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A Delicate Balance: The Truth (2008)
The truth is our beautiful
world is in danger. The planet, the environment and all of its inhabitants are subject to global warming. A world, completely off balance, is revealing its catastrophic implications. What you're about to see is the truth... the truth about the delicate state of our world and our bodies... these scientifically documented facts have direct and imediate impact on your life. A Delicate Balance The Truth On April 14th, 1912, the Titanic made her maiden voyage from Southhampton, England, to New York. The Titanic was the largest and best build ship of her day. She was considered unsinkable. In fact, some members of her crew believed that not even God had the power to sink her. How many people today consider the human body to be beyond the capacity to be destroyed by the everyday event of the food that we consume. Invencibility is an illusion. Most people are not aware of the epidemic of ill health which is rapidly approaching catastrophic proportions. Many members of the medical profession today are not aware of what causes the epidemic of ill health. They are also not aware that the medications and treatments they prescribe are documented as being the third most common cause of death in the western world. Where we're at with the medical profession right now... is we are actually selling sickness. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. MD Modern medical education needs to be reviewed and uptaded in basic areas such as giving medical students adequate education about the exact effects of the food patients consume on the health of their bodies. Really, our aim and our responsibility has to be to show people how really to lead and live healthier lives. Hundreds of studies from the most prestigious medical instituitions in the US and around the world have been published in equally renown medical journals. From JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, they indicate clearly how various foods contribute to and cause ill health. Today, most people are not educated on how to take care of their bodies to maintain optimal health. Today, the American Cancer Society reports that 47% of men and 38% of women will develop cancer during their lifetime. 1 in 4 of these people will die of cancer prematurely. We've got to wake up... out of greater empathy for the public because the public can only access information according to what they're generally being told, it takes hard work to really get behind the scenes and see what's going on. And I say that we've got to make changes. We have a serious problem: the cost of health care, especially in the US, is wrecking our country, we have a serious problem with respect to the impact it's having on the environment. There is hardly anyone in the western world today who doesn't have a family member, friend or colleague who hadn't been diagnosed or died of cancer. I don't want that to happen to anybody I love or anybody else that is out there that it shouldn't happen to. It does affect people's lives, we're talking about children's lives, affects husbands and wifes and family members. It affects the lives of more people than the person that it's happening to. That person that it's happening to... somebody loves that person. According to National Institute, the number of Americans diagnosed with cancer each year is expected to double within the next 50 years. The time to pay attention, to hear the warnings and educate ourselves is now. The result of the current state of health in the western civilized world is that people die unnecessarily. What is the reason for this epidemic of bad health in countries that have the best of everything? Doctor Neal Barnard is a physician with 27 years of experience. He is the founder and current president of the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine. Doctor Barnard teaches and conducts extensive research into the causation of various deseases. He has written 9 books and over 40 scientific publications. The consumption of animal products has killed more people over the last century than auto accidents, all of the natural disasters and all of the wars combined. What is animal protein? Anything that comes from an animal, bird or fish. This includes all dairy products: milk, cheese, yogurt, butter; all meat, red and white, and eggs. Doctor T. Colin Campbell is professor emeritus at Cornell University. Doctor Campbell has done extensive research on the effects of food and health. Over the last 45 years, he has published some 300 articles in scientific journals. Protein was discovered in 1839. At that time, it was considered to be a very important nutrient. So they gave it a name and they took the name from the greek word 'proteus', which means of prime importance... and so this gentleman, a Dutch chemist, by the name of Gerhard Mulder, and then went on to have students and others followed him, and as the years passed, as the decades passed, protein was considered to be really... an awesome nutrient, an extremely important nutrient. In general, it was thought to be only present in animal based foods... in the beginning, at least. It wasn't until some years later that they start realizing that plants also have protein as well. And so, over the years, protein tended to be associated with animal based foods. Then, when plant proteins were finally discovered and recognized, it was shown animal based proteins, as opposed to plant based proteins, was more efficiently used by the body, more efficiently used in the sense that it tended to create faster rate growth. And so, protein from animal based foods, considered to have what is called high quality or high biological value. That has stuck with us througout the decades and now almost centuries. That assumption has probably done more harm to our general understanding of what food and nutrition can do to create health and prevent disease than was any other discovery, in my view. The reason for this is that individual plants contain most, but not all, the 20 individual protein components found in meat. Human meat has the most complete protein content. This doesn't mean we have to eat other people or animals to get all the protein we need. Both animals and people have to eat a variety of plants which together will give them the whole complement of all the protein they need. This way, nature ensures that people and animals get to consume a variety of the other nutrients found in plants to optimize health. Did you know that 100 calories of spinach contains 12 grams of protein? Which is virtually the same as 100 calories of beef which contains 13 grams of protein. But instead of fat, cholesterol and no fiber the spinach contains fiber, no fat, no cholesterol, lots of anti-oxidants, iron and calcium and it will fill you up. The ideal diet is to eat a variety of vegetables, beans, lentils, grains, nuts, seeds and fruits in combination, just as do the largest animals in the world. This way, nature ensures that people and animals get to consume a wider variety of the other nutrients found in plants to optimize health. Let's see what researchers at Harvard have to say. Professor Walter Willet is the chairman and head of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health. What we're trying is set up three large studies that include about 300,000 men and women across the US and we've repeatedly been collecting dietary data from these individuals. Over now has gone almost 30 years and evaluating how that relates to their risk of cancer, heart disease and other conditions. And through that we've learned a lot about the influence of diet. We've learned that diet is important in ways that we've never really dreamed of it at the beginning of the study. And what I think, the general conclusion is our dietary choices have an enormous impact on our long-term health and well-being. One of the most comprehensive studies ever conducted in the history of medicine took place in China. It started in 1983 and involved 6,500 people. It compared what they ate with the appearance of disease. Doctor T. Colin Campbell from Cornell University was one of the principal researchers who participated in this China study. Animal protein, either directly or indirectly, it contributes to increases in the risk for a wide variety of diseases. Most notably cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, a number of auto-immune diseases and so forth. The basis for this lies in the chemistry of the effects which animal proteins and fats have on the individual cells as well as the whole body interactions. First and most importantly, cancer causing chemicals are produced whenever any animal, bird or fish tissues are cooked. One of the most worsen aspects of a meaty diet... and when I say that I mean not only beef and pork, but also chicken and fish, is that when you cook it, cancer causing chemicals form on the surface of that meat and they're called heterocyclic amins, or HCA. And they're not in the meat at the store. They form when you put it in your oven, in your fry pan, on your grill, and between the temperature and the amount of time that it takes to cook these carcinogens form. The higher the temperature, the more they form. Now, well, should we just eat meat raw? Obviously not. (?) Because you have salmonella and ??? back there and the other infectious bacteria that the cooking is there and knock out. So, the meat is obviously not safe if you under cook it. It is also very risky if you over cook it. And the best thing to do is set it aside. These heterocycle amins and some other carcinogens too are very often found in meat products and I'm encouraging people to recognize that some of the cases of cancer that we're seeing: breast cancer, colon cancer and other forms are known to be linked to these chemicals that we get when we're eating meat. There are also other cancer causing chemicals found in meat processed products which are used as preservatives. We have quite a few epidemiologic studies that have looked at the relationship between consumption of beef and cancer risk. The one side where the relationship is seen most consistent is for colon rectal cancer. And in this case, there seems to be an overall association with red meat, but that relationship is particulary stron for processed meat, meaning sausage, bologna and hot dogs and those kinds of foods. According to professor Willet, the optimum amount of red meat we should consume is zero. Vegetables do not form heterocycle amins or any other carcinogens during cooking. Formation for heterocycle amins is a unique feature of animals, including fish and bird meats such as chickens and eggs. Fresh fruits and vegetables are mostly made of fiber. Fiber gives food its bulk and helps to move it faster through the digestivetrack. Fiber actually absorbs and helps to remove toxins introduced into our body as a result of cooking animal tissues. People in the west dread cancer more than any other disease. Why? Because cancer slowly and often painfully takes over the human body over months or years, depending on how quickly it spreads through the various organs. There is now overwhelming evidence from research and direct observation over many years of what happens in people that demonstrates the exact role of animal based protein in the initiation, promotion and final spread of cancer. Animal protein tends to increase cancer risk (?) and there are multiple, multiple mechanisms, so to speak, ??? to this effect. Chemicals play a crucial role in carcer formation. They have become an everyday part of our modern day world. Chemicals are present in pesticides, pollution and all kinds of industrial waste. Our body has a natural defense mechanism that is able to inactivate all these chemicals and make them harmless. This defense takes place inside cells by an enzime called mixed function oxidase. When plant-based protein is eaten, even if chemicals enter at the same time, this enzime is able to inactivate them so they become harmless. However, when animal based protein is eaten, this defense mechanism turns against us and converts these chemicals into carcinogens. These new dangerous substances then damage the genetic content of ourselves. When this damaged DNA is replicated, which occurs when cells divide, cancer cell formation is the actual final result. It is the actual protein contained in flesh from animals that causes our defense system to turn against us. The antibiotics, pesticides, hormones and all the other multitude of chemicals and toxins we give farm animals to eat are an additional problem. Pure animal protein itself causes our body to rebel in the form of our defense system failing. The bottom line: low animal protein diet represses cancer formation and promotion. In cancer progression, the cancer cells that have grown locally, continue to grow and eventually spread to the other organs and throughout the body. The body cannot continue to survive this final damage. The same push and pull effect applies in cancer progression. Animal based diet accelerates and promotes cancer progression. Whereas a plant based diet slows down or reverses cancer progression. How Much Animal Protein Is Needed To Promote Cancer Growth? Research has shown that even small changes in the amount of animal based protein in the diet, such as increase from 4% to 10%, will increase cancer growth and spread. Increasing animal protein beyond 10% results in a dramatic increase in cancer growth. The average western diet contains 15 to 16% of animal protein. Which corresponds to 70g to 100g of protein a day. To give you a idea in terms of the food you eat, 3 chicken nuggets contains 7g of protein. 1 and 1/2 ounces of steak contains 13g of protein. 1 ounce of fish contains 7g of protein. 1 large egg has 7g of protein. 1 ounce of cheese has 7g. 1 cup of milk has 8g. To turn on the cancer promoting effect of animal protein All You Have To Eat Is This Which is basically your average western diet. Our bodies want protein, need protein and as long as we provide the amount of protein that meets our needs, everything is fine. But when we excede that amount, that is when we get into difficulties by consuming animal based foods. For optimum health, women need to consume no more than 38g of protein per day. And man, no more that 47g of protein. You can obtain this, more than adequately, by eating a variety of whole fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes. It is important to eat these foods whole, not processed. Processing, removes most of the natural occurring vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and other wonderful nutrients which the foods grow naturally. All animal, bird, fish or egg-derived protein plays a role in the formation and promotion of cancer. But the most potent so far is casein. Howard Lyman is a fourth generation cattle rancher. In 1979, he developed cancer in the spinal cord. Today, Howard Lyman goes around the world, talking about the harmful effects of animal protein. The first thing I recommend is to take out dairy. Remember, I was born on a dairy farm, the largest dairy farm in the state of Montana, I believed that milk was nature's most perfect food. I believed that milk did a body good. But today, I say the first thing you should take out of your diet is dairy. And the reason? 87% of the protein in dairy products is a thing called casein. Casein has been shown in laboratory test to stimulate the growth of cancer cells just like pouring gasoline on a fire. Casein is even more concentraded in dairy such as cheese and skim milk from cows, goats and sheep. The connection between dairy intake and cancer is particulary strong for prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is now the most commonly diagnosed cancer among men in the USA and other western countries. It represents about 25% of all cancers. People who consume more animal protein have more so called insulin-like growth factor, IGF or IGF-1 and they have more of this hormone (?) when they're consuming animal protein sub-base ??? foods and that in turn is consistent with increases in risk for prostate cancer. We know that this "I" growth factor tends to turn on cancers. Those findings originated with the comparison of, let's say, vegetarians, with vegans, vegetarians, 90% of whom are consuming substantial amounts of dairy products and eggs, still getting a lot of animal protein, they haven't gain that much by just avoiding meat and then still consuming a lot of dairy and eggs, in terms of animal protein, they're still consuming a lot of animal protein. It just comes in a different form. And those people, the vegetarians, tend to have higher levels (?) of this insulin-like growth factor, ??? the vegans who, of course, are avoiding all animal proteins. And getting less prostate cancer, by the way. As many as 50% of all men over 70 years have a silent form of prostate cancer which is not yet causing problems. Studies have revealed that men with the highest dairy intakes had about double the risk of total prostate cancer and up to 4 times the risk of fatal or metastatic whole body spread of prostate cancer compared to low dairy food consumers. Do We Have A Cure For Cancer? Let's hear what Dr. Campbel has to say. If we assume that we're gonna find a cure of cancer coming out of a needle or a pill, we're not gonna find it. I don't believe it. On the other hand, with reference to the question, do we have a cure for cancer? I say, yes, absolutely. And what I'm talking about is not the generally assumed sugestion, pills or needles, but rather, just simply food. Food of the right kind consumed in the right amounts, right combinations and so forth, plant based foods, whole plant based foods have a remarkable effect on being able to reduce the incidence of cancer. The Truth Is The most powerful weapon against cancer is the food you choose to eat. Everyday. Animal protein is not the only culpriting causing cancer. Most people today are aware that cholesterol leads to heart and artery disease. But most people are not aware that cholesterol is also associated with increasing the risk of cancer. The fact is both animal protein and cholesterol are linked to cancer. Blood cholesterol levels have often been associated with coronary heart disease, as we all know. The higher the cholesterol levels, the higher the heart disease rates. We learned in China that the higher the cholesterol is the higher risk for cancer as well. And higher cholesterol levels in the body turned out to be a good bio-marker for the consumption of animal based foods and the absence of plant based foods. (?) So, what cholesterol is ??? in fact or related to or associated with the emergence of cancer as well as heart disease and some of the other so-called western type of diseases. The China study found that, what in the West would be considered mildly elevated cholesterol, was associated with cancers. As blood cholesterol levels decreaesd from 127 to 90 mg/dl, there was a decrease in the incidence of cancer of the liver, rectum, colon, lung, breast, childhood and adult leukemia, childhood and adult brain, stomach and throat cancers. The average cholesterol in the US and other western countries is 215 mg/dl. The average in China was 127 mg. In some provincial areas, the cholesterol was as low as 80. If such relatively low cholesterol levels were associated with an increased incidence of cancer, you can appreciate the much greater risk of cancer occuring on a western diet. Cancer of the breast is as much of a problem in women as cancer of the prostate is in men. The connection between breast cancer and fat from animal sources has been documented in many studies. High blood cholesterol raises female hormones, specially oestrogen. Higher levels of oestrogen are associated with an increased incidence of breast cancer. The fact is: both animal protein and cholesterol cause cancer. The Vitamin D Connection There is another factor that links animal based food and cancer, including prostate, as well as all the other diseases of affluence. Vitamin D is produced in our skin by exposure to sunlight. 15 to 30 minutes several times per week is all we need to supply us with adequate vitamin D. This then needs to be converted to the active form, which is responsible for keeping cells throughtout the body in optimal condition. This supercharged vitamin D has to be made in our kidneys by conversion of the vitamin D made in our skin following sun exposure and then absorbed by the food we eat. This supercharged vitamin D has to be made in our body. What we eat, however, is a crucially important determinant to how much supercharged vitamin D is made, as well as how well it works once it is made in the kidneys. Because the active form of vitamin D is crucial to maintaining all individual cells in optimal condition, disruption of its work can result in a wide range of diseases. Animal protein has a tendency to block the conversion of vitamin D to the active form. If these low levels persist, the result is prostate cancer, as well as cancer of the breast, colon, osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, such as type 1 or insulin dependent diabetes and many others. Also persistently high intakes of calcium create an environment where the supercharged vitamin D declines. Most doctors are not aware of this and therefore recommend both higher intakes of dairy products and calcium suplements, thinking they are reducing the risk of osteoporosis. Long-term consumption of calcium, specially as occurs in a young person's life and on into the mid years, on the 20's, 30's and 40's, if one is accustomed to consuming really high levels of calcium, the body again tries to addapt to those, makes the most of it, in a sense: "it's not good", but the body is doing as best as it can to minimize the harm that, otherwise, may occur. So, when a person reaches the late stages, they're accustomed to consume high calcium diets, it's gonna take a while to readapt a little bit. And during that period, and perhaps even before, when calcium is consumed to these high levels, one of the means by which the body protects itself against that harm, is to minimize calcium absorpsion in the intestinal tract. Serious diseases are not only affecting more and more people, they are occurring at a younger age. Belinda Emmet died of breast cancer at the age of 32. Despite the massive amounts of money that have been poured into cancer research, the risk of dieing from cancer has actually increased by 5% from 1970 to 1994. John McDougall is a physician and a nutrition expert who teaches better health through vegetarian cuisine. He has been studying, writing and speaking out about the effects of nutrition on disease for over 30 years. This is what Dr. McDougall has to say: I'm a medical doctor and I'm an internist, a board-certified internist, and I take care of my patients based on correcting the cause of their sickness. They're sick because they eat a diet of kings and queens, they eat rich foods all day long, breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's a feast. Every morning, they have easter for breakfast, they go on to thanksgiving and christmas for lunch and dinner, and every night after dinner they have a bithday party. As a result of eating all this feast food, this king and queen food, they're fat and sick, just like royalty has always been throughout history. And so, the way you correct the problem is not by giving them a bunch of drugs, or vitamin pills, you change the cause of the problem, all this rich food. So, instead, you put them on a healthy diet, you put them on really tasty, healthy foods, like oatmeal for breakfast. You give them various healthy soups and sandwiches for lunch. (?) For dinner you give them bean burritos, ??? vegetables. Animal Protein And Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease. The higher the blood cholesterol, the higher the risk of heart disease. Heart disease is the most common of the diseases of affluence. It affects 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women. It kills 1 in 3 of these people every 30 seconds in the US alone. 5,200 People Die Everyday Nearly Double The People Who Died In 9/11 Women die 8 times more frequently from heart disease then breast cancer. Yet, most people are more afraid of cancer than the silent and deadly number 1 killer. Doctor Esselstyn is a distinguished surgeon with some 40 years of expertise. He conducted the longest study demonstrating, beyond any doubt, that a pure vegetarian diet, with no dairy products or eggs, effectively reverses heart disease and stops it from progressing. We have to appreciate just how much cardiovascular disease has really infiltraded our health situation. We know, for instance, that to the battle casualties that were studied in Korea and Vietnam that, roughly, at an average age of 20, 80% of these young GIs, when their cardionary arteries are examined without a microscope, already have gross evidence of the disease. (?) Now, is it, therefore, any surprise that when somebody like Dr. Louis ???, who's a professional of public health in the University of Pittsburg, has stated that all men by age 65 and women by age 70, who had been exposed to a traditional western diet, have diffused cardiovascular disease? What does that tell you? Our entire nation, all men and all women, have cardiovascular disease. This is so powerful to get across to the organizations that are providing us with our food and our food guidelines. Most people think that medication for lowering cholesterol and blood pressure or bypass surgery can cure their problems once they get it. The pain accompanying heart disease is often quite severe and crippling. Bypass surgery and other available procedures are not an effective solution. In western medicine, what the profession has to offer is, (?) of course ???, drugs, pills, procedures such as ??? bypasses. Now, these procedures have a great deal of risk. It's not well advertised, but of the million people, for instance, who are going to be having a stent this year, 1% are going to die. the time of the stent. 1% of a million is 10,000. Now, if we had lost 10,000 GIs in Iraq this year, it would be called carnage. Of those 1 million people who have stents, there are going to be 4% who are going to have a heart attack at the time of the stent. That means 40,000 people, at the time they are having a procedure to protect them from having a heart attack are going to sustain a heart attack. (?) Pills and procedures truly just don't get it done, ??? , because it never addresses the basic causation of the disease itself, which is the toxic western diet. Blood cholesterol is the single most crucial factor in determining heart and blood vessel disease. Together with other fats, protein, immune system cells and other components, cholesterol deposits on the inner walls of arteries. This accumulation eventually leads to blood vessel blockages to the heart. According to the ?? Heart Study, which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, 50% of children 2 to 15 years have fatty streaks, marking the beginning stages of heart disease. Animal Based Diet Causes Impotence 30 million American men have erectile disfunction. A meat based diet doesn't just give you a heart attack, eventually, it can also make you impotent. And I have found that for a lot of folks that would get their attentions, specially if you're an 18-year-old young man. The male sexual apparatus is a rather odd hydraulic system that does require a good blood flow in order to work properly, if you see what I mean. So, if you have blocked arteries to the heart the heart can die, but if you block the arteries to a man's private parts, they don't function so well anymore either and I think that the big market we have now for Viagra and other erectile disfunction medications comes in a large measure from the fact that a lot of men are eating unhealthy foods. Tell you something funny... if you look in the prescribing information for Viagra it says it works better if you don't eat a fatty meal. Well, I have to tell you, everything works better if you don't eat a fatty meal, and if you eat a healthy enough vegan diet for a longer period of time I don't think you're gonna need that prescription at all. Animal Based Diet And Auto Immune Diseases Auto immune diseases result from the body attacking its own tissues and damaging or destroying them. The end result is progressive loss of various physical or mental functions. There are some 40 different types of auto immune diseases. The most common include: type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, thyroid gland over-functioning or under-functioning, kidney and muscle inflammation. Virtually any organ in the body can be the target of destruction by the body's own immune system. About 3% of the American people currently suffer from one or more of these crippling diseases. This totals about 8.5 million people. Some estimates are as high as 12 to 13 million. With 250,000 more people diagnosed every year. Once the attack and destruction of the various organs begin, they will generally continue and the damage done is not reversable by any currently available means. The only remedy is the use of drugs that supress the entire immune system. These drugs have a variety of other untoward and often serious side effects on the whole body. I was told from very young age that I would get diabetes. I was put on a very low what the doctors call a baby dose of diabetic medication, that turned into a very heavy dose within a year and a half. (?) I mean ???, just so much medication, it's making me foggy in my brain, I can't afford that I can't... I can't... live like that. So, I wrote to doctor a letter a couple of weeks ago and said: "instead of your medication I'm gonna step up the cardio... I'm gonna seek out... someone that knows about food... and I'll really try to do something about this" and the doctor said: "Well, you're non-complyant and you'll loose your medical insurance. " How does eating animal tissues trigger our immune system to attack our own body? Many of the proteins found in animals are very similar to those found in our human tissues. During digestion, some of these animal proteins enter our blood stream without being broken down into the basic components. These animal proteins are then treated as foreign invaders and are attacked by our own immune system and destroyed. But because they resemble very closely our own tissues, the body begins to attack and destroy our tissues as well. Cow's milk protein is one of such foreign proteins that mimics some of the proteins found in our body. Specifically, it looks the same as cells in our pancreas, which make insulin. In getting rid of the foreign cow's milk protein, our body also destroys the insulin producing cells. (?) This means that for the rest of the child's ??? life, they will suffer from type 1 diabetes, in which insulin injections will have to be given several times a day and diet strictly controlled. And that lasts for a lifetime. That is a devastating disease. That is a devastating disease. In Finland, people have one of the highest milk consumptions in the world. Children from 0 to 14 years of age drink an average of over 200l of milk, or equivalent dairy products, per person per year. The result is that type 1 diabetes is 36 times more common in Finland than in Japan, where milk and dairy consumption is one of the lowest in the world. In the US today, 1 in 13 people has diabetes. The Center for Disease Control in the US has predicted that 1 in 3 caucasian children and 1 in 2 hispanic or black American children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes at some stage in their lifetime. The good news is that diabetes has been shown to be a reversable, or at least its progression slown down, by pure vegetarian, non-dairy diet. We've recently been conducting a research study in individuals with diabetes and the group of participants is randomly assigned to either a current diet for diabetes, which is the kind of diet that's been used for a number of years, which includes some meat and dairy products and things. But it tries to be cautious about carbohydrates, that's the control group. The experimental group is using a diet that's entirely vegan, no animal products. It also keeps oils low and we avoid sugary foods, but we're not low in starch at all, there's plenty of carbohydrate from the healthies forms. Well, the result has been striking. The individuals on the vegan diet are doing hands down better than the individuals on the other diet. So, we now believe there's substantial evidence sugesting that the best diet for diabetes is probably a low-fat vegan diet. I was not aware how affected my body would be if I ate... if I eliminated animal products and dairy. I've lost weight, I'm continuing to loose weight, my doctor is so encouraged that she told me that I could be off all my medication, which includes two high blood pressure medications, cholesterol and diabetic, within six-month period of time. Animal Protein And Multiple Sclerosis Multiple sclerosis is a life-long disease, in which people loose their ability to walk, see, think clearly and speak. There are often episodes or acute attacks in between gradual loss of ability to move, so people are eventually confined to a wheel-chair or bed for the rest of their life. Doctor Royce Swang conducted a study of multiple sclerosis patients over 40 years ago. He found that the progression of the disease was greatly reduced by low-saturated-fat diet, that is, a diet excluding animal based food. This worked even with people who had advanced stage of the disease. About 95% remain only moderately disabled for approximately 30 years. And only 5% of these patients died of multiple sclerosis. In contrast, 80% of the patients with early stage multiple sclerosis, who consumed a diet high in saturated fats, that is, an animal based diet, died of multiple sclerosis. Most auto immune diseases are significantly more common in colder climates. The further people live from the equator, the higher the incidence of multiple sclerosis and the other auto immune diseases. This geographical localization is linked to the reduced sunlight needed to form vitamin D in the skin. As well as the high animal based food consumed. More milk and other dairy products are consumed at the higher latitudes. The consversion of vitamin D, made in the skin in response to sunlight, into the crucially important active vitamin D, is inhibited by foods that are high in calcium as well as acid-producing animal proteins. This supercharged vitamin D, not only stops cells from becoming sick, it also helps to repress the development of auto immune diseases. There is a multitude of other auto immune diseases. The mechanism for their causation is similar to multiple sclerosis. They include dementia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, diseases affecting the eyes, the thyroid gland, joints, resulting in rheumatoid arthritis, muscles and just about every tissue in the body can be the target of the immune system going awry and resulting in 1 of the 40 auto immune conditions. Animal protein, specially milk and other dairy products, cause osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a disease in which the body takes calcium from its bones. This leaves the bones thinner and more fragile. The resulting weakness leads to bone fractures. It fact, hip fractures are often used as a reliable indicator of the severity of osteoporosis. This bone disease affects women more frequently than men, specially after menopause. Countries that consume cow's milk and its products also have the highest fracture rates and the worst bone health. If milk is so good for our bones, as we are lead to believe, then people who consume milk should have better, stronger and healthier bone structure than others who do not drink as much milk or eat dairy products. The fact is: this is not so! Studies have shown that American women aged 50 years and older have one of the highest rates of hip fractures in the world. The rates of bone fracture are exceeded only in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, where the milk consumption is even higher. Researchers at Yale University's School of Medicine summarized information on osteoporosis taken from 34 separate surveys in 16 countries that were published in 29 peer-reviewed research publications. The study found that 70% of the bone fracture rate was related to the consumption of animal protein. The reason for this is that animal protein is acidic. The body does not like an acidic environment and begins to neutralized it as soon as possible. To do this, the body uses calcium, present in the blood stream. If not enough calcium is present in the blood, more is taken from bones. This loss results in bone thinning and eventually leads to bone fractures. It has been well known as early as 1880 that animal protein causes excess metabolic acid. Unlike plant protein, which does not cause this acidity in the body. When animal protein consumption is increased from 35g to 78g per day, the loss of calcium through the kidneys increases by 53%. This 53 % increase of calcium of leaving our body is not only desastrous to bone, but also increases the incidence of stones forming in the kidneys and, of course, stresses the kidneys by forcing them to get rid of all this calcium. Anyone who cares for the welfare of others and their own health, needs to look squarely and rationally at this avalanche of evidence. Even if they are a farmer or work for the industry that processes and supplies theses products to their fellow human beings at large. Doctor Greger is a phisycian with a degree in agriculture. He is also the director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at The Humane Society of the US. The reason we're told to drink milk is for strong bones, at least that's what the advertising campaigns would have us believe, but, over and over, in fact, the latest review was in a journal called The Osteoporosis International, October 2004, (?) which was a med ??? analisys, reviewed all the studies done today and found, this was done by The World Health Organization, found that low milk drinking was not at all a risk factor for osteoporotic fractures, for breaking a hip, for breaking a forearm later in life. So, one certainly doesn't need to eat or drink dairy for their calcium. The best absorbed calcium on the planet, really is dark green leafy vegetables, (?) these low oxidated ??? dark green leafy vegetables, like kale, collards, bak choy, etc. These are loaded with calcium and are absorbed even more than milk and, instead of getting the saturated fat and the cholesterol, potential for growth hormones, antibiotics in the dairy milk, by getting your calcium from plant sources, the kind of baggage you get then is the fiber and the foliage and all the wonderful vital nutrients, these anti-aging, anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory compounds found exclusively in the plant kingdom. In 2000, the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, piblished a summary of 87 separate surveys, which showed that high intake of vegetables and low intake of animal protein resulted in virtual disappearance of bone fractures. Another study followed 1,000 women for over 7 years. Women with the highest animal-to-plant protein content in their diet had 3.7 times more bone fractures than women with the lowest ratio. The women on an animal protein diet also lost bone 4 times faster than women on plant protein. Calcium Supplements Taking extra calcium is an accepted and well-established practice. Recommended for people who have osteoporosis or are at risk of developing it. (?) Professor Mark ???, at Harvard University, commenced studies on calcium in the 1950's. He showed that excessively high intakes of calcium over a long time impair the body's ability to control how much calcium it uses and when. Our body is a perfectly balanced system. Into this perfect system, we introduce additional factors and the system copes... and copes... and copes... and copes... until it cannot cope any longer. Continuous abuse leads to inability of our body to control the finely tuned mechanisms. This is a well-established phenomenum in biology. "If a little is good, more must be better. " Is the way our minds tend to think. Taking excess calcium in the form of dairy food or calcium suplements has been found to destroy the body's finely tuned ability to regulate calcium. This disruption of the regulation of calcium absorption, retention and use for bone maintenance can be temporary or permanent. Instead of concerning ourselves to calcium suplements, what these women need to do is to go off of animal protein. Because animal protein, in fact, is creating a condition that leads to calcium loss. What Is The Best Source Of Calcium? Nature demonstrates the solution to the best calcium, protein and iron intake. The largest animals in the world have large skeletons and muscle structures to uphold. What Do They Eat? Exclusively plants and grasses. We do not have to eat animals to get what they get by eating greenery. (?) Some of the recommendations of the ??? is from countries ? for the amount of calcium intake. You'll see that these levels are quite high leading one to believe that we can't get enough calcium by consuming plant based foods. Well, my point is if one goes back and looks who's developed those policies and those setting those standards, my view is that we don't need to set those standards so high. And, unfortunately, the bias that have been involved in setting these standards have been greatly influenced by the dairy industry. A similar situation of excess holds true for iron. And so, we have to think a little bit... rethink our recommendations on iron again and ask wether or not we can get adequate amounts of iron, let's say, from plants. And the answer is definitely yes. The ability of the body to monitor its own needs needs to be respected and protect in the form of giving it the right kind of resource to work with. These are not the only problems resulting from drinking milk, eating other dairy and animal based products. The so-called milk replacer, right? The calves can't drink milk, that's our milk, belongs on the shelves, right? But... so, what do we give the calves? The calves get milk replacer which, too often contain spray-dried cattle blood, is a protein-rich component, we continue to feed cattle tissues in the form of cattle blood to calves in this country. We're the only country on the planet with mad cow disease that allows these kind of quasi-canibalistic practices to continue. And we know blood is infectious, we have people, two people over in Europe that seemed to have gotten the human form of mad cow disease, not by eating meat but by getting a blood transfusion from someone who did eat infected tissue. We kill animals... we eat them... those animals are killing us. Fish Noam Mohr is a physicist with degrees from Yale and Pennsylvania University. He has worked on global warming campaigns for the United States Public Interest Research Group for which he published several reports on clima change and fuel economy standards. Recent study found that we will deplete the oceans of all the commonly eaten species of fish in the next few decades. (?) You can see from space the lines made in the ocean by ships ??? dragging behind them huge nets. People think of the ocean as to so vast that we could never have a big effect on it, but just like we have a huge effect on clima with our emissions, we're having a huge effect on the oceans by our vast appetite for sea food. Most people have come to believe that eating fish is healthy. That fish contain omega-3 oil, that is good for the heart. A closer look at the scientific literature reveals a different story. A large, long-term study, by Michael Burr and colleagues (?) from the University of Wales College of Medicine, ???, reported that men with chest pain caused by heart disease had a higher risk of heart attack when they took fisk oil capsules. Facts About Fish Fish and sea food contain significant amounts of fat, including cholesterol. Prawns have two times the amount of cholesterol found in beef. And 3 ounces of salmon is equivalent to 3 ounces of t-bones steak or chicken in fat content. Free Radicals Fish harbor a lot of bacteria which flourish at colder temperatures, such as those found in refrigerators. The fishy smell is an indicator that these bacteria have began to multiply and have started breaking down or decomposing the fish. The decomposition includes omega-3 fish oils. Once the spoiling process has began, the omega-3 oils not only become useless, but also begin to release free radicals. This begins and leads to a wide variety of diseases. The fact is: linseed oil derived from purely vegetarian sources contains twice as many omega-3 oils. Linseed oil has no cholesterol and it is lower in saturated fat. It does not break down as easily into free radicals as does fish. A recent study plubished in the American Journal of Cardiology reports that fish is not a boon for good health as consumers are often lead to believe. The study suggest that fish consumption does improve heart health or improve heart disease. Excess Protein Fish contain significant amounts of protein. The western diet already contains twice the amount of protein needed for optimum health. As scientists have already demonstrated, too much protein in the diet carries the risk of all the diseases of affluence. Accumulation of chemicals, toxins and heavy metals like mercury, everything, from human waste to industrial waste, ends up in rivers, lakes and oceans. The consequence is that fish and shellfish can accumulate extremely high levels of toxins. Fish are the ocean's and water waste cleaners and filters. They take in chemicals and wastes and retain these hazardous substances until the fish die. In 1962, Rachel Carson, in her book called Silent Spring, warned of the dangers to be anticipated in the future resulting from the 637 million pounds of synthetic poisons which were produced every year and then released into our environment. Since then, as Al Gore as pointed out, the production of these toxins has increased by 400%. In Rachel Carson's word, this pollution is, for the most part, irrecoverable. The chain of evil it initiates, not only in the world that must support life, but in living tissues, is, for the most part, irreversible. Living tissues includes us humans, all the animals, including fish, and all living vegetation. We have polluted our environment in the name of progress to such an extent that we are now reaping what we have sown. We poisoned the environment with all our modern day activities and it is now returning in the form of fish and flesh from other animals to poison us back. Farmed Fish Fish bred in farms bring even more health hazards to the table. Less and less of the fish we people eat comes from the oceans and more and more is being replaced by industrialized agriculture where animals are raised in closed areas where just stuck so tightly in there that there's hardly room for them to swim around. And, as a result, this ? requires an enormous amount of feces and pollution that settles out of the whole area and destroys the entire area of the ocean around there. Soon, almost all the fish that people eat will be coming from theses farms as we depleted the oceans and it's a serious threat. Canthaxanthin This artificial chemical pigment is used in salmon to give them nice pink color when they are bred in captivity. Without it, salmon would be a pale gray color. Salmon farmers can choose the depth of the color they want in their fish. The chemical pigment was banned and withdrawn from the market, as a sunless tanning pill, because it was linked to retinal eye damage. It is very difficult to find a fish that has not been exposed to some contamination. All these toxins end up on your table and in your body. In practical terms, for the rest of your life. What Should We Be Eating? Are fruits, vegetables and grains going to give me all the protein and nutrients my body needs? Many people in the western world today believe that humans have always eaten flesh from animals. This is not so. The structure of our teeth and digestive system speaks to the contrary. The eating of animal based products is a recent phenomenum. Plutarc, a Greek priest and philosopher, who lived some 2,000 years ago, pointed out that men has no curved beak, no sharp talons, no claws, no pointed teeth. On the contrary, by the smoothness of his teeth, the small capacity of his mouth, the softness of his tongue and the sluggishness of his digestive apparatus, (?) nature ??? forbids him to feed on flesh. All animals that feed on the flesh of others have very short digestive systems, about three times the lenght of their bodies. This enables speedy removal of decaying flesh which can poison their body if it stays too long. They also have very acidic saliva and their stomachs produce large amounts of hydochloric acid, which is necessary to digest flesh. The human digestive system is about twelve times the lenght of our body. This is necessary in order to digest plants and vegetables, which take a lot longer to digest because of the fiber they contain. Meat has no fiber at all and so the nutrients can be extracted a lot faster. Because of our long digestive tract, the meat we eat putrefies. Can this putrefication, with the resulting release of toxins and proliferation of bacteria, be good for us? Our saliva is alcaline and contains a special enzime which is necessary to pre-digest grain. Ouir canine teeth are canine only in name. Compared to carnivores animals, our canine teeth are not sharp enough or strong enough to tear cooked, let alone raw flesh. Environment 50% of the total US land area is used to produce food. At present, the US livestock population consumes more than 7 times as much grain as is consumed directly by the entire American population. There is a consequence, not just in our health, but also on what it means to the environment, in order to farm all these animals. It should not surprise you that the price in environmental destruction and consequences is beyond anything that the people who began large scale industrialized animal agriculture 80 years ago envisioned. Deforestation The first step in animal agriculture is that native forest have to be cleared for growth of crops to feed the animals as well as to allow sufficient pastures to house and grow them. Professor Pimentel is Professor Emeritus from Cornell University. We feed 280 million metric tons of grain to our livestock. That's enough grain to feed 800 million people as vegetarians. Did you know The World Health Organization (?) reports that 3.7 billion people out of 6.5 billion total ???, nearly 60% of the world population are now malnourished. The largest number of malnourished people ever in the history of the Earth. It may not seem that important to cut native forest, trees will grow again, you might say. What is the big deal about cutting trees? Getting rid of forests is a huge deal for the following reasons: Natural forests catch water from rain and snow melt. This not only prevents the water from running off causing soil erosion, the water held by the dense forest floor replenishes underground reserves and evaporates to form clouds. Clouds not only bring more rain, recycling water naturally, they also prevent heating of the Earth by the sun. Professor Tom Lyons holds an established chair within The School of Enviromental Science at Murdoch University, in Australia. His interests concentrated on the lowest 200m of the atmosphere where we all live and is directed towards the solution of enviromental problems. When you change an agriculture surface or a native vegetation surface you're actually changing the climate of the region. Professor Lyons and his colleagues have obvserved that if an area of more than 20 by 20 kilometers of natural vegetation is removed and replaced by agricultural land, cloud formation slows down or stops. This has a profound effect on climate of the entire region. The cooler temperatures prevent drying. Higher temperatures leads to extremes of climate and, specifically, droughts. By catching water naturally, forests also prevent major and catastrophic flooding. Natural forests take 200 years and more to reach significant maturity to act as efficient catchers of water. They also make soil, as a result of the dead leaves and branches falling to the forest floor. These decompose to form natural fertilizer and, eventually, nutrient rich soil. And it takes 500 years to replace 1 inch of top soil. And, so, you can't wait for that. So, it's a terribly serious problem. Methane According to Tim Flannery, when measured over a century long time scale, methane is 60 times more potent at capturing heat energy than carbondioxide, but it lasts only 8 years in the atmosphere. The animals we raise for food produce huge amounts of manure that these industrial animal factories that, primarily, use to raise animals for food in the developed world, need to store these feces in huge... acres and acres of cesspool which they euphemisticaly call lagoons, these, of course, foul the air around them, but also release large amounts of methane and also huge amounts of nitrous oxide. These are released not just from the lagoons themselves, but also when these feces are spread over the huge amounts of crop land that must be used to raise plants to feed the animals. Nitrous oxide is about 300 times more powerful than carbondioxide. (?) When it comes to methane, about 37% of the world's methane ??? (?) come from animal agriculture and about 70% of the world's nitrous oxide ??? come from animal agriculture. These gases, which are produced in smaller quantities than carbondioxide, but are far more powerful, have a huge effect and, because of their power, and because they come mostly from animal agriculture, makes this sector of the economy important to target in any effort to address the serious global crisis. The average meat consumption in the 1950's was 170 kilos per person per year in the US. Today, this figure is 277 kilos per person per year. In China, meat consumption in 1950 was 4 kilos per person, while today, it is 77 kilo per person. This massive increase, when taking into account with the ever growing world population, means that unfathomable numbers of animals have to be grown and killed on a daily basis. In the US alone, it was estimated that 1 million chickens were killed every hour in the year 2000. The worlwide figures for the number of animals killed every day to end up in supermarkets, restaurants and your home is staggering. Around the world, about 60 billion animals are slaughtered every year for food. That doesn't even include all the animals that don't make it to slaughter. In the US alone, more than 10 billion animals, every year, are killed for food. If you just compare this to the population of the Earth, of humans, are just 6 billion... you realize that the number is so vast, that it's hard to conceive of. Water In the US, 80% of the fresh water is used for food production. It requires about 100 times more water to produce 1 kilo of animal protein than to produce 1 kilo of grain protein. In total, what this means is that to produce 1 kilo of beef requires 100,000 liters of water. We should really be pricing water properly so that people, farmers, agriculture, meat producers, pay the real cost of the water. (?) And then the market would ??? sort out that what kind of things it made sense to produce in Australia, and what sort of things it didn't make sense to produce without the subsidies that currently are going to agriculture because of the... virtually free water that they're getting. This is obviously not sustainable. Especially with the ever growing demands for animal based food. The water required to grow various plant crops ranges from 400 to 2000 liters of water per kilo of crops. Maneka Gandhi is a member of the government in India. Former activist for the environment and animals, she has written numerous books. Some of which are law textbooks in various universities today. She was the Minister for Environment and Cultural Affairs. Most people don't know this. They think that when they eat meat is just one chicken. They don't realize when they've eaten the chicken, they've eaten the forest, they've eaten the water, they've eaten the air, they've eaten the land... And huge amounts of of it. Fossil Energy And Animal Agriculture In the US, 17% of the fossil energy is used for food production. This does not include transport of the various food products. Oceans The massive advances in modern technology have also reached the oceans. Peter Singer is the bioethics professor at Princeton University. He was named one of the most influential minds in this century. When people talk about fish you first have to distinguish between wild caught fish and farmed fish and they both have their problems. With wild caught fish, the major problem is that, basically, most of the fish stocks in the oceans that have taken, perhaps, millions of years to build up, are being depleted by modern fishing practices. Trollers the size of a football field have scoured the ocean floors, leaving them as bare as an 8-lane highway. The consequence of what this means to the life in our oceans and its contribuition to global warming, has not even been assessed scientificaly. A lot of people think that fish farming is a good thing for the oceans because... we're the producing the fish, we're not removing fish from the ocean, so they think it's sustainable. What they don't realize is that, for the fish that are generally in demand, certainly in developed western countries, fish like salmon, that are farmed, they are carnivorous fish. So, in order to feed them in the fish farms, we have to, actually, catch other fish, cheaper fish, less valuable, and grind them up and feed them to the fish in the fish farm. And so, we're actually probably catching two or three times as many fish and feeding them to, let's say, the farmed salmon, in order to get that highly priced, but small amount of farmed salmon out of it. So, in terms of preserving the ocean, or for that matter, reducing green house gas emissions, because these ships have to use oil to travel, it's really, completely contrary to any sound conservation principles. Biodiversity is the multitude of events and intimate interactions of various living creatures, which together maintain a harmonious balance in nature. We have so far wiped out some 80% of this harmony in the oceans. Many fisheries actually have a huge by-catch, which means that they catch a lot of fish that they don't wanna catch, they call it trash, usually, and they just throw them overboard, but, generally they're dead or so bad injured they can't live. Some fisheries, I think prawn fisheries are an example, the by-catch might be as much as ten times the... by volume of the prawns that they're catching. Without the fisheries, it might be two or three times. So, there's a vast waste of life and destruction of the ocean ecology. We as humanity, as a whole and as individuals, have come to the edge of a dangerous precipice. We Have A Choice We either behave as rational, intelligent human beings who look at the facts and make the decision to survive... Or we ignore reason and supress our intelligent faculties and, as robots, driven by our desires for sensual delight, fueled by addictions to the food we love, we continue until death or diseases force us to let these go. One of the questions that has troubled me is why people get hooked on unhealthy food. I mean, let's face it... nobody ever had to race out at 9 o'clock at night to go buy an orange, but they do wanna get chocolate, or something sugary, or a cheeseburger, that sort of thing. And we now know why it is that people are drawn to those things, or at least we have some pretty good clues, these foods: sugar, chocolate, also cheese and meat, tend to release opiates within the brain, and when I say opiates, I mean brain chemicals that have a narcotic effect. And other foods will not do that. And, so, it helps to think of these unhealthy foods really as very much like drugs and we break the habit in much the same way. The choice is in your shopping basket... and on your plate. We all need to act while we still can. Global warming is here and now... like it or not, it is something we have to deal with. Al Gore is right. Together, we can still save the planet. But first, you have to save yourself. Even when we reduce our energy use, transportation needs, flying, recycling and all that we can and should do, that is still not enough, as it takes 100 hundred years for the carbondioxide to leave the atmosphere. There is something much more powerful you can do today... that will significantly reduce global warming within 8 years of the time you start. Improving your health will help save you, your loved ones and our planet. Restore a delicate balance by doing the following: Stop eating all animal based foods, including all dairy products. Learn to cook delicious, pure vegetarian meals. Plant organic gardens. Drive green. Recycle. Eduvolve yourself and those around you. There is a glimmer of hope and it shines through you and what you do today. Margaret Mead once said: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. Imagine what all of us can do. This philm is dedicated to Belinda, Lloyd, Marie Therese All who are still sick... In memory of all the people and animals who have died prematurely and all who continue to die needlessly. Let us not forget the trees... All Life is Sacred. May all remember this and join to end the massive waste and destruction of life everywhere... subtitled by: Tio Beto from Brazil sugestions and/or corrections, please feel free to contact me at: tiobetonh@gmail. com ... =Peace Through Anarchy=... |
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