FOR about three million years humans ate red meat as part of their overall diet and seemed to get along very well.

The Lone Star tick. For millions of years red meat has fed human beings, yet modern “anti-meat” studies increasingly dismiss its proven nutritional value and instead focus on ways to force people to give it up – from retail nudges to extreme proposals that involve engineering ticks to spread meat allergies.

Then somewhere around the turn of the 21st century, scientific studies began warning that red meat was in fact harmful to human health and should be reduced or preferably removed from human diets altogether.

At the same time, other research pushed back, showing that red meat is in fact a nutrient-dense and healthy food that provides important amounts of protein, essential amino acids, vitamins, and minerals in balanced human diets.

Some might argue those previous three million years had already proved that quite conclusively.

But studies suggesting red meat is good for you don’t tend to get the same airplay as those warning it will send you to an early grave.

Good science usually acknowledges what came before, weighing competing findings as part of the scientific method’s self-correcting nature.

Increasingly, that’s not happening.

Many recent anti-meat studies don’t appear to be too bothered with nuance.

Instead, they open with the unchallenged assertion that “meat negatively impacts human health” and then dive straight into answering one question: what is the best way to stop people from eating it?

And judging by some of the examples that have lobbed into our inboxes in recent weeks, some of the suggested tactics sound more like social psychology experiments rather than actual nutrition research.

Among the more benign examples is one such study which examines the effectiveness of “default nudging” – a strategy which involves convincing retailers to position vegetarian or vegan options as the first and most convenient choice for consumers, with meat options requiring an extra step, in the hope consumers will just give up and take the easier selection.

Another explores how forcing people to watch animal suffering via Virtual Reality can influence their attitudes toward meat consumption.

A further study examines the use of “meat-shaming” stickers on meat labels to alter consumer purchase intentions.

But none of these efforts at coercion even come close to the lengths the authors of other so-called academic papers advocate in order to prevent people from eating meat.

In a paper titled “Beneficial Bloodsucking” published in the medical journal “Bioethics” earlier this year, two professors of medical ethics argue that ticks could be engineered to spread alpha-gal syndrome (AGS) — a natural condition that causes a debilitating red meat allergy.

They argue that eating meat is ethically wrong, and contend that actively promoting this tickborne disease to force people to give up meat is not just permissible but “morally mandatory”.

Our attention was first drawn to this issue in this recent linkedin article from EP3’s Andrew Whitelaw, who argues the idea is not only scientifically absurd but also ethically bankrupt, violating personal freedom and bodily autonomy.

The idea of using bio-engineering to stop people from eating meat was also given a platform by TED talks back in 2013, when another “bioethicist” S. Matthew Liao suggested people could not be trusted to stop eating meat on their own.

Bioethicist S. Matthew Liao: In order to fight “climate change”, we should genetically modify humans to be intolerant to meat.

“If we eat less meat, we could significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.”

“Now, some people would be willing to eat less meat, but they lack… pic.twitter.com/9uQS9XmqEx

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) October 8, 2024

“If we eat less meat, we could significantly reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions,” he says in the video.

“Now, some people would be willing to eat less meat, but they lack the willpower.

“Human engineering could help. Just as some people are naturally intolerant to milk or crayfish, like myself, we could artificially induce mild intolerance to meat by stimulating our immune system against common bovine proteins. And in this way, we can create an aversion to eating eco-unfriendly food.”

Andrew Whitelaw hit the nail on the head with this description: “This proposed scheme isn’t persuasion. It’s coercion. It says: “If you won’t change willingly, we’ll take your freedom away with a bite.” That’s not bioethics, and it’s certainly not ethical. It’s body politics. No one should be forcibly altered to fit someone else’s moral agenda.”

Bioethicists now brand the consumption of something that has sustained human kind for more than three million years, and which evidence shows continues to play a vitally important role in maintaining human nutrition across the globe, as a crime.

When “bioethics” becomes a vehicle for enforcing ideology, it ceases to be ethical itself.