The Meaty Truth (8 page)

A Weighty Problem

Eating healthy has become synonymous with lean-meat meals, the latest workout regimes, such as P90X and CrossFit, and calorie counting. Yet with every new fitness regime, diet pill, or diet fad such as Atkins, South Beach, or Weight Watchers, our waistlines have collectively continued to rise. Two in every three Americans are overweight and one in three Americans are obese. Just fifty years ago, only one in eight Americans were obese. If we were to look at the rise in obesity next to the rise in factory farms, the trends would mirror each other—an obvious relationship that
our industries and government choose to overlook for the sake of promoting animal foods. Instead, marketing campaigns focus on sugary drinks and exercise. We use the gym as a place to “work off” our meals instead of keeping our bodies fit. Exercise is not the problem, collectively. Our increasing waistlines are directly linked to our heavy consumption of foods high in saturated fat and cholesterol, primarily from animal-based and processed foods.

Let’s take grilled chicken, the most advertised lean meat for “healthy” eating, as an example. According to recent data in Europe from the EPIC study, one of the most comprehensive studies on nutrition, grilled chicken is not correlated with weight loss, but rather weight gain. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the study found that weight loss was most associated with the decrease of meat consumption. Since obesity is the gateway to chronic disease, it is critical that we keep our weight in check. This is second nature on a plant-based diet, as it is low calorie and low fat. We can eat as much delicious food as we want and not have to count calories. Isn’t this the ideal diet we have been waiting for all along?

The American Ideal is SAD

For some reason, society has correlated eating meat and dairy as a sign of wealth. American culture that prominently features the Standard American Diet of excessive meat and dairy meals is an ideal that most citizens of other countries desire to replicate. When populations that previously had lesser financial means come into money, the first thing they do is change their diets to mirror the American one. Flattering? Why yes. Healthy? Far from it. Within a generation, these populations get their wish: they mirror the American diet and the health problems that go along with it.

For example, in the 1950s, the Marshall Islands were awarded a substantial sum of money from the United States after it tested a nuclear device there. The citizens went on shopping sprees and completely changed their previously plant-based diets to meats, cheeses, and fish. Until the 1950s, diabetes had been relatively unheard
of in the Marshall Islands. The Marshall Islands now have some of the highest diabetes rates in the world.

Our high rate of disease is a homegrown problem that stems directly from our fast-food, high-meat, and processed-food diet. Studies on immigrants from China and Japan, raised on diets mainly consisting of rice and vegetables, show that within a generation of moving to the United States and adopting our SAD diet, those immigrants experience the same rates of prostate cancer! It’s hard to face these facts, but we can’t deny the science.

If America is one of the sickest countries, then what does one of the healthiest countries look like? The Blue Zones Project sought to answer this question. Researchers looked at societies that had the highest longevity around the world and found that those who lived the longest, such as the Okinawans in Japan and the Seventh-Day Adventists in Loma Linda, California, largely ate an almost completely plant-based diet.
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The question then is: is a plant-based diet really the healthiest or are there other cultural factors at play? Fortunately, there are rebels in every group, and the Seventh-Day Adventists have provided the ideal environment to actually test, as accurately as possible, how diet affects disease. The findings are astounding—those who stuck to the rule and avoided meat and dairy were the healthiest.
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The rebels who ate more fish, eggs, meat, and dairy had higher rates of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.

Ditch the Junk Science

Since the 1970s, the government has been attuned to the fact that eating animals is a disaster for our health. As we steadily became overweight and saw an increase in heart disease, President Nixon organized the Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, led by Senator George McGovern, which researched three questions: Why are we getting sick? Why are we getting fatter? Why is heart disease increasing?
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The committee’s conclusion was that eating animals is bad for our health. So why has this information not been disseminated in society? Good question. When the committee came out with this recommendation, the meat and dairy industries had a field day and lobbied Congress. Along with voting McGovern out of office, the
industry didn’t just stop Congress from issuing a statement concluding that our meat and dairy diets were the culprits of our rising rates of disease; they also passed food libel laws that made it illegal to say certain foods are bad for our health. We aren’t kidding. This happened. These food libel laws are still in effect today in one-fourth of the states.
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The meat and dairy industries have responded in full force to allegations against the harmful effects of their products. The animal-food industry even created the “Meat Myth Crushers” website to address the growing scientific literature that implicates animal foods as the primary culprits in our growing health crisis.
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One of the main issues they push to sell their product and discredit health claims is that we need animal protein. Ounce for ounce, we can get more protein (without side effects) from roasted pumpkin seeds.

The industry claims that the site seeks to remedy the problem that most Americans get their information about food from the news, media, books, and movies. According to the meat and dairy industries, these somehow aren’t credible sources. We are interested in learning how their site is apparently more credible and represents no conflict of interest.

The USDA’s
Dietary Guidelines for Americans
is a prime example of industry sabotaging our health. Nine of the thirteen committee members issuing the most recent
Dietary Guidelines for Americans
all had ties to the food industry.
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These guidelines are the foundation for the USDA’s new MyPlate food “pyramid” that sets the federal nutritional standards and programs. Installing people on boards that have conflicts of interest is an American pastime for the animal-food industry. Current USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack has ties to Monsanto. Gregory Miller, the president of the Dairy Research Institute, also serves as the Committee Chair for the American Society for Nutrition.
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Seems a little biased, doesn’t it?

This is why meat and dairy continues to be featured prominently on the USDA food pyramids. However, these food pyramids, ingrained into us since grade school, were designed as marketing schemes straight from the Dairy and Meat Councils. In fact, the studies promoting meat and dairy are
paid for
by the corporations themselves. Statistically, the research
funded by an industry is four times more likely to reach a conclusion supporting that financial backer. Knowing that fact, consider this: the dairy council spends $58 million a year on marketing and research.
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That is a lot of studies showing the “benefits” of dairy.

Today other food pyramids designed by doctors put meat and dairy as the lowest priority on our plates or completely eliminate them. In fact, Harvard researchers do not endorse the USDA’s guidelines at all. They call out these guidelines as fundamentally flawed and rather “intense lobbying efforts from a variety of food industries.”
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We tend to side with Harvard on this one.

The various meat and dairy councils and associations have a particularly close relationship with the very institutions we turn to for nutritional guidelines. Corporate sponsors of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association) include the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Dairy Council. As the nation’s health spirals downward, one would expect leadership from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition members, boasting over seventy thousand members. Yet this organization that should be promoting our health is completely infiltrated by the very industries it seeks to regulate. For example, at the 2012 Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo, about 23 percent of the speakers had undisclosed ties to food industries.
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One of the most prominent sponsors is Coca-Cola, which oversees educational programming for the Academy. What was their take-home message? Teaching kids that sugar is not unhealthy and aspartame, a known carcinogen that also happens to be in some of their products, is perfectly safe. Clearly this is sound (and unbiased), nutritional advice for our nation’s children.

For over a decade, the Academy has enjoyed continued financial support from food giants such as ConAgra Foods, General Mills, Nestle, and Kellogg’s, as well as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
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In particular, the Dairy Council is a premier partner and supporter. The “consume more dairy” message remains continuous year in and year out at the expo. Yet humans’ zero necessity for dairy is completely at odds with
this propaganda. The Academy is supposedly a prestigious organization that holds merit and weight on scientific publications about our food sources. As the Academy has been hijacked by corporate interests promoting unhealthy food at odds with science, so has its credibility.

It’s not our fault that we have been eating wrong. It’s also not our doctors’ fault either. Doctors receive little to no education in medical school on the connection between diet and disease. Think about this: at one time, doctors endorsed smoking cigarettes. They recommended smoking to their patients to open their lungs and to improve overall health. Today this advice seems ridiculous. So why did the doctors promote it? First, there was a lack of information, and second, some doctors were paid by the tobacco corporations to promote their brand products.

The exact same phenomenon is happening with meat and dairy. Big pharma pays some doctors to keep their patients popping pills, and most doctors know very little about nutrition. Additionally, the USDA’s mixed messages on what to consume leave consumers and, sadly, even our physicians wondering which message is right. For instance, the USDA website’s “key message to consumers” is to switch to fat-free or low-fat milk.
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Yet when milk is stripped of the fat, all that is left is sugar and the cancer-causing casein protein.

Clearly, this isn’t healthy. More worrisome is that the USDA’s website lists under health benefits of dairy possible prevention of osteoporosis and definite promotion of bone health. The site also claims that “intake of dairy products is also associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, and with lower blood pressure in adults.”
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Really? These recommendations in no way match the plethora of scientific research that states the opposite. Fortunately, more and more doctors are waking up to the fallacy behind eating meat and dairy. Many now know that plant food, loaded with antioxidants and phytonutrients, is our best prescription for good health.

We are approaching an age where we have to take an active role in our health. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fifteen of the sixteen leading causes of disease are lifestyle related.
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Friends, this is why our health-care system is broken. Our health is being bought by corporate interests. We can’t afford to keep traveling down this path of misinformation and poor diets. For too long we have fallen prey to marketing schemes that confuse us and don’t let us think for ourselves. We are smarter than this.

These largely preventable chronic diseases are consuming 75 percent of our national health-care budget.
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Consuming animal foods generates over $600 billion in health-care costs every two years. Consider this: the notorious tobacco industry only generated $400 billion in health-care costs over the course of five decades.
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We have admonished the tobacco industry and forced them to pay for their costs on our health. Why aren’t we doing the same with the animal-food industry?

We are putting dead, rotting, obese (and more likely than not, sick) animals into our mouths. How is that going to help us? The reason we feel like crap is because we are eating it! We aren’t supposed to live on prescriptions. Remember, what is on your plate is more powerful than anything at the bottom of a pill bottle. We have the answers to our health problems. It is time we make smart investments, and our bodies are our greatest investment. The power to change this paradigm rests on the end of our forks.

Know your Sh!t Solutions

1) Stop eating crap and you will stop feeling like crap! Eliminate meat and dairy from your diet as much as possible. Keep in mind that our bodies cannot differentiate between free-range and factory-farmed meat. Even though factory farmed meat has added harmful toxins, any type of meat damages our bodies when you eat it. Go meatless every Monday and completely meat free by taking out meat from your diet one meal at a time
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