Tag Archive for: meat

Purge Week

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An Insider sent me an interesting link about meat—more specifically, the red liquid that’s often at the bottom of the plastic bag when you bring home meat from the grocery store or the butcher. I’ll bet you thought it was blood because that’s what it looks like, but that would be incorrect. It’s called purge by butchers and meat scientists.

If you understand three things, purge will be easy to understand.

  • All the blood is drained immediately from animals after slaughtering; if not, it will coagulate quickly and cannot be removed.
  • Muscle in animals is about 73% water. Depending on several factors, including temperature, that water starts to drain from the meat.
  • Muscle has an iron-containing protein called myoglobin that can store oxygen; myoglobin is dark red.

When the protein degrades, myoglobin leaves with the water; it’s red and that’s why people think it’s blood. If you purchase your meat very cold, purge will be released as the temperature rises, depending on which muscle the cut of meat was from, how the meat has been handled and processed, and how long it takes you to shop and drive home. And if you like your steak “bloody,” I’m sorry to tell you that’s not blood; that’s purge.

To purge also means to eliminate. I’m going to do that to my email lists. If people haven’t opened an email in the past year, it’s time to remove them from my list. I don’t make that decision lightly, because there was a reason they subscribed in the first place. In Saturday’s email, I’ll explain why I’m going to trim my list in August.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: American Meat Science Association. www.meatscience.org.

How Methionine Affects Cancer Treatment

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If you’ve ever been diagnosed with cancer and you start searching the Internet, one of the things that you’ll come across is using a vegetarian diet to help treat the cancer. I’ve recommended it myself combined with conventional treatment. The question is why? Yes, the phytonutrients from plants are healthier, but is there something in animal products that’s detrimental?

A research group examined the impact of the amino acid methionine on a pathway of one-carbon metabolism; this pathway is the target of a variety of cancer interventions that involve chemotherapy and radiation. They demonstrated that removal of methionine from the diet of mice and humans resulted in more effective treatment in two types of cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation were more effective in both types of cancer once the diet was changed.

There are a couple of important points. First, this was tested on only two types of cancer. There’s no reason to think it would benefit every type of cancer treatment because this one-carbon pathway is not a target for every treatment. Second, because methionine is found in all meat and seafood, it would mean giving up all meat for the duration of treatment.

For myself, I’d give up meat and seafood during treatment whether we have the research or not. It wouldn’t have to be forever and combined with giving up refined carbs to reduce the risk of C diff, it could lead to a better chance for treatments to work. And that’s the key. It’s not in place of treatment; it’s combined with treatment. The goal is to put the odds in your favor. This seems like a simple way to do that.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Nature Vol 572: 397–401 (2019).