Meat Free Mondays

The dreadful Australian bushfires have recently demonstrated how dangerous Green policies can be. Hopefully, this will result in a review of some of their most dangerous policies, but in the meantime, their zeal and stupidity still raises its head in many places. In the last week, it has been announced that hospitals in this country are planning to introduce ‘meat free Mondays’, as all patients will be fed vegetarian or possibly even vegan meals every Monday.

Making sick people eat a vegan diet? What could possibly go wrong?

Patients’ health will suffer if hospitals cut down on meat and dairy in meals, the country’s former chief education health and nutrition adviser warns.

However, another researcher has backed the push for plants to replace meat and dairy in meals, saying our meat consumption seriously harms health and the planet.

The guidelines have been criticised by Grant Schofield, professor of public health at Auckland University of Technology.

“Hospital food is generally of a pretty poor quality anyway, it is generally pretty highly processed. If you wanted to improve hospital meals you would look at the quality of the food, and meat would be my last possible target, because it is one of the best sources of nutrition, protein, good quality fat and vitamins and minerals. To take that out of it seems objectionable.”

Most of the dietary advice available these days to promote good health tells us to limit carbohydrates, particularly sugar. While I have no problem with vegetarian options being available in a hospital, deliberately reducing patients’ allocation of healthy protein seems contra to the idea that being in hospital is supposed to help patients get well.

Schofield, who advocates a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet and quit his Government advisory role over a lack of action on obesity, said cutting meat and dairy in hospital meals to counter climate change was “nonsense”.

“I think we have unfairly demonised meat and got it into our heads that it is somehow ruining the planet.”

So the Greens slavishly insist, but the evidence that a meat-free and dairy-free diet is not a healthy way to live is well and truly out there. Many vegans and vegetarians are not particularly healthy. You have to be a really good cook and nutritionist to get all of your daily vitamins and minerals from a vegetarian, and particularly a vegan diet. Some people do it well; many do not.

I have a vegan friend who is not a particularly good cook. She lives on chips and 2-minute noodles. It is good to stand by your principles, but not if it risks damaging your health. Still, at least this is her choice. Hospital patients don’t have that luxury.

Associate Health Minister and Green Party MP Julie Anne Genter championed the guidelines.  DHBs are expected to make appropriate and responsible decisions about food menus that consider both the nutritional requirements of patients, staff and visitors, as well as the environmental impact of those choices,” Genter said in a statement.

The Greens in Australia prefer people and animals to be burnt to death rather than to deliberately cut down a single tree. Greens in New Zealand don’t care if sick people are undernourished, so long as they consider the environmental impact of what they eat. What absolute garbage.

After the guidelines were released Dietitians NZ, the professional body for dietetics, labelled the meat and dairy recommendation disappointing and not appropriate for those in hospital, who are often malnourished.

Some of them are probably vegans…

That position drew a response from Professor John Potter of the Centre for Public Health Research at Massey University, who wrote in a blog post that even if some patients needed more protein, this could be sourced from plants. Hospitals should go further and initiative meat-free Mondays and stop serving all processed meats .

NZ Herald

What he neglects to mention is how very little protein can be obtained from plants. Not all protein is equal. It would take a couple of kilos of mung beans and 7 kilos of kale to get the protein a patient could obtain from one small steak. Also, protein from meat is much more satisfying than kale, so the only way a patient can end up without hunger pangs is for them to eat lots of carbohydrates – bread, pasta, potatoes or the like. Yep. Very healthy.

I did wonder if this might be a bit like the plastic bag issue, where supermarkets all jumped on the virtue-signalling gravy train, while dramatically improving their bottom lines. But to get the same nutritional value from plants as from meat would be an expensive exercise, and I doubt if it will happen. I am guessing that it will be baked beans on toast for dinner every Monday, take it or leave it.

Of course, all the virtue signalling in the world will not get around human behaviour. How much do you want to bet that there is a surge of family members visiting their relatives in hospital on Mondays, and bringing them KFC. Yep, that will really help their recovery. And the planet.

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