What is different about humans that makes fatty meats perceived unhealthy when other animals in the animal kingdom thrive on eating meat?
I’d say it’s the type of fat. For example a bear eating a dear is not the same thing as a bear eating a Big Mac. I’d also say how the food is processed, the American diet has a bit of processed fats.
Very different metabolisms and digestive systems—look at how much of the day they spend asleep, and how little cognitive processing they do compared to humans. Eating raw rather than cooked meat. Eating a significant amount of organ meat & connective tissue. Eating zero preservatives and added salt and sugar. Working extremely hard to access limited amounts of food, rather than being able to get to unlimited calories by hopping on their ubereats.
And a note on thriving; animals don’t live terribly long compared to us. Big cats rarely get past 20 in the wild, while bears might live 20-30 years and wolves, like dogs, are living into their late teens at most. Many of the dietary-related issues that arise for us are vastly more likely to come about much later in life (heart disease, bowel cancer, etc).
Fatty meats are not unhealthy as long as the animal is grass-fed with no hormones injected in it. Also if the individual is active and health conscious, fatty meats shouldn’t be an issue. The real problem is in the man-made additions during raising the cattle or during cooking the meat itself.
Don’t blame the burger for what the bun, potatoes fried in seed oils and extra large coke did. Other animals also aren’t promoting sugary foods and seed oils to their others in order to turn a massive profit.
Meat is not bad for you, and neither is fatty meat.
Sure, there are studies that attempt to show this, and there are plenty of agendas and reasons why this is constantly attempted… And then you also get various biased committees that come to questionable conclusions with some epidemiological non significant correlations and try to pass that off as legit, knowing that the public will not know better but to trust them… But to my knowledge, not a single interventional study has ever shown a clear harm from eating unprocessed meat in its natural state, not also wrapped in processed carbs or fried in seed oils - in an otherwise healthy group of subjects, in the context of an otherwise balanced whole foods diet.
So to answer your question - There is no difference, as long as you eat it without other overly processed things and in the context of a food matrix and a generally healthy diet of whole foods.
Anybody that downvotes this comment while ignoring the truth I wrote in bold, is not a bad person, but is probably either lying to themselves, unfamiliar with the literature, or perhaps doesn’t understand the difference between interventional and observational studies, and what a statistically significant correlation means.
Actually over the past few years eating fatty meats have shown to not be harmful for humans as long as there is no history of high cholesterol or other dietary based health concerns. The foods that are connected to cholesterol and heart disease include plant oils (vegetable oil, canola, etc) and sugar. But chicken thighs, marbled steaks, etc are actually good for most people!
As stated before in these comments, it’s the type of fat. If you had a nice grass fed, pasture raised burger vs. a whopper the grass fed is way healthier and probably contains some vitamin K2. And the whopper is just packed full of fillers and soy which is high in omega 6 fats which are highly inflammatory. That’s not even touching the buns that we eat them with or other toppings.
And actually the organ meats are the most nutritious per pound. Packed full of vitamins that we need every single day. Think about how many folks eat organ meats. Probably next to none.