Read Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World Online
Authors: Kathy Freston
Tags: #food.cookbooks
Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World (11 page)
2. Not smoking
If you’re not a smoker, congratulate yourself on avoiding a particularly strong risk factor associated with a reduced life span. If you are a smoker, or are in the process of trying to quit, realize that becoming an ex-smoker is one of the best things you can do to extend your life. Researchers at the University of Bristol in England found that each cigarette reduces your life by eleven minutes. Huge bodies of well-established research have conclusively proven the direct link between mortality and smoking. The 1998 book
Dying to Quit
, by Dr. Janet Brigham, a specialist in the effects of tobacco, estimates that a typical smoker may lose as many as twenty-five years of life. Clearly, quitting smoking drastically extends your life, benefitting you and your loved ones.
3. Avoiding (and learning to manage) stress
Stress is yet another aspect of life that, if excessive, can rob you of months or years. Not all stress is bad—in fact, some stress is actually positive and normal. But being constantly stressed means that your nervous system is always on alert, and that is detrimental to your heart, your immune system, and your overall health. Meditate, take walks, talk things through with trusted friends and advisers. Just breathe, and put one foot in front of the other; you will get through.
4. Limiting alcohol consumption
The news on alcohol seems conflicting these days, with one study telling us that a glass of red wine a day may promote health, and others saying that any alcohol is detrimental. What these studies agree on, however, is that anything more than moderate consumption of alcohol decreases our longevity. In women, this may be especially true, as we metabolize alcohol at a slower rate than men do. The CDC suggests that for women moderate drinking is no more than one drink per day, for men no more than two.
Too much alcohol intake is correlated with many destructive things: an increased risk of accidents and/or unintended injuries, cirrhosis of the liver, high blood pressure, and some cancers, including liver, mouth, throat, larynx, and esophageal cancers.
Conclusion
As we’ve seen, it’s harder to find a common deadly disease that
isn’t
linked in some way to diet. With the abundance of advice out there on extending your life, it’s easy to be confused. But consider that a plant-based diet is so clearly linked to a better and longer life that even the American Dietetic Association, which requires overwhelming scientific evidence, has endorsed it as helping to reduce risks for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity. Adopting a whole new, plant-based set of rules for eating could be one of the most dramatic, life-extending changes you’ll ever make. As Dr. Ornish explains, “I find it gratifying to know that when people make the diet and lifestyle changes I recommend, they not only lose weight but also improve their health and well-being.”
And now, the story of one of my heroes.
Ruth Heidrich, PhD, is the very definition of living long and well. At seventy-five years old, she has been running every day for more than forty years, and has been a vegan for almost thirty years. She credits her veganism both for her formidable intellect—she has her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology, her PhD in health education, and has lectured across the country, from Stanford to Cornell—and for her excellent health. She has won eight gold medals in the Senior Olympics, has completed six Ironman Triathlons, and has set age-group records in every distance from the 100-meter dash to the 5K road race to ultramarathon, pentathlon, and triathlon.
Ruth Heidrich’s Story:
You Can Be Fit at Any Age
My awakening to the harm of dairy and meat came in middle age, almost thirty years ago. I was forty-seven years old and healthy—or so I thought. Like so many athletes of my generation, I ate lots of chicken, fish, and low-fat dairy.
While in the shower one morning, I found a lump in my right breast. My doctor thought cancer unlikely, but scheduled a mammogram, to rule it out, he said. I was, as you can imagine, delighted when the results came back negative; to be safe, I was encouraged to schedule annual mammograms, which I did. For the next two years, the results were negative.
That third year, though, my life was turned upside down: positive. And not just positive, but the lump was now golf-ball size. The doctor did an immediate excisional biopsy (meaning that he intended to remove the entire lump) and found that it was infiltrating ductal cancer, an invasive cancer that was already spreading to my bones, liver, and left lung. And because there were no clear margins, meaning they didn’t get it all, I had to go back for more surgery.
My doctor, as well as other doctors I consulted, recommended standard cancer care—chemotherapy, radiation, tamoxifen. I wanted answers, but all I had were questions and uncertainty. No one could tell me if I had months to live, or years. They couldn’t tell me if I might send the cancer into remission, or anything else. I felt totally powerless.
And even more: I felt betrayed. I was an athlete. I stayed away from high-fat foods and junk food. I ate a lot of chicken, fish, and low-fat dairy. How could this happen to me?
As I pondered chemotherapy, radiation, and so on—I got more and more scared. I read that people on chemotherapy didn’t necessarily live for longer than people who didn’t have chemotherapy. But by then I had resigned myself to it.
By the wildest of coincidences, I came across an advertisement for a research study that Dr. John McDougall was conducting with breast cancer patients. My first consultation with Dr. McDougall was revelatory. I’ll never forget the first thing he said to me after he reviewed my record—that my cholesterol level of 236 put me at a risk of heart attack that was on par with my risk of dying from my cancer.
Dr. McDougall encouraged me to change my diet, noting that ample research had shown (and the evidence is much stronger now) that diet is linked to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and a host of other ailments. In fact, making the dietary change was a condition of my being a subject in his study. Remarkably to me as one who grew up with “the four food groups,” his biggest recommendation was the elimination of animal products, which constituted two of the four groups (and about half of what I was eating).
Once Dr. McDougall showed me the science, and explained the power of the research—especially about diet and cholesterol level—I was convinced. I adopted a vegan diet—and became a subject in his research study—that very day.
I know that some people find a vegan diet difficult to follow, but I can’t understand how or why. For me, the diet opened me up to a range of foods that I had previously ignored. My old diet was centered on four animals, with everything else only making up “sides,” that now strikes me as narrow and boring. My new vegan diet was exciting, colorful, and much more varied than my previous diet.
Anyway, my body responded immediately. And I do mean immediately: From that point on, I’ve had daily bowel movements—I had been constipated my entire life and had no idea why. Doctors had told me that going three or four times per week is normal for some people; maybe in a meat-based culture, but once you adopt a vegan diet and begin to go every day (sometimes repeatedly, especially if you’re athletic and thus eat a lot), you realize that for the entirety of your pre-vegan life, you’ve been incubating rotting food for days at a time. You felt lethargic, heavy—and didn’t even know why.
My oncologist assured me that my diet and cancer were unrelated, but I’d seen so much evidence linking diet and cancer that I didn’t think he could possibly be correct. Since that time, I’ve read much more, studied the evidence, and I now understand that chicken and fish are at least as carcinogenic as beef and pork; they have more animal protein than beef and pork, and animal protein is the key carcinogenic agent, as anyone who has read Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s work will understand.
Remarkably, the cancer had reversed and stopped growing, and my excruciating bone pain went away. It’s been twenty-eight years, and I have not experienced another cancer flare-up. My reading of T. Colin Campbell’s work convinces me that my diet stopped my cancer. I have no other explanation—and neither did my oncologist.
I can’t remember how and when, but as I was going through the emotional and physical turmoil of grappling with cancer, I happened to see the Ironman Triathlon on television. I can’t recall just what my thinking was—looking back on it, I can’t begin to understand why I thought this would be a good idea—but somehow, I decided I had to do it. I’d been an athlete up until this time, and I knew I could handle the running. So really, I thought, why not tack on a 2.4 mile swim and 112-mile bike ride?
Obviously, my cancer and cholesterol level gave me pause. And my age gave me even more pause—could a late-forties cancer survivor really complete this ultratriathlon, said to be one of the most grueling races in the world, done only by crazies? But I’d been devouring information on diet and health, and I was convinced that a vegan diet was the healthiest one imaginable, and that it would power me through. Regardless, I wanted to try; if it worked, I’d be able to tell everyone I met that my diet not only beat back my cancer, but it gave me the energy to compete in one of the toughest imaginable physical endeavors.
Since my diagnosis in 1982, I have completed the Ironman event six times, setting age-group records in the process. I’ve run sixty-seven marathons, and I’ve won nearly 1,000 gold medals (including eight in the Senior Olympics). And I’ve been declared by
Living Fit
magazine to be “one of the ten fittest women in North America.” I have a fitness age of thirty-two.
In addition to the fact that I feel spectacular and have boundless energy on my vegan diet, I also want to briefly discuss osteoporosis. I have a history of this bone-degenerating disease on both sides of my family, so I’ve paid attention to it. What I have learned from the scientific studies is that the best way to prevent osteoporosis—by far—is to exercise. I wasn’t surprised to learn, but am pleased to say that from the age of forty-seven to age sixty-four, my bone density increased significantly with each test—it’s because of all the exercise I get.
Additionally, the arthritis that developed in my thirties vanished, and I was able to stop taking Naprosyn, the drug that doctors told me I’d be taking for the rest of my life. My joints today not only are not arthritic, but I actually do my own daily mini-triathlon as part of my regular training.
As someone who is so deeply convinced both that bad diets can kill us and that good diets can keep us healthy, I’ve been dispirited by the deafening silence of the medical community to the overwhelming scientific evidence in support of the work of Dr. Mc Dougall, Dr. Esselstyn, Dr. Campbell, and others. I am pleased that Dr. Mehmet Oz has become famous preaching the diet gospel, but the information has yet to get to the masses.
And that’s why I tell my story to everyone who will listen—because I think that if the world understood the link between diet and health, as well as how tasty and exciting vegan eating can be, there would be a food revolution… tomorrow.
You might want to check out some of Dr. John McDougall’s best-selling books; they are extremely helpful and informative. He’s a physician whose focus is healing the body through vegetarian cuisine, and he has many success stories that support his research. Dr. McDougall also has a ten-day residential program designed to turn your health around and give you a new program for eating and living. I highly recommend checking out his website for more information: www.drmcdougall.com.
ROMISE
4:
You Will Take Yourself Out of Harm’s Way
Did you know?
- All food poisoning—all foodborne viruses, bacteria, and antibiotic-resistant infections—comes from animals, including humans. (Yes, even the bacteria carried on spinach and tomatoes. See below.)
- Over 95 percent of the meat, dairy, and eggs we eat comes from factory farms, where the animals are pumped full of drugs to keep them alive and to speed up their development and productivity. In fact, chickens get twice the antibiotic dosing that cattle do, because the conditions they are raised in are the worst of the worst and therefore require more medicine just to keep them alive long enough to be killed for their meat.
- On average, the immune cells of vegetarians are twice as effective at destroying their targets—not only cancer cells, but virus-infected cells as well—as the immune cells of meat eaters.
- In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control reported finding fecal contamination in 90 percent of poultry, 75 percent of beef, and 43 percent of the pork.
- Dairy cow and pig factories routinely dump millions of gallons of putrefying waste into massive open-air cesspits, which can then contaminate the water used to irrigate our crops. That’s how a deadly fecal pathogen like
E. coli
O157:H7 can end up contaminating our spinach.
I recently came across this truly shocking fact: More people per year die from antibiotic-resistant infections than from prostate and breast cancer combined. And the numbers are going up at an alarming rate.
Why? Why have so many infections become resistant to drugs? Because factory farms are breeding grounds for ever more sophisticated bacteria. And why is that? Because when you try to keep animals in horrifically cramped conditions, literally living in their own waste, they are extremely susceptible to germs, so you have to dose them prophylactically (preventively) with antibiotics to increase their odds of surviving long enough to get fat enough for market. With these antibiotics in such widespread use, there is massive opportunity for resistant strains to emerge and flourish.
We call them superbugs. And we humans are increasingly vulnerable to their antibiotic-resistant ways. Farm animals are also pumped full of antiviral drugs, leading to the emergence of drug-resistant strains of viruses. Combined with the stress of confinement impairing the animals’ immune systems, these farms are perfect incubators for new viruses, which are now mutating like never before and becoming increasingly difficult to control.
I’m no expert on viruses and bacteria, so for this chapter I rely particularly heavily on an interview with someone who is—Michael Greger, MD. I recently read Dr. Greger’s book
Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching
(it can be found free online at www.birdflubook.org), which is about the potential of a deadly flu pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen, and I went directly to him to find out more. In the book, Dr. Greger very clearly delineates how a new virus begins, mutates, and becomes dangerous. And as with so many problems we are seeing lately—water pollution, climate change, you name it—factory-farmed meat seems to be a big part of the cause.
A graduate of the Cornell University School of Agriculture and the Tufts University School of Medicine, Michael Greger serves as the director of public health and animal agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States. His recent articles in the
American Journal of Preventive Medicine
,
Biosecurity and Bioterrorism
,
Critical Reviews in Microbiology
, and
the International Journal of Food Safety, Nutrition, and Public Health
explore the public health implications of industrialized animal agriculture.
According to Dr. Greger, more than 95 percent of the meat, dairy, and eggs we eat comes from factory farms. Not only are dangerous flu viruses mutating because of these concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) but we are also being exposed to some other very serious bacteria and pathogens. The good news is that by eating a plant-based diet, we significantly reduce our risk of exposure and vote with our dollars against a business model that is causing such health havoc.
Straight from the Source: Michael Greger, MD, on Factory Farming and Superbugs
Here’s what Dr. Greger says about the bugs that are germinating now.
KF:
How likely are we to have a bird or swine flu that turns into something really deadly and widespread?
MG:
Unfortunately we don’t know enough about the biology of these viruses to make accurate predictions, but influenza is definitely the disease to keep an eye on. AIDS has killed millions but is only fluid borne. Malaria has killed millions but is relatively restricted to equatorial regions. Flu viruses are the only known pathogen capable of infecting literally billions of people in a matter of months. Right now [early 2010] we are in the midst of a flu pandemic caused by the swine-origin influenza virus H1N1. Tens of millions of people have become infected and thousands of young people have died, but H1N1 is not particularly virulent. There are other flu viruses that have emerged in recent decades such as the highly “pathogenic” (disease-causing) bird flu H5N1 that may have the potential to cause much greater human harm.
KF:
What kind of damage could it do in terms of population mortality?
MG:
Currently H5N1 kills approximately 60 percent of those it infects, so you don’t even get a coin toss chance of survival. That’s a mortality rate on par with some strains of Ebola. Fortunately, only a few hundred people have become infected. Should a virus like H5N1 trigger a pandemic, though, the results could be catastrophic.
During a pandemic as many as 2 or 3 billion people can become infected. A 60 percent mortality rate is simply unimaginable. Unfortunately, it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Both China and Indonesia have reported sporadic outbreaks of the H5N1 bird flu in pigs and sporadic outbreaks of the new pandemic virus H1N1 in pigs as well. Theoretically, if a pig became coinfected with both strains, a hybrid mutant could arise with the human transmissibility of swine flu and the human lethality of bird flu. That’s the kind of nightmare scenario that keeps virologists up at night.
KF:
How does a virus like that kill? What does it do to the body?
MG:
Most often it starts with standard flulike symptoms—fever, cough, and muscle aches. Instead of just infecting the respiratory tract, though, H5N1 may spread throughout the body and infect the brain, for example, leaving victims in a coma. Other early symptoms atypical of regular seasonal flu include vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, chest pain, and bleeding from the nose and gums. Death is usually from acute fulminant respiratory distress, in which one basically drowns in one’s own blood-tinted respiratory secretions.
Most of the damage is actually done by one’s own immune system. H5N1 seems to trigger a “cytokine storm,” an overexuberant immune reaction to the virus. These cytokine chemical messengers set off such a massive inflammatory reaction that on autopsy the lungs of victims may be virus-free, meaning that your body wins, but in burning down the village in order to save it you may not live through the process. Indeed, the reason why young people may be so vulnerable is because they have the strongest immune systems, and it’s your immune system that may kill you.
KF:
How easy is it to contract the virus?
MG:
Catching a pandemic flu virus is essentially as easy as catching the regular seasonal flu. During a flu pandemic about one in five people may fall ill, but there are certainly ways to minimize your risk, by washing your hands and social distancing techniques. In a really severe pandemic, though, the advice would be to “shelter-in-place,” isolating yourself and your family in your home until the danger passes. During such a pandemic the Department of Home-land Security uses as a key planning assumption that the American population would be asked to self-quarantine for up to ninety days per wave of the pandemic.
KF:
Why do we have this potential disaster on our hands?
MG:
The industrialization of the chicken and pork industries is thought to have wrought these unprecedented changes in avian and swine influenza. No one even got sick from bird flu for eight decades before a new strain H5N1 started killing children in 1997. Likewise, in pigs here in the U.S., swine flu was totally stable for eight decades before a pig-bird-human hybrid mutant virus appeared in commercial pig populations in 1998. It was that strain that combined with a Eurasian swine flu virus ten years later to spawn the flu pandemic of 2009, which sickened millions of young people around the world.
The first hybrid mutant swine flu virus discovered in the United States was at a factory farm in North Carolina in which thousands of pregnant sows were confined in “gestation crates,” veal-crate-like metal stalls barely larger than their bodies. These kind of stressful, filthy, overcrowded conditions can provide a breeding ground for the emergence and spread of new diseases.
So far, only thousands of people have died from swine flu. Unless we radically change the way chickens and pigs are raised for food, though, it may only be a matter of time before a catastrophic pandemic arises.
KF:
If factory farms are to blame, why have there been plagues and flus throughout time, when factory farms were not around?
MG:
Before the domestication of birds, about 2,500 years ago, human influenza likely didn’t even exist. Similarly, before the domestication of livestock there were no measles, smallpox, or many other diseases that have plagued humanity since they were born in the barnyard about 10,000 years ago. Once diseases jump the species barrier from the animal kingdom, they can spread independently throughout human populations with tragic consequences.
The worst plague in human history was the 1918 flu pandemic triggered by a bird flu virus that went on to kill upwards of 50 million people. The crowded, stressful, unhygienic trench warfare conditions during World War I that led to the emergence of the 1918 virus are replicated today in nearly every industrial chicken shed and egg operation. Instead of millions of vulnerable hosts to evolve within back then, we now have
billions
of chickens intensively confined in factory farms, arguably the perfect-storm environment for the emergence and spread of hypervirulent, so-called predator-type viruses like H5N1. The 1918 virus killed about 2.5 percent of the people it infected, twenty times deadlier than the seasonal flu. H5N1 is now killing 60 percent of infected people, twenty times deadlier than the 1918 virus. So if a virus like 1918’s gained easy human transmissibility, it could make the 1918 pandemic—the deadliest plague ever—look like the regular flu.
KF:
Does handling or eating chicken or pork increase a person’s chances of contracting the virus?
MG:
There are certainly lots of viruses people can pick up from handling fresh meat, such as those that cause unpleasant conditions like contagious pustular dermatitis and a well-defined medical condition known as “butcher’s warts.” Even the wives of butchers appear to be at higher risk for cervical cancer, a cancer definitively associated with wart virus exposure.
Cooking can destroy the flu virus, and the same can be said for all the other bugs that sicken 76 million Americans a year. The problem is that people can cross-contaminate kitchen surfaces with fresh or frozen meat before pathogens have been cooked to death. There have been a number of cases of human influenza linked to the consumption of poultry products, but swine flu viruses don’t appear to get into the meat. Regardless, the primary risk is not in the meat, but how meat is produced. Once a new disease is spawned from factory farm conditions it may be able to spread person to person, and at that point animals—live or dead—may be out of the picture.
KF:
How do we stave off the risk?
MG:
We need to give these animals more breathing room. The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which included a former U.S. secretary of agriculture, concluded that industrialized animal agriculture posed “unacceptable” public health risks, and called for gestation crates for pigs to be banned as they’re already doing in Europe, noting that “[p]ractices that restrict natural motion, such as sow gestation crates, induce high levels of stress in the animals and threaten their health, which in turn may threaten human health.”
Studies have shown that measures as simple as providing straw for pigs so they don’t have the immune-crippling stress of living on bare concrete their whole lives can significantly cut down on swine flu transmission rates. Such a minimal act—providing straw—yet we often deny these animals even this modicum of mercy, both to their detriment and, potentially, to ours as well.
The American Public Health Association, the largest organization of public health professionals in the world, has called for a moratorium on factory farms. In fact the APHA journal, the
American Journal of Public Health
, published an editorial that not only called for an end to factory farms, it questioned the prudence of raising so many animals in the first place:
It is curious… that changing the way humans treat animals—most basically, ceasing to eat them or, at the very least, radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten—is largely off the radar as a significant preventive measure. Such a change, if sufficiently adopted or imposed, could still reduce the chances of the much-feared influenza epidemic. It would be even more likely to prevent unknown future diseases that, in the absence of this change, may result from farming animals intensively and from killing them for food. Yet humanity does not consider this option…. Those who consume animals not only harm those animals and endanger themselves, but they also threaten the well-being of other humans who currently or will later inhabit the planet…. [I]t is time for humans to remove their heads from the sand and recognize the risk to themselves that can arise from their maltreatment of other species.
