Be mindful about what you put in your body. Mental stresses are compounded by stressing your digestion with stressed foods. One fuels the other. If you are taking in foods, like beef, that have had a stressful life, than you are likely to take in the energy of that stress.
In this piece I will show you how eating flesh that has been stressed, could exacerbate your stress. In another piece, I will look at plant life that experience a similar stress to animal life through being mono-/cash-cropped.
How A Nutritional Food Like Chicken Can Be Injurious
The issue of stressed-digestion is not just poor nutrition. It may be you are consuming flesh that are seemingly nutritious from a dietetics viewpoint (this again underlines some of the major holes/fallacies in the western scientific model, which may be guilty of what it often dismisses traditional medical systems like Ayurveda for - being a pseudo-science).
For example, from a dietetics perspective, chicken is high in lean protein, good for bone health, high in tryptophan to counter an overactive mind, regulates homocysteine, which is an acid that can be injurious to heart health, etc. But what if nutritious foods, like chicken, are themselves stressed? Are they still so nutritious?
Stress in the Flesh We Eat
Some of the most stressed beings on this planet are non-human animal life. Specifically factory-farmed animals: poultry, cattle, and marine life.
One of the concepts of Ayurveda that you will see like a mantra throughout my pieces is: as without, so within. For instance, in the case of a factory farmed animal, if you are taking in flesh that have a stressful life, than you will be likely to take in the energy of that stress.
The majority of meat, poultry, fish, and other flesh sold in supermarkets derive from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s). These are in essence, as the name suggests, concentration camps for animals, in which animal cruelty is an institutional practice.
Unfortunately, many small farms also employ some of the same techniques used by the mega-farms. They use hormones, and use feed for rapid growth of the animal, creating a short shelf life for the animal, and a quick turnover for the market.
The Context for the Stress
Factory farmed animals are packed to and beyond capacity in confined spaces. This is where the term factory farming derives from. The animals are in feedlots that resemble both in concept and practice, assembly lines in factories that produce phones, sunglasses, watches, etc. In fact, in the documentary Food Inc, we see several examples of this, including how baby chicks go through assembly belts, are tagged and packaged for mailing to mega-poultry feedlots.
According to Dr. Mercola, “A typical poultry CAFO measuring 490 feet by 45 feet can hold at least 30,000 chickens or more. Animal Welfare Guidelines permit a stocking density that gives each full-grown chicken an amount of space equivalent to an 8.5-inch by 11-inch piece of paper.” Many chicken take up much more space than this, as they are bred for obesity. Going by the assembly line model, chickens are raised for rapid production, to maximize profit, and minimize costs.
Whether it is factory farmed salmon, or poultry, or cattle, these animals are congested to the point that they are coerced into performing their life activities without wiggle room. Thus, they eat, defecate, sleep, where they stand. What would your state of mind, the health of your body be like if it were like this? The most analogous version of CAFO’s among humans would be the prison system.
According to a research study on stress among prisoners in several prisons throughout Texas, researchers found that the close proximity, poor conditions, lack of mobility, tight bodily regulations “seem to lead to more frequent suicides, nonviolent and violent deaths, psychiatric commitments, inmate-on-inmate assaults, disciplinary infractions, self-mutilation, illness complaints and high blood pressure”.
If prisoners are experiencing this level of stress, what about their wardens? Currently (fall 2016) there is a nationwide prison officer strike in several prisons throughout the country to protest the low pay and huge ordeals officers endure. A feedlot farmer interviewed in Food Inc, described how miserable she felt.
The Prevalence of Stress Hormones in Factory Farmed Flesh
Many research studies to determine efficacy of drugs and human physiology are based on animal testing. If rats can be studied for everything from obesity, insulin resistance, to dopamine and cortisol, then their stress response can be likened to humans as well.
In a study on stress in factory-farmed animals – “The Handling of Cattle Pre-slaughter and its Effects on Carcass and Meat Quality” – researchers found that CAFO’s foster heightened stress responses in cattle. One of the physiological components of this is circulating cortisol, the stress hormone. Although the article’s focus was on better design in these slaughter facilities, for me it raised a key question on the stress-response – what happens when we consume animals that are in a heightened physiological state of stress, anxiety, depression, rage? That is, in addition to energetics, there are chemical markers of stress that are tangibly communicated, primarily the disease state.
This is further evidenced in the notion of meats creating an acidic environment. In a study done on “The Effect of Stress on Livestock and Meat Quality Prior to and During Slaughter,” researchers look at how “Psychological stressors, such as excitement and fighting, will often have a more detrimental effect on meat quality than physical stressors, such as fasting or cold weather. “This includes the lowering of pH levels in the animal and the increase of lactic acid from being in a state of over-whelm, and thus in an anaerobic state of producing energy.” According to the article, this is what causes the meat to be darker and more acidic.
How Does Stress in Animals Get Conveyed in Humans?
There is much research that has also exposed relationships between animal cruelty and human violence. Much of this research focuses on adults who engage in violence and their exposure/participation in violence towards animals. In one piece, examining the relationship between “Childhood Cruelty Toward Animals Among Criminals and Non-criminals”, researchers found that “childhood cruelty toward animals occurred to a significantly greater degree among aggressive criminals than among nonaggressive criminals or noncriminals.”
How does this translate to stress communicated in the food we eat? Could it be that the violent offenders, who abused animals when they were young, and were exposed to animal and other human cruelty, also had a diet of stressed and abused animal meat? In one laboratory study on rats fed stressed meats, researchers found that the rats reproductive capabilities had been compromised. This included impacts on both women and men.
The research highlighted one possible link to the high rate of impotence among teenage boys with high meat diets, was due to eating stressed meats. Adolescence is already a peak period for hormonal activity. The flood of stress hormones during this period, I imagine could retard many processes. Although the primary meat the researchers focused on as having severe impacts on stress were dog-meat, they also make it clear that “stress and pain when animals are being slaughtered results in several disease processes in humans.”
Choose the Path of Less Stress
In conclusion, if you are already suffering from stress, you may want to reconsider your flesh intake, especially if the conditions the animals you are consuming from were stressful .If you are not suffering from stress, then be preventive in avoiding factory farmed meat.
コメント