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Your Health
Eating for Life
Some people ignore dietary advice to cut back on or cut out animal products, perhaps hoping that a “magic pill” will come along that will make their illnesses go away. Common sense tells us that prevention is the best medicine. More and more people are finding wonderful ways to tempt their taste buds without tempting fate.Vegetarians and vegans live, on average, six to 10 years longer than meat-eaters.
Eliminating animal foods from your diet reduces the risk of some of our biggest killers. According to Dr. T. Colin Campbell, nutritional researcher at Cornell University and director of the largest epidemiological study in history, “The vast majority of all cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and other forms of degenerative illness can be prevented simply by adopting a plant-based diet.” Heart disease, cancer, strokes, diabetes, osteoporosis, obesity, and other diseases have all been linked to meat and dairy consumption.
It’s never too late to change your habits for the better. Changing your diet isn’t nearly as inconvenient as enduring a heart bypass operation, suffering paralysis from a stroke, or facing chemotherapy and radiation treatments for cancer! Going vegetarian is the single best thing you can do for your health.
Chickens, pigs, cows, and fish accumulate toxic chemicals in their flesh and fat, which is why meat and dairy products are responsible for almost all the toxic residues—dioxins, pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and antibiotics—that Americans consume. In fact, 80 to 90 percent of dietary pesticide exposure, as well as 100 percent of dietary hormone and dioxin exposure, comes from eating animal products, and many of these chemicals are known to cause cancer in human beings.
- The risk of developing heart disease among meat-eaters is 50 percent higher than that of vegetarians. In fact, researchers have found that the longer and more often people eat meat, the greater their risk of heart disease.
- Meat, dairy products, and eggs are completely devoid of fiber and complex carbohydrates, the nutrients that we’re supposed to be consuming more of, and are laden with saturated fat and cholesterol, which make us fat and lethargic in the short term and lead to clogged arteries and heart attacks in the long term.
What About Protein?
In Western countries, our problem is too much protein, not too little. Most Americans get at least twice as much protein as they need. Almost everything contains protein; unless you eat nothing but junk food, it’s almost impossible to eat as many calories as you need for good health without getting enough protein.Healthy sources include whole-wheat bread, oatmeal, beans, peanuts, peas, nuts, mushrooms, and broccoli. By contrast, too much protein, especially animal protein, can cause people to excrete calcium through their urine and increase their risk of osteoporosis. Too much protein can also strain the kidneys, leading to kidney disease. Vegans do not need to combine foods at each meal to get “complete protein.” All grains, legumes, vegetables, nuts, and seeds provide all the essential amino acids.
What’s Wrong With Milk and Eggs?
No species naturally drinks milk beyond infancy, and no species would naturally drink the milk of a different species. Cow’s milk is designed for baby cows, who have four stomachs and gain hundreds of pounds in a matter of months, sometimes weighing more than 1,000 pounds before their second birthday.For humans, milk has been linked to heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes, and even osteoporosis, the very disease that the dairy industry claims it is supposed to prevent! The high animal-protein content of milk actually causes calcium to be leached from the body. According to a Harvard Medical School analysis of the evidence, milk does not protect against osteoporosis. In fact, according to Harvard’s nutritionists, countries with low calcium intake (just 300 mg/day) tend to have a lower incidence of hip fractures (an indication of osteoporosis) than those countries with higher calcium consumption rates.
Milk is also loaded with fat and cholesterol and contains an everincreasing variety of pesticides and antibiotics that are fed to cows. You can get all the calcium that you need from the plant world—tofu, broccoli, beans, grain, and calcium-fortified orange juice are all good sources.
Serving up just one egg for breakfast each morning can raise your cholesterol level by as much as 10 points! The human body makes all the cholesterol it needs for maintaining healthy nerves and cell membranes. The consumption of additional cholesterol through animal products, the only other sources of cholesterol, subjects the human body to a potential overload, leading to clogged arteries and heart disease.
Eggs are a primary carrier of salmonella, which sickens more than a million people and kills over 500 every year in the U.S. alone.
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“What do you think of meat-based diets like the Atkins
diet?”I call them the “make yourself sick” diets because they cause the body to go into ketosis—a state that occurs when we are seriously ill. I also use that designation because the very foods recommended — meat, chicken, bacon, eggs, and cheeses —are the foods the Heart Association and the Cancer Society say cause our most dreaded diseases. ... There is only one way to fully satisfy your appetite with delicious foods and stay trim and healthy for a lifetime—that’s a low-fat vegetarian diet with fruits and vegetables and a bit of exercise. —Dr. John McDougall, medical director of the McDougall program  “Isn’t
fish a health food?”Anyone who eats fish for “health” reasons should think again: The flesh of fish can accumulate toxins up to 9 million times as concentrated as those in the waters that they live in, and the flesh of some sea animals, like shrimps and scallops, contains more cholesterol than beef. Fish on farms are also fed antibiotics that are passed along to humans, impairing the immune system. Every year in the U.S., there are roughly 76 million cases of food poisoning, resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths—and eating fish and other sea animals is the number one cause of food poisoning.” —Dr. Neal Barnard, author of Foods That Fight Pain “Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rates of coronary disease of any group in the country ... they have a fraction of our heart attack rate, and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate.” —William Castelli, M.D., director, Framingham Heart Study, the longest-running clinical study in medical history “There’s no reason to drink cow’s milk at any time in your life. It was designed for calves, it was not designed for humans, and we should all stop drinking it today, this afternoon.” —Dr. Frank A. Oski, former director of pediatrics, Johns Hopkins University |
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