Skinny Bitch (4 page)

When our bodies get too acidic, we are much more prone to illness. Sometimes, we don’t even know we’re sick until it’s too late.

But we can notice mild maladies, like skin problems, allergies, headaches, colds, or yeast infections. Or, we can experience major trauma—severe damage to our thyroid gland, liver, and adrenal glands. If our pH balance becomes too acidic, our bodies will react to protect themselves. To neutralize the acid, they will take alkalizing minerals from our reserves. If our reserves are low, the body will withdraw minerals from our bones and muscles.38 If that doesn’t scare you, consider this: It is commonly believed that cancer cells thrive in acid environments.39

Now, logically, you would think that citrus fruits are acidic, but actually, when they enter the body, they are alkalizing. We know this goes against the “use your own head” idea because they seem like they’d be acidic. But they contain potassium and calcium, which are alkalizing minerals. They also have a high percentage of alkaline salts. Nearly all fruits, vegetables, and legumes are alkaline when they enter the body.40 Other alkalizing foods are sea vegetables, miso, soybeans, and tofu.

Fruit, good. Natural sweeteners, good. Refined sugars, bad.

Artificial sweeteners, bad. Any questions?

Chapter 4

The Dead, Rotting,

Decomposing Flesh Diet

The Atkins diet. Hmm. Eat the flesh of dead cows, dead pigs, and dead chickens. Avoid fresh fruit. You are a total moron if you think the Atkins diet will make you thin. Or, you are a gluttonous pig who wants to believe you can eat cheeseburgers all day long and lose weight. Perhaps you weren’t listening the first time: You need to get healthy if you want to be skinny! Eating carcasses all day while avoiding fruit is a recipe for disaster. Of course, if you stop eating refined carbohydrates, you will lose weight. That’s the part of the Atkins Diet that actually works. However, most of the weight you lose is water weight. You see, when our bodies metabolize protein (found in high amounts in meat and dairy), nitrogen waste is released in the form of urea. Urea is toxic and must be passed out of the body through urine. So the high-protein diet isn’t ridding your body of fat. It’s just serving as a diuretic—making you pee more to flush out the toxic urea.41 But whether you lose this piss weight initially is inconsequential. You will be a fat, unhealthy, bloated pig if you live this way.

Trendy diets like Atkins become popular for one reason: They hide behind scientific jargon that
seems
to make sense and allow you to eat unhealthy, fattening foods as long as you avoid carbs.

You believe in these diets because you want to. Most Americans eat twice as much protein as necessary, which has sent obesity, heart disease, and cancer rates soaring over the past fifty years.

When you eat large amounts of animal protein and saturated fats and do not eat whole grains, vegetables, and fresh fruits, there is no fiber to bind all of the toxins and fat together to be eliminated from your body. You will eventually do an incredible amount of harm to yourself. Your poor kidneys are in serious jeopardy of developing stones, aging prematurely, and failing altogether. They must work twice as hard to break down protein and remove waste.

By the time your blood shows the effects, it will be too late to reverse the damage. Diabetics are in even worse trouble with a high-protein diet because they are already at a higher risk of kidney disease to begin with. In a study involving 1,500 patients with diabetes, most had lost more than half of their kidney function because of a high intake of animal protein.42 Don’t care about your kidneys and just want to lose weight? The American Cancer Society conducted a study over a ten-year period with nearly 80,000 people trying to lose weight. Participants who ate meat three times a week or more gained substantially more weight than participants who avoided meat and consumed more vegetables.43

Studies published in
The Journal of Clinical Nutrition and The New
England Journal of Medicine
stated that meat eaters are much more likely to be overweight than vegetarians.44

Before you start spouting off information you’ve been brainwashed with about evolution and the food chain, read on. Yes, humans have a high level of intelligence. Yes, we created weapons for hunting and fire for cooking. Yes, we found a way to mass-produce animals for consumption. However, if you study animals in the wild, you will note that they do not rely on anything other than their natural hunting ability, speed, strength, claws, teeth, and jaws. They have no tools or weapons. Now look at yourself. Look at your flimsy fingernails in comparison to an eagle’s talons. Look at your flat, blunt teeth compared to a lion’s fangs. Compare your speed and agility to that of a tiger. Compare the strength of your jaw to a wolf’s. Imagine yourself trying to run after an animal, catch it, and kill it using your bare hands, fingernails, teeth, and jaws. Not only would you look ridiculous, but you’d probably get your ass kicked, too. And even if you were successful, envision yourself eating the kill without the aid of an oven and silverware.45 Yes, the human brain allows us to stay removed from the process of hunting. But does this mean we are “evolved” and “intelligent” and should be eating animal flesh just because we can? Man’s “intelligence” also created alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. Should we drink, smoke, and use just because we can?

Many meat eaters credit eating meat for our evolution from cavemen into what we are now. Even if this were the case and eating meat did help us to evolve, look at what we evolved
from
. We looked liked friggin’ apes and had massive heads, strong jaws, and brute strength. Maybe back then we were supposed to eat meat.

But the last time we checked, we aren’t cavemen anymore.

The second we put food in our mouths, the digestion process begins, thanks to our saliva. Guess what? Our alkaline saliva is not meant to break down animal flesh; carnivores have acid saliva, perfectly designed for the task. And hydrochloric acid, essential for digesting carcass, is secreted in very small amounts in our stomachs.

However, the stomachs of carnivores have ten times more hydrochloric acid than ours. Our enzymes, digestive tracts, and organs are all different from those found in carnivores. Like it or not, our kidneys, colon, and liver are ill-equipped to process animal flesh. Compared to carnivores, our intestines are very long, so food that doesn’t get adequately processed becomes clogged in our intestines. Animals quickly pass food through their digestive systems, but we have food rotting, decomposing, and fermenting in our intestinal tracts and colons, hence the need for colonics (aka: enemas). You don’t see many tigers getting colonics, do you? You do see them napping, though. Even though their bodies are designed to digest meat, animals generally sleep all day while doing so because it is such a taxing process. Genetically and structurally, we are designed to thrive on plant foods.46 Whether it is “lean meat” or a “skinless chicken breast,” animal fat is still animal fat.

Don’t be fooled by terms coined by the meat industry. Your body can’t handle animal fat, so it settles like lumpy shit all over your ass, thighs, sides, arms, and stomach.

And then there are the gross, stomach-turning realities of the meat-production industry.

Of the ten billion animals slaughtered each year in America for human consumption, the vast majority of them come from factory farms. Factory farms that raise cattle, pigs, chickens, egg-laying hens, veal calves, or dairy cows have an enormous amount of animals in a very small space. There are no vast meadows or lush, green pastures. The animals are confined inside buildings, where they are literally packed in on top of each other. Egg-laying hens are crammed into cages so small, they are unable to open their wings, and their mangled feet actually grow around the wire mesh floors. This overcrowded, stressful environment causes chickens to peck at each other and factory farm workers, so the ends of their beaks are seared off their faces using a hot knife. Pigs and cows are imprisoned in stalls so small, they are unable to turn around or lie down comfortably. Cattle are subject to third-degree branding burns and having their testicles and horns ripped out. Pigs also suffer from branding and castration, in addition to the mutilation of their ears, tails, and teeth. They all live in the filth of their own urine, feces, and vomit with infected, festering sores and wounds.

To keep animals alive in these unsanitary conditions, farmers must give them regular doses of antibiotics.

Half of all the antibiotics made in the United States each year are administered to farm animals, causing antibiotic resistance in the humans who eat them.47 A study at the University of California-Berkeley linked eating beef to urinary tract infections (UTIs) in women. It just so happens that the most common infectious disease in women is UTIs.48 You do the math.

For shits and giggles, we’ve compiled a partial list of what’s in meat, poultry, seafood, and dairy: benzene hexachloride (BHC), chlordane, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), dieldrin, dioxin, heptachlor, hexachlorobenzene (HCB), and lindane.49 Perhaps that’s why eating “meat” has been linked to obesity; cancer; liver, kidney, lung, and reproductive disorders; birth defects; miscarriages; and nervous system disorders.50 American farmers started using chemical pesticides in the late 1800s and were initially thrilled with the results.

However, it was eventually noticed that pesticides were killing those who were most exposed to them: farmers, field workers, and animals.

In 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT.51 But the pesticides that followed were even worse. BHC is 19 times more carcinogenic than DDT, chlordane 4 times more, dieldrin 47 to 85 times more, HCB 23 times more, and heptachlor 15 to 30 times more.

By the late 1980s, of the 450 endangered animal species, more than half were threatened with extinction. The government finally called for a ban on the production and use of other pesticides. But this didn’t stop these pesticides from reaching our food supply. Companies were allowed to use up their enormous stockpiles of these pesticides by selling them to countries outside of America. (Apparently, it was acceptable to poison people and animals as long as they weren’t American.) These countries used the pesticides on their crops, which were then imported into the United States.52 Brilliant, huh? And, banned or not, once they have entered the soil or water, pesticides can still poison for decades.53

One widely used herbicide, glufosinate, whose residues have been found in U.S. waters and food supplies, causes hormonal and brain damage.54 In his book,
Diet for a Poisoned Planet,
David Steinman reports that of all the toxic chemicals found in food, 95 to 99 percent come from meat, fish, dairy, and eggs.55 He also reveals that many of the tests performed don’t even detect many chemicals and pesticides. The Food and Drug Administration’s own Total Diet Study found that bacon had 48 different pesticide residues, bologna and other luncheon meats had 102 different industrial pol-lutants and pesticides, fast food hamburgers had 113 residues, hot dogs had 123, and ground beef had 82 industrial chemical and pesticide residues, just to name a few.56 In comparison, meat contains 14 times more pesticides than plant foods, and dairy has 5 times more pesticides than plant foods. The United States alone uses
one
billion pounds
of pesticides every year on our food. That, our pathetic contamination sampling process, and our use of growth hormones has caused the European Economic Community to reject our meat exportations on numerous occasions.57

Many animals are even given arsenic-laced drugs.58 Arsenic!

Chemical pesticides are often sprayed directly onto the skin of animals to ward off parasites, insects, rodents, and fungi. In addition, these animals are given food treated with pesticides. On factory farms, bigger is better. More meat, milk, and eggs mean more money for the farmers. So to grow them larger or have them produce more, animals are given steroids and growth hormones. But what is happening to the people who eat these fattened animals?

Young girls are experiencing an early onset of puberty at epidemic proportions. Many scientists attribute this to all of the hormones in chicken, meat, and milk that are forced upon children. Basically, every time you consume factory-farmed chicken, beef, veal, pork, eggs, or dairy, you are eating antibiotics, pesticides, steroids, and hormones. This is worth repeating:
Every time you consume factory-farmed chicken, beef, veal, pork, eggs, or dairy, you are eating
antibiotics, pesticides, steroids, and hormones.

Now you might be thinking, “Who cares about all this pesticide-cancer shit? I just want to get skinny!” Ever been on The Pill and gained weight? Ever gained weight from having fertility treat-ments? Well, eating animals that are given hormones has the same effect as if you were taking these directly. According to Dr. Paula Baillie-Hamilton, author of
The Body Restoration Plan,
antibiotics alone can account for weight gain in animals.59 She also states that the toxic chemicals used in food production are fattening. Whether it’s the pesticides used for growing crops or the chemicals given to animals to fatten them up, they alter the body’s metabolism in a way that causes weight gain. Having studied animals and humans, she discovered that low doses of toxic chemicals increased appetite, slowed metabolism, decreased ability to burn stored fat, and reduced ability to exercise.60 The FDA lists approximately 1,700 drugs approved for use in animal feed. Of these approved drugs, approximately 300 include “weight gain” in their description.61