Yuk!!!
Carl/Dad
On 7/10/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This piece made me very, very uncomfortable.
Miriam
Truthdig
Eating Our Way to Disease
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/eating_our_way_to_disease_201707091/
Posted on Jul 9, 2017
By Chris Hedges
In July 1976, the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, chaired by
Sen. George McGovern, held hearings titled "Diet Related to Killer
Diseases." The committee heard from physicians, scientists and
nutritionists
on the relationship between the American diet and diseases such as
diabetes,
heart disease and cancer. Six months later, the committee released "The
Dietary Goals for the United States," which quickly came to be known as the
McGovern Report. "Decrease consumption of meat," the report urged
Americans.
"Decrease consumption of butter fat [dairy fat], eggs, and other high
cholesterol sources."
"The simple fact is that our diets have changed radically within the last
50
years .," McGovern said when the report was released. "These dietary
changes
represent as great a threat to public health as smoking. Too much fat, too
much sugar or salt, can be and are linked directly to heart disease,
cancer,
obesity, and stroke, among other killer diseases. In all, six of the ten
leading causes of death in the United States have been linked to our diet.
Those of us within our government have an obligation to acknowledge this."
The response to the report was swift and brutal. The meat, egg and dairy
industries lobbied successfully to have the document withdrawn. They
orchestrated new hearings, supplying a list of 24 experts approved by the
National Livestock and Meat Board, so that, in the words of Wray Finney,
then the president of the American National Cattlemen's Association, the
public would get "a balanced, correct view of this whole matter." A new
report was released in December 1977. This second edition insisted that
"meat, poultry and fish are an excellent source of essential amino acids,
vitamins and minerals." The Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs
was abolished. Its functions were taken over by the Agriculture Committee.
"The Agriculture Committee looks after the producers of food, not the
consumers, and particularly, not the most needy," wrote The New York Times
(http://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/02/archives/feeding-and-heeding-the-poor.htm
l ) . And when Sen. McGovern, who had already angered the Democratic and
Republican leaderships with his 1972 insurgent campaign
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/us/politics/george-mcgovern-a-democratic-
presidential-nominee-and-liberal-stalwart-dies-at-90.html ) for the
presidency, was up for re-election in South Dakota in 1980, he was defeated
by James Abdnor, a cattle rancher and well-funded spokesman for the meat
industry.
To see other Truthdig articles about veganism, diet or the animal
agriculture industry, click here
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/all_forms_of_life_are_sacred_20150104)
, here
(http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/days_of_revolt_chris_hedges_talks_with
_cowspiracy_directors_video_20160503) , here
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/saving_the_planet_one_meal_at_a_time_20
141109) and here
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/choosing_life_20150419) .
Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn-whose documentary "Cowspiracy
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3302820/?ref_=nv_sr_1) ," about the
environmental impact of the animal agriculture industry, led me to become a
vegan-recently released a new film, "What the Health
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5541848/?ref_=nv_sr_1 ;) ," which looks at how
highly processed animal products are largely responsible for the increase
of
chronic and lethal diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer in
the United States and many other countries. Both films are available on
Netflix.
The companion book
(https://www.amazon.com/What-Health-Eunice-Wong/dp/1524575755/ref=cm_cr_arp_
d_product_top?ie=UTF8) , also titled "What the Health," written by my wife,
Truthdig Book Editor Eunice Wong, lays out in even greater detail how the
animal agriculture industry intimately joins with the pharmaceutical
industry, the medical industry, health organizations and government
agencies
to mask and perpetuate the disastrous effects of animal products on our
health. The animal agriculture industry, like the fossil fuel industry or
any other branch of the corporate state, profits at the expense of our
health and even our lives. Many corporations and our government have a lot
invested in keeping us sick.
"We sometimes joke that when you're doing a clinical trial, there are two
possible disasters," one biotech stock analyst told The New York Times
(http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/01/your-money/blockbuster-drugstake-the-hype
-in-small-doses.html) . "The first disaster is if you kill people. The
second disaster is if you cure them. . The truly good drugs are the ones
you
can use chronically for a long, long time."
In the book "What the Health," Wong writes, "The public's willingness to
endure lifelong pharmaceutical use is called, in industry lingo,
'compliance.' And we are compliant. In 2014, the US spent $374 billion on
pharmaceuticals. That's more than the combined gross national products of
New Zealand and Bangladesh. It's also well over 200 percent of what the US
federal government spent on education in 2015."
For long excerpts from the book "What the Health," click here
(https://books.google.com/books?id=FIY8DgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=what+
the+health&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjn6ZfX6fzUAhVI52MKHTvxC0IQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepag
e&q=what%20the%20health&f=false ) . For the trailer of the documentary
movie
of the same title, click here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf44vLndiRM
)
.
Corporations invest heavily to promote the nation's unhealthful diet. "The
meat, egg, and dairy industries," economist David Robinson Simon says in an
interview in the book, "spent, in one year, at least $138 million lobbying
Congress alone."
"It's money well spent for these industries," Wong writes. "A $1 industry
contribution usually results in a $2,000 return as federal subsidy
payments."
"You have a $5 billion stent industry," Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, a renowned
cardiologist, says in the book. (A stent is a permanent wire mesh inserted
into an artery to prop it open.) "A $35 billion statin
[cholesterol-lowering] drug industry. They don't want that to go away.
Look,
if I'm in the middle of a heart attack, there's no question that I want a
man or a woman with great expertise in stents by my side. They will save my
life and a lot of my heart muscle. But the 90 percent of stents being done
electively? There is zero evidence that you can prolong life or protect
against a future heart attack with stents."
"Of every US federal income tax dollar in 2015, 28.7 cents went to
healthcare," Wong writes. "That's the biggest single chunk of the dollar,
larger now even than the military (25.4 cents). Compare that to 3.6 cents
for education, and 1.6 cents on the environment. Talk about priorities. And
yet for all that healthcare spending, the US has the lowest life expectancy
among 12 high-income nations, and some of the worst health outcomes."
Early in the film, a news broadcast announces, "The World Health
Organization this morning has classified processed meat, such as bacon and
sausage, as carcinogenic, directly involved in causing cancer in humans. ."
Andersen discovers that processed meat has been classified by the cancer
agency of the WHO as a Group 1 carcinogen
(https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/general-info/known-and-probable
-human-carcinogens.html ) , along with tobacco, asbestos and plutonium.
In fact, Wong writes in the book, ". every 50 grams of processed meat eaten
daily [on an ongoing basis] raises your risk for colorectal cancer by 18
percent. Fifty grams is less than two pieces of bacon, or two slices of
ham.
. [E]ating meat only 4 times a week [on an ongoing basis] increases your
cancer risk by 42 percent, according to an Oxford study."
"No more than 10-20 percent of risk for the primary causes of death come
from our genes," Wong writes. "Only about 5-10 percent of cancer cases are
attributable to genetic defects, with the other 90-95 percent rooted in
lifestyle and environment. Colon cancer, the second most lethal cancer in
the country, is the cancer most directly affected by what you eat.
According
to WHO, 80 percent of all heart disease, stroke, and Type 2 diabetes can be
prevented." (The book's extensive footnotes facilitate research by readers
on the scientific and medical studies cited.)
"The reason we know cancers like colon cancer are so preventable is because
rates differ dramatically around the globe," Dr. Michael Greger says in the
film. "There can be a 10-, 50-, 100-fold difference in colon cancer rates,
from some of the highest measured in Connecticut, down to the lowest rates
in Kampala, Uganda, for example. There are places where colon cancer, our
No. 2 cancer killer, is practically nonexistent. It's not some genetic
predisposition that makes people in Connecticut die from colon cancer while
people from Uganda don't. When you move to a high-risk country, you adopt
the risk of the country. It's not our genes; it's our environment."
"We can change the expression of our genes-tumor-suppressing genes,
tumor-activating genes-by what we put into our bodies," he goes on. "Even
if
you've been dealt a bad genetic deck, you can reshuffle it with diet."
In the film, Andersen visits the American Cancer Society website. In a
section of the site called "Basic Ingredients for a Healthy Kitchen,"
recommended foods include extra-lean hamburger, ground turkey breast,
chicken breast, fish, eggs and cheese.
The American Diabetes Association (ADA) in its "Diabetes Meal Plans" was no
better. The U.S. has the highest diabetes rate
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3341773/America-HIGHEST-rate-diab
etes-developing-world-UK-Australia-Lithuania-nations-lowest-rates-condition.
html ) among 38 developed nations, according to the International Diabetes
Federation. The ADA recommended to the estimated 29 million Americans with
diabetes that they eat dishes such as "Moroccan Lamb Stew, oven-barbecued
chicken, Asian pork chops and barbecued meatballs."
Eating one egg a day
(https://www.medpagetoday.com/cardiology/diabetes/11883
) can triple the risk of death among diabetes sufferers. And consumption
of
eggs doubles the risk of prostate cancer progression
(https://nutritionfacts.org/2014/08/21/why-the-egg-cancer-link/) among men
with that disease. This is probably why, as the book points out, "90
percent
of scientific studies on dietary cholesterol are currently paid for by the
egg industry."
"Diabetes, of all the diseases, may be the most affected by meat," Dr.
Garth
Davis says in the film.
"There is probably more confusion around what causes Type 2 diabetes than
around any other disease, among doctors, patients, and the media," says Dr.
Michelle McMacken in the book. "People don't understand that high blood
sugar is a symptom of diabetes. It is not the cause of diabetes. The foods
most clearly linked to the development of Type 2 diabetes are processed
meat, like bacon, hot dogs, cold cuts, salami, pepperoni, ham, sausage.
There's a number of studies showing that the more processed meat there is
in
your diet, the more likely you are to get Type 2 diabetes. And of all the
foods, whole grains are the most protective against the disease. The root
cause of diabetes has to do with our insulin not working properly, which is
very directly related to extra body fat. Until that message gets out, we're
never going to break the cycle."
The American Heart Association posted recipes for "Grilled Chicken and
Vegetables," "Pork Tenderloin Stuffed With Spinach" and "Steak Stroganoff,"
along with recommendations to eat low-fat dairy and skinless poultry and
fish and to buy cuts of beef labeled "choice" or "select" rather than
"prime."
Andersen and Kuhn found that these major health organizations received
large
donations from the animal agriculture industry, fast food chains such as
McDonald's, soft drink companies such as Coca-Cola, and pharmaceutical
corporations.
The American Heart Association, Wong writes, "has received money from the
National Cattlemen's Beef Association, National Live Stock and Meat Board,
Subway, Walgreens, Texas Beef Council, Cargill, South Dakota Beef Industry
Council, Kentucky Beef Council, Nebraska Beef Council, Tyson Foods, AVA
Pork, Unilever, Trauth Dairy, Domino's Pizza, Perdue, Idaho Beef Council,
and fistfuls of pharmaceutical companies-the usual suspects like
AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Pfizer,
Sanofi, and Merck, which spent $400,000 to fund an AHA program teaching
40,000 doctors to 'treat cholesterol according to guidelines.' "
One of the main sponsors of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) is
the National Dairy Industry. AND, which is the nation's largest trade group
for registered dietitians, publishes so-called Nutrition Fact Sheets for
the
public. The food industry writes these Nutrition Fact Sheets for its own
products and gives $20,000 for each of these sheets to AND.
Dr. T. Colin Campbell, one of the lead scientists of the
China-Cornell-Oxford Study, a 20-year study "that found 8,000 statistically
significant correlations between eating animal protein and risk of disease
in 65 counties in China," is emphatic about the danger of dairy products.
He
told The Guardian that "cows' milk protein may be the single most
significant chemical carcinogen to which humans are exposed." Susan Levin,
director of nutrition education for the Physicians Committee for
Responsible
Medicine, warned in the book, "Milk, because of what it is [a fluid
designed
to jump-start the growth of a 60-pound calf into a 1,500-pound cow], makes
things grow faster, and that includes cancer cells. This is not a product
even in its purest state that you want to consume."
The filmmakers confront spokespeople for the health organizations about
funding from the animal agriculture industry, much as they confronted
environmental groups in "Cowspiracy." They ask these spokespeople about
peer-reviewed, scientific studies showing that plant-based diets
dramatically lowered the risks for disease. The administrators in these
health organizations, including Dr. Robert Ratner, the chief scientific and
medical officer of the American Diabetes Association, invariably canceled
or
terminated the interviews once they discover they would be asked about the
link between diet and disease.
The idea that chicken is a healthful alternative to red meat is fictitious.
A skinless chicken thigh, the book points out, contains more fat-including
saturated fat, the most dangerous kind-than over two dozen different cuts
of
lean beef. Chicken is potentially the most fattening meat. Carcinogens form
in chicken and other meats as they are cooked. Chicken is the top source of
sodium for American adults because the chicken industry injects poultry
carcasses with salt water to increase market weight and therefore prices,
while still being able to label its product "100% natural." Chicken
contains
more cholesterol than a pork chop. And cholesterol is found primarily in
lean parts of meat.
"The birds come through on hooks," Dr. Lester Friedlander says in the book
in explaining the processing of chicken carcasses, "and then a mechanical
arm goes up the cloaca [the opening through which the bird releases urine
and feces] and pulls out everything inside the cavity. Unfortunately, when
the mechanical arm pulls the intestines out, they often burst. Then all the
fecal contamination is inside the bird. At the end of the poultry slaughter
line there's a big chill tank to cool the birds down quick so they can get
packaged and shipped out. If you have just one of those chickens with
broken
intestines and fecal contamination, the whole chill tank is contaminated.
They call the water in the tank, 'fecal soup.' All the chickens throughout
the day, if they don't change the water, are contaminated with feces.
Hundreds of thousands of chickens go through that water. And while they're
in the tank the chicken flesh soaks up that fecal soup. That's what they
call 'retained water' on the chicken label."
"About 90 percent of the nation's retail chicken is contaminated with fecal
matter," the book states. "Yes, that includes the kind you buy at your
clean, local supermarket. This is according to a 2011 FDA report, which
monitored bacteria such as E. faecalis and E. faecium, on meat, concluding
that 90 percent of chicken parts, 91 percent of ground turkey, 88 percent
of
ground beef, and 80 percent of pork chops have fecal contamination."
We need to stop believing the lie that we require animal products in our
diet for protein, calcium, iron, omega-3s or any other nutrient. "Every
nutrient from meat, dairy, and eggs can be found, in a form that is as
healthy or healthier, in plants," as Dr. Neal Barnard points out in the
film.
There is one weakness in the film. It focuses at the end on several people
suffering from serious diseases who switched to a vegan diet. A few weeks
later they appear on screen dramatically improved. The book, unlike the
film, makes it clear that the patients did this within a supervised medical
program, including liquid fasts before the transition to a whole-foods,
plant-based vegan diet, free of salt, oil, sugar and processed foods. Yes,
they did improve, but I worry that the scene in the film incorrectly
implies
that veganism is a miracle cure. Despite this shortcoming, the documentary
"What the Health" is tremendously important. We are being preyed upon and
poisoned by the animal agriculture industry, working in conjunction with
the
medical and pharmaceutical industries and our government.
"We are on the cusp of what can truly be a seismic revolution in health,"
Dr. Esselstyn says in the book. "It's never going to occur because of
another pill or operation. That revolution will occur when we in the
healing
profession have the grit and the determination to share the nutritional
literacy that will empower the public to absolutely destroy this common,
chronic, killing disease [heart disease]. When somebody orders pizza with
cheese or a steak, it will be the same as smoking today. Look how long it
took us, but it happened; nobody would even dream about smoking in your
house now. It will be the same with food."
"I thought of George McGovern, struggling to present the truth to a society
that wasn't ready to hear it," Wong writes. "The animal agriculture
industries mercilessly snuffed out-for the moment-his attempt to tell the
truth, just as other powerful political forces snuffed out his attempts to
bring justice to a war-ravaged nation. . But things spiral around. A
groundswell of awareness is surfacing, and people are feeling the change
before they can articulate it. We know there is something terribly broken
about the industrial food, medical, and pharmaceutical systems, but most
people don't know what it is. It's no wonder, because, as we've discovered,
there is an intricate political and corporate apparatus in place to keep us
from finding out."
Scientists Link Having a Purpose in Life to a Good Night's Sleep
Here's Why the UN and WHO Both Want to Decriminalize Drugs
The Medicaid Threat That Isn't Getting Much Attention
Amid Climate Change, Wildlife Faces Problems With Survival and Gender
Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
C 2017 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
Signup for Truthdig's newsletter
gumgum-verify
Sponsored Content
Calculate The Price To Own A 2017 Hyundai Elantra
Stylish and well-sorted, the Hyundai Elantra give segment leaders a
legitimate run for their money. [KBB.com/HyundaiElantra]
Learn More