Happy Healthy Gut (9 page)

Not only does your body feel funky due to the lactose intolerance, it is becoming antibiotic resistant, one glass of milk at a time. It’s also making our hormones go crazy. In fact, Dr. T. Colin Campbell writes “we should not have our children consume diets high in animal based foods.”
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If that’s not enough, there are also genetically modified organisms to worry about now. Sheesh!

If you decide that you can’t live without milk, try and purchase it organic from grass-fed cows. If you live in the United States, you may be purchasing genetically-engineered hormone milk, or milk that has been labelled with rBGH. Both the United Kingdom and Canada have refused to sell this milk, but the United States’ FDA has approved the sale of this engineered milk since 1994, so the U.S.
stocks their grocery stores’ shelves both willingly and readily, even though we probably won’t fully know or understand the implication of ingesting so many growth hormones until much, much later.

“Based on conclusions on the adverse veterinary effects of rBGH, particularly an increased incidence of mastitis, lameness and reproductive problems, Health Canada reluctantly broke ranks with the U.S. in January 1999, and issued a formal ‘notice of non-compliance,’ disapproving future sales of rBGH.”
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—Cancer Prevention Coalition

Even if you live in a country that makes the sale of this hormone-laced milk illegal, the bottom line is that all milk contains lactose, and none of it can be digested properly. So as if there weren’t enough arguments that could be made for the avoidance of dairy, let the lactose one sink in for you. If you have a digestive problem, it might very well be your body screaming for the cessation of all those milk products. I know mine did.

For those of you concerned that eliminating dairy will affect your calcium consumption, you can rest assured. You can easily absorb calcium through whole, unprocessed foods like organic broccoli and raw almonds. In fact, numerous studies conclude that women with the lowest risks of osteoporosis and breast cancer reside in Asia. You know, where they don’t drink dairy. To be exact, Chinese breast cancer rates are only about “one fifth of those of western women.”
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In North America, where we drink the most milk in the world, we have one of the highest rates of both osteoporosis
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and breast cancer.
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I’ll explain the osteoporosis bit. Osteoporosis is a term used to describe low bone density. The lower your bone density, the greater the risk of bone fractures. Calcium helps create and build bone density, hence the association with milk and good bones. Although calcium is indeed present in cow’s milk, milk also is an animal food, and therefore creates an acidic reaction within the human body.
When this reaction occurs, your body pulls its resources together to combat the high levels of acidity, and tackles the acidity with calcium. Where does your body go to for calcium? Your bones. So, as you drink milk, and create an inevitably acidic environment, your bones are forced to leech calcium into your body, rendering your bones calcium-deficient. It does the exact opposite of what we have all learned growing up. Milk is
not
good for you, or your bones.
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I totally give props to almond, hemp, soy, and brown rice milk. Try substituting your cow milk for one of these on your cereal, in baking, in smoothies, or just drink them straight-up. They are honestly good for you, definitely can’t hurt you, and taste delicious. Try and buy organic when you can, especially soy.

Avoiding dairy products will help so much. The solution to managing IBS-C and diverticulitis (as well as many other digestive diseases for that matter), is to keep a clean colon. Not clogging it with mucousy dairy will work wonders for you. You’ll be a new person. If this seems extreme to you, try cutting out one food at a time, but you will probably decide for yourself that you’ll want to eliminate them all eventually. You will feel
that
good. It took me almost two years to cut out most of this stuff, and I’m still a work in progress. I still indulge in a little cheese sometimes, but I’m always reminded pretty quickly (like, within two hours), why I shouldn’t eat it. It’s crazy how well you get to know your body, once you get rid of all the crap. (Pun intended.)

“ . . . people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease . . . people who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest, and tended to avoid chronic disease.”

—T. Colin Campbell, PhD and Thomas M. Campbell,
MD,
The China Study

I mentioned before how our bodies were not designed to take in and process animal meat. Some of you might be thinking, “But in caveman days, we ate meat!” This may be true, but we would have eaten way less, and it was definitely not pumped full of weird chemicals. Those lucky animals were not forced to consume grains laden with genetically modified organisms (food, whose DNA has been altered in a laboratory, for the purpose of appearance, extending its shelf life, and its ability to grow in certain conditions), foods no being should ever be fed in the first place. Cavemen
did
hunt, but they also did a lot of gathering and picking (not to mention probably running from things that wanted to eat them), jumping, swimming, and generally moving their tight, muscular caveman bodies all day, every day, in order to survive.

Well, we don’t do that anymore (enter pre-packaged, microwavable meals and previously recorded television), and we can no longer digestively process what they did, either. More healthcare professionals than ever before are converging on the conclusion that animal flesh
may not be as ideal for human consumption as was once thought. That’s big news!

Fresh veggies, fruit, beans, raw nuts, whole grains, and clean, chemical-free water are what our bodies run optimally on. It is a natural, healthy, clean diet that suits our twenty-first century lifestyle perfectly. These nutritious gems are easily digested and eliminated with little or no effort. They easily keep us at our pre-designed, healthy body weight, and they make our skin glow and our hair shiny. They give us energy that lasts all day (say goodbye to that afternoon slump), and they keep our bodies alkaline, not acidic, the latter of which is a breeding ground for disease, and sadly a common one at that. They also provide us with the exact right amount of every vitamin and mineral that we require, and in all the right proportions. No more supplements (except possibly vitaminB12), and no more stress over losing that last ten pounds. A whole food, plant-based diet is the perfect remedy for everything from fatigue, to hormone imbalances, weight loss, and great bowel movements.

Praise the gourd!

If you are currently eating animal products, do you know whether they are factory-farmed, or produced on a smaller scale, organic, family-run farm? If you don’t know the answer to this question, then you are eating meat and dairy that are products of a factory-farm. We, by eating this factory-farmed livestock, are plugging our bodies full of antibiotics and hormones that we don’t need, and certainly can’t process. Do you ever sit back and try and figure out why some antibiotics work on you and not others? Why the teenagers today are so much bigger than the teenagers of forty, or even twenty years ago? Why girls start their periods younger than ever?
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(It is not uncommon anymore for a nine-year-old girl to begin menstruating.) We have no idea what these toxic substances are doing to us, but we do know that they are neither researched well enough, nor helpful for maintaining good health. Why risk it?

Another issue that falls into this category is the ever-increasing enormous catastrophe of overcrowded hospitals, due in large part to chronic disease and bad immune function. Both of these ailments can be altered for the better by following a healthy, plant-strong diet.

In case you need proof, here is a story that coincidentally happened to be on the front page of my newspaper on the day I was writing this sentence: “Experts Probe Hospital Overcrowding.”
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I’m not sure what needs to be “probed.” The answer is fairly obvious. We are sicker than ever before, due to the current disease epidemic in North America, but make no mistake: we, to a large extent, bring this on ourselves.

We are not listening to our bodies screaming for more nourishment and less filler. That’s not to say that we don’t have some major assistance in making bad food choices. With all the advertising mediums available to us, we absorb a lot of straight-up bullshit from food companies that have a huge stake in you purchasing their substandard product. But how would you even really know it’s substandard? The packages have pictures of happy animals, living on green farms, being cared for by smiling farmers. Or perhaps it’s a sugary cereal product, with artificial flavors and colors, which now advertises “whole grains” even though there is absolutely nothing “whole” about it. What about water that is advertised as containing added vitamins? With almost as much added sugar as a soda, and just as many artificial colors and flavors, what’s healthy about this product that is marketed as such? It’s easy to lose sight of what’s real and what’s a total, obvious, lack of responsibility on the part of these food companies who are purposely deceitful in order to make a little moolah.

Here’s a quote from the above mentioned article: “A multi-pronged strategy was rolled out fall 2011 to clear hospital beds faster; reduce lengths of stay, and discharge more elderly patients to home care rather than residential care home.”
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Translation: get sick people in
and out as quickly as possible, and let the elderly go home to fend for themselves so that we can save money. Sounds extreme, but is it? This way of thinking doesn’t make sense. Should we not be coming up with solutions to make people healthier from the ground up, instead of trying to cut costs while dealing with the aftermath of bad decisions regarding healthcare? Wouldn’t a pre-emptive solution be a better way of solving this ever-increasing issue of poor health—the results of the popular western diet that is high in chemicals, and low in nutrients?

The western diet is like the popular girl in high school with whom everyone wants to be friends. The thing is she doesn’t care about you. She doesn’t even like you. In fact, she’s a straight-up backstabbing bitch who’d steal your boyfriend before you even knew what happened!

Like the vast majority of today’s food, animals are grown and processed in ways that encourage incredible, undeniable increasing levels of chemicals, hormones, and deadly pathogens. While most processed foods are stripped of nutrients, enhanced with artificial colors, flavors, and stabilizers, and completely over-packaged in warehouses hundreds and even thousands of miles away from where you will actually consume it, animal meat goes one step further. Approximately fifty percent of this meat (yes, I said
half
), is contaminated with harmful bacteria like
E. coli, Listeria, Campylobacter,
and
Salmonella
that can be (and has been) lethal if ingested.
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Knowing this, you can begin to get an idea of what your digestive system is being subjected to when forced to try and process this type of food.

We are not doing ourselves any favors here. The time has come to take charge of our health. I want to be absolutely certain that I am doing everything I can to make sure my tummy has an easy time on the digestion front, so that if I do become sick, because of reasons beyond my control, I can be assured a hospital bed, in a hospital room, and not in a nearby fast-food restaurant.
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“The greatest wealth is health.”
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—Virgil

You might be thinking that eating healthily is expensive business, but I argue that you have to be informed of the whole picture. First of all, meat is expensive. Even when it’s cheap it’s expensive. This is because the price we pay at the grocery store or fast food outlet does not accurately reflect the actual cost of meat.

Meat is heavily subsidized by the government, and we pay only a tiny portion of what it costs to produce an eight ounce steak. If you take into account the cost of grain production to feed just one cow, the amount of water it takes to grow that grain and hydrate that cow, the amount of antibiotics that are pumped into the cow to keep it alive in less than ideal situations, the cost of slaughter, and the cost of bringing that meat to your friendly neighbourhood grocery store, the total cost is immense. In fact, if you factor in the amount of money we spend on healthcare for heart disease, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure that’s in large part caused by eating all of that beef, the total cost of consuming a single steak is completely insane.

America’s healthcare system (and Canada’s too, for that matter) is in jeopardy. Although they are both very different systems of health, the United States and Canada have a similar issue that is directly related to the root cause of the core struggle: terrible nutrition. Food that is void of nutrients is the norm in these two countries, and it is this issue that is the main cause for diseases of affluence. Are you interested to know the single most important contribution you can make to help our healthcare system flourish? You guessed it! Eat whole, and plant-based. Disease prevention equals money saved, my friends.