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Meet a Former Meat Eater!
By Jim Plunkett

If my parents had ever known what I know today about what I should or should not be eating, I probably would have been the most frustrated kid on the block.

There is not a boy that gets a chance to go to a baseball game or sporting event that doesn`t want to eat a big, fat, juicy hot dog or hamburger with mustard, relish, and the works. My passion for hamburgers as a youth was rather exaggerated, and I always recall those early summer days in Connecticut when I was 14. There was a strawberry farm looking for cheap labor and we kids were looking for fast income. We got paid 5 cents to pick a basket of berries and by noon we could be talking about almost $5.00.

Once we got paid, we would head immediately for Harry's Hotdog Stand, a popular kiosk on the highway leading to the New England shoreline. Harry´s brother owned a slaughter house and the public was assured of the freshest beef and the best kosher hot dogs around. We would shoot our entire strawberry income on Harry`s finest. Watching them sizzle on his hot grill would make anyone's mouth water.

Based on the latest scientific studies, today's kiddies better learn to eat raw veggies and yogurt. What we never saw creeping in and out of the meat were heterocyclic amines or HCAs which are born of reactions with animal proteins during the browning process. These little critters sabotage your cells and promote aging, heart disease, and cancer.

Cooking meats and meat products at high temperatures such as frying, broiling, and barbecuing produces big amounts of negative chemicals, where as oven roasting and baking produce few HCAs. Stewing, boiling, and poaching and even microwaving supposedly generate virtually no HCAs, although micro-waving is now under deep scrutiny by the boys in the lab. Scraping off the charcoal surface of your tenderloins will not solve the problem either, as the HCAs work deep inside and are embedded in the meat. They can stimulate free radicals that damage DNA. They cause colon, breast, pancreatic, liver, and bladder cancer in animals, and I consider myself part animal. They work rapidly inducing liver cancer in monkeys, our closest relatives.

As to those great, fully loaded hot dogs I USED to love, researchers at the University of North Carolina found that kids who ate hot dogs once a week or more had twice the risk of brain tumours compared to non-hot dog eating kids. Not only that, but youngsters eating cured meats like ham, bacon and sausage, also have an 80 percent higher risk of brain cancer. The only ones less vulnerable are those who take antioxidant vitamins that help counter free radicals and carcinogens in cured meats.

According to USC School of Medicine in L.A., hot dogs are tied to childhood leukaemia. Kids who ate more than a dozen hot dogs a month had nearly nine times the risk of leukaemia as kids who ate none. Nitrates used in curing are the likely culprit.

As to my old hamburgers made from Harry's pure, fresh beef awaiting all those overactive HCAs, they have found a good solution. It was discovered that mixing as little as 10 percent of soy protein in with the ground beef blocks the formation of cancer-causing HCAs when you cook your burgers, and also substitutes for hazardous fat. So don't complain the next time they tell you that MacDonald's and Burger King aren't using pure beef. And don`t worry…. It doesn't affect the taste.

Speaking of taste, they even suggest we first partially cook cuts of meat and hamburgers in a microwave. Before putting them on the grill, drain and eliminate their juices, rich in raw materials that produce HCA's. Talk about killing the taste! And forget about using drippings to make scrumptious gravy, since they contain high concentrations of HCAs.

The bottom line is to reduce your intake of meats and turn your nose up to the franks at the baseball games. Of course garlic, theme of my recent article and a natural miracle drug, is highly recommended by the same scientists since it prevents the formation of dreaded nitrosamines found in cured meats that kill your precious cells and accelerate aging, something we would all like to avoid.

I won't get into the anti-aging effects of consuming alcohol, and will only console you with the discovery that wine is most apt to lessen heart attacks, followed by beer, and far from hard liquor. Drink wine with meals, since chugging beer and knocking down hard liquor drinks at bars and parties is a sure way to kill your youth and yourself fast. I frankly don't know how I've survived!

Ref. Jean Carper, Stop Aging Now! (1996)

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