Having to bring in extra meat and eggs was an embarrassment for the organizers, of course, but it was just as disappointing for advocates of plant-based diets more generally, who were hoping for a stunning vindication of their own dietary choices. The first plant-based Olympics: See, you really can break world records without eating meat, eggs, or dairy!
Paris was intended to be the definitive test of a claim that’s made regularly now on behalf of plant-based diets, including in the 2018 documentary “The Game Changers,” which surprisingly was co-produced by a famous bodybuilder, a man who built his legendary physique with precisely the kind of foods we’re now being told we must abandon: superhuman quantities of steak, chicken, eggs, raw milk, and cream.
The Olympic athletes, by voting with their plates, reminded us of what we already know—or should know: A vegetarian, and especially a vegan diet, is maladaptive. Plant foods are not the foods we should be reaching for when we want to perform at the highest level. In fact, a diet built solely on plant foods will not make us healthy even in our day-to-day lives. Far from it.
This was also the unmistakable conclusion of the pioneering dentist Weston A. Price in his book “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” (1939). I’m not alone in considering this the greatest book on nutrition ever written, although you may never have heard of it. At his practice in Cleveland at the turn of the 20th century, Price began to notice a strange thing.
More and more of his patients, especially the children, were displaying signs of profound physical degeneration. Their mouths were full of cavities, but not only that: Their teeth were crowded, their jaws weren’t forming properly, and neither were their cheeks or noses. It was like their faces were collapsing, like the very structure that supports the face was being removed.
The results were disastrous visually, of course, but they also had serious effects on the patients’ health. Children with narrow cheeks and nasal passages can’t breathe properly, and many of the children whom Price saw were also suffering from behavioral problems that until that point had been almost completely unknown.
Price, being a wise man, knew that diet was to blame. This was the age when more and more Americans were moving away from what we might call their “traditional” diets, built from whole foods locally produced, to factory-made foodstuffs produced from refined wheat and with added sugar and other novel ingredients such as vegetable and seed oils: the very first processed foods.
He wanted to test his theory scientifically, though, which meant he needed a control group or groups for comparison. Would people who were not eating such diets show the same signs of physical degeneration as his patients?
Eventually, after some years, Price got the chance to find his control groups. He and his wife traveled the length and breadth of the globe, visiting small-scale societies in North America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and the South Pacific. Wherever the Prices encountered peoples who still ate the foods their ancestors ate, and, in particular, nutrient-dense animal foods such as organ meat, fatty cuts of meat, blood, shellfish, eggs, dairy, and butter and other fat products, the Prices found “physically perfect people.” Such people were beautifully well-developed, physically robust, and disease-resistant—and happy, too. By contrast, wherever the Prices found peoples who had deviated from their ancestral diets and adopted the “displacing foods of our modern civilization,” they also found the same ugly conditions that blighted the lives of the people back home in Ohio.
Above all, Price provided a warning about the cost of abandoning the patterns of life, especially diet, set down and followed by our ancestors for the longest part of our long history as modern humans.
If we want to keep eating the foods that sustained our ancestors in perfect health, we should milk the Paris athletes’ revolt for all it’s worth. The greatest physical specimens in the world refuse to eat anything but animal foods when it really counts. They, at least, still know what our ancestors took for granted.
Manufacturers of plant-based alternatives have already shifted their advertising to reflect the fact that taste and health claims about their products fall flat with consumers. So now companies rely on social pressure and shame to try to sell their products.
And yet, billions of dollars continue to pour into new startups offering “cell-cultured salmon,” “plant-based meat,” “precision fermentation,” and “alternative proteins,” and mega food players such as Tyson Foods and JBS Foods are rebranding themselves as purveyors of macronutrients, especially protein, rather than the traditional foodstuffs that they’re known for. Tyson has even trademarked the slogan “the protein company.”
Why? Because producers are banking on a time in the not-too-distant future when, for one reason or another, ordinary people simply don’t have the option of consuming meat regularly or maybe even at all. It could be inflation. It could be artificial scarcity, as more and more producers transition away from animal products and land passes out of use for traditional agriculture. It could be punitive “carbon taxes” on polluting commodities—or it could be a combination of these things and others.
We need more than symbolism. We need a political movement. That’s what I call for in my book, “The Eggs Benedict Option.” At present, no such movement exists, but we might be seeing the stirrings of one. A few months ago, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis banned lab-grown meat in the Sunshine State. Producing or selling lab-grown meat in Florida is now punishable with a fine and up to 60 days in prison.
Whatever objections that free marketeers may have about banning foodstuffs or providing incentives and protections for others, we need to realize that government power is the only effective way to protect the foods we love and need to develop fully, mentally and physically, as human beings. Nothing else can prevent the plant-based agenda from being realized and destroying our health for good.
