The Alzhamburglar

As Alzheimer's awareness month comes to a close, I wanted to comment on a book I recently read, titled "Dying for a Hamburger - Modern Meat Processing and the Epidemic of Alzheimer's Disease"


Looking back through history, reviewing scientific literature, and examining the practices of various cultures around the world, the authors make a complelling case that the processed meat industry is directly linked to the growing epidemic of Alzheimer's disease.

It's generally accepted that as people get older, they naturally become foolish and forgetful, having "senior moments" and things like that. Senility is assumed to be a natural development - but until about a century ago this was not the case. All of the great documentors and physicians of the past infrequently reported cases of dementia in the elderly. Yet today we are literally seeing an epidemic of the disease, and the majority of people over the age of 85 develop some form of dementia. And this disease is unlike any other - it robs people of who they are and who they were, not to mention the emotional impact on their friends and families.

Looking to the past, it appears that Alzheimer's disease only became prevalent as modern meat processing facilities developed. And the fact that all parts of the animals we slaughter are put to use - be it for human consumption, animal feed, or a plethora of other uses - it's hard to find many products that don't contain processed animals. (It's in your make-up ladies.)

A correlation is also found between countries that use these mass produced meat products (mainly Western cultures) and those that don't (i.e. India). Basically if you don't eat alot of meat as a society, you don't get many cases of Alzheimer's.

On the scientific front, a new theory has developed in the past few decades that aberrant proteins called prions can interact with normal proteins and convert them to prions as well, in animals and humans alike. This causes a cascading effect that leads to more and more prion production, which eventually leads to the destruction of cells. And it seems that the most susceptible cells are those in the central nervous system, which explains the shrunken and "Swiss cheese-like" brains that are found in Alzheimer's victims.

Coming from a scientific background, it's fairly easy for me to understand the fundamentals of the theory, but to lay it out simply, prions are tiny compared to viruses, which are generally accepted as the smallest infective agent known to the Earth. And viruses are thousands of times smaller than bacteria, which are the smallest organisms we can see through a basic microscope. Viruses can be readily sterilized using known methods, but prions are a new threat that can survive these precautions taken by doctors and scientists. Such evidence for this includes the fact that scalpels used to dissect the brains of Alzheimer's patients have been sterilized and reused on live patients, but still confer Alzheimer's to the living patient.

Scary shit eh?

A parallel is also drawn that shows how similar Alzheimer's disease is to Mad Cow disease and variant CJD - diseases that hit Britain especially hard, and was traced to the practice of feeding dead animals to live ones, in effect creating cannibals out of grass eating ruminants. And the goal here is to increase yields for farmers and make more money - make a cow eat a cow, and they become bigger and fatter. Always with the money...

Speaking of cannibals, the book also examines cannibalistic cultures and discovers dementias are directly related to eating your own friends! So don't eat your buddies, especially their brains.

The end result of the British follies was to prevent cows from eating other cows, and laws were passed to ensure this rule would stand (though mistakes are often made, and sometimes rules are ignored). But here's the brilliant part - you can still feed these extra cow parts to chickens and pigs to make them bigger and fatter. And then you can slaughter the chickens and pigs, and feed their remains to cows! So the prions flow everywhere, and the holier-than-thou race of humans can pat itself on the back. Well played sir...

One point that I found particularly unsettling was the argument against eating ground meats. Imagine 1 in 100,000 cows has prion disease - if you only buy steaks, your chance of getting those prions into your system is 1 in 100,000 right? But if 1000 cows are ground up in a large vat and hamburgers are pumped out, your chance of getting that prion just skyrocketed to 1 in 100. I'm not a big fan of those odds, especially considering how many hamburgers the average Joe is going to plow back in a lifetime.

So I've basically summed up some of the arguments, albeit not so eloquently as the book does, but it's certainly made me reconsider my food choices. And it also makes me want to visit an abattoir and become a vegetarian, but that's not likely. Though I will stick to the solid cuts of meat more often than I used to.

My main criticism of this book is the lack of alternative theories offered for the Alzheimer's epidemic. Many, many things have changed in the past century or so. Countless factors could be involved in this phenomena, but not much is offered beyond the apparent culprit of the meat industry.

Regardless, I highly recommend this book.
Read it, and I guarantee you'll grow a serious case of paranoia about your future in the old age home. Not to mention the paranoia we're bound to feel about our parents who are all getting to that age when the baby boom hits the age of senility, right?