Food for Life: How the New Four Food Groups Can Save Your Life (25 page)

Surgeons in England reasoned that perhaps they could cut down on the risk of blood clots forming in their surgical patients by feeding them bran. That is exactly what happened.
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There are other contributors to blood clotting besides disruption of blood flow, and other causes of disrupted blood flow besides fiber-depleted diets. Nonetheless, putting the grains, vegetables, fruits, and beans back in the diet is an easy and important step to take.

Just as abdominal straining can damage the veins of the legs, the same thing happens to the veins surrounding the anus. A British surgeon, Hamish Thomson, provided an explanation for hemorrhoids, which is as follows: Hemorrhoidal blood vessels are normal structures used to provide an effective closure for the end of the digestive tract just as the lips do for its beginning. Repeated abdominal straining engorges these vessels. Then the passage of hard stools pushes the enlarged vessels downward and out through the anal opening. The result is the engorged, painful masses we call hemorrhoids.

While some people may need surgery for hemorrhoids, trading a meatbased
diet for a high-fiber, plant-based diet is an important step in preventing them in the first place and in preventing a recurrence of swelling.

The stomach is located just below the diaphragm, and a passageway through the diaphragm allows the esophagus to reach the stomach. In a person with hiatal hernia, part of the stomach actually slips through the diaphragm into the chest cavity.

About one in every five people has a hiatal hernia, and most have no symptoms whatsoever. The rest are buying antacids for heartburn.

Dr. Burkitt hypothesized that the condition is another result of daily straining to pass stools.
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This creates enormous abdominal pressures, pushing the stomach upward toward the esophagus. The prevalence of hiatal hernia seems to follow the same pattern as other diet-related conditions: wherever low-fiber diets abound, hiatal hernia occurs.

Diverticula are small pouches that form in the wall of the large intestine, like a bicycle inner tube pushing outward through a hole in the outer tire. Diverticulitis is the medical term used when these small pouches become inflamed, sometimes causing a great deal of pain.

Doctors used to suggest low-fiber diets for patients with diverticular disease on the theory that they should keep the intestinal tract relatively empty. That treatment did not work very well. In fact, it turned out that hard, compact stools disrupt the normal movements of the intestinal tract, increase pressures in the intestine, and lead to the formation of diverticula.
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A better solution is a high-fiber diet. Fiber holds water and keeps intestinal contents soft, allowing them to move along smoothly without damaging the intestinal wall.

The gallbladder is about the size of an uninflated balloon, and is used to store bile, a digestive juice manufactured in the liver. After a meal, the gallbladder squirts bile into the intestinal tract to assist in the process of
digestion. Bile can crystallize to form small stones. If a stone sits in the gallbladder minding its own business, it will cause no symptoms at all. But if it lodges in the tube system between the gallbladder and the intestine, it can cause intense pain or jaundice. Women have a greater risk of gallbladder problems than men for reasons that are unclear, as do overweight and older individuals.

Every day, surgeons remove gallbladders from patients. They send the stones off to the laboratory, which reports to the surgeon what they were made of. The number one ingredient is cholesterol. The problem was that there was too much cholesterol in the bile for it to stay dissolved. Imagine that you were to stir salt into a glass of water. Some of it would dissolve. But if you were to put in more and more, eventually it would be unable to dissolve and would remain in crystal form. The same happens with cholesterol. If there is too much of it in the bile, it forms solid stones.

Plant foods are cholesterol-free and low in the saturated fats that cause the body to make cholesterol. The natural fiber in plant foods also helps by discouraging the reabsorption of the cholesterol back into the blood. It is not surprising that vegetarians are only half as likely as meat-eaters to develop gallstones.
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But be sure not just to eliminate animal products. Keep vegetable oil to a minimum as well, because it too is a stimulus for bile production. The high polyunsaturated-fat diet that is still used by some to promote cholesterol reduction is the wrong way to go, because vegetable fats can also cause gallbladder problems. The New Four Food Groups fit the bill perfectly, with a low-fat, no-cholesterol menu that also helps keep you trim.

What’s live, infectious, invisible, and present on one out of every three chickens you buy at the grocery store?

When we think of food poisoning, we think of an unsanitary restaurant kitchen, or maybe home canning gone awry. But food poisoning is an everyday occurrence. If you had the flu recently, it might not have been caused by a virus. It might actually have been a bacterial illness you brought in the door with your groceries. Because one out of every three chickens has live salmonella bacteria growing right inside the plastic packaging. Or maybe
salmonella got you when you decided, damn the cholesterol, full speed ahead, and you ate an egg. Eggs are increasingly a source of salmonella.

Animal products are surprise packages, with a seemingly endless array of contaminants. Salmonella causes an intestinal illness with vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and low-grade fever beginning anywhere from six hours to two days after infection. Usually, it passes in several days without any treatment. But sometimes it becomes very serious, spreading into the blood and to various organs. Most cases are never reported. The Centers for Disease Control estimates the true incidence to be anywhere from 400,000 to 4 million cases per year. The death toll has been as high as 9,000 per year.

To see why salmonella is so common, you have to take a look at modern farms. Chicken farms are now essentially factories. Many thousands of tiny chicks are put into a large steel building. Eight weeks later, they are boxed and trucked to an assembly-line slaughterhouse. During their two months of life in a crowded steel building, they are living in the accumulating excrement of thousands of birds. That excrement contains salmonella and other bacteria.

In the slaughterhouse, the feathers are beaten from their skin. In the process, feces containing salmonella are beaten into the skin. The chickens are eviscerated by machine. From time to time, the intestines are punctured, and feces are spread around even more. The carcass is then run through a water bath to cool. This water starts out clean, but rapidly accumulates feces and debris.

When you bring home a chicken from the store and cut the package open, a little bit of water dribbles out onto the counter. You might think it is “chicken juice.” Well, chickens are not fruit; they do not have juice. What dribbled out onto your counter was a combination of cooling water, blood, lymph, and feces, which CBS News once called “fecal soup.”

Under federal regulations, it is perfectly legal to sell salmonella-tainted products. And illness is inevitable. The federal government uses inspectors who actually look at every chicken carcass. The irony is that salmonella are not visible to the human eye. Thousands of inspectors and hundreds of millions of dollars go to inspect the 6 billion chickens slaughtered every year in the United States. They throw out birds with broken bones, but allow carcasses covered with salmonella to be wrapped up and sold. When researchers have gone to grocery stores and taken samples, they have found that one in three chicken packages has salmonella bacteria still alive in the package. This is true of all major brands.

Sickness is not usually the result of eating the chicken because salmonella are easily killed by cooking. Illness results from contamination of kitchen surfaces and cooking implements. For example, chicken is cut on a cutting board that is then used to slice lettuce and tomatoes for a salad, which then becomes thoroughly contaminated with the chicken’s unseen bacteria. Or a sponge used to clean up “chicken juice” on the counter is then used to wipe off other surfaces.

In infants, the elderly, and people with immune disorders, salmonella can be especially serious and is often fatal. The highest incidence is in three-month-old babies, who may be victims of cross-contamination or from infection from others in the household. Infants are protected somewhat if they breast-feed. Within the breast milk are cells that can help the child knock out salmonella.
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And they are protected much more when their parents don’t bring animal products into the home.

Salmonella is not only found in chicken meat. Outbreaks have frequently occurred from beef and many other animal products and rarely from produce such as melons or tomatoes, apparently due to contaminated soil. (Washing produce removes bacteria.) And increasingly, eggs are bringing salmonella into households across America. Egg operations are intensely crowded, typically putting three to five hens into a single cage with a floor about the size of a folded newspaper. The salmonella that is spread from one bird to another can end up inside the eggs, even when the shells are intact.
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In October 1989, in an Atlantic City casino, a man was eating a chocolate mousse with his wife and their friends. He and more than 100 other people became ill. He got worse and worse, and finally died three months later. What was in the mousse? Salmonella, according to the New Jersey Health Department, apparently from a shipment of eggs.

In 1987, in a New York City hospital, 404 patients suddenly came down with salmonella, and 9 died. The source was the low-sodium tuna-macaroni salad, which was made with salmonella-laden eggs. The egg farm sent the chickens to slaughter and the ovaries were removed for inspection. More than two-thirds tested positive for salmonella, suggesting that chickens pass salmonella, not only in their feces but also directly from the ovaries into the eggs.
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Cooking eggs “sunny-side up” cannot kill salmonella, no matter how long the cooking continues.
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The
Journal of the American Medical Association
observed that eggs should be boiled for seven minutes, poached for five minutes, or fried for three minutes on each side.
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More prudent is to avoid
eggs altogether, because of their load of cholesterol, fat, animal protein, and, of course, salmonella. Look out for hidden eggs, especially foods made with raw eggs: Caesar salad dressing, hollandaise sauce, eggnog, and homemade ice cream.

People can sometimes be infected with salmonella and carry the bacteria in their own intestinal tracts without being aware of it. Normal intestinal bacteria keep the salmonella from overgrowing, but if a person happens to take antibiotics for some unrelated condition, normal bacteria will be killed off. Salmonella, however, are often resistant to commonly used antibiotics because they came from farms where antibiotics are routinely fed to livestock as growth promoters. With the other bacteria killed off, the salmonella overgrow and can cause a very serious illness.

All doctors now recognize the problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which is why they will not use antibiotics without clear evidence of a bacterial infection. But farmers are fostering bacterial resistance as they feed antibiotics willy-nilly to animals, not to stop infections but to promote more rapid growth.

Salmonella is not the only disease-causing bacteria that resides in the poultry department. As many as 65 to 80 percent of chickens are contaminated with a bacteria called
campylobacter
,
^39
,
40
and many strains are resistant to antibiotics. The result is at least 2 million cases annually of vomiting, diarrhea, fever, and abdominal pain, particularly in small children,
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when it sometimes is mistaken for appendicitis.

There are other uninvited dinner guests, including yersinia,
E. coli
, and others, which cause a whopping intestinal illness and which all have one thing in common: they are transmitted primarily in animal products such as poultry and other meats, eggs and milk. Plant products tend to be free of these pathogens unless contaminated by contact with animal products.

One particularly worrisome bug is
Toxoplasma
, a protozoan (one-celled animal) present in 25 percent of pork products, 10 percent of lamb, and many other animal products. Millions of people are infected with
Toxoplasma
with no problem at all, but if a woman acquires toxoplasmosis during pregnancy, her baby is at risk for birth defects such as blindness or brain damage.
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Miscarriage or stillbirth can also occur. People with impaired immune systems, including cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, AIDS patients, and transplant recipients who are on rejection-suppressing medications, can also have serious problems with toxoplasmosis.

Although cats have often been blamed for
Toxoplasma
, only about 1
percent of cats actually pass it in their feces, and this is a result of ingesting another
Toxoplasma
-infected animal. Cleaning the litter box within two to three days removes
Toxoplasma
before they can become infectious. The most common source of
Toxoplasma
is undercooked or raw meat. Thorough cooking destroys the organism but, like salmonella, the problem is cross-contamination. When raw meat touches the kitchen counter or the carving knife,
Toxoplasma
can be transferred to the new surface, where they can survive, waiting to contaminate other foods.
Toxoplasma
can also be transmitted from soil.

What about raw bars or sushi? Don’t even think about them. Bacterial contamination is rampant, particularly in oysters. The Food and Drug Administration estimates that the bacteria
Vibrio vulnificus
are present in 5 to 10 percent of raw shellfish, and there is no way to tell an infected oyster from a clean one.
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Shellfish live in waters that are often polluted with human and animal waste. The result is hepatitis, salmonella, or cholera. Any sushi bar in the world would be perfectly happy to make you vegetarian sushi using cucumber, carrot, or radish instead of raw fish. Take them up on the offer.