aspects of meat consumption.

The outlining, understanding, and weighing of such parameters will be required to enable a proper cost-benefit analysis of any food system transformation, and particularly those that wish to strongly reduce or even eliminate meat intake.”

We Have a Manmade Problem Alright

We do have a manmade problem, but it’s not climate change per se. The problem is that food production has been bastardized. In an April 24, 2023, article in The Scotsman,¹¹ columnist Philip Lymbery shares memories of a trip through Italy’s agricultural valley.

While touring “pretty villages,” “endless pastures and crop fields,” he quickly realized that something was missing: Livestock. Not once did he see a farm animal anywhere. The picturesque pastures were all empty.

“Where were the cows producing milk for world-famous Parmesan or Grana Padano? Or the pigs renowned for Parma ham? Or the chickens producing eggs for Carbonara? What I discovered is that farmers in Italy’s richest agricultural region had forgotten how to keep animals outside.

They simply had a blind spot. They couldn’t see why it wasn’t right to keep them cooped up indoors all day, every day. They couldn’t see the irony of grass being grown then mowed and packed into bales to feed incarcerated cows,” he writes.

“They had lost sight of the fact that cows, pigs, and chickens like to feel fresh air and sunshine as much as we do. It put me in mind of something else Locatelli once said: ‘It is better to have fantastic meat once a week than fill ourselves up every day with cheap, carelessly reared meat. We all have to get used to quality, not quantity.’”

Even foods advertised as being made from “grass fed” cows, such as Italy’s famous Parmigiano Reggiano Parmesan cheese, were raised indoors, Lymbery discovered. Instead of letting the cows graze freely on all those pastures, cut grass is shoveled into darkened factories where hundreds of cows are cramped together.

According to Lymbery, less than 1% of Italian farms that supply dairy for the production of Parmesan allowed cows to graze freely outdoors in 2016. (He asked the consortium that governs Parmesan manufacturing for updated 2023 statistics but received no reply.) Instead, “zero grazing” is the norm. This is where cows are permanently kept indoors.

Another fact Lymbery discovered during his travels through Italy was that crop fields are primarily dedicated to growing animal feed, not human food. These kinds of practices are what’s having a detrimental effect on the environment. It’s factory farming that is the problem, not farming or food production in general. As mentioned earlier, the solution is regenerative farming and holistic husbandry, Not more processed fake foods.

Fake Meats Are Not a Viable Replacement for Real Meat

As detailed in “Red Meat Is Not a Health Risk,” research has demonstrated that unprocessed red meat poses a very low risk for adverse health effects, if any. On the other hand, cultured meat operations are significant producers of CO2 emissions and plant-based meats have been shown to inhibit mineral absorption in humans.

Both of these meat alternatives are also ultraprocessed,¹² and may therefore cause the same kind of health deterioration as other processed foods. Obesity,¹³ Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and depression are but a few examples of conditions known to be promoted and exacerbated by a processed food diet.^{14,15,16,17,18}

In December 2022, Swedish researchers warned that plant-based meat alternatives have very high phytate levels — antinutrients that inhibit the absorption of minerals in the human body. As a result, while the meat substitute may appear to contain many of the necessary nutrients, such as iron, your body cannot absorb them. That plant-based meat alternatives may therefore result in health-robbing nutrient deficiencies is wholly predictable. As reported by Nutrition Insight:¹⁹

“The study, published in Nutrients, analyzed 44 meat substitutes sold in Swedish supermarkets, mainly made of soy and pea proteins. It also included fermented soy products of tempeh and mycoproteins — fungi.

‘All products were high in iron and zinc content but low in bioavailability (except the tempeh and mycoprotein-based products). This means that the minerals pass through the gastrointestinal tract without being absorbed,’ Ann-Sofie Sandberg, co-author of the study and professor of food and nutrition science at Chalmers University, tells NutritionInsight.

Sandberg details that the mycoproteins did not contain iron but relatively high amounts of zinc. Zinc absorption might be negatively influenced by the fungi cell walls, although it’s yet unknown.

‘Among these products, we saw a wide variation in nutritional content and how sustainable they can be from a health perspective. In general, the estimated absorption of iron and zinc from the products was extremely low,’ says Cecilia Mayer Labba, lead author of the study …

Sandberg explains that the most available iron for absorption comes from meat and fish containing heme iron, which is very easily absorbed. ‘Meat and fish also contain what is called ‘the meat factor’ — muscle tissues or amino acids — which stimulate the absorption of nonheme iron in the whole meal. Thus, there are two reasons for animal protein being superior for iron absorption. Also, zinc absorption is stimulated by animal protein.’”

Executive Order Lays Foundation for Lab-Created Foods

Government leaders, however, appear wholly ignorant of the risks involved with a wholesale transition from real, whole food to processed and synthetic alternatives.

In September 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy,”²⁰ which paves the way for biotechnology to take over food production.

In late March 2023, Biden further expanded on this premise in a “Bold Goals for U.S. Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing” report.²¹ According to this plan, the food industry is to be led by biotech, and the “improvements” we can look forward to are more lab-grown meats and bioengineered plant foods. A similar plan is also detailed in the U.K.’s Genetic Technology and Precision Breeding Act of 2023.²²

Specific goals highlighted in Biden’s “Bold Goals” report²³ include reducing methane emissions from agriculture by 30% by 2030, in part by reducing methane emissions from ruminant livestock.

While Bill Gates is investing to develop methane-capturing face masks for cattle,²⁴ the easiest way to reduce emissions from livestock is to simply eliminate the animals altogether, and this, of course, means less real food.

Among the many problems with this plan is the fact that taxpayers will now be paying for government’s funding of private corporations involved in the fake food industry. The end result is highly predictable. What we’ll have is a repeat of what happened with farm subsidies.

Rather than subsidizing the most nutritious foods, government farm subsidies go almost exclusively to large monoculture farms growing genetically engineered corn, soy and other basic ingredients used in processed foods. As a result, the processed food industry has grown on our dime while public health has deteriorated.

The same thing will happen here. Instead of investing in regenerative agriculture, the government is backing a whole new industry of fake foods, from lab-grown meats to large-scale insect production. Meanwhile, safety data for plant-based meats, synthetic cultured meats and insect proteins are sorely lacking.

As just one example, a March 2023 Food Hazards Identification report²⁵ by the British Food standards Agency (FSA) and Food Standards Scotland stresses that there are “considerable gaps in knowledge” when it comes to cell-based meat production. There’s either little or no data at all on the toxicology, nutrition profiles, product stability, allergy risks, contamination risks and adverse effects of these products when consumed by humans.

Examples of Potential Hazards

Potential problem areas identified by the FSA include:^26,27

• Contaminated reagents, air or water baths
• Poorly cleaned or maintained equipment
• Failing to follow cleaning protocols when culturing cells
• Failing to follow good laboratory practices (GLP) and/or good manufacturing practices (GMP)
• Use of antibiotics, fungicides and/or chemicals that are toxic to humans in the production
• Consumption of viruses used in the manufacturing process
• Cross-contamination of one cell line into another due to concomitant use of multiple cell lines
• Other cross-contamination risks, such as “poor maintenance of equipment, poor cleaning regimes, incorrect storage of cells, working with multiple cell lines in one area, using the wrong cells and incorrect labeling”
• New diseases and/or allergic reactions to new proteins due to using cell lines of animals not common in the local diet
• Nutritional deficiencies, “as the nutrition profile could be different from what it is replacing”

As noted in the Food Hazards Identification report:²⁸

“There are many stages of development for producing cultured meat … from taking a cell line from a small vial or biopsy and increasing the culture volume stepwise in stages (proliferation), until a commercial sized bioreactor can be seeded, to differentiating the cells to final desired cell type.

Then [they are] maturing them, usually on a scaffold, to increase the protein content, and then detaching/grinding the cells with/from their scaffold to produce a final product that can be used to make meat like cells. At each stage, different chemicals, biologics, media formulations, additives and supplements are used to ensure a successful culture.”

Contamination can occur at any of these steps. Each additive also poses potential risks, both known and unknown, as various byproducts are created in the process. In the video above, I review some of the many potential dangers associated with fake meats.

Considering the multistep processing cultivated meats undergo, it’s simply not possible for it to be as safe as conventional meat, where the primary contamination risks are limited to slaughter, processing, packaging, distribution and storage. With fake meats, hazardous contamination can occur at any point during manufacturing, in addition to these conventional “weak points.”

Ultraprocessed Foods Are Anything But ‘Green’

Ultraprocessed foods are also completely counterproductive to environmentally “green” and sustainable goals. For example, ultraprocessed foods already account for 17% to 39% of total diet-related energy use, 36% to 45% of total diet-related biodiversity loss and up to one-third of total diet-related greenhouse gas emissions.²⁹

So, how is expanding the manufacturing and consumption of even more ultraprocessed foods going to lower greenhouse gas emissions? As noted in a September 2022 Journal of Cleaner Production paper:³⁰

“Ultraprocessed foods are fundamentally unsustainable products; they have been associated with poor health and social outcomes and require finite environmental resources for their production … are responsible for significant diet-related energy, [and] greenhouse gas emissions.”

And, for all the lip service paid to “equity,” increasing consumption of processed foods will worsen economic inequalities, as it redirects money away from small farmers and independent homesteaders to transnational corporations that rely on underpaid workers.

Will Beef Be Banned?

Crazy as it seems, there’s every reason to suspect that a meat ban will eventually become reality. Personally, I don’t think this will be done through laws banning the consumption of meat.

Rather, meat will simply be phased out as farmers are forced to limit herd sizes to comply with various restrictions on fertilizer use and limits on carbon emissions. Fake alternatives will then take their place, and over time, people will forget how to raise their own food. At that point, humanity will be wholly captured and enslaved.

Be Part of the Solution

Ultimately, if we want to be free, and if we want food safety and food security, we must focus our efforts on building a decentralized system that connects communities with farmers who grow real food in sustainable ways and distribute that food locally.

Strategies that can get us there were covered in the Children’s Health Defense’s March 4, 2023, Attack on Food symposium (video above). For example, Dr. John Day and Beverly Johannson shared tips on how to grow your own food and preserve the food you grow. Other helpful strategies include buying food from local farmers and farmers markets and creating independent food hubs that cut out the middlemen.

The final session of the symposium dealt with larger societal solutions to fight back against the war on food. U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie highlighted core vulnerabilities in the U.S. food supply, which fell apart during the pandemic when farmers had to euthanize animals because they couldn’t get them processed.

Four meatpackers control 85% of the meat that’s processed in the U.S. One of them is owned by China, one by Brazil and the other two are multinational corporations. Food prices are going up while farmers are going broke. In 2017, Massie introduced the Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption (PRIME) Act,³¹ but the bill hasn’t moved since its introduction in the House.

The PRIME Act would allow farmers to sell meat processed at smaller slaughtering facilities and allow states to set their own meat processing standards. Because small slaughterhouses do not have an inspector on staff — a requirement that only large facilities can easily fulfill — they’re banned from selling their meat. The PRIME Act would lift this regulation without sacrificing safety, as random USDA inspections could still occur.

“If a farmer wants to sell pork, beef or lamb to a consumer, as long as that consumer and that farmer and that processor are all in the same state, they’re not crossing state lines, they keep the federal government out of that transaction,” he said.

Massey has also introduced legislation to protect access to raw milk (HR 4835, the Interstate Milk Freedom Act of 2021³²).³³ The bill was introduced at the end of July 2021, as an amendment to the 2018 Farm bill. Contact your representatives and urge them to support these bills.

• ^{1, 7, 9, 10} Animal Frontiers April 15, 2023
• ^2, 3 The Guardian September 23, 2019
• ⁴ Science June 1, 2018; 360: 987-992
• ⁵ Science Erratum February 22, 2019
• ⁶ The Guardian May 31, 2018
• ⁸ Nutrition Insight April 17, 2023
• ¹¹ The Scotsman April 24, 2023
• ¹² Friends of the Earth, From Lab to Fork, June 2018 (PDF)
• ¹³ Cell Metabolism, 2019; doi: 0.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008
• ¹⁴ JAMA Internal Medicine February 11, 2019;179(4):490-498
• ¹⁵ BMJ February 14, 2018; 360
• ¹⁶ JAMA 2017;317(9):912-924
• ¹⁷ BMJ, 2019;365:I1451
• ¹⁸ BMJ, 2019;365:l1949
• ¹⁹ Nutrition Insight December 9, 2022
• ²⁰ White House Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology September 12, 2022
• ^21, 23 Bold Goals for US Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing March 2023
• ²² Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023
• ²⁴ Cowboy State Daily March 23, 2023
• ^25, 26 Food standards Agency Hazards Identification Report November 2022
• ²⁷ Food Safety News March 24, 2023
• ²⁸ Food standards Agency Hazards Identification Report November 2022, Page 8
• ^29, 30 Journal of Cleaner Production September 25, 2022; 368: 133155
• ³¹ HR 2657 PRIME Act
• ³² HR4835  Interstate Milk Freedom Act 2021
• ³³ Thomas Massie Press Release July 30, 2021

Article cross-posted from Dr. Mercola’s site.