The United States isn't the only country with health problems. In a report explaining why 1 billion people on the planet are overweight and prone to disease, the World Health Organization blames reduced physical activity and “foods with high levels of sugar and saturated fats.”3 The equation is simple: lack of exercise plus poor diet equals health problems.
But for Americans, our food choices are far from simple because of the producer-driven forces of meatonomics. As much as consumers would like to stay informed and eat what's right, we often don't get the proper incentives or information. This chapter explores the relationship between animal foods' low prices, Americans' heavy consumption of those foods, and the resulting diseases and financial costs. The idea that money is at the root of the problems in meatonomics is one of the central themes of this book. Yet, the real kicker is that financial drivers, perhaps as much as—or more than—lifestyle or dietary preference, are a key reason why Americans consume so much meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. As the Pew Commission noted in a 2008 report on factory farming, “Animal-derived food products are now inexpensive relative to disposable income, a major reason that Americans eat more of them on a per capita basis than anywhere else in the world.”4
The artificially low prices of animal foods encourage Americans to consume these items at levels much higher than normal market forces would dictate. Government-led marketing programs add fuel to this fire of consumption. As a result, Americans eat an average of 0.6 pounds of meat each day, or about four USDA-measured servings. While this might sound like a healthy daily ration, it's actually more than a typical adult needs—by even the most liberal measure—and more than many can safely process.
In large part because of our high meat consumption, Americans regularly exceed USDA guidelines for intake of both protein and fat. Adult males under fifty, for example, eat twice the recommended daily protein allowance and close to twice the recommended maximum of saturated fat.5 (And that's ignoring the fact that, as we'll see, the USDA's recommended levels are artificially high and represent poor targets for healthy consumption.) People don't need to consume meat at these levels. But market forces motivate us to do so, and rational consumers simply follow market cues. Unfortunately, those cues are making America ill.
Meat and Disease
Consider the case of the former evangelist of ultra-high meat consumption, Dr. Robert Atkins. In 2002, the Atkins Diet's founder and chief proponent had a heart attack. Rather than let the ailing physician recover in peace, critics seized the opportunity to speak out against the low-carb, high-fat diet he had followed for years. Atkins denied his diet was to blame, instead citing a chronic infection. But when bad luck visited the doctor again the following year and he died after a serious fall, the coroner's report noted that he had a history of heart attacks, congestive heart failure, and high blood pressure—all associated with eating too much saturated fat.6 He was six feet tall and weighed 258 pounds at death, yielding a body mass index of 35 and placing him in the severely obese category. The Atkins Diet may not have single-handedly killed its founder and chief proponent, but it seems to have caused a number of life-threatening health problems likely to have killed him eventually.
This book is not meant to dispense nutritional advice. However, because I argue meatonomics is making Americans ill in record numbers, a few nutritional highlights (or lowlights) are necessary to show why that's the case. For starters, most of the research in meat consumption in the past several decades shows that the more of it people eat, the more likely they are to develop disease. This research is presented in hundreds of studies published in peer-reviewed journals like The New England Journal of Medicine and the American Journal of Epidemiology. (Google is a great tool—if you want to read any of the articles cited in this book's endnotes, they're easy to find.) Of course, you won't find this research discussed in the marketing communiqués issued by meat and dairy producers, and if you haven't heard it before, that may be why.
The point isn't that it's a miracle you're still alive if you've eaten meat for years. Rather, the depth and breadth of studies leave it beyond dispute that the levels at which Americans consume meat and dairy increase our incidence of disease. And this higher incidence of disease, in turn, generates economic costs that affect us all.
Take heart disease, the number-one killer of Americans, dispatching more people each year than AIDS, cancer, and car accidents combined. A stack of published studies taller than a quadruple cheeseburger with all the fixings establishes a direct, causal link between eating meat and developing heart disease.7 Much of the research finds that red and processed meats carry the biggest risk of heart disease, making these the most dangerous animal foods. But a 2008 study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition found those who eat poultry just twelve times a month are more than three times as likely to develop heart disease as those who rarely eat it.8 A typical American eats 69 pounds of poultry per year, or about thirty servings per month.9 Thus, this study shows that at less than half the amount the typical American eats each month, consumption of chicken and turkey can cause heart disease.
For those who've read that turkey burgers and boneless chicken breasts are healthier than steak and hamburger, this news may come as a shock. It turns out that healthier is a relative concept. Clinical studies comparing one animal food to another do show some are better than others, but that's like saying it's healthier to smoke filtered cigarettes instead of unfiltered. In fact, when studies compare the health effects of plant foods to animal foods, including fish, animal foods always lose.10
Consider dietary cholesterol, which elevates blood (or serum) cholesterol and causes heart disease.11 Plants contain no cholesterol, but as shown in table 6.1, fish, poultry, and red meat contain a little dose in every forkful. In fact, bite for bite, according to the USDA, salmon and chicken contain about the same amount of dietary cholesterol as ground beef. Is it any surprise that cardiologists increasingly advise those with advanced heart disease to avoid all animal foods?
TABLE 6.1 Cholesterol Content of Select Animal Foods (mg of cholesterol per g of food)12
Another disease closely linked to animal food consumption is type 2 diabetes, the scourge of some 34 million Americans. A 2011 study by researchers from Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, and other leading institutions looked at the eating habits of more than two hundred thousand people. The study, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, concluded that consumption of just one daily serving of red or processed meat was associated with up to a 35 percent higher risk of type 2 diabetes.13 Thus, if eaten as a steak, hamburger, hot dog, or bacon, a single serving of meat each day—well below the multiple servings Americans actually eat—significantly increases one's risk of becoming diabetic. As Americans eat about 50 percent more red meat than white, such research may help explain the nation's surging incidence of type 2 diabetes.
Or take cancer. Regularly eating the amount of meat in three Chicken McNuggets, about one-tenth of the typical American's daily meat intake, is enough to materially increase one's risk of developing cancer.14 Copious research finds that meat-eaters are particularly prone to cancers of the prostate, breast, and colon.15 Again, the studies link cancer more to red and processed meat than to white meat, and again, our nation's prodigious consumption of red meat may help explain our nation's high cancer rates.
It's not just a few outliers tapping on typewriters in the middle of a forest who have established these links between meat and disease. Four centuries ago, clergyman Thomas Fuller noted with surprising acuity: “Much meat, much malady.” Since then, his view has found support in hundreds of clinical studies from around the globe. If a single daily serving of meat can increase one's risk of developing cancer, diabetes, or heart disease, the four servings each American actually does eat are just asking for trouble.
Incidentally, the list of diseases clinically linked to meat consumption goes well beyond just the big three of cancer, diabetes, and heart
disease. Alzheimer's.16 Parkinson's.17 Crohn's.18 Arthritis.19 Gout.20 Cataracts.21 Don't take my word for this. Pick any article cited in the endnotes, type the title into a browser search field, and digest the news for yourself.
But what about the important nutrients people seek from meat, like protein and iron? And what about dairy's nutrients, like calcium? How about the omega-3 fatty acids people get from fish? Or the benefits of eggs? While this chapter's purpose isn't to address the nutritional pros and cons of these animal foods, an analysis can be found in Appendix A (spoiler alert: these foods aren't as necessary as you might assume).
How We Stack Up
To put Americans' half-pound of daily meat in perspective, consider how we compare to others. Per person, Americans eat nearly three times as much meat as any other culture or country on the planet.22 We also have nearly triple the cancer rate and double the rates of obesity and diabetes as the rest of the world.23 Of course, anyone can throw around statistics, and sometimes numbers can mislead. One might argue that because of Americans' comparative longevity, we're simply more likely than those in other countries to live long enough to develop diseases associated with old age. Still, for the nation with the world's highest gross domestic product and the sixth highest per capita income (based on purchasing power parity), factors typically associated with longer life spans, our life expectancy is surprisingly unimpressive. In worldwide longevity rankings, we're about fiftieth.24 Most of the countries that beat us in longevity (including every nation in Europe) also have lower disease rates, meaning our high rates of diseases of indulgence stem from factors other than old age.
Another comparison offers even more clarity: how vegetarians stack up against meat-eaters. When researchers compare vegetarians to omnivores, they routinely find significant differences in health and longevity between the two groups. You don't need a mystic who can see the future for this science-based prediction—compared to a vegetarian, the typical meat-eater will die as much as ten years earlier and have twice the risk of diabetes and half again the risk of heart disease and colorectal cancer.25 Omnivorous men have two and a half times the risk of prostate cancer as those who abstain from meat, and omnivorous women have twice the risk of breast cancer.26 And of course, because these diseases can kill, omnivores' overall risk of death is two to three times higher than vegetarians'.27
But what about people who have eaten a half pound of meat every day for years without any health problems? Don't years of disease-free consumption mean something? Not really. Diseases of indulgence don't develop overnight the way infectious diseases do. The incidence of meat-triggered diseases increases with age, and many simply haven't reached the age when these illnesses develop and start to show symptoms.
Of course, these diseases have various contributing causes, including genetics and nondietary environmental issues like exposure to toxins. But in the case of the big three—cancer, diabetes, and heart disease—diet seems to be behind one-third or more cases.28 It's certainly possible to eat a half pound of meat every day and never develop disease. It's also possible to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day and never get emphysema or lung cancer. But in both cases, just like trying to beat a casino at its own game, the odds are against it in the long run.
Obeying the Law of Demand
When the price of a product falls, we generally buy more of it. When the price rises, we buy less. That's the law of demand in a nutshell. Just how closely our behavior tracks a good's price depends on many factors, including our disposable income, how badly we want it, whether substitutes are available, and so on. Take cigarettes. One study found that a 10 percent increase in cigarette prices lowered the number of high school students smoking by 3.5 percent.29 As simple as the law of demand is, it has profound implications for meat and dairy consumption. That's because industrial production methods and other producer-spurred phenomena of meatonomics keep prices artificially low, and low prices mean more people in line at the butcher counter.
Recall that the inflation-adjusted retail prices of animal foods have declined over the past century. Since 1935, ham is cheaper by 48 percent and steak by 20 percent.30 As the law of demand predicts, the steady drop in prices causes an upswing in consumption. Since 1935, US per capita meat consumption (for all meat types) rose by an astonishing 95 percent. In the chicken category, while prices fell to one-quarter of their original level, per capita consumption jumped sixfold. Chart 6.1 shows the dramatic relationship between US chicken prices and consumption during this period. (Note that because this consumption increase is measured on a per-person basis, it is unrelated to growth in the US population.)
CHART 6.1 US Chicken Prices and Per Capita Consumption, 1935–2011
Of course, it's not fair to give all the credit for our high meat consumption to low prices. After all, people eat meat for reasons other than price—they might like the taste, or they might think it's good for them. Americans' disposable incomes have risen in the past century, which has helped spur consumption. And as we've seen, consumers are constantly hit with aggressive government messaging that urges us to eat more meat and dairy. However, while these non-price factors are important drivers of demand, price is also important. How important? Luckily, economists have a way to determine just how significant price is among the various factors that affect demand. It's relatively easy to measure the effect of price changes on quantity demanded in a manner that takes into account the effect of other factors.
The technical term is price elasticity of demand, and it describes how closely demand for a good follows its price. If a 1 percent change in price causes a 1 percent difference in quantity demanded, demand is said to be elastic (or technically, unit elastic). If a 1 percent price change causes less than a 1 percent demand change, as in the cigarette example above, demand is relatively inelastic. In other words, the more elastic the demand for a good, the more a price increase will cause quantity demanded of the good to drop.
A number of factors influence a particular good's price elasticity, including the availability of substitutes and the good's necessity (real or perceived). For example, because insulin is necessary for those with diabetes and there are no substitutes, demand for insulin might well be perfectly inelastic—that is, consumers might buy the same quantity regardless of price changes. The availability of substitutes is often a big factor in a good's price elasticity. As a general category, soft drinks have demand elasticity of about 0.8, which is relatively inelastic and means people want soda enough that price increases have less than a one-to-one effect in lowering sales.31 However, because of widespread substitutes within the soft drink category, the Coca-Cola brand has price elasticity of 3.8.32 This means that if Coke prices were to go up by 10 percent, consumers would switch to other brands or flavors and cause Coke sales to go down by a whopping 38 percent. Demand for Coke, then, is highly elastic—and brand loyalty of its drinkers, in the face of price hikes, is flatter than a week-old can of the stuff.
A hefty pile of studies (419 at last count) measures the price elasticity of demand for animal foods—that is, the relationship between prices and consumption. In 2010, a meta-study determined that a 1 percent change in the price of beef causes American consumption to change by about 0.75 percent.33 In other words, notwithstanding all the other reasons why people buy beef—including marketing, taste, and nutritional beliefs—a 10 percent price change will shift consumption by about 7.5 percent. The study found that dairy has demand elasticity of 0.65, meaning that a 10 percent price change in dairy products causes consumption to change by about 6.5 percent.34 Other animal foods are less elastic. A 10 percent rise in the price of eggs, for example, causes only a 2.7 percent drop in consumption. One reason why demand for eggs is less elastic than that for dairy is probably the perceived lack of egg substitutes—you might drink soy milk instead of cow's milk, but you're less likely to make a fried egg out of egg replacer.35 (Although the idea that substitutes are lacking is really a problem of perception; tofu, for example, makes a mean breakf
ast scramble.)
The weighted-average elasticity rate for all animal foods is about 0.65, based on the aggregate wholesale, or production, values of beef, pork, poultry, fish, eggs, and dairy consumed in the United States yearly.36 That is, on average, a 10 percent change in the retail price of an animal food causes a 6.5 percent consumption change. While this relatively inelastic figure means that price changes in animal foods have less than a one-to-one effect on quantity demanded, price is nevertheless still quite important as a driver of demand. As animal science professor Marta Rivera-Ferre notes, “consumer demand [for animal foods] is not linked with the actual biological needs of the human organism but with prices.”37 With this elasticity figure in hand, we can make some curious observations about the effect of meatonomics on Americans' consumption of animal foods.
Retail Prices and Consumption Levels of Animal Foods
Economists are often interested in whether economic phenomena (such as a rise in consumption) are more supply driven (pushed by producer behavior) or demand driven (spurred by consumer income and preferences). In the case of animal food production, retail prices are low in large part because producers have gotten good at minimizing production costs through practices like hyper-confining animals and producing meat and dairy in high volumes to achieve economies of scale.38 The elasticity data above suggest that retail prices are a large factor (although not the only factor) in Americans' decisions to buy animal foods. Since producers' cost-cutting behavior is a major driver in rock-bottom prices, it is also a major driver of consumer consumption. As professor Rivera-Ferre writes:
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