The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet (5 page)

More health issues:
Meat eating is also believed to exacerbate gout, contribute to rheumatoid
arthritis,
and to be a major factor in the formation of kidney stones.
^9–11

Meat is full of antibiotics:
Because animals raised in confined, dirty, stressful environments have a tendency to get sick, they are given antibiotics as a routine preventive measure. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 70 percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States go to livestock, including farm-raised fish. In fact, farmed salmon have more antibiotics administered by weight than any other form of livestock. These antibiotics are then passed on to you. Before yelling, “Yay! Free drugs!” you should know a thing or two: When you take unnecessary antibiotics by eating meat, (a) your own healthy intestinal bacteria get wiped out, making you less able to fight off disease, and (b) the bacteria that the drugs are designed to kill eventually morph into smarter and stronger versions of themselves. In true horror movie fashion, they are literally becoming superbugs against which none of us has natural resistance. Science has not yet caught up with these superbugs, so we have no efficient antibiotics to use against them. By dosing the cows and pigs with antibiotics, we are actually endangering ourselves.

Meat carries freaky pathogens:
Have you ever seen the inside of a slaughterhouse? Suffice it to say they’re not exactly the cleanest places on Earth. When animals are eviscerated, it’s not unusual for their bowels to be punctured (workers kill up to 330 animals an hour), leaving all sorts of intestinal bacteria splatter on the meat and skin. In 1998, an amendment to an agriculture appropriations bill was proposed to give the USDA the power to fine meatpacking plants for unsanitary conditions. The House Appropriations Committee voted it down 25 to 19. Why would they do that? Turns out the 25 “nays” receive six times more money from the meat and poultry industries than the 19 “yays.”

A USDA report published in 2000 estimated that a staggering 89 percent of U.S. beef ground into patties contained traces of deadly E. coli.
¹²

Another bug called campylobacter is the leading cause of food-borne illness in the United States, and it usually arrives via chicken flesh. A dangerous little bacterium, campylobacter is estimated to infect more than 2.4 million Americans each year.
¹³
It is also estimated that 70 percent of American chickens and 90 percent of our turkeys are contaminated with campylobacter, the result of the birds being housed in ridiculously crowded conditions and their regular dosing with antibiotics. In fact, factory-farmed chicken is so unclean that Gerald Kuester, former USDA microbiologist, says, “The final product is no different than if you stuck it in the toilet and ate it.”
¹⁴

Superhero: Dr. William Castelli

In 1948, scientists at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute began a huge research project called the Framingham Heart Study, which continues today. It is the longest-running study of its kind in medical history, covering three generations of roughly 5,000 participants per generation over the last 60 years. Dr. William Castelli served as director of the project from 1979 through 2008. After analyzing all the evidence, he concluded vegetarians have the lowest rates of coronary heart disease of any group in the country. He added that when individuals keep their cholesterol below 150, they are virtually guaranteed never to suffer a heart attack.

When the flesh we’re putting in our mouths is full of disease, is it any surprise we get sick ourselves? It would be nice to think that Uncle Sam is there to protect us, but unfortunately, the Federal Humane Slaughter Act is so full of exceptions and loopholes that 90 percent of U.S. animals are exempted.

Another disturbing thing about meat is that it’s secondhand food; in other words, because you are eating an animal, you are eating everything
stored
in that animal’s tissues—including all the toxins he couldn’t get rid of. And while we’re on the topic of all things disgusting, consider what the animal you’re eating has eaten; livestock feed is routinely beefed up with slaughterhouse wastes like blood, bone, and viscera as well as the remains of euthanized cats and dogs.
¹⁵
The drug used to kill these pets, sodium pentobarbital, survives the rendering process, so it gets passed into the feed as well. Ugh.
¹⁶

Meat is full of hormones:
Cattle, pigs, and chickens are routinely pumped full of hormones to promote muscle mass, and these hormones are passed directly on to you. Eggs are chockfull of hormonal goodies as well, as are farmed fish. That might sound good to the bodybuilders out there, but excess hormones have been linked to many cancers, including breast and prostate. We have our own hormones, and the body is constantly working to keep them in balance—simply put, we don’t need more!

Plus, when an animal is led to slaughter, the adrenaline and stress hormones coursing through her veins get passed onto the dinner plate. Might this cause excess anxiety and aggression in us? Are we eating fear and anger? Although there’s very little hard science on this, many people report becoming much calmer and more peaceful when they give up meat.

Fish has its own dangers:
These days fish contain
mercury
and other industrial toxins. Coal-burning power plants release mercury into the air, which then falls into the ocean. Bacteria consume this mercury, which then is consumed by little fish and is concentrated up the fishy food chain. Smaller fish and seafood like salmon, cod, shrimp, and trout have lower levels of mercury, while swordfish, tile, mackerel, and tuna have the highest. But they ALL contain mercury, which has been shown to damage the brain, kidneys, and lungs and is particularly dangerous to pregnant women and their growing babies.

Does that mean farm-raised fish are better? Well, besides the fact that they are pumped full of antibiotics, farmed salmon were found to contain levels of industrial toxins called PCBs
16 times
higher
¹⁷
than their wild counterparts, so neither choice can be considered clean.

Why don’t we know this stuff?

The meat industry has created entities like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the American Meat Institute, and the National Pork Producers Council, which spend millions and millions of dollars on print and television ads to cast their products in a positive light, despite evidence to the contrary.

Approximately 650,000 Americans die of heart disease each year. Half a million die of cancer. Those two diseases are slaying our population like modern plagues. And you know what? They’re basically preventable—and often even reversible—through diet and lifestyle changes. Some people are trying to get the word out there: Groups like the American Heart Association, the World Health Organization, and the American Institute for Cancer Research. They all agree that a plant-based diet will help prevent these horrible illnesses that are killing our friends and families.

Superhero:
Olympic Wrestler
Chris Campbell

Chris became vegetarian after doing research on how to maximize his athletic potential for the 1980 Olympics, but because of the U.S. boycott, he was not allowed to compete that year. After an injury kept him out of the 1984 Olympic Games, he stopped competing and went on to earn a law degree. Still in world-class shape 8 years later, Chris qualified for the Barcelona Olympics and took home the bronze medal in 1992 at the ripe old age of 37, making him the oldest American wrestling medalist and one of the greatest comeback kids in wrestling history. He feels that his vegetarian diet allowed his body to use more energy for training because less was needed to process meat.

However, unlike the Cattlemen, these groups aren’t in it for the money—they’re simply trying to disseminate information as a public service. But it’s hard to compete with big business: Did you know that the meat industries are subsidized by the U.S. government and continually lobby Congress to keep the subsidies alive? On its Web site, the National Chicken Council clucks with pride that it pays off politicians: “[We] collect funds through [our] Political Action Committee to distribute to congressional candidates who support the industry.”

The doctor of the future will give no medication, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.

—Thomas A. Edison

MAYBE WE’RE JUST NOT BUILT FOR THIS

Many argue that we’re not actually
designed
to consume much animal flesh. True carnivores, like cheetahs, have razor-sharp teeth and long claws and run as fast as a speeding car. You can’t run that fast and your molars are flat, meant for grinding grains. Yes, we have four vestigial canine teeth, but good luck ripping flesh with them, much less your nails.

Our intestines tell a story, too. A carnivore’s intestines are only about 6 feet long, because meat isn’t meant to hang out in the gut forever. Our intestines are 20 feet long; when we eat meat, it takes a full 72 hours to pass through us. That’s
3 days,
and your body, my friend, is 98.6 degrees inside! It’s like having a steak sit out in the hot sun for 3 days straight. Eventually it will start to rot and putrefy. And that’s what’s happening inside of you. You may not feel that process now, but I challenge you to abstain from animal products for a month and then eat some meat. You will feel how heavy and dense it feels in your gut.

And maybe it’s not in our nature to eat meat. If I were to put a child in a room with a live lamb and say, “That’s your dinner . . . go for it!” what do you think she would do? Chances are I’d come back an hour later to find them cuddling on the floor together. A young tiger would know what to do . . . but a human? I understand that some of our ancestors had to kill, but they did it for survival, used the whole animal, and expended enormous amounts of energy in the hunt. That’s a world away from scarfing down a double cheeseburger for lunch at your desk.

The argument is often put forth that, in the Bible, man was given dominion over the animals, which is interpreted as, “Hey, let’s go get a ham sandwich!” But it’s hard to believe that God was encouraging us to torture and slaughter His living creatures for profit or fleeting sensual pleasure. Dominion means stewardship, implying a certain respect that just doesn’t exist in our factory-farming world.

Finally, maybe we should ask ourselves if we really even
want
to be meat-eaters. The carnivores of the natural world have quick, precise energy, but then they’re tuckered out and sleep for days. They are aggressive hunters with very little endurance. The herbivores, like horses or giraffes, not only have long-lasting energy and strength, but are generally a peaceful lot. Hmmm . . .

NASTY TO THE PLANET

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

—Albert Einstein

Our collective environmental consciousness has been raised enormously in the past few years, which is awesome. We’ve made great strides. But there’s a big piece missing in our education. Despite all of our recycling, energy saving, and water conservation (all of which are great), most people still don’t know that they can have the greatest impact on our precious Planet Earth by adopting a plant-based diet. With
20 billion
heads of livestock walking the earth—that’s more than triple the number of humans—we are spending precious natural resources on
them
instead of us. They, in turn, wreak havoc on the environment. Crazy.