＜WASHINGTON＞ Restoring
"consumer confidence"
in the safety of eating body parts of cattle is the pitched goal of the British government now that its population of flesh-eaters has been frightened off by the "mad-cow" disease.
The effort is shared by the keepers of the beef culture in the United States.
Meat-industry officials have been as aggressive as the bulls of Pamplona in telling America's steak and hamburger lovers to keep chomping away: The carcasses are safe, healthy and every bit as real food for real people as the actor James Garner said in TV commercials they were, before he had a real fine heart-bypass operation.
Without doubt, the panic about "mad-cow" disease, which causes small holes in the brains of cattle, is an over-reaction.
In the absence of hard medical proof that the eating of cattle diseased with bovine spongiform encephalopathy causes a similar nerve disorder in humans, all that has been presented are announcements that a suspected link might exist.
This tenuousness has created a scare far out of proportion to the available scientific evidence.
It contrasts starkly with the mountain of credible information on the health-care costs of meat itself. Heart disease, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, obesity and food-borne illnesses are among the medical blights directly associated with flesh-eating.
The American Heart Association puts the cost of heart disease in 1996 at US$66.4 billion (S$93.7 billion), which includes spending for hospital and home-nursing care, drugs, physicians and lost output.
More than 13 million Americans suffer coronary heart disease. More than 500,000 Americans die annually from heart attacks.
If the "mad-cow" disease can cause an international panic and political heartburn in the British parliament because a dozen or so Britons may have contracted a rare nerve disorder from tainted beef, it should follow that the heavens themselves would be shaken by humanity's outcry over the proven deadliness of meat that is available everywhere.
Why isn't this happening? Dr. John A. McDougall, a California doctor and writer, has a theory. "We've come to accept cardiovascular disease as a natural consequence of living," writes this author of McDougall's Heart Medicine: Never Have a Heart Attack Again.
'The failure of the American medical profession to encourage people to adopt the traditional human diet — the low-fat vegetarian diet — as the primary therapy for heart disease contributes to the 1.25 million preventable heart attacks.'
- Dr. John A. McDougall, a California doctor and writer.
Dr. McDougall is a voice of medical sanity sounding amid the self-serving cacophony heard from the sellers and advertisers of animal foods.
"When I recommend a mostly vegetarian diet," he writes, "I am not asking people to do something bizarre, or out of the ordinary. All I'm asking is that we go back to doing what people have been doing for a million years or so.
"From the standpoint of long human experience, the American diet is the anomaly. It is the first time large numbers of humans have consumed so much animal foods, fat, refined foods and artificial ingredients.
'The failure of the American medical profession to encourage people to adopt the traditional human diet — the low-fat vegetarian diet — as the primary therapy for heart disease contributes to the 1.25 million preventable heart attacks.'
annually, he says.
Not all doctors have been herded into conformity by the economic and propagandistic might of the meat and cattle industry.
The Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine, a Washington non-profit group, has created a newspaper advertisement with a drawing of a man and a cow arm in arm and with holes in their heads.
"The way some people eat meat," the copy read, "we wonder if cows aren't the only ones with holes in their heads.
"The committee sought to place the advertisement, at a cost of US$1,000, in The Des Moines Register. The newspaper's publisher said no, arguing that "the ad did not meet The Register's standards for accuracy and fairness".
In cow country, apparently, no beefing about beef is to be tolerated.
Industry advertisements can run ad nauseam touting nauseating meat, but a well-established fact or two that might offend cattle barons? Never.
On March 30, the Register ran a news article about the publisher's rejection. It labelled the physicians' committee an "anti-meat group".
That was wrong-headed, too. The doctors are not anti-meat, they are pro-health.
Beef: If mad-cow disease doesn't get you, a heart attack will