I'll Have Ham, And Hold The Mayo

Following the lead of the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future's "Meatless Mondays," the Mayo Clinic is promoting meatless diets.

The famous clinic put out a press release on the issue, suggesting that as an alternative to meat women can eat beans and legumes, tofu, tempeh, textured vegetable protein, seitan, quinoa and nuts and seeds. (We're still trying to find out what "tempeh, textured vegetable protein, seitan and quinoa" are.) This is Mayo's prescription for lowering cholesterol and blood pressure and dealing with obesity and diabetes.

We easily found one critic of the clinic's cure for diabetes. And we previously pointed out that meat is a valuable source of vitamins and minerals that are essential to healthful diets.

As for the Center for a Livable Future, it's director is Prof. Robert Lawrence, a "co-principal investigator" for the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production's report on antibiotic resistance, which essentially blames animal agriculture for the rise in antibiotic-resistant illnesses in humans.

That's contrary to top scientists at the CDC and NIH, who recently told a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that there is no definitive study linking the use of antibiotics in animals to changes in resistance in humans.