Common Health Hazards From The Typical American Diet
I know several people who found out about the significant health hazards in their typical American diet and for that reason alone, they went vegan.
Some did eventually learn about the mistreatment of animals, the risk to the environment, and the damage done to the economy. But, the most important thing to them was health, and I think that's fine.
There are huge benefits to a vegan diet vegan diet, and huge drawbacks to eating diets that include meat, eggs, and dairy products. And, even if you just eat them occasionally, most of those health hazards remain the same.
To start, I want to talk about the weird irony of the food industry...
Almost everyone I know would get a second opinion if they were diagnosed with a serious illness. And all would do something to try to take care of themselves.
So why is it that we don't take the same care with what we put in our bodies? Some people are willing to live with common misconceptions about food and never get a second opinion. Most of us are basically feeding ourselves fatal illnesses and never stopping to think twice.
Feeding ourselves is the most important thing that we do to our bodies for health, and yet, we never question what we have been taught. I believe in the good of our teachers and that they are only giving us the best information they have about nutrition. But, I do have some concerns about the source of our information.
These are not nutritionists putting our public service announcements about the health of milk. The same goes for yogurt commercials saying that it helps people lose weight.
Guess who sponsors the "Beef: It's what's for dinner" campaign? The National Cattleman's Beef Association. How about "Pork: The other white meat"? The National Pork Board. These are commercials put on by the company that wants to sell the product.
Some of the irony of the commercialized food world is discussed in The China Study. Dr. T. Colin Campbell spends most of the book writing about the dangers of animal protein on the human body. It's fascinating.
How about our old standard-- the food guide pyramid. Who do you think puts that together? It's the US Department of Agriculture. Agriculture. They want us to spend money on the things that we produce in the US that make the most profit.
It's just a little suspicious. And, if you never do independent research, this is what you see and hear and take as fact. Milk does a body good, yogurt helps you get into bikini shape, chicken is low-fat, beef is what's for dinner. It's a bunch of nonsense.
I have done a good amount of research on the health hazards of a diet rich in meat and dairy. If you want to do research of your own, a great resource is the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine. I am not a doctor and cannot give as much information as an organization like PCRM or a health diagnosis, so I will summarize my research on the greatest health hazards associated with meat consumption.
High Cholesterol Diets and Heart DiseaseEveryone knows that high cholesterol leads to heart disease and is a health hazard. But did you know that your body makes enough cholesterol for your needs and that you do not need to eat ANY cholesterol to be healthy?
Also, even picking the skin off the chicken and picking lean cuts of meat does not decrease the amount of cholesterol in your food?
The only place cholesterol comes from in nature is animal products. That means fish too! Shellfish is very high in cholesterol. Reducing the amount of cholesterol in your diet makes a drastic difference in your risk for heart attacks.
Another way to reduce risk of heart attack is lower your fat intake. The most important number for measuring fat is the percentage of calories from fat, NOT the fat grams or calories. We should be getting about 10 percent of our calories from
fat. -The leanest beef gets 30% of its calories from fat.
There was an amazing study done by Dr. Dean Ornish that found that heart disease can be reversed without medicine or surgery. In this study he took a group of people with heart disease and divided them into two groups.
The second group followed Dr. Ornish's recommendation-- follow a low-fat (10% of calories from fat), vegetarian diet, as well as decrease the smoking and stress, and increase exercise.
It seems almost unbelievable, but yet, it makes so much sense. If cholesterol is linked to heart problems, and vegans don't eat cholesterol, they will have lower cholesterol levels in their blood and develop fewer coronary artery diseases.
There are studies that look at the foods and cholesterol levels in other countries, and in places where meat and dairy is eaten less, there are lower levels of coronary artery disease. Vegetarians are typically lower than meat eaters, and vegans have lower levels than vegetarians. Cholesterol and heart disease are health hazards. "Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." -- Albert Einstein Cancer of the breast, colorectal, prostate, kidney, and pancreasCancer is another one of the significant health hazards from a diet high in animal products. I think this is much less widely known about than heart disease, but it has been studied extensively.One great study was done on Seventh Day Adventists. In this group, everyone avoids alcohol and tobacco and is generally healthy, but half eat meat and the other half are vegetarian. The vegetarian half of the group was found to have a much lower risk of cancer than the meat eaters. Another study by the World Health Organization found vegetarians to be 40% less likely to develop cancer than meat eaters. A study was done on Japan, where the traditional diet contains less than 10% of its calories from fat. Not surprisingly, breast cancer levels are traditional very low in Japan. However, when someone is more affluent and eats more meat, or when a Japanese girl moves to the US and adopts a typical American diet where about 30-35% of calories are from fat, they are more likely to develop breast cancer. Additional studies have found that reducing the amount of animal products you eat lowers your risk for breast cancer later in life. With colorectal cancer, a large contributing factor seems to be the daily consumption of 2-3 ounces of red meat (like beef, pork, and lamb.) That means if you eat a hamburger a day, or 1 oz of cold cuts 5-6 times a week for men and 2-3 times a week for females, you are at a higher risk for colorectal cancer. Even if you eat white meat, you have about 3 times the risk of colon cancer as a vegetarian. The same pattern is true of prostate, pancreatic, and kidney cancer as well. Studies show an association between red meat consumption and prostate cancer risk. Men who eat 5 servings of meat a week are about 2.5 times as likely to develop prostate cancer as men who eat it less than once a week. It is also found that reducing or eliminating meat reduces the risk for prostate cancer. There are many reasons that cancer is associate with meat. First, it has no dietary fiber, which helps food pass through the body and aids in digestion in the intestine. Second, eating the fat in meat increases the production of hormones, which can increase cancer cell development. And also, it is found that heating meat to a very high temperature creates carcinogens in the meat, health hazards which are linked to cancer. Diabetes and Diet
Another of the health hazards from eating a large amount of meat is diabetes. This is a very interesting finding because normally diabetes prevention is focused on sugar and carbohydrate levels. It has been found that when people reduce those level, their fat intake tends to be higher, and fat makes it harder for insulin to help get glucose into the body.Studies have found that diabetes patients who adopt a low-fat vegetarian or vegan diet are able to lose weight, lower their hemoglobin levels, and reduce or end their medications. Adults who have type 2 diabetes can sometimes permanently eliminate their medicines, and people with type 1 diabetes will still need insulin, although it can be reduced with a healthy vegan diet and exercise. ArthritisMany studies have found that some forms of arthritis are actually influenced by diet. People have found that dairy leads to rheumatoid arthritis, and that by eliminating them, they can eliminate their arthritis symptoms.Dr. Neal Barnard wrote a great book on a four-week anti-arthritis diet called Foods That Fight Pain that shows how to avoid these health hazards. Osteoporosis and MilkI was always taught that little girls who drank lots and lots of milk grew up to be strong, tall women. In fact, while it is helpful to increase the calcium we eat, it is also important to reduce our calcium losses. Calcium loss happens partially because of genetics, but also because of the food we eat. The amount of protein we get from animals, salt and caffeine have a large impact on calcium loss. The other factors are lack of exercise, smoking, and not getting enough sun.Milk has animal protein, and so it actually takes calcium from the bones, making it harder for our bodies to absorb calcium. The more animal protein you eat, the harder it is to get your calcium needs. Sodium makes calcium to pass through to the kidneys and caffeine causes the loss of water and calcium. Smokers have a higher chance of bone fractures. Active people retain calcium better. And Vitamin D from the sun controls the efficiency of your calcium absorption. The best calcium sources are green leafy vegetables like collards, kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and turnip greens, and beans like pinto, black-eyes peas, navy beans, and tofu.
Alzheimer's DiseaseEven some neurological diseases like Alzheimer's are shown to be related to diet. Though much of the blame for the cause of Alzheimer's is genetic, studies show that people who eat large amounts of cholesterol, saturated fats, and calories and not much fiber, vegetables, or fruit have a higher incidence of the disease. And, people who eat the highest amount of vegetables, fruits, and fiber decline in mental capacity much slower.Health Hazards From Eating Factory Farmed AnimalsThe other health hazards from eating meat come directly from their farming practices. The animals are treated with high levels of antibiotics to prevent illnesses from the poor living conditions in their stalls. These antibiotics lodge themselves in the animals' muscles and cells, and are transfered to humans when we eat them. Then our bodies create a resistance to those antibiotics so that if we needed to take them, they would not cure the disease.The animals are also fed high amounts of food treated with pesticides and fertilizers, which we directly ingest when eating the animal. About 70% of the fertilizers in the US are used for agriculture, not for planting our gardens. Pesticides and fertilizers in our food are a huge health hazard. Also, because the slaughterhouses need to process a huge amount of meat very quickly in order to make a profit, the entire slaughtering process has been sped up. By doing this, there is less time to make accurate cuts, and accidents happen, creating significant health hazards.
Often an animal's intestines are accidentally cut open, and the leaks put the meat at serious risk for diseases like salmonella and E-Coli. There is even an E-Coli that is resistant to antibiotics and is deadly. These food-borne illnesses create a huge health hazard for humans.
There are inspectors for these slaughterhouses, but with the number of places to inspect and the amount of food processed every day, they are on pace to inspect every slaughterhouse every 100 years. There is not enough inspection. Other serious illnesses and health hazards are sure to develop with the amount of bacteria that is on the meat we eat and with our antibiotic-resistance.
Mad-cow disease is another concern from factory farming. It was started when farmers tried to use dead animals crushed in the animal feed to stretch their dollar. Obviously these animals are herbivores and were never meant to eat meat, let alone their own species, and this cannibalism created a massive disease epidemic. Mad-cow disease takes years to develop, and we may soon see that many more people were affected by it than originally believed.
The other huge health hazard from factory farming is the affect on the environment. The pollution of our waterways, land, and air has and will continue to have an enormous affect on the population's health.
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The "Got Milk?" campaigns are sponsored by The Milk Processor Education Program and the Dairy Management Inc. What I think we sometimes forget is that "Got Milk?" is a commercial. Commercials sell things to us.
The first group followed the common medical recommendations-- moderate diet changes like cutting skin off chicken and eating fish, as well as decreased smoking and exercise. This group had the common reactions-- they complained about having to change their diet, but did not improve over time.
These patients did complain at first about changing their diets, but then noticed immediate improvement. Their cholesterol levels dropped, the chest pain went away, they lost weight, and after a year, Dr. Ornish found that 82% of the patients had reversed their heart disease. And, his patients stuck with the diet in the long-term because they were able to see such noticeable changes.
