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I wish I were more sensitive about animals, but I spent countless weekends and summers of my childhood at my family’s farm in southern Illinois. If my Grandpa were alive today, he’d be well over 100, but I do remember him telling me this when I was 4, “We raise these animals to eat them Lori. That’s why God put them on this earth. That’s their job.” Amen, another Midwestern carnivore was born.

So you won’t be getting a cruelty-to-animals argument from me. I do wish mass food producing farmers would give these animals better living conditions because it would solve my meat-eating conundrum. Nope…I won’t give you the antibiotic/steroid argument either. I don’t want to eat a sick cow. Of course, if they’d stop giving them steroids, they’d require fewer antibiotics. But again, that’s not the root of my problem.

I won’t eat caged animals because they are stressed out. “What?”, you reasonably ask me. You won’t eat mentally unfit animals? How dedicated to mental health advocacy can you be? Nope…my argument isn’t ethical, it’s pathophysiological.

When we (or animals) are stressed, we trigger a cycle in our bodies known as the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis (HPA for short). This axis is the overlap between your endocrine and nervous systems (known as the neuroendocrine system), and perhaps a wonderful conduit to understanding how the brain is connected to the body. Many people think of mental illness as discretely confined to the brain, almost ethereal in its existence. In actuality, mental illness is an interplay of genes and neurotransmitters and hormones (and lots of other interesting “parts”) which can be measured, if only at a rudimentary level (Come on science! Advance I say!). There is an actual physical misstep occurring in mental illness, and someday, medicine and science will be able to quantify it with things people can understand: lab draws, xrays, MRIs…and other tests that can be neatly billed with insurance codes.

When we experience stress, this Axis does all sorts of wild and wacky things, one of the most important being, modulating cortisol in the body. Cortisol is known as “the stress hormone”. It increases blood pressure, blood sugar, and lowers immune response. Patients with severe mental illness have frightening cortisol levels, partially due to the stress they experience from the illness itself (debilitating anxiety is a comorbidity to many mental illness syndromes), and partially due to a dysregulation of the HPA Axis. Think of it this way: if the chemicals in your brain are out of whack, they are probably out of whack elsewhere in your body. Which is why depressed patients complain of pain all over their bodies, not just in their heads.

But back to cortisol. Have you ever noticed that schizophrenics have pear-shaped bodies? Schizophrenia, being the worst of all mental illnesses, causes extreme stress that lasts for a lifetime. The lifetime risk of a schizophrenic patient becoming diabetic is 2-4x greater than that of the average population. Why is that, you ask? A lifetime of elevated cortisol levels means a lifetime of increased blood sugars. And so there you go. This interplay also causes schizophrenics to put on weight “in the middle”. Therefore, the severely mentally ill are more likely to be diabetics with pear-shaped bodies. Studying schizophrenics has given researchers key insights to the physical changes that occur in people exposed to decades of chronic stress.

Cortisol also rises and falls based on your circadian rhythm….so if you are chronically under rested, you will NOT easily lose weight. Humans must get 7 or more hours of sleep at night to stay at healthy weights (without intervention like dieting or exercise). Late night “munchies” are not passing urges: they are real events occurring in your body.  People who suffer from mental illness can also experience sleep problems…because again…our whole body is connected. Screw up your sleep cycle and NOTHING works right.

And here is where Lori math starts: so just how stressed out are those caged chickens? How much cortisol are they secreting and is it meaningful to me as a food source? I don’t know. Nobody knows. We are so busy measuring the hormones and steroids in livestock that I’m not sure anyone has thought about anything as complex as the HPA Axis. But I barely want my own cortisol, let alone some stressed out chicken’s. Is that cortisol passed into their eggs? I don’t know. But what if it is? That could be one concentrated source of cortisol. A “bad egg” if you will.

Basically, in summary, I don’t want to eat unhealthy animals. They just can’t be good food. I don’t care how “tiny” the levels of testosterone, steroids, cortisol, etc, etc. I cannot disconnect myself from the simple idea that eating a sick (physically or mentally) will make me sick. You are what you eat…literally.

I might be wrong, but no harm done if I am. Not to freak you out or convert you (because I am not evangelical in my eating habits), but cows have an HPA Axis too. I don’t want to eat stressed out cows and drink their stressed out milk anymore than I want to eat those sick chickens.

I’ll finish by saying I’m not entirely sure you can stress out a pig. You can freak out a pig, but chronically stress a pig? I’m not convinced. And fish (except for those poor lobsters at the grocery store) are free range by pure evolutionary luck. I eat a lot of sausage and fish these days (other than the free range chickens and cows). I’m back down to my wedding day weight and holding. It might have zero to do with my diet and everything to do with the Hawaiian dance parties Sara keeps holding in the living room. But hey, these days, if you don’t have a food fetish of some kind, you’re just not keeping up.

So to my friends on the anti-juice lobby, the anti-refined sugar lobby, the anti-cartoon lobby, the anti-donut lobby (I think they also worship the devil…because donuts are downright Godly), the anti-hot dog and nitrate-laden lunchmeat lobby, organic-only lobby, Vitamin C as a food group lobby (that one is for you Dad)….HEY BIG WORLD! LORI DOES NOT EAT STRESSED OUT CHICKENS! IS THAT DORKY ENOUGH FOR YOU? DO I GET TO KEEP MY MEMBERSHIP IN THE GEEK CLUB? I think I can, I think I can, I think I can….