World Health Org. Adviser: Eat Meat Only Once Per Week to Fight Obesity, Global Warming

If Tim Lang, a professor of food policy at City University in London and adviser to the World Health Organization, had his way, we would only eat meat once a week. Eating meat only on special occasions, like feast days, he suggests could help reduce obesity and curb global warming.

The Telegraph reports Lang as advocating that people adopt meat-eating practices like those in medieval times:

"Let's go back to where culture has been for thousands of years, which is meat is an exception," Prof Lang said. "If you were growing meat yourself, it is an incredibly slow process and killing and eating an animal is a special day.

"At Christmas if we were well off we had beef. It was a big deal. We killed an animal as an exception, for a feast."

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Sir Paul McCartney has advocated Meat-Free Mondays but Prof Lang said: "I am saying instead of having one day where you do not eat meat, eat meat once a week and have really good, grass-fed meat."

On the other end of the spectrum, the Daily Mail reports that a recent study of one area in the United Kingdom has found eating disorders in children as young as three.

In a report published by the East Lancashire Child and Adolescent Service (ELCAS), researchers found that in the East Lancashire area alone more than 125 children under 18 had received some sort of treatment for eating disorders since 2007. According to the Daily Mail, 109 of these cases were children between the ages of 12 and 16 but two 6-year-olds, four 7-year-olds and one 3-year-old were observed with eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia.