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Meat & Protein:Dispelling the Myths


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Meat & Protein:

Dispelling the Myths (Part 1)

Transcript of Gary Null's Radio Show

 

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Note: The information on this website is presented for educational purposes only.

It is not a substitute for the advice of a qualified professional.

 

GARY NULL: I'd like to welcome you to this program. Today part one of an original in depth investigative report: Meat, Protein, and Unraveling the Myths. Most people claim that we live in a violent world, but they are not violent. Do you believe that there is a violence connected to things that we are not directly imparting to another person or an animal? Let me give you an example. Does that make you violent if what you're doing or consuming was in itself violence against another? Imagine for a moment being hung up and unable to move because your body has been paralyzed by an electric shock. Then while you're still conscious your throat is cut. This is how 15 million pigs die each year along with the other cattle that are over 214 million. Now you may not be concerned about pigs because of the stereotypes that we carry around with us, but pigs are intelligent. They're sensitive and highly social animals. They are functionally equivalent to human infants in both intelligence and capacity to suffer.

 

Before pigs have their throats slit, it's called sticking. They are stunned electrically by placing tongs on either side of the neck behind their ears, but in most cases the stunning is inadequate because they're not held in place for long enough or they're incorrectly placed. The voltages used are insufficient so many pigs remain fully conscious during the bleeding out or even before throat slitting. Thus the animal dies an agonized and terrified death. Tries to escape. Is frequently beaten, kicked, punched, hammered until it finally falls into submission. Still conscious and still aware that it's being killed. Now the question is add into that equation - that's just one - one pig - how about 214 million cattle and calves, 615 million hogs, 377 million lambs and sheep, 128 million goats, nine million horses, 19 million metric tons of birds. That's how many animals are killed in the world in a single recent year.

 

In the United States alone 140 million cows, calves, sheep, lambs, and pigs and three and a half billion chickens and turkeys are slaughtered every year. In the 70-year lifetime, the average American eats 11 cows, one calf, three lambs, 23 hogs, 45 turkeys, and 1,097 chickens, and 861 pounds of fish. Some would say that the wanton slaughter of animals in such large numbers gives us an idea just about how violent our world is and specifically people who consume that are. That is what we have become. We have very little regard for life unless it's our own. Many people that eat meat probably profess to like animals, but believe that if it were really possible to prove that they could have a healthy body without having meat there surely would be more incentive to do so. They kind of look at vegetarians and say well. I'm not sure that that is scientifically based. As a result, they don't make the change.

 

Can they really like animals though knowing the suffering and pain inflicted on them by their chosen dietary habits? Or do we care? When we sit at a restaurant and have a veal Parmesan we don't look at the little calf that's been taken from its mother. Put 24 hours a day in a tiny little iron and concrete cage with no room to turn around and intentionally creating anemia to create a white flesh. So the person who gets it at their dinner table says I like the way that looks. I like the way it tastes. But walk down one of the veal rows as I have and put out your hand and all they do is come over wanting to lick your hand, suckle your finger. They have been taken away before they were even weaned. They still have a desire to be with their mothers, and that's what we're eating.

 

Now here's a question. Is there an ethic? Is there a moral responsibility to ask more questions and become more involved to see if we have been for too long consuming these animals with the idea that it's the best or only primary source of complete protein? This program is going to delve in great depth into the entire industry into all the different aspects of why we're eating. Can we be healthy without eating meat or animal proteins at all? How can we redefine a true reverence for life, all life? When we examine the food sources how big a problem is world hunger because of our consumption of our meat? There is a connection. The protein myths will be explored in some depth.

 

In July of 2002 Olivia Rodriguez fidgeted as the monitors at the head of her bed beeped and tubes fed into her arms. She had eaten a meatball, but the meatball was made with ground beef contaminated with E. coli, O157H7, and it was torturing little Olivia's insides. Many others suffered from eating meat that might have come from the same place. One hallucinated that flies were coming through the walls. Another little boy collapsed onto a bathroom floor a blood filled toilet nearby. He screamed in pain all the way to Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center in Denver. Doctors told his parents that Alex nearly died because his platelet count was so dangerously low. "It was almost surreal. It was so awful. You can't even fathom that a little four year old could die because he ate a hamburger," said his father. A recall of 354,000 pounds of contaminated meat from Con Agra Plant in Greeley came too late. Like most recalls across the country much of the meat had already been eaten.

 

Gail Eisnitz was recently the author of a book entitled "Slaughterhouse," which promoted the following remarks in a review by Lawrence Carter Long for The Animal Protection Institute. "'A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.' That was from Franz Kafka decades ago. A line that could serve just as well as the book jacket and endorsement for Gail's Slaughterhouse book. Her expose of the meat industry shocks us into realizing the horror that exists largely unseen around us, and helps us realize that the impact of the meat industry is felt everywhere from elementary classrooms to government offices to feed lots to courtrooms. The E. coli deaths recently in the news substantiate the evidence of her documents. Can anyone least of all meat eaters still believe that the United States has an adequate meat inspection system?" Through anecdotes and interviews with USDA inspectors, slaughterhouse workers, undercover investigators, and other industry insiders we have seen there are disturbing indifferences displayed by the meat industry not only toward animal suffering, but also toward the exploitation of its human workers and toward a product that puts its customers at risk through exposing it to life threatening bacteria. Emotional where it needs to be Slaughterhouse is a thoroughly researched and powerfully damning indictment."

 

One that I would certainly suggest people read, and then go way back. Go to the library and pull out Upton Sinclair's book written in 1906 called "The Jungle." You want to turn your stomach. You want to see what inspired some improved laws to govern the meat industry, but woefully inadequate for what we have today. On January 17, 1961 in his farewell speech to the nation, President Eisenhower warned of the destructive potential of the eminent military industrial complex. As the '60s unfolded his prophecy materialized as a gigantic arms dealing and war making corporation, which killed thousands of American's youth and millions of citizens in Southeast Asia. It has taken decades for Americans to begin to acknowledge the direct havoc on our nation and the sizable portion of the planet's been adversely affected.

 

Ten years after Eisenhower proved precedent another warning slipped on to the public radar. A small voice from vegetarians and ecologists pointed to the new meat industrial complex as a formidable national threat. Accused it of feeding human greed by killing living beings and destroying their environment. However unlike its predecessor this complex did not wait for wars or other diplomatic failures. Driven by grain surpluses, government subsidies, deceptive promotional practices and consumer apathy it carried out its deadly mission every minute of every day of every year. Butchering nine billion cows, pigs, turkeys, chickens, and other innocent animals for human consumption.

 

It ignored the gathering scientific evidence that linked heart failure, cancer, stroke, and other chronic diseases to the consumption of these animals. It had no inkling of the absurd scenario where millions of other animals were abused and sacrificed in a vain search for a magic pill that would relieve its customers of largely self-inflicted diseases. As the decades passed since the '70s we have begun to recognize that the meat industrial complex poisons the lands and waters with pesticides, fertilizers, and other toxic substances. It depletes irreplaceable topsoil, ground water, and other critical food production resources. It wipes out forests and decimates wildlife in its habitats.

 

Let's take a look at the genesis of the meat industrial complex and its protein theories. The meat industrial complex remains what the phrase suggests: a power, a leviathan that seems impervious to public concerns and constraints. So perhaps we should retrace the evolution of this late 20th century plague to get our bearings on the lethal social menace. The popularity of meat and other animal proteins in the United States diet can be traced back to the early 1940's when the concept of complete and incomplete proteins was popularized. You may even remember being taught this concept in health or science class where you were shown charts of meat and dairy products and eggs and told these were the good complete proteins. Usually the connotation being that complete is equal to what you should have. Then you were shown other foods like vegetables, grains, legumes, and fruits, which you were probably told were the incomplete or bad sources of protein. Now according to the original theory, complete proteins had all the essential eight amino acids in the right proportions while incomplete proteins lacked certain amino acids and did not have them in the right proportions.

 

This theory was music to the ears of the meat and dairy industry who did the original research from behind the scenes supporting all this myth to begin with. It was not long before their products alone began to be advertised in dietetic journals and on television as the right kind of protein. An advertisement for the Armour Beef Company in a 1949 issue of The Journal Of The American Dietetic Association states that fine beef is "a rich source of complete protein and various minerals essential to a normal blood picture and fuel supplying calories, and its satiety value and thorough digestibility make it an important addition to virtually every balanced diet." Well that journal soon became chock full of various ads supporting the meat industry. The American Meat Institute of Chicago for example ran full-page ads resembling scientific reports of the kind usually found in medical journals. This was gearing up to get more meat into the stomach of more Americans. These ads tried to lend scientific credence to the idea that meat was the only great food. Another ad called "meat and the dietary fallacies in the public mind run by The American Meat Institute label the scientific findings on the connections between high dietary uric acid intake and degenerative diseases erroneous." They assured the public that meat did not aggravate such disorders as gout, rheumatism, and hypertension; and furthermore they stated that high protein diets were not harmful. A 1948 ad still advertised meat as "Man's Preferred Complete Protein Food." It stated that, "meat provides protein of biological completeness requiring no protein supplementation from other sources. It instead enhances the nutrient value of the daily diet by supplementing incomplete protein foods to full biological activity."

 

Poultry on the other hand was pushed as being "rich in protein and relatively low in calories." The message became clear. Eat meat or if you want to lose weight eat poultry. This kind of advertising was soon being done by other industries whose foods were protein rich. The Dairy Council for instance held milk as a high protein food especially necessary for children and teens. A 1964 ad paid for by The National Dairy Council pictured carefree teenagers romping on the beach and read, "Teenage Nutrition Protein They Could Care Less." But not to worry. The Dairy Council added that as a prime source of readily available high quality protein milk is particularly well endowed to help meet the unique nutritional needs of teenagers. The American Dietetic Association went so far as to endorse ice cream as a good source of protein. They recommended it particularly for different appetites: the convalescent and the elderly. Ice cream only contains 3.85 grams of protein per 100 grams, but it does contain 12 grams of saturated fat, which as we know can clog arteries.

 

The practice of biased and deceptive advertising by special interest groups still prevails today and even more so. A few years ago the pork industry ran a pro pork campaign. They promoted pork as the lean meat ideal for dieters. They also said that it is a great source of protein despite the fact that pork is high in saturated fat, high in cholesterol, and calories. These ads were seen on television and in magazines like The Journal of The American Dietetic Association. This organization has helped to perpetuate the notion that meat and other animal products are the superior source of complete protein. What is startling about this so-called complete versus incomplete protein theory is that it remained intact and unchallenged for so many years. The proof is that it is wholly a lie. Completely and totally unfounded. No science to back it up. Animal products are only not our own source of protein and aside from the egg they are not even high quality sources of protein. I'll get to that when I talk about the egg project.

 

I was the one who, of course as a scientist at The Institute of Applied Biology, did the original first work in the United States to show that all non-animal foods are also complete proteins and contain all eight essential amino acids. That work done originally in 1978 had difficulty getting published even though it was reviewed and supervised by Dr. Berman and Dr. Hilliard Fitzkee and others. It took 12 years before we could get anyone to publish it because just the concept that an entire nation - all of its scientists, all of its doctors, all of its nurses, all of its dieticians, hundreds of thousands of people had all been wrong in the advice given. And then as a consequence tens of millions of Americans had been sickened and killed by misinformation. It could have been one of the reasons why it took 12 years after being proven repeatedly that there is no such thing as complete or incomplete comparing animal to non-animal. It was all a lie. Even to this day the average dietician, the average physician, the average nurse will still tell you that your best sources of protein are your animal sources of protein. They are wrong. It will take up to 30 years if most scientific history is repeating itself here before the notion of what is good or bad about a particular area of science has changed. The facts are not on their side. They still hold however to the old concept. Modern nutritionists, at least those who have broken from the pact, have abandoned the theory of complete and incomplete proteins, and now are evaluating proteins in terms of quality.

 

Quality is determined using a formula that evaluates the utilization of a protein. Meaning let's say of ten grams protein eaten. How much does a body actually utilize? How much does your cell take in? What amount of that is not utilized? That's what important. It's called net protein utilization or NPU. It tells you how much you actually need in a day of the real good net protein. We also need to take the amino acid content and digestibility of the food into account when assessing it. The highest quality proteins contain the most complete set of essential amino acids, and due to their ideal protein patterns they are utilized with maximum efficiency by the body. The digestibility of the protein containing food is also very important because we cannot thoroughly digest something if we are lacking in enzymes or hydrochloric acid. If we don't thoroughly digest it, then we can't utilize its protein.

 

So think of all the people who are convalescing who are ill and who have improper digestive symptoms, which is a lot of Americans. So when they do eat a hamburger or a hotdog or chicken because of how it's prepared. It's deep-frying. It's difficulty in digesting the amount of fat in it. Those people only get a percentage of the protein in any case, but none of that is considered by the industries giving us the food. They just want us to crave it, and to eat it without any fear of consequence. That's a mistake.

 

While The American Dietetic Association still supports the old theories on protein originated by the meat, poultry, and dairy industries, biochemists and nutritionists from the US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration support the more current view of protein. According to the Food and Human Nutrition Information Center, a division of the US Department of Agriculture, total protein refers to the amino acid composition of a food rather than its completeness. For example animal sources have a higher quality of protein than most individual vegetarian or grain sources. However, the total protein figure for an animal product such as beef is not synonymous with its quality more accurately its net protein utilization. Simply put what matters when you're eating a protein is if it has all the amino acids in the right balance to sustain life, and whether these amino acids are going to be absorbed by you.

 

So with the exception of only a few foods almost all vegetable foods including fruits, grains, legumes, nuts and seeds contain the essential amino acids. Some of them contain very large amounts of these amino acids, and many have very high net protein utilizations. Meaning they contain these essential amino acids in the right proportion that your body needs. There's no question that we need protein. Men need somewhere between 50 and 70 grams a day, and women between 30 and 50 grams a day depending upon what they're doing and if they're pregnant they're going to need more. Lactating more. High-level training more. Recovering from fever or cancer more. But for the average person that's about right. About nine-tenths of a gram per (inaudible) body weight a day. However contrary to what you may have been led to believe, when you decide to obtain that protein it's important you ask yourself where am I getting the protein. It's a matter of personal choice and responsibility, and when I say that I mean this.

 

Today if I decide to have my protein I could have a hamburger or a pork chop or ham sandwich or fried chicken, but to do that I would also have to accept responsibility for the fact that in the eyes, in the heart and the mind of an innocent animal, an animal with intelligence, an animal that if you're around it as I have been you'll see that they are as friendly and smart as your dog and cat and frequently far more smarter. That animal is going to suffer. That animal is going to die. Do I need to connect my life force with that animal's dead force? Not in my case.

 

Recently there was a report of a cow that was in line to be slaughtered. If you've ever been - and I recently filmed and you'll see it on a documentary I'm doing on vegetarianism in the near future. You'll see a whole lot of cattle about 1,000 waiting to go into to be killed. The killing process is not pretty. They are supposed to depending upon if everything goes right be able to kill them so the animal doesn't suffer. I've never seen an animal killed without it suffering. Never once. I defy anyone - anyone - to show me an animal that doesn't suffer.

 

More often than not the animal starts moving around. They see in front of them. They see the other animals being killed, and they try to get out of the confined little chute. They'll try to jump over it, and that's when the guy takes out this ball peen hammer and just starts whacking it in the head and knocks out its eyeball. Knocks out its teeth. It's bleeding. It's screaming. Then two or three guys come and just hold its head down and just keep smashing it in the head until its finally knocked unconscious, and then they'll drag it and put a hook under it and hoist it up and start cutting off its skin. Then suddenly it becomes conscious again. Now it's seeing its skin cut off. It's seeing its organs taking out. This can last a minute to a minute and a half while it's aware that it's being dissected.

 

So ask yourself okay. Have your hamburger. Kosher or not. But are you willing to be out there and killing the animal? If you're not willing to kill the animal and take the spiritual responsibility for taking that life, then what right do you have under any concept to do so? Well that's for each of us to determine our own way. I'm just trying to make you aware. Holding a mirror up as painful as it may be. Think before you eat that next piece of flesh because that's what's going to happen. There must be the suffering, the violence. There must be the highly indiscriminate importation of pain before that animal becomes your meal. In different cultures they have preferences for different animals.

 

In France for some reason they seem to love horsemeat. So horses are killed. The very same horses that Americans love and we have seven million horse owners. Over there it's just another form of protein. Other cultures it is monkeys. They bring a monkey to a table. They open the table up after you've selected the monkey. Then they come and put a corkscrew in its head. Its body is below the table. Its head is in a little hole above the table so it can't get out. So it's watching you as the waiter comes over and puts a corkscrew in. Takes off the top of its head. Now the brain itself doesn't have the pain. Cutting its scalp will cause it pain and it's frightened. It's highly intelligent. Then they start eating its brains and dipping it into sauce. The Chinese love to do that. Those in Bangkok they certainly do it. Then in China, Korea, and in Thailand they'll eat puppies. The things that you love come out of box at Christmas time. Well to them that's lunch. Some other countries they eat other things. But all around the world people who have this idea that there is no moral responsibility for this. But then again they're not the ones suffering.

 

So let's take a look at beyond that suffering and beyond the responsibility for that all with the idea that we're getting our protein by an industry that has lied, manipulated. That has used its advertising power to keep the mainstream media from wanting to even see is it true or not. There are other things that we should be concerned with. Let's start with antibiotics. Those meat lovers who discount the arguments over the protein qualities in meat there's a more sinister problem. Meat is also one of the most chemically treated foods in the US diet. Currently some 20 to 30 thousand different drugs are administered to animals. Of these it is known that 4,000 may be transferred to the human population be it the dairy, the egg, the meat, or the cheese.

 

Most of these drugs because they are initially administered to animals and not humans do not require FDA approval. Even those drugs that are FDA approved are not safe. Antibiotics are perhaps the most widely used and abused of these drugs, and since they were first introduced into animal feed in 1949 the use of antibiotics has grown from 490,000 pounds in 1954 to 1.2 million pounds in 1960. Today it's nine million pounds. The cost of these additives exceeds 300 million dollars annually. These antibiotics are primarily administered to stave off disease that would otherwise be rampant in the closed, highly unsanitary conditions in which meat animals are forced to live.

 

They are fed to veal because these calves are purposely made anemic by iron deprivation in order to yield the white pale meat preferred by many chefs. In this anemic condition the calves are prey to many sorts of infections. Now these highly level of antibiotics have numerous side effects on the people who eat these animals. First of all a bacteria becomes resistant to antibiotics very quickly. It's now recognized that these resistant strains of bacteria can be passed from animal to man, and that they may not be treatable by other antibiotics. Second the antibiotics themselves remain in the animal flesh after it has been slaughtered, and then passed on to the consumer. Over time these drug resistant residues can build up and make your own body resistant to antibiotics when you really need them. So when you need an antibiotic it's not working. Third people who are allergic to antibiotics fed to the animal may suffer from very serious adverse reactions when eating meats full of the drug residues. Just complete that one thought I just realized I didn't complete.

 

So anyhow on this one feedlot one of the cows was so frightened by what it saw of the cow in front of it being slaughtered that it managed rather miraculously so to jump over a five foot retaining wall and hit the ground well below it. Got up and tried to find a door. Ran out a door. Ran out through a lot. Ran across the street. Jumped over a fence and ran out and hid in a thicket. They searched around. Couldn't find the cow. The cow wouldn't move. The cow was hiding. Now think of it. Hiding from what it knew would be its own death. When this got out on the news, and when they found the cow and of course were going to kill it again that's when Peter Max, a unique and very special artist and humanist called and said I'll buy the cow. Well that cow was probably worth about $700, but they charged him I believe $30,000. Exploited the situation, but Peter paid it. Now that cow is living on a farm upstate. One cow saved by one person who really showed his heart. But in the time of a blink of an eye there are another 5,000 cows that don't have that opportunity to be saved.

 

There are other drugs that are widely used on these animals including hormones to regulate breeding, to tranquilize, and to promote weight gain. Now these synthetic hormones can and do cause cancer in the animals given the drugs, which in most cases does not affect the marketability of the meat. So the fact that a cow can have cancer doesn't mean they're going to condemn the cow. They figure just cut out the cancer as if cancer were merely a localized condition, which it is not. It's systemic. We do not yet know the degree to which cancer is viral in its origins, but recent studies have found viruses to be responsible for some cancers. So apart from the unappetizing aspect of eating cancerous meat this meat may actually be the vehicle for cancer viruses to enter our body.

 

Additionally the residues of estrogen one of the hormones commonly fed to these animals may also increase women's chances of contracting uterine and breast cancer. Also children exposed to estrogen may enter puberty prematurely. Androgen, a growth-promoting hormone, may cause liver cancer. Diethylstibestrol (?) hormone, which was banned for human use in 1960's, remained in use in animals until 1979. Other drugs which are used are Ralgrow, an estrogen like compound; Synovax a naturally occurring hormone which affects weight gain and Lutalyse, a prostaglandin often given to an entire herd so that they will ovulate at the same time. Now this drug can affect the menstrual cycle of women. It can also cause pregnant women to miscarry. Cattle are also commonly and frequently sprayed with pesticides such as Vapona, which is in the same family as nerve gas. This is the same chemical used on the no pest strips, and it's considered so toxic that The World Health Organization set the daily allowable limit at .004 milligrams per kilogram. You could exceed this limit by merely staying indoors with one of these strips for nine hours.

 

Unfortunately meat is not the only product, which is filled with chemicals. The chemicals fed to milk cows or are sprayed on them are passed into their milk. Chickens are given the same assortment of drugs that beef cattle are given, which in turn shows up in eggs. Chickens are given additional drugs to promote shell hardness and uniformity of yolks in their eggs. So actually the complete protein found in meat, eggs, poultry, fish and milk can be associated with saturated fat, elevated cholesterol, nitrates, hormones, pesticides, herbicide residues, antibiotics, preservatives, and countless additives.

 

Therefore animal proteins can be worse for you by far than vegetable protein even though the meat industry would have you think otherwise. Unfortunately the US population is towing the meat industry line. On average the individuals in the United States eat about 200 pounds of red meat and 50 pounds of chicken and turkey and 10 pounds of assorted fish and 300 eggs and 250 pounds of various dairy products per year per person. Now consider that that takes into account every single American citizen. I eat none of the above. Babies don't eat any of that. Many senior citizens and vegetarians don't eat that, which means that the people really eating these are eating a lot more.

 

In December of 2002, a hopeful development occurred in Denmark where the results of a ban on antibiotic use in animal feed since 1995 was released by Professor Heinrich Wagner of The Danish Veterinary Institute. It was found that using antibiotics as growth hormones did not boost farm productivity as much as good animal husbandry, which has the added benefit of reducing antibiotic resistance. In a previous landmark study in the early '90s, the professor and his colleagues discovered that bacteria in the animal gut were developing strong resistance to antibiotics. These resistant bacteria were then finding their way into the human population causing infections in hospitals that did not respond to antibiotics and becoming difficult to treat. That research led to a voluntary ban on the use of antibiotic feed in Denmark. Now during the phase out between 1995 and 2000 the agriculture use of antibiotics fell from 210 tons to 96 tons per year. The researchers found that this was followed by a large drop in the incidence of antibiotic resistant bacteria in animals. One strain of resistant bacteria dropped from 80 percent of poultry and 20 percent in pigs to just three percent in both species.

 

Because of these dramatic results, Europe is now considering following Denmark's lead. A meeting of the European Union Agriculture Ministries for later this year will decide whether or not to ban the use of antibiotics in animal feed all together. Meanwhile in the United States antibiotics are a big business when it comes to raising animals. Over one-half of the nation's annual antibiotic production goes to livestock and poultry. Antibiotics for livestock and poultry account for 800 million dollars in annual sales in the major nations of the worlds, and the figure is expected to rise steadily as is the number of medical feed additives now figured to be around 50. The massive wealth being accumulated as a result of this brisk and flourishing enterprise has benefited only a few major companies though. Nearly three-quarters of the feed additive sales in the United States is generated by only three companies: Eli Lilly, American CytoMed, and Pfizer.

 

Let's take a look at the meat inspection. Most people believe that everything they eat has been inspected and therefore must be safe. These are the pillars of the meat industrial complex. They have the clout to prevent proper inspection of their slaughterhouses. For example The US Department of Agriculture was opposed to the passage of the Humane Slaughter Act, but was nevertheless made responsible for its enforcement. However while the intentional violation of the Meat Federal Inspection Act carry stiff fines and imprisonment violations of the Human Slaughter Act carry no penalties at all. When inspectors observe violations of the Humane Slaughter Act they're required to stop the slaughter process until violations are corrected. The threat of these stoppages is supposed to assure an industry compliance with the law since downtime can result in fewer profits for the day. But the inspectors are prevented from properly observing the plants. How so? Well the General Accounting Project's Tom Devine says, "Inspectors who have attempted to stop the production line of a slaughter have been reprimanded, resigned, reassigned, physically attacked by plant employees, and then disciplined for being in fights. Had their performance appraisals lowered. Been placed under criminal investigation. Fired or being subjected to other forms of retaliation that were necessary to neutralize them."

 

Another fact is - I'll quote from this. "Inspectors are required to enforce humane regulations on paper only. Very seldom do they ever go into that area and actually enforce humane handling in slaughter." They can't. They're not allowed to because the inspectors' stations are at the beginning and end of the line, and they aren't allowed to leave their stations. "I'd go to the office," says one man. "I'd go to OSHA, Occupational And Safety Health Administration. I'd say look. You got live hogs here. Number one. People are getting cut. Number two. It's cruel. Meaning living hogs. Those are hogs that weren't anesthetized so they're being butchered alive. No one would take action. I was also the safety representative for the union, and I got lots of complaints about it." Another person says, "They make sure everything is by the book when anybody official visits. Whenever OSHA comes to check on things the stick pit where animals are bled out runs like a jewel. As soon as they're gone it's back to business as usual." Another person, "I asked Mike why the union hadn't brought the humane violations to the USDA's attention. Neither he nor the other local union officials were aware that USDA had any enforcement authority regarding the humane treatment of livestock or that there was a Humane Slaughter Act. No one knew." This was the union representing the people who were doing the slaughtering.

 

What are these inspectors? These were all meat inspectors I just mentioned. Federal inspectors. Well why didn't they get their report out to the public? Here's what an inspector says. There's no way these animals can bleed out in a few minutes. It takes up to that time just to get them up the ramp. By the time they hit the scalding tank they're still fully conscious and squealing, and then they're dumped into boiling hot water. Now you've got them cut, bleeding, and bruised bad. They're thrown into a tank of scalding hot water and they try to get out of it. It could take 15 minutes of them trying to get out of it all the while their body and their skin is peeling off from being boiled." Another says, "Bad sticks when the person who is supposed to be hitting the right vein in the animal's neck sends the blood flowing from the animal's body misses the vein, which is easy. Usually you don't have enough time to bleed out. What do they do? They just take this bleeding animal fully conscious and they drown them by holding them under water in a scalding tank."

 

Think of that for a moment. Think of that the next time you have your regular kosher piece of meat. That animal could have been intentionally drowned in scalding boiling water fully conscious. Do you have a responsibility for the meat that you eat? Then go and drown a screaming terrified cow or pig, and while you're holding it under water and you're looking in its eyes and you're watching it gasp for breath and air. It's 400 degrees. You watch its skin bubbling up. It may take two or three minutes. Ask yourself is your belief so strong that you could kill without any thought of any consequence. Some people no problem at all. Other people they'd have to think about that. Still other people are repulsed by the concept. If you're repulsed by the concept of the vast majority of animals - the vast majority - suffering this way before you have them on your plate, then you should be equally repulsed by your own lack of conviction of pushing it away. Unless you're willing to kill it and take the moral responsibility for killing it, what right do you have to eat it?

 

"Animal abuse is so common that workers who've been in the industry for years get into a state of apathy about it. After a while it doesn't seem unusual anymore. In the wintertime they are always hogs stuck to the sides of the floor freezing on the floors of the truck. They go in there with wires and knives and just cut the skin off and pry the hogs loose with crowbars. The skins pull right off. These hogs were alive when they did this. Animal abuse is so commonplace nobody even thinks about it anymore." That's from an inspector.

 

Another inspector, "One time the knocking gun was broke all day. They were taking a knife and cutting the back of the cow's neck open while he's still standing up. They would just fall down and be shaking, and they then just start stabbing the cow in the butt to try to make him move. They'd break their tails. They'd beat them badly. I've drugged cows until they're bones start breaking while they're still alive." And another one, "Bringing them around the corner they'd get stuck in the doorway. Just pull them until their hide ripped off until the blood just dripped on the steel and concrete. Breaking their legs pulling them in. The cow was crying with its tongue stuck out. They'd pull him until his neck just popped off."

 

"Dragging cattle with a chain and forklift is standard practice at the plant," explained a long-term inspector at a large beef operation in Nebraska. He says, "And that's even after the forklift operator rolled over and crushed the head of one cow while dragging another. They go through the skinning process alive. They'd actually be living. Conscious and being skinned alive. I saw that myself a bunch of times. I found them alive clear over to the rump stand. And that's happened in every plant. I've worked in four large ones and a bunch of small ones. They're all the same. Everybody gets so used to it that it doesn't mean anything. Workers drag cripples with a garden tractor and a chain crunching their bones."

 

I'm Gary Null. Part one of my in depth investigative report on meat and protein. For those of you who have not eaten meat, but you eat chicken consider the following. Science studies of market ready chickens found that campylobacter, which is a very serious bacterium, on up to 82 percent of chickens. In a survey of 50 brand name broilers in Georgia, government researchers found 90 percent contaminated with campylobacter. Even Food Safety Review, the USDA's own publication, reported "heavily contaminated flocks may result in a contamination rate of 100 percent for finished products." Again, even with chlorine and other so-called improvements in place for sanitation, the campylobacter was found on up to 100 percent of the chickens coming out of the chill tank. A US inspection report highlights this impotency (?). "Anyone reading this may wonder why the inspectors didn't do something to stop the problems. The leadership at The Department of Agriculture wouldn't let us. We used to stop production for hours if necessary to get the facility cleaned up. But by the time I left anyone who tried to do that would have to find another job."

 

Let's take a look at the meat industrial complex today. If we recognize the complicity of the meat industrial complex and the creation of these threats to the lives of the meat consumers we have to take a look then at Tom Devine. At GAP, he told the following: "The very same officials who are charged with promoting the sale of agricultural products are also supposed to protect the consumers from filth and unscrupulous practices." As a result of the USDA's duplicitous mandate and its primary focus on marketing, the department's ranks have long been filled with industry leaders meaning the meat and chicken industry leaders how have demonstrated their abilities at increasing industry profits. In fact as far back as 1983 author Kathleen Hughes wrote "Return To The Jungle," an expose of the collusion and the partnership between the Reagan Administration and the meat industry.

 

By that time Ronald Reagan had already appointed three agribusiness leaders to head up the USDA. The Secretary of Agriculture was John Block, a corporate hog producer from Illinois. The Assistant Secretary later to be Secretary of Agriculture was Richard Line, President of The American Meat Institute. The Assistant Secretary for Marketing and Inspection Services was William McMillan, a former meatpacking executive and Vice President of The National Cattlemen's Association. In May of 1989 Joanne Smith was appointed Secretary Treasurer of Agriculture for Marketing and Inspection Services. She was a cattle rancher and previous President of the National Cattlemen's Association and previous Chair of The Beef Board, a public relations organ for the beef industry. Now she was the enforcer, and the trend continued into the '90s.

 

Don Tyson, Senior Chairman of the Board of Tyson Foods of Arkansas, the world's largest poultry processor and one of the nation's leading seafood and pork producers maintains close ties to the White House. In addition to being a long time Clinton friend, Tyson was also the second largest contributor to a $220,000 fund that Clinton used to pursue his Arkansas political agenda. A Mr. Frielander (sp?), a USDA insider said that 14 former USDA executives he personally knew had recently moved directly into industry jobs. Not just vets he explained. Training officers. Area supervisors. Regional directors. Agency administrators. Washington staff officers. Not only does the meat industry control the government bureaucracy at the top, but also now we have the hazardous analyst critical control point, which turns over regulation to the plants themselves. Plant workers now with no whistle blower protection at all are replacing federal workers on the line. Could the meat industry finally be trusted with corporate self-inspection? Not on your life, and yet that's exactly what has happened.

 

We have seen whistle blower files documenting the type of products some of the nation's largest meat and poultry plants have tried to slip into human food channels in 1995 and '96. Red meat animals and poultry that were dead on arrival at the plants were hidden from inspectors and hung up to be butchered. Several heads of from cancer eye cattle were switched to smaller carcasses before inspection so less meat would be condemned. Up to 25 percent of slaughtered chicken on the inspection line was covered with feces and bile and ingesta. In one enforcement action at a single facility, inspectors retained six tons of ground pork with rust, which was bound for a school lunch program in Indiana. Fourteen thousand pounds of chicken speckled with metal flakes. Five thousand pounds of rancid chicken necks and 721 pounds of green chicken that made employees gag from the smell.

 

Despite the fact the federal agency employees had documented the sell of nearly two million pounds of tainted food, USDA was allowing the sale (?) buterol treated calves to be sold to the American public. Instead of altering this and alerting consumers to the widespread use of these chemicals, the investigating agencies trying to protect the veal industry from what its members stated could be potential ruin initiated a major news blackout. When meat inspectors work for the government they yielded appraisals such as the company employees told us that rats were all over the coolers at night running on top of meat and gnawing on it. We saw fecal contamination get through one to one foot smears as well as flukes, which are liver parasites. Grubs, worm-like fly larvae that burrow into the cow's skin and work their way through the animal's body. Abscesses, which are encapsulated infections filled with pus. Hide hair and ingesta, which is partially digested food found in the stomach or the esophagus. Cows are slaughtered that have been dead on arrival. So some long that they're ice cold. So it's hard to believe that such blatant corruption is possible when the industry regulates itself. And that's the part of the story people are not aware of.

 

The meat industry is so pervasive in its sinister effects that even its workers are vulnerable. With nearly 36 injuries or illnesses for every 100 workers, meatpacking is the single most dangerous industry in the United States. In fact a worker's chance of suffering an injury or illness in a meat plant are 600 percent greater than if that the same person worked in a coal mine.

 

If it seems harsh and irrational and unfair to call the meat industrial complex a plague, by the late 1990's the public was reacting to just such a perception. Nearly a century ago in 1907 a doctor Alzheimer had published a treatise about the disease that would one day carry his name. He had two young colleagues who worked with him, a Dr. Creutzfeldt and Dr. Jakob. They too had identified a similar brain wasting disease that now had Europe in a panic. The disease caused the brains of cows to turn into sponge-like mass and their behavior was called mad. But now over 90 years later, it was repeating itself.

 

I'm Gary Null. In the next installment of our special program we'll go in depth into looking at the true cause of mad cow disease and looking at the statements that we had nothing to worry about in America. No mad cow disease here or so they said. Could we have it here? How would we know? When an industry regulates itself and is one of the single most corrupt in our nation, what can we do about it? First thing we have to do is dispel the myths, and we'll do that on our next program. Thank you very much for listening. (End of Part One of Meat, Protein and Dispelling the Myths)

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Meat & Protein:

Dispelling the Myths (Part 2)

Transcript of Gary Null's Radio Show

 

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Note: The information on this website is presented for educational purposes only.

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GARY NULL: Hi everyone. I'm Gary Null and I'd like to welcome you to this special presentation: Meat, Protein, and Dispelling the Myths. This is a continuation of our discussion where we're trying to explain why we should be very conscious of the choices we make about what goes into our system. After all the long-term effects could be heart disease, Alzheimer's, gastrointestinal cancers, breast cancer, prostate cancer, arthritis, fibromyalgia. Now it depends upon who you speak with. If you talk with people within the industries producing these products of course they're going to say there is no connection. And we could say well the tobacco industry said the same thing, but they were wrong. Today I'm going to present more evidence as to why vegetarians and non-vegetarians should be focusing on this very important issue.

 

At the end of the last program I discussed how that in the late '90s the public began to react to the perception that the meat industrial complex was indeed a plague. That nearly a century ago back in 1907, Dr. Alois Alzheimer, who by the way later would be named for Alzheimer's disease how that ended up uh - his research showed that there was a lot that we should be concerned with. And he was joined by Drs. Creutzfeldt and Jakob. They had identified a brain wasting disease and how it was affecting people in Europe. The disease caused the brains of cows to turn into a sponge-like mass, and their behavior was called mad. But now all these years later more than 167,000 British dairy cows had died from the bovine form of this very disease popularly known as mad cow disease between 1985 and 1995. mad cow disease is a member of a family of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or TSE's seen in various animals. Not just cows. You can find them in humans, sheep, mink, deer, and cats. TSE's are known by different names depending upon which species of animal they're found in: for example, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans; Scrapie in sheep; Chronic wasting syndrome in deer and elk; and bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE in cows.

 

Whatever animal is affected however the diseases have very similar characteristics. They attack the central nervous system causing disintegration of the brain. They have a long incubation period between the time when infection first occurs and the appearance of symptoms. They are always fatal, and they are transmitted by eating parts of animals, especially the brains and spinal cords. And during this entire time British health officials adamantly maintained that there was nothing unsafe about eating British beef. They lied. Even as evidence mounted to the contrary the government held stubbornly to this position. Then finally in 1996 a panel of government scientists told parliament that "the most likely explanation for new cases of the human form of mad cow disease was that BSE had moved from cows to people." The human variant of mad cow disease had been named Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease or CJD. The protein causing CJD has no DNA, and has been described as more like a crystal than (inaudible) material. In labs 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit heat does not destroy this protein particle. Some scientists say that once infected the incubation period can last anywhere from one month to 30 years as the human brain turns into a sponge. The spongiform encephalopathic condition physically debilitates those so infected. At present there is no reliable anti-moratorium diagnosis, specific treatment, or vaccine to prevent the disease. The agent thought to be responsible for this unusual class of disease is a rogue protein, and unlike all other agents known to cause infectious disease contains no DNA, no RNA. The bad form of this molecule holds or (?) a sponge appearance inside the brain in all disease variance. It doesn't matter. It will have the same manifestation in a human as a cow as a pig as a sheep as a deer. All the same. The infectious agent of mad cow disease remains infective even after exposure for an hour to a temperature of 680 degrees Celsius. Enough to melt lead. And it can withstand antibiotics, boiling water, bleach, formaldehyde, every form of solvent, detergent, enzymes known to destroy all other bacteria and viruses. But it doesn't hurt this virus or this protein.

 

By 1996 more than one million infected cows had been consumed in Britain. So in the next few years more than 2.5 million dairy British cows infected with mad cow disease were killed and incinerated at extremely high temperatures in an attempt to eradicate the disease. Meanwhile studies were showing that transmission of these proteins, the prions, from infected cattle to humans by oral intake was also probable. The meat industry was reeling. Statements such as meat is a lush medium for pathogenic bacteria and germs; it can harbor parasites, toxic chemicals, and medical contaminants; and it can bring death by brain rot were circulating in the industry itself as well as in the more popular media. Six months after Oprah Winfrey had discussed these things.

 

In 1999 the US Food and Drug Administration and Canadian health authorities recommended that blood centers refuse blood donations from people who had spent six months or more cumulative time in England during the past 17 years because anyone who had spent substantial time in England during this period was potentially infected with the human form of the disease. And it is transmittable through blood. Meanwhile studies were showing the transmission of the protein from infected cattle to humans by oral intake was very probable. The meat industry was reeling as statements such as meat is just a harbor of all forms of toxins and containments and can cause brain rot were circulating.

 

In 1998 six months after Oprah Winfrey survived a highly publicized suit by the cattle industry for discussing mad cow disease on her show the FDA formally banned the practice of feeding cow meat and bone meal back to cows. But most people didn't know that happened. Most people imagined it well a cow is fed grass or hay when grass is out of season or grains. Little did anyone know that cows are actually fed ground up dead cows. But they're also fed ground up dead chickens and chicken manure and chicken feathers and grease trappings. Just imagine you can only be what you eat. And if a cow becomes all of that that it eats and when you eat the cow that's what your cells become. And there's no discrimination in the body. The cell cannot just take in the good nutrients and leave out all of the contaminants. Every thing that's in the cow comes right through the hamburger, the hot dog, or fried chicken.

 

Well within two years reports surfaced that the meat industry again was ignoring legislation as pigs and chickens were still being fed the bones, brains, meat scraps, feathers, and feces of their own species. So little was really done in a conscious period of time. The British failed first, and the Americans failed behind them always bending to the pressure of the meat industry. Another issue beyond this is what about the irradiation of meat. Doesn't that make it safe? Isn't that better? Doesn't that kill bacteria and viruses and allows to have a healthier cut of meat? The answer is no. When you have an industry which causes up to 33 million cases of food related illness each year - that's 33 million - 9,000 deaths and food poisoning from E. coli, O517-H7, better known as E. coli, which effects up to 73,480 people annually in the United States then there is a problem. On February 22, 2000 the penny dropped. The US Food and Drug Administration gave the green light to the irradiation of beef and other meat products. But would you eat a fast food burger that had been nuked, exposed to nuclear radiation in order to kill pathogens such as salmonella. The FDA claims the technology is safe and effective. My research shows it is neither. There are two major types of food irradiation: electron beam which uses a high speed gun to bombard foods with electrons; and nuclear, which is favored by the nuclear power industry because it provides a use for spent nuclear fuel and it uses nuclear reactors to manufacture the necessary cobalt 60.

 

Electron beam radiation is not in itself environmentally hazardously; but critics say that it is even more hazardous to the food supply than the nuclear variant. In addition to eliminating E. coli the treatment can significantly reduce levels of other pathogens including listeria, salmonella, and campylobacter. The food isn't radioactive and while it is a slight loss of nutrients the food is largely unchanged according to the Food and Drug Administration. And while a label disclosing the irradiation treatment is required for meat products purchased in a store, labeling isn't required for foods used as ingredients in a product like flour and bread for example or for foods served by restaurants or school lunch programs.

 

The animal feeding studies first used to evaluate the safety of food irradiation were inadequate to assure there would be no long-term ill effects. That's according to Dr. Marcy Van Gemmert (sp?), a toxicologist and Chair of the FDA Committee that investigated 441 irradiation studies before the approval of the process for poultry and some other foods in 1982. She says that she's not for or against food irradiation, but believes politics not good science was the basis of its acceptance.

 

In 1963 wheat and wheat powder were the first food approved for irradiation. And in the early '70s meat prepared for NASA astronauts were routinely sterilized with radiation. But these early experiments never affected consumer products. The FDA admits that no more animal feeding studies have been done since 1982, but claims they aren't needed because irradiation has a trivial effect on food. "Conducting animal feeding studies would be a waste of time and effort," says Dr. Paul Pauley, Director of the FDA's Division of Product Policy. "One could predict what would occur better than one could determine by doing a study with animals." Pauley claims that studies evaluated in 1982 suggest that there might be ill effects from irradiation were flawed and that the FDA has concluded there are no toxic effects that could be attributed to radiation. He says, "We tried to look at the totality of evidence to see is there any pattern here. When you start getting dozens of studies adding up to thousands of animals and the only thing you can see is that no one found any toxic effects due to irradiation then your assurance of safety becomes stronger."

 

However opponents of irradiation disagree. "We're about to have a huge experiment at your local McDonald's and Burger Kings so why bother with animal studies," says Michael Colby, Executive Director of Food and Water, a consumer advocacy group based in Vermont. "The trouble is the government won't go to the trouble of having controlled and experimental groups. We are all subjects of the experiment." He advises consumers to boycott all forms of non organic meat and poultry and says that unless consumers purchase organically grown products they won't know if the meat has been exposed to radiation or not. If you don't know where your food comes from, you're playing Russian roulette with your meal. You aren't going to know if you buy irradiated food in a restaurant or if your child eats irradiated food at school lunch. You won't know. No labeling is required for any processed food that contains irradiated ingredients even if you're talking about the chicken in chicken soup. These loop holes are a result of extensive corporate lobbying to fool consumers and jumpstart a very dubious technology.

 

Besides creating toxic byproducts such as formaldehyde and benzene, irradiation can create some unique radiolytic products. Chemicals that have not been identified or tested for toxicity. According to Dr. John Goffman at the University of California, Berkeley, "What we do know with certainty is that irradiation causes a host of unnatural and sometimes unidentifiable chemicals to be formed within the irradiated foods." Goffman says, "Our ignorance about these foreign compounds make it simply a fraud to tell the public that we know irradiated foods would be safe to eat. It is dishonorable to trick people into buying irradiated foods," he says. Dr. Pauley of the FDA says chemical changes do take place when products are irradiated, but the levels of toxins like benzene are so low it has to be of no concern. He also denies there is any reason for concern about irradiation destroying essential vitamins and minerals.

 

But the Organic Consumer Association claims that by releasing molecular materials called free radicals irradiation may destroy as much as 80 percent of vitamin A, C, E, K, and B complex depending upon the dose of irradiation and the length of the storage time. The group charges that irradiation also deactivates the natural digestive enzymes found in raw food and encourages fats to turn rancid. Another issue has been raised in the safety of irradiated facilities. Colby says that workers in irradiation plants risk exposure to large doses of radiation due to equipment failures, leaks, and other problems. In 1998 in Decatur, Georgia there was a radioactivity release into the water storage pool at Radiation Sterilizers, Inc. Taxpayers paid up to 30 million dollars to clean up in the case. Dr. Pauley responds that it's unfair to equate that accident with an unsafe record for the industry. "What I have seen is that the safety record is good. These are heavily regulated facilities. If anything goes wrong, measures are taken to remedy that," he says.

 

Still more controversy surfaces when one considers that irradiation kills beneficial microorganisms as well as the harmful ones, and that the use of the technology could lead to the development of radiation and antibiotic resistant bacteria. And there's another factor. One of the things that finally we are paying attention to when we study the American diet and disease patterns is that the average American consuming the average diet has a plethora of gastrointestinal problems. In part this is due to eating wrong combinations and excessive quantities of food, but it's also due to the fact that our diet is substantially lacking in enzymes. Enzymes are the catalysts of life. They are the spark plugs of a food. And when you use irradiation, you are destroying the enzymes. You have to because it's the destruction of the enzymes that's allowing the food to have a longer shelf life. It's no different than when you taste an orange and it doesn't taste very sweet. You eat a tomato and it tastes kind of cardboard-ish. One of the reasons that our fruits and vegetables do not taste quite as good as they once did, and certainly nowhere comparing it to the taste of what comes from a fresh picked something out of your garden is that they are picked unripe and then gassed with chemicals in storage timing how long it will take an unripe fruit to artificially ripen by the time it gets to the store. The difference is that you've speeded up a natural process unnaturally, and you do not get the full maturity of taste.

 

Try a peach. Have you ever seen the peaches that when you bite into them they are kind of mushy? Well that's an example of peaches picked unripe, gassed in transit, and then ripened artificially. Nothing like the sweet orb of juice that flows from a peach right off a tree. Naturally ripened is always better. Allowing a plant to go to its full maturity is better, but naturally ripened fruit generally has a relatively short shelf life. And one of the things that manufacturers want is longer shelf life. Destroy the enzymes. Neutralize them. The enzymes that would normally cause a fruit of any kind or vegetable or meat to go rancid to complete its life cycle are substantially limiting. So the fruit lasts maybe a week longer. Well a week longer is a lot more sales time, but we pay a price for it. We are being nutritionally robbed at one end.

 

There is more to this. We should look for example at a vegetarian alternative. Just for a moment let us examine some of the reasons why millions of Americans, billions of people throughout the world, have selected a vegetarian alternative. Since Americans have been forced fed the propaganda of the basic four food groups they had been taking a beating in many ways. While the profits of the meat and dairy industries have greatly increased, the average consumer has had to dig deeper in to his pocket to pay the rising costs of their products. He is always paying more for medical bills and health insurance because of sharp increases in disease and sickness. The Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs has found an increase in the rate of malnutrition and obesity alongside a decrease in the quality not quantity of food consumed. At the same time there has been a direct increase in the rate of heart disease, cancer, hypertension, arthritis, and other degenerative diseases. The animal producers have successfully brainwashed Americans into believing that without meat and dairy products they're in danger of malnutrition. But with the public health and nutritional well being dramatically declining while meat and dairy consumption greatly increases, their scare tactics are wearing pretty think.

 

A workable alternative to the basic four would be a five-group division that would be utilized not just by the affluent consumer societies of the western world, but also by the average citizens of the third world. Now this trans-cultural food grouping would comprise three principal dietary staples: grains, legumes, and vegetables, and while the two smaller groups would be raw foods and foods containing B12. And this categorization includes all of the foods needed by people in any socioeconomic or cultural group in order to maintain a healthy normal active life. The five-group division is not a new concept. The Canadians have separated fruits and vegetables into two separate categories and together with meat and cereal and milk they end up with five. Those are the bad three. The Puerto Ricans who stress vegetables and fresh fruits also work with five groups. But adapting a vegetarian diet of grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, fruits and vegetables - actually it better be a six group - would not be easy to sell to agribusiness. This brainwashing has blinded us from seeing the health benefits of the vegetarian alternative.

 

The time has come though when the public begins to comprehend the enormous waste of health and the dangers involved in eating meat. We are starting to see through the thinly veiled public education messages of the meat and dairy industries that for years have fabricated our need for animal products. As far back as 1977 agriculture expert Lester Brown informed us that if American cut their meat consumption by just ten percent it would save us about 12 million tons of grain. This savings alone could negate the entire year's nutritional deficit in India where nutritional deficit is among the highest in the world. In By Bread Alone Brown reasoned that if some of us consume more others of necessity must consume less. The moral issue is raised by the fact that those who are consuming less (?) are not so much the overweight affluent, but the already undernourished poor. Continuing to eat animal products amidst starving people in the world is not just thoughtless it's selfish.

 

While the average person in the United States consumes some 2,000 pounds of grain annually all but 150 pounds of that grain is in the form of animal food. As senseless as this seems our gluttony demands for meat has prompted us to waste 170 million tons of grain a year this way. We could eat the grain directly instead of pumping it into livestock thereby enabling us to feast on a greasy steak or fatty hamburger. If we did, we would alleviate the present caloric deficiency of the world four times over. Instead of donating to world hunger organizations, try eliminating beef from your diet, chicken from your diet, veal from your diet, and pork from your diet. It is the most effective and concrete thing to do to help humans end a lot of suffering.

 

Food experts agree that we should eat much more of a vegetarian diet in order to create more nutritional parity in the world. They note that a simple diet would free up grain exports and therefore increase global food resources. By decreasing our demand for meat, we are releasing millions of tons of food that can be used to nourish our starving and malnourished brethren in underdeveloped parts of the world. And we're even becoming healthier for it. On the other hand if we refuse to change our wasteful food production and selfish food consumption amidst the starving millions, the devastation will continue and no one - not even us - will be spared. Sickness and disease, hunger and famine, economic chaos and violent struggles for dwindling food supplies will ensue and augment steadily.

 

So the time has come to reallocate our food resources while the problem can still be solved. Since Brown's appeal to Americans to consume less food a quarter of a century ago, there have been hundreds of studies supporting the vegetarian outlook. And by the late 1990's - early 2000's as Americans incorporated the phrase virtual reality into their vocabulary, many realized that the meat industry complex and Byzantine concepts of offering only virtual meat was not a healthy solution. Various journals picked up on the trend and reported that over 30 million Americans had explored a vegetarian program at some point. About one-third of US teenagers think that being a vegetarian is in. Aging baby boomers who are waking up to their own health concerns are taking a proactive approach to their health by eating more meatless meals. Health and taste were the top two reasons consumers were eating more meat-free meals. The American Institute for Cancer Research reported a 40 percent of the world's cancer cases could be prevented through the adaptation of diets rich in grains, fruits, and vegetables.

 

Recently I was asked in a debate on a Phoenix radio station to explain the proof that a vegetarian diet works. Where is the science behind it? Well right off the bat I was able to cite and give them over 275 references. Lest you feel that there is not adequate proof review Loma Linda University, a Seven Day Adventist Christian Health Science Institution in Loma Linda, California. They've allocated considerable resources towards studying the Adventist vegetarian lifestyle. The Loma Linda University has achieved a 300 plus list of nutritional benefits of the vegetarian diet published in peer review journals dating clear back to 1964. The first research was done by Dr. Hardage on 86 lacto-ovo vegetarians, 26 pure vegans, and 88 non-vegetarian adults, adolescents, and pregnant women. From 1954 to '66, he completed eight published studies in peer review journals comparing the diets of Adventist vegetarians to non-vegetarians. What he found was simple. Blood cholesterol levels were lower in the vegetarian groups than in the non-vegetarian groups. Their heart conditions were better.

 

Another researcher Dr. Winder in 1959 observed that the incidence of cancer and coronary artery disease was much lower in Adventist populations consisting mainly of nonsmokers and nondrinkers since alcohol and smoking are prohibited in their religion. At the time the Seven Day Adventists had a membership of about 300,000 people in the United States. By 1964 researchers reported in The American Journal of Medicine that aschemic heart disease was the most common cause of death among adult white Americans and was increasing in frequency. The author also reported that there was a growing belief this was partially related to "environmental factors peculiar to the so-called highly civilized societies." While a group of Seven Day Adventists were chosen for this study because they used much less of the animal products. They don't drink coffee, alcohol or tobacco or are not supposed to. The researchers also felt that day-to-day stresses seemed to be less in the Adventists group, but had no objective proof of this. The authors found that the hospital admissions for coronary artery disease were 40 percent less among Seven Day Adventists men than among men in the general population from all other religions. And they had less blood fats that were harmful. They had less aschemic heart disease compared to white males living in New York.

 

In 1996 Winder and Lemon had collected information from several studies reporting in The Journal of the American Medical Association that results in ongoing health survey of Seven Day Adventists. From 1958 to 1962 there were 850 deaths among 11,000 Seven Day Adventists men. The total number of deaths observed was one-half expected in the average population. Half. The death from respiratory disease was one-fourth the average of the rest of America. In the Adventist group there were 28 deaths due to emphysema or lung cancer, but occurred in a minority of Adventists with a history of heavy smoking whereas only one death occurred in the Adventists who had never smoked out of 3,913. So dramatic were these findings in 1966 that it gave the alternative medicine and natural health community strong evidence of the beneficial effects of a healthy lifestyle and an early warning about the detrimental effects of cigarette smoking.

 

By 1969 a report in The Archives of Environmental Health found that there was a greater life expectancy in the population of 34,000 Seven Day Adventists, which was in large part due to not smoking and not eating meat and not having dairy. A series of study on dental health also began around 1958 and confirmed a lower incidence of dental caries, tooth decay, in children of Seven Day Adventists children. Researchers set out to determine if the difference was purely due to diet. There was also a somewhat humorous side of the study of the Adventists diet. A researcher decided to study whether the stress of abstaining from the so-called pleasures of modern society - tobacco, caffeine, and alcohol - had a mental health impact on the group of Adventists. Or perhaps the thinking was that you must be crazy to give up on normal cultural socializing behavior. It wasn't true. They didn't mind it, and they were healthier. And they had less tooth decay due to the diet.

 

In 1966 Dr. R.O. West repeated the earlier cholesterol studies with a group of 466 Seven Day Adventists in Washington, DC. This study matched the Adventists vegetarians with non-vegetarians from the same local population looking at the effects on eating meat and chicken versus vegetarian and measuring their cholesterol. Well the findings were that the vegetarians had much, much healthier lower cholesterol than the non.

 

Now what I've just cited just in the last two minutes is represented by 21 peer review mainstream scientific journals from The Medical Arts and Sciences Volume 21 and The Journal of Dental Research Volume 46. All of these of course and all the citations - hundreds - will be on my website garynull.com at the completion of this particular series of studies. Now I stopped at 1966. From 1966 until today there are over 1,500 studies in the mainstream scientific literature that support the importance not just of eating a healthier diet, but of specifically fruits and vegetables and protecting us against heart disease and cancers. All told there are more than 5,000 studies on all types of dietary changes. That includes soy products in the diet.

 

Well here's how it works. Those people who are going on a meatless diet are more likely to consume more fruits and vegetables and vegetable juices and soy products. They are more likely to take their antioxidants. They're also more likely to exercise with more regularity. It's as if when you raise your consciousness about what is healthy for you in one part of your life, you're less susceptible to resisting making positive changes in other areas. Whereas a person who is smoking and drinking and drinking coffee and eating meat is less likely to deal with stress, is less likely to deal with exercise, is less likely to have the positive thoughts because they're not in the same mindset. It has nothing to do with intellect. Nothing to do with success of life. But it has an awful lot to do with the health of the body.

 

Now there has been a lot said about well do we need all this protein from meat or can we get adequate protein by not having meat. I will deal with that on our next program time permitting. But now I want to take a look at the reverence for life issue in a little more depth. If people were truly concerned about animals, they would never condone the hell they are put through while alive to say nothing about their torturous slaughter. Animals do not enjoy the sunshine or roam the fields or smell the fresh grass after a gentle springtime rain. They are isolated in dark cells. Herded into tight quarters so they can barely move. There they are fed and maintained while they await their slaughter. Their life is like that of the unjustly condemned prisoner who lives out his days on death row awaiting his ultimate death by decree. Animals are not raised on farms anymore but in animal factories. They are seldom cared for by a small farmer running a family business, but by factory management constantly seeking ways to increase profit and decrease overhead.

 

At this time virtually all poultry and better than half of all cows and pigs live their days like inmates on a mechanized factory environment. Poultry, pigs, and calves live a totally confined life. Never to see the light of day until their head is put in the direction of the slaughterhouse. Hens are frequently crowded into tiny cages, which they do not leave for a year or two. Pregnant sows are tightly housed to control their movement. They can barely squeeze their bodies into the minute stalls that are their homes for three months at a time. Cattle and pigs sometimes get to enjoy open air feeding lots, but even that is strictly timed by machines which feed them, water them, and remove their waste. These factory methods of animal farming have greatly endangered the small traditional farmers. Today 95 percent of hens, chickens, and turkeys and more than 50 percent of all cattle, dairy cows, and pigs are raised in this kind of impersonal high tech environment.

 

Agribusiness has little interest in the natural instincts of animals. Confinement is so complete that chickens don't even have enough room to flap their wings. Mating is so controlled and normal sexual activity is so hampered that male animals commonly become impotent and females cannot even menstruate regularly. If you live shoulder to shoulder with other people day after day in a city with walls and no escape and no natural light and controlled central air systems instead of fresh air, what do you think would happen? Predictably animals living under these conditions become so highly aggressive and violent that normal interaction is rare. Subsequent depression lowers the will and the ability to fight off disease and infection, which can easily become epidemic. Agribusiness may not be concerned about the natural instincts of animals per say, but they are when their repression cuts into capital gain. Diseases resulting from the horrendous living conditions described just a moment ago are very costly. If animals die, they can't create profits. But because only so much spoilage is allowed rather than improve the animals' living conditions though producers prefer to initiate health programs.

 

Well we have a difference of opinion on what constitutes a good health program. Their programs are not designed to improve health, but to control sickness. Over half the cattle and nearly 100 percent of the hogs and calves and chickens are fed a study diet of antibiotics and related medicines to keep infection and contagious diseases at a controlled level. One FDA official advises us that antibiotics are most effective in the early growing period in warding off diseases in animals that are crowded or improperly housed or malnourished. Antibiotics in animal feed actually stimulate quicker weight gain while improving the efficiency of livestock feed by 16 percent. Now this might seem to solve the economic problems of producing meat in animal factories. But it bypasses the question of the rights of the animals to decent, natural and even happy lives. Moreover no one is sure of what the long-term effect of many eventually possibly contagious diseases might be in a very sick animal population that gets into the human population. All they do is just keeping pouring more antibiotics in.

 

Commercially they are very profitable. The meat industry, the dairy industry, the poultry industry are hundred billion dollar industries. They do what they feel is in the best economic interest. Methods are devised to inhibit natural extraneous behavior. The chickens are de-beaked so they will not peck under stress. The pigs have their tails cut off because they tend to bite them when they're stressed. Not only physical behaviors are controlled, but also so are biochemical processes. Hormones are given to intervene in reproductive cycles to produce an exceptionally large number of ova in the female and to keep the animal's labor contractions and delivery time on schedule. That is on the animals' factory schedule.

 

There is a recent trend in the United States towards creating fewer and larger feedlots. This trend is expected to mean big overhead cuts for the animal industry, but even greater discomfort and inhumane treatment for the animals. Chickens are now given only one-sixth the space that laying hens had in 1954. Animals are being pushed closer and closer together to cut the cost of operations as well as fixed overhead. On top of these savings as animal's physical activity is restricted by a lack of space it eats less and gains weight faster. But even though overhead and feed costs may dip, obese animals can also become burdensome and undesirable. Chickens frequently gain so much weight that they can't even stand up without industrial intervention. Obese cattle may have fatty livers and abscesses that make them more difficult to market and certainly less desirable. Who wants to eat a diseased liver? But then how would you know that the liver you're eating is diseased?

 

Stress accompanied by low tolerance to infection and disease and unusual unsanitary conditions is a typical problem with the factory-farmed animal. Pigs are known to suffer greatly while they are being transported to the slaughterhouse. The respiration and heart rate increase. The blood vessels may constrict from muscular tension causing insufficient circulation of blood and oxygen. A circulatory and respiratory collapse may ensue. Many pigs cannot even stand during the trip to the slaughterhouse because of skeletal rigidity while others are dead long before they ever reach their destination. More than one billion dollars is lost because of livestock injuries and stress and death resulting from the mishandling in transport every year.

 

Not all money saving steps taken by animal producers result in bigger profits. Animal rights activist Dr. Michael Fox contends that happier less-stressed and more naturally raised animals would spell (?) greater productivity while cutting deeply into the costly problems of infections, sickness, and ultimately death. He insists that husbandry conditions should be allowed so that the animal has the opportunity to develop, explore, and experience its telose (?) to some degree. Its chicken-ness or its cow-ness or its pig-ness or whatever. He goes on to list typical basic needs that should be fulfilled. Freedom to form natural physical movement. Association with other animals where appropriate of their own kind. Facilities for comfort where they can rest, sleep, and have body care. Provisions for food and water and to maintain full health. Ability to perform daily routines and natural activities. The opportunity for activities for exploration and play especially for younger animals. Satisfaction of minimal spatial and territorial requirements including a visual field and personal space. Most cattlemen however say nonsense. Why do all that? All we're raising them for is to kill them so you can eat them. Well it makes sense.

 

What we might consider for a moment is shouldn't we know more about what we're eating. Leo Tolstoy a vegetarian once said well there was a woman and he presented her with a live chicken. She was told to decapitate and prepare it for cooking since she had requested chicken for dinner. She turned down the opportunity. If more people were aware of what is involved in producing meat, they would probably be much less enthusiastic about dining on ham and hot dogs. Children are taught early to recognize all their barnyard friends and their different sounds and peculiar habits. Yet they may think nothing about eating a juicy hamburger or chicken leg until they make the actual association between the food and its source. That juicy hamburger is the friendly brown cow with the big gentle eyes and the chicken leg is the same one that was being used by a real chicken that might have been running in the yard that very day. Unfortunately most people don't see the raw cuts of beef hanging on hooks while the blood drips dry or the screams of the pigs as they're hauled off to the slaughterhouse. Living in apartments in the city and shopping for prime cuts of meat neatly packaged and nicely colored you've lost the touch with the actual processes of food gathering and food processing. We're too removed from the origins of our food. Too insulated from the sights and sounds and smells of the animal factories and slaughterhouses that we silently support by eating meat in fine restaurants or at the family table.

 

Doctor Fox explains that what the eye doesn't seem the consumer doesn't grieve. The Styrofoam carton of impeccable eggs, neatly trimmed meat in the plastic wrappers or a delicate slice of veal cordon bleu served on a silver platter doesn't tell us the whole story. What would tell the story is a trip to an animal factory or a slaughterhouse. Arthur Richard Rhoades gives us some idea of what such an experience might be like as he describes his impressions at the ID Packing Company and meat producer for the Armour Meat Company. He says, "Down goes the tailgate and out come the pig enthusiastically after their drive. Pigs are the most intelligent of all farm animals by actual laboratory tests. They talk a lot to each other. So you can listen. They do talk. Low grunts. Quick squeals. Kind of a hum sometimes. Angry shrieks. High screams. A fear. It was a frightening experience seeing their fear. Seeing so many of them go by it had to remind me of things no one wants to be reminded of anymore. All mobs. All death marches. All mass murders and extinctions. The slaughter of the buffalo. The slaughter of the Indian. The Inferno. The Judgment Day. That we are the most expensive of races able in our affluence to hire others of our kind to do their terrible work of killing another race.

 

Even though meat eating is allowed in the revised Judeo Christian tradition, the inhumane treatment of animals is strictly forbidden. Isaac Singer, author of Yentl and The Family Moskat, became a vegetarian when faced with the moral dilemma created by eating meat. He relates accounts of the brutal and heartless treatment of animals in Blood and The Slaughter and other works. He raises the issues of animals having as much right to a life as a man has. All creatures being God's creatures he challenges the very basis of our social order in a New York Times article entitled, "When Keeping Kosher Isn't Kosher Enough." He asks how can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood? Singer was interested in being a vegetarian even as a child, but his parents discouraged it. Now for the past 20 years he has championed the cause of vegetarianism and even adopted it as his religion. He's experienced understandable reservations with adhering to any religion that could justify the abominable practice of slaughtering animals.

 

Nowhere is reverence for life expressed more profoundly than in the philosophy of the vegans. Not only do vegans refrain from meat eating but also shun dairy products and eggs. After all they reason animals suffer unbelievably in the production of these foods. Mark Braunstein writes in Radical Vegetarianism Diet Ethics and Dialectics about the hapless hen forced in to endless labor throughout its life and confined to tight quarters without hardly ever contacting the real world. The hen he says must forever count her chickens before they hatch. Cows too he notes are treated sinfully. They are grossly overworked and have only the most meager quarters. They are even forced to surrender their young calves to the meat producers who are trying to fill the demand for tender veal. Braunstein ponders over just how many vegetarians there are, how vegetarian a person can claim to be if he insists on eating eggs or dairy. After all he reasons, what about the veal floating invisibly inside every glass of milk. There can be no quart of milk where there is no cutlet of veal. The vegetarian might protest that eggs and cheese have nutrients and protein essential to proper health, but Braunstein sees a little difference between the vegetarian and the meat eater in this argument. Both insist that animals must be allowed to suffer so that people can have good nutrition. Braunstein counters it this is the vegetarian dialectic of diet and ethic. That not coincidentally but absolutely essentially those foods, which are the products of the least deprivation of life from others, will contribute to the longest life in ourselves.

 

The vegans' reverence for life runs deep and wide. They will not use any products that have been made possible by any degree of animal suffering. The list of banned items goes far beyond food: fur, leather, silk, pearls, oil-based soaps, cosmetics. A survey done in England indicates that some 83 percent of all vegans have chosen their lifestyle primarily for ethical reasons. They hold closely a reverence of life coupled with the disdain for the atrocities wrought on animals in the name of convenience and commercialism. The second reason for their preferred lifestyle is their own health. The third is to conserve our dwindling food supplies.

 

The sort of mistreatment of animals that gives vegans so much cause for concern is exemplified by the dairy cow. A vegan society booklet tells how dairy cows are scheduled by producers for annual pregnancies. They are only allowed to suckle the young calf for a maximum of three days. Although in most cases the calf is taken for slaughter just after birth to be processed as meat or to utilize its stomach lining as rennet for cheese. It's a little wonder that vegans are left scratching their heads when a vegetarian refuses to eat veal and instead has a cheese casserole. Both require the suffering of animals. Atrocities that few would care to hear about at the dinner table.

 

A certain number of calves are reserved to be used for white veal, a fine delicacy in many circles. But the animal must have its physical activity virtually stopped cold if it's to be tender and white. The calf is squeezed into a small crate where it stays for over a quarter of a year. Its diet is mostly liquid frequently leaving the animal to eat at the siding of the crate in order to satisfy its natural craving for substance and roughage. By the time this confused animal is ready for slaughter it can barely stand up without support. It is so lacking in normal muscle tissue and skeletal support and stamina and vigor.

 

Meanwhile even the poor old dairy cow is chopped up into convenient size meat packages after her milk dries up. Her flesh is too old for prime cuts. Though it is only suitable for export. We must wonder why this violence and abuse is allowed to continue. The Texas Cattle Feeders Association leader gives up a pretty good reason why. He says, "We the cattle industry are willing to produce any kind of animal the consumer wants." In other words this situation persists because we the consumer support it with our dollars and our eating habits. If we think that the consumer is not really capable of setting the pace for what's so vast an industry thinks, well think again.

 

Think of what would happen if we the consumers became vegetarian. They would of course cease functioning - the meat industry. Land now being used and abused to grow animal feed could then be used to grow well for real human feed. Vegetables and grains for people. The wanton destruction of life would be diminished and energy spent on killing and violence might begin to be used to foster peace and goodwill. How could we even hope for peace among men until we have taken steps towards establishing harmony with the animal life?

 

An organizer for a World Vegetarian Congress in India is convinced that vegetarianism must precede international peace. He says the demand for vegetarian food will increase our production for the right kind of plant foods. We shall cease to breed pigs and other animals for food thereby ceasing to be responsible for the horror in the slaughterhouses where millions of creatures cry in agony and in vain because of man's selfishness. If such concentration camps for slaughtering continue, can peace ever come to earth? Can we escape the responsibility for misery when we are practicing killing every day of our lives by consciously or unconsciously supporting this trade of slaughter? Peace cannot come where peace is not given.

 

Pete Singer coauthor of Animal Factories is likewise concerned about the animal carnage that we are too readily to defend as a tradeoff for human survival. He says the root of the problem is our blithely taking power over the lives and deaths of other creatures whose suffering is in no way necessary for our survival. If we so easily take the lives of animals who are only a few evolutionary steps removed from us, what is to prevent us from doing the same to humans who are physically very different from us, of a different color or speaking in an unintelligible language or primitive in their customs?

 

The exploitation of animals is nothing new to civilizations. Its roots can be tracked back to over 10,000 years. But it has become a particularly perilous problem in the 20th century in the presence of mechanized technology and antibiotics and hormones and horrendously artificial living conditions. Animal care is no longer a simple matter of man caring for animals. Feeding, watering, cleaning and doctoring it. Now machines tend to the basic animal care. Hormones are used to make them grow. Antibiotics help keep them from dying prematurely. Raised in horribly close quarters and unnatural environments. Obese and unhealthy from lack of exercise and excessive drug use. Depressed from lack of warmth, affection and normal social interaction.

 

Modern day animals are exploited more completely than animals have ever been before. They are physically abused, mentally tortured, and spiritually castrated. But we can stop all that. After all it was Mahatma Gandhi who said the greatest of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. I'm Gary Null. This brings us to the end of this particular program: Meat, Protein and Dispelling The Myths. More on our next program. (End of Meat, Protein and Dispelling the Myths Part Two)

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Meat & Protein:

Dispelling the Myths (Part 3)

Transcript of Gary Null's Radio Show

 

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GARY NULL: I'm Gary Null. The topic at hand is one that's so important, but rarely discussed in any depth. And that is meat, and when I include meat I'm also suggesting chicken in that and veal and pork and lamb. Protein and that's the primary reason people are eating this and dispelling the myths. But there are many myths on this topic. None of them are easily dispelled because we've lived with them for so long. So I'm going to take different categories. I've shown you up to this point some of the horrors to the animals at least of why we should reconsider our reliance upon meat. Now I'd like to take a look at our food resources.

 

How big a problem is world hunger? Now we hear so much about world hunger. People starving to death in underdeveloped countries while Americans struggle to stay on diets. Although being overweight and obese are major concerns and should be for our national health, a significant proportion approximately one quarter of the world's population has been condemned to a life of hunger and eventual starvation. An estimated 500 million to one billion people are suffering from malnutrition receiving such inadequate amounts of nutrients that even their basic physiological functions are impaired. Now this is hard to believe since here in the United States we have so much wealth and food that we hardly know what to do with it. Isn't it strange that children in the United States routinely throw away food that children in Ethiopia, the Sudan, Somalia, India and Southeast Asia pray for but seldom ever obtain? Children in drought ridden northeastern Brazil where some 350,000 of the what are called flageolets (?) were tormented once have starved to death.

 

Children suffer severe growth abnormalities and irreversible brain damage for want of the kind of nutrients that collect in our garbage pails. Infant brain damage is a serious problem in this region of Brazil because of chronic dietary protein deficiencies. There seems to be little disagreement among scientists according to the American Scientist Magazine that "a conscientious protein deficient diet produces irreversible damage to the brain." We have difficulty imagining the horrors of world hunger because in our own wealth and comfort we are so far removed from it. Most of us have to badger our children to get them to eat even half their dinner. It's hard to believe that other children are dying because they have absolutely no food. But even though we have trouble feeling the immediacy of the starvation crisis we do hear about it and try to understand it on an intellectual level.

 

One of the most common explanations for the phenomenon revolves around the notion that overpopulation places an undue strain on an already tenuous food supply of the underdeveloped nations. However this theory includes many closely associated assumptions. For instance it is often presumed that underdeveloped countries are backwards. That is they have failed to obtain the updated machinery and technology needed to keep pace with modern population growth rates and subsequent food demands. It is also presumed that widespread ignorance among the peoples of these countries plays a major role.

 

For one thing the argument goes there is little understanding of those modern agricultural technologies that could help farmers increase their product yield and to make matters worse a general distrust of modern science in society is responsible for the fact that these people ignore birth control and continue receiving bad advice from each other. So they have more children with no measure of restraint. And while there is undoubtedly some truth in some of these observations, they only explain the problem. They don't solve it. Moreover they tend to be somewhat culturally prejudiced in assuming that modern ways of doing things are superior to traditional ways that have existed for centuries in many of these countries.

 

The most basic oversight in this sort of explanation is that it presumes that world hunger can be overcome by increasing agricultural production coupled with more stringent birth control measures. It may be that we have gotten out of alignment if we continue our present rate of population growth. Seven hundred years from now people will be standing virtually shoulder to shoulder on every square foot of the earth's land surface. In 7,000 years our population will be expanding outward into space at the speed of light.

 

Even in the United States where the birthrate is double the death rate there will come a day when we simply won't have enough food to feed so large a population. Reducing the rate of population growth will obviously ease the strain on our limited food supplies. Yet that cannot be the only solution to world hunger. Increasing agricultural production may be an immediate solution, but that in turn may create a lethal drain on our natural resources as we saw in previous decades. Moreover increasing output is not an easy task for countries that can ill afford modern farming machinery.

 

What must be understood here is that starvation is essentially manmade. Population increase coupled with production decreases caused by droughts or flood or deforestation or gross soil erosion or other natural manmade causes have plagued everyone and these are the primary roles. But experience shows us that these problems can be dealt with much more fruitfully if we simply begin to make more economically sound use of our land by developing a more efficient food chain. It was Francis Forlape (sp?) who showed us that famine is not necessarily a part of the human condition even in notoriously poor countries.

 

For instance let's just take Bangladesh. It's by no means a hopeless basket case. Yes. This small country does have an extremely dense population and that does create a problem, but Taiwan has twice the number of people per cultivated acre that Bangladesh has. Yet its people are not starving. Population density is not the sole variable indicating whether or not a country's available food supply is sufficient to support its people.

 

Far more significant is how the country's land is used and how efficiently its food supply is utilized. The demand for animal protein is the single most significant factor that condemns hundreds of millions to a life of hunger and eventual starvation. It has pitted man against animal as they are forced to compete over grain supplies for their very existence. The animal industry is based on gross misuse of the land. Land that would be better used to feed people rather than cattle or pigs. It is responsible for creating a food supply of meat and dairy products that are highly inefficient in terms of nutritional return to the consumer considering the amount of food and other resources that were required for its production. Most of which by the way are subsidized. And I'll discuss that a little later on. For now we only should recognize that while world hunger is real and does pose a threat to human existence in many areas of the planet but not our own immediately, the situation is by no means hopeless.

 

It is true that if the current population explosion continues, the world will eventually reach a saturation point for its food resources, but estimates predict that our present world population of over six billion would increase ten times before we actually face that situation. So it does provide for time and a calmly (?) investigation of the problem and constructive solutions. So now what would I suggest are some of these solutions?

 

Well how about raising food without feeding people? That's a big problem. Increasing agricultural output may sound like a reasonable solution to famine, but unfortunately the increasing grain production in recent years has gone more and more to animals and less and less to people. Livestock consumes our grain supplies in gross amounts and gives us very little in terms of our dietary requirement return. And that's assuming that every single thing you ate from an animal would be disease-free and produce no adverse ill health effects in you, which also is not true. So while agricultural output may be going up, our ability to feed people continues to go down. Just how much food do we waste when we eat meat and dairy products? Well here's an eye opener.

 

Let's take beef for example. Cattle consume 16 pounds of feed to produce a single pound of flesh. And remember in that flesh is a lot of fat and in some cases up to 50 percent. This means that for every pound of beef we consume we virtually waste 15 pounds of grain. You might think that agribusiness would try to cut down on this tremendous grain drain if for no other reason than to save the high cost of feed. They do try, but they are unwilling to take the most obvious and sensible step. Produce less meat and advise consumers to balance their diets better by eating vegetables and grains and legumes and nuts and seeds to replace at least part of the meat. I'm realistic. I'm not assuming for a moment that once someone hears this advice they're going to come to some sensible conclusion. May be they're part of a problem and want to reverse it to a solution. The vast majority of people are not just going to stop and shift to a vegan diet. Okay. So let them have a transition diet. Anything that takes them from where they're at to a better place will help lessen the burden and it starts a chain event.

 

Instead they find methods for maintaining full weight on the cattle while having them eat less, and to accomplish this they severely restrict their physical movements therefore cutting their feeding requirements. No longer do the cattle graze freely in the meadows and drink from babbling brooks beneath shady trees. Instead they are lined up in crowded and squalid feedlots. The whole face of the animal industry has been changed with this new technology. Livestock fed in these mechanized feed lots can now attain a target weight and be delivered to the slaughterhouse in about one third the normal time. This has greatly increased the profits for the animal factories that insist on maintaining their hold on the food market even if it means tolerating gross waste that ultimately leads to world hunger. Despite the industry's attempt to cut down on feed allocation though, cattle still require a high caloric intake. And since meat production is rising steadily so is the overall feed requirement.

 

Use of livestock feed in the United States is now averaging over 250 million tons annually. Now compare to that 100 million tons on the eve of the Second World War. Although this figure accounts only for feed consumption in the United States it's equivalent to all the grain that is currently imported by every nation in the world. The number of poultry as well as livestock that are fed grain has doubled over the last 30 years with 75 percent of all livestock being currently grain fed. Pigs consume as much as grain as do cattle with each animal requiring about 5,000 pounds of grain and soy and additional crops annually. That's per pig. Not that all the protein being consumed helps us much when we eat the animal. A lot of it goes for the normal growth, maintenance, and repair of the animal itself; and a large amount is also absorbed by the livestock's hair, skin, bones and excrement parts that we do not eat.

 

And while agribusiness has stepped up its livestock production, the United States has still been growing enough feed to export abroad. But still the hungry are not being fed. Over 60 percent of all of the grain exported from the United States goes to affluent industrialized nations rather than the third world that have high rates of hunger and starvation. Where does it go? Well much of the grain that does eventually filter into the third world goes to feed - you guessed it - cattle rather than the starving mothers and children. So reducing meat production is clearly the best solution to the problem of world hunger. Yet industrialized nations try to circumvent the issue by inventing the so-called green revolution, and what a fiasco that was. Oh what was it? Forty years ago this program was intended to end world hunger by introducing new crops, breads specifically for rapid growth and high yield and overcoming pestilence. There were several problems with this very highly touted system.

 

One was that the new strains of crops like a new rice or a new maize or a new corn were very expensive to grow because of the uncommonly large amounts of fertilizer used. This allowed the wealthiest farmers to out price their competition putting many small farmers out of business in countries where farming was the traditional binding socioeconomic force. An overemphasis on grain production was another weakness of the system. Grains largely replaced many varieties of legumes and fruits and vegetables, and that was all ended up being wasted on livestock anyhow. In the industrialized countries high yield crops created a surplus, which needed a market thereby encouraging even greater animal production, which in turn placed even greater pressure on farmers to produce even more food for the oversupply of livestock. It became a vicious cycle of overproduction. Yet nutrition was seldom considered.

 

Dr. Harris, Professor of Biochemistry and Nutrition at MIT, found that the indigenous strains of crops being replaced by the new high yield varieties were actually superior in nutrition. In Food For Naught, Ross Hume Hall talks about the shortcomings of the project. He said the green revolution devised in western countries as a solution to the nutritional problems of other countries and cultures is based on the fully mechanized technology of western countries. It is not just a matter of planting new strains of rice or wheat, it is also a matter of applying fertilizer at the right time, irrigating at the right time, applying insecticides, herbicides, and using new types of machine - a whole complex of business. Well the use of this modern technology put even further stress on the local economy and especially where countries were okay. They weren't rich, but they weren't poor. They were sustainable. It led to an increase in unemployment and subsequently to poverty and even greater hunger among the working class.

 

It seems that from every perspective the green revolution only made matters worse. Most of the production increases that it generated led to further economic decline in already troubled lands. Most of the increased food supply went to livestock for the meat and dairy industries. It seems to have been responsible for just about everything except getting more food to the people who needed it. Let me put it in this way. I'll put a human face on this.

 

Let's go to India, which was one of the targets of the Rockefeller University and whiz kids over there who said the green revolution. And it was touted, and we saw all of its benefits. There was wonderful propaganda about it. Let's take a village in the Punjab area. You have a village that has 20,000 people living in it. If you've been in some of these villages, they have what looks like an airplane hangar. They have booths, and on these booths you might have 50 varieties of grains and legumes. They're very cheap. You can buy giant cashews for six cents a pound and also have your shoes fixed right there on the spot too. They have everywhere these fellows with these little shoeboxes and tacks and hammers and scissors, and they're fixing people's shoes. That was for two cents. And you had then the vegetables. Vegetables you'd never see anywhere else in the world and wonderful exotic fruits. They have like a litchi fruit that looks like a little brown fur ball. But you open it up and it's just this translucent wonderful sweet succulent fruit. I've never seen that in the United States. They have dozens. They have a tamarind paste made from the tamarind seeds that they use in their chutneys.

 

So you could go in one of these sheds, and they sometimes have one or two or three per village. You could think my goodness I've never been in a health food store in the world that has all this stuff, and of course it was nontoxic. It was grown organically. They used animal manure because they do not slaughter animals in that area of the world. They're sacred, and people were poor. But everyone bartered. Everyone had a small plot of land and whatever they grew they took in to this kind of place and everybody bartered and everybody had plenty of food. Nobody was hungry. You couldn't be. It wasn't possible. Not only because they had such an abundance seasonally all the time, but also because they care for one another.

 

Then in come the guys who said hey. We're going to solve your problems. We're going to sell you this tractor and with it these seeds and with it these chemicals. You're going to plant. You're not going to plant all this stuff. You're going to plant rice, but a kind of rice that's not going to be susceptible to insects. It's going to have five percent more protein. So they planted some rice. Now the rice came in and they had an abundance of rice. They were able to export it and actually make money on it. More money than what they could make bartering or selling it for small amounts in their common community food coops. Then it expanded. Those who did have money began to buy the little plots of land from those who had no money. But now people had a few dollars. Well a few dollars for a few days or a few months, but at the end of a year or at the end of two years one or two people now controlled all the agriculture. It was wonderful for them. One planting of rice comes in or wheat. It's harvested, but then the local people can't afford it. So they ship it off to other places to eat or to feed to cattle or pigs on large farms, and that's what was done.

 

Even in Bangladesh there was more than enough protein to feed all the population, but the grains that were grown were shipped out of the country. Mind you this is in the midst of massive starvation. And they had fish farms. And they would have an enormous amount of fish including perch that would be grown and they would ship it out to other countries that wanted you know their fish. Or it would be ground into fishmeal for fertilizer, but the point was that plenty of food was grown. No one could afford it locally. So local people starved in the midst of abundant food production. Now you had people who had no money and they no longer had land for sustainable agriculture. So they had to migrate to the cities for work. Many of them had their children work in brick factories or rug factories under the most horrific conditions of forced child labor - indentured labor. Many of their daughters were sold into prostitution. As a result, exploitation was rampant. And yet none of this - the starvation, the displacement of communities, massive poverty - none of this was ever featured in any of the major propaganda stories about the miracles of the green revolution. In point of fact the miracle of the green revolution after its inception was a fraud. It was one massive lie, but no one was there to herald the lie, to spotlight it, or focus on it. That's the other side of the story that we're not told.

 

It's quite sobering to learn how much food is wasted by the meat and dairy industries especially since vegetarianism exists as a simple and healthy alternative. In a recent year our livestock used up 145 million tons of grain and soy to produce a meager 21 million tons of animal products. Can we really afford to waste 124 million tons of food every time we net 21 million? Now this loss of waste is enough to provide one cup of grain every single day for every person in the world for an entire year. So the next time someone from the meat industry or the dairy industry - at the next one of their cattlemen's association - who I've debated. By the way, I've debated the head of the sugar people, the dairy people, and the cattlemen's association on network television. And they cannot put up the arguments because we have the proof. We could be feeding the world sustainable nutrition every single human being on the planet if we simply didn't waste what we're spending on our meat. And that's just a fact.

 

How would you like to buy 145 gallons of gasoline for your car and only be able to use 21 gallons? You would undoubtedly be outraged and rightly so. You wouldn't dream of wasting gasoline for your car. So does it make sense to tolerate wasting food in those proportions - a waste, which has the effect of starving your fellow human beings with whom you share this planet? Some might argue that they really don't know what to do about solving hunger in distant lands. Or they might think that governments should give more money to the needy, and that the Peace Corps and the United Nations or other charities should send more trained technical assistance to underdeveloped countries to teach modern farming techniques. But now that we see how grossly inefficient and wasteful meat is we know that the most direct and powerful and immediate solution to the problem is to adapt a vegetarian lifestyle.

 

Now I've spoken at length about the waste of grain perpetuated by the meat and dairy industries. We have not even looked at the other nutritious ingredients like wheat germ and fishmeal that are pumped into feed. If everyone adopted a low meat or vegetarian diet the combined surplus of both grain and legumes could be eaten by 800 million hungry people in the world every day. Now I mentioned before that cattle must be fed 16 pounds of grains to produce a single pound of flesh. Smaller animals are more efficient in this regard. To get that same single pound of flesh pigs consume about six pounds of feed and poultry need about four pounds. Milk requires the least amount of input averaging less than one pound of grain for each pint we drink. For each of these examples, the amounts vary. We can see how wasteful meat, poultry, and dairy products are. If 16 pounds of grain were eaten directly by people instead of fed to cattle to produce a single pound of flesh, we would net 20 times the amount of calories and ten times the amount of protein from it. And as an extra benefit while getting 20 times the calories, we would only be getting three times the fat. And even the fat is a more usable unsaturated fat instead of the heavy arachidonic difficult to digest saturated fats from animal products.

 

Eating meat wastes calories at the same time that it cuts into the amount of land that we have available to raise vegetables and grains. Of 100 calories consumed for its production, milk gives us back a scant 15 percent. Eggs give us a tiny seven percent and beef only gives you four percent. Well how would you like to get involved in an investment portfolio that offered you four, seven, and 15 dollars for every 100 dollars that you invest? You'd say well this is ridiculous. That's a bad investment. But those are the numbers we play when we consume meat and dairy products. Shouldn't we be as concerned about our food supply as we are about our passbooks savings?

 

Most people eat animal foods because they want the protein, but even here there is a tremendous waste and inefficiency. We get to use only 25, 12, and ten percent of the protein that goes into producing milk, pork, and beef respectively. In terms of land use a single acre of farmland can yield 800,000 calories per acre for growing vegetables. If we feed the same vegetables to animals first, the meat and dairy products that we then get in our food, gives us 200,000 calories. That adds up to a 75 percent loss in terms of nutrition. You can see why as meat eaters we have to start worrying about whether or not we have enough land to feed the world's population. If we were all vegetarians, there would be an ample amount of acreage for our dietary needs.

 

Eating meat is robbing us of millions of tons of calories and proteins without even offering the health benefits of a vegetarian diet. To sustain the meat and dairy producers we must compromise the use of our fertile and pure land and accept a 75 percent loss on return. Then we wonder why nature has not provided us with ample resources to feed all the world's populations. It has. We've just mismanaged it. Many people assume that most of the underdeveloped countries in the world simply do not have enough arable land and other resources to support their population. However that's not true. The root of the hunger problem according to the best study that I've seen is the misuse of land resources. Small but powerful groups of wealthy landowners typically use the land in their countries to turn profits. By the way that's also even true in previously communist countries, which were utterly corrupt and I mean utterly corrupt.

 

I have friends who were at the hierarchy in Russia and I have friends in Cuba, and I'll tell you something. They never stood in a food line. None of their friends ever stood in a food line. They never shared an apartment with four other families. No. There's always this little oligarchy within every system that controls the rest of the system no matter what name you put on the system. There's always room for the privileged not to have to adhere to the rules that everyone else has.

 

Even recently in Cuba one of the things that I was there for was to study land use, and the predominance of land in Cuba, which is extremely beautiful country and wonderful people, though I certainly do not respect its mismanagement under Fidel Castro who I'm not a friend of. Even though he is a friend of a lot of people in this system. I'm not one of them, but the Cuban people I am a friend to. They will tell you. Of course they tell you frequently where no one can hear their true words that they would love to see the sugar cane fields eliminated and allow the individuals to have sustainable agriculture. There are so many rules and laws about what you can and cannot have and sell, and it's just been pathetic. But there's a good example. Jamaica's no different. The best land in Jamaica is taken for sugar cane. I've gone to Trinidad. Same way. Best land sugar cane. Barbados. Best land sugar cane for making molasses in one and sugar in the other countries. But when you do that it destroys the land because sugar cane uses up more nutrients than almost anything else other than corn. Corn is about the most useless food ever grown, but it absolutely destroys the soil of its nitrogen base. Then people have to find small little tracks frequently on the sides of hills to grow what they can. So we have plenty of land in the world to feed everyone everything they need. It's just that it's been mismanaged and it's in the hands of people who do not see beyond their own immediate selfishness.

 

Reprioritizing the use of this. So instead of growing grain and legumes and vegetables and fruits and nuts and seeds for people many of whom are starving all around them the landowners choose to raise cash crops. Cash crops are things grown for dollar profit rather than to fulfill local dietary needs frequently for export. These crops are typically exported to people who will pay dearly for them. What do you take? Well let me tell you're supporting and subsidizing starvation. Okay. Let me put a mirror up to you for a moment and see if you can see this. Coffee. So when you're in your Starbucks or any of these other places ask yourself. You're drinking coffee. Did you know what had to happen to land use - not even talking about whether it's organic or nonorganic - just for that to be used? Sugar cane. Tobacco. Beef. Beef in particular. Argentine beef. Think of all the beef that's grown in South America for fast food hamburger joints here. You say you care about people. When you go in and eat a hamburger you realize there could be 1,000 different animal's flesh in that one single hamburger.

 

Do you know that it could come from South America where the rain forest was destroyed so they could grow cheap beef and that the agriculture is also destroyed? You don't have deep topsoil in South America. I went into some of the fields in Venezuela and Brazil and other countries. You go down one inch and that's it. You're at clay or rock. So what happens is they take these giant tractors and they put humongous chains between them. The chains are like a foot around in the links, and they just have two tractors with a giant chain in between them. It's like going down two sides of a football field. Every tree and every thing just gets ripped right out. Then they bulldoze all this down, and then they take these seed spreaders and they put down a seed for either Bahia or Bermuda and then the grass grows and then they put all these cattle in there are heat resistant. That generally came over from India. They grow the beef, but every native species of bird and even native populations are out of there all for the hamburger.

 

The poor farmers who toiled the fields to grow them rarely can afford to buy any of the things they grow. The bulk of these luxury items are exported to the wealthier industrialized world, and while beef production rose over 90 percent in some areas of Latin America for example local meat consumption dropped by 30 percent. Why? Well the meat is ending up not in Latin America's stomachs, but in franchised restaurants. Staple crops are also raised in the third world of course, but even these are used indirectly as cash crops being used primarily to feed animals for the lucrative meat and dairy industries. Once these affordable crops have been used for production of animal foods, they become unaffordable to all but the affluent minority and the balance is shipped out of the country for cash. Now I'm going down to Haiti in about two and a half weeks because I've been asked to help down there, and I intend to. I believe that we can help a lot of the starving people. In fact I'm donating. I invented something that will help them, and I'm going to show them how to do some sustainable agriculture. I'm going to fund at least two test sites. We're going to take a look at the health of the people, and I'm going to take some people who have some serious illnesses especially malnutrition and parasites and AIDS and I'm going to work with them. I'm going to have some blood tests drawn on them and taken to show what will happen every six months for two years of how we can reverse the diseases. Reverse their malnutrition. Have them do it all locally in a sustainable way and because there's really no profit in it hopefully the organized crime elements, which are rampant in Haiti, will not bother them.

 

That's frequently a problem in Africa. You go to put a water well in a village to help people get drinking water, and during the night the guys with the guns come and dig it up and take it and sell it for its metal value. So all that effort becomes for nothing. In any case I believe that we can turn this problem around in every single country, but we can't do it if we don't do it. We have to do something because everything we've done as an official policy has failed and will continue to fail because it doesn't take into account how to get people to become self sufficient. How do you get them 2,500 calories a day? How do you get them vitamins and minerals? You're only going to be able to do that if you show them what to do and then show them proper land utilization. Then of course on a political level you have to get redistribution of land from the wealthy to the poor and that's never been done voluntarily.

 

You want to talk about a lack of spirituality look in almost all the countries where there's an inequity in who controls the land and landlord groups continually bleeds the poor tenant farmer for the bulk of their produce by constantly raising their rent. Many are not even content simply to monopolize the market. They go on to become moneylender merchants hoarding grain. As grain is held back from the population in this way, food shortages ensue. By now people are desperate and hungry and will pay almost anything for the release of some of their hoarded grain, and the landowner now, the merchant, is finally ready to sell at instantly inflated prices. But there is a lot that can be done, and all we have to do is know that there is a solution beyond what we've been told.

 

Let us take a look at something that has not received much attention in the United States and that is King Cattle. In the early part of the 19th century, cotton had become the chief cash crop in the United States. King Cotton as it was called was the source of tremendous profit for the southern gentleman who farmed it and also for the northern industrialist who used it to make finished products. Everyone was profiting almost. Everyone except the slaves who were worked mercilessly pulling it from the plantation fields and the land that was depleted for years to come because of the reluctance to rotate cotton production with other crops. Plantation owners were bound to get everything they could while the getting was good. Of course cotton was eventually dethroned. Slavery ended and the vast plantation fields laid in waste. The magnificence of southern plantation had never recovered and the economy in general is just beginning to be reestablished where King Cotton once reigned.

 

In the 20th century cattle had become king bringing with it much of the same human, ecological, and economic abuse. As recently as just 1950, each American was consuming an average of 60 pounds of beef, the same amount of pork, and 25 pounds of poultry per year. By the 1970's though, per capita beef and poultry consumption had doubled. The American Meat Institute having seen meat consumption dropped considerably since 1930 was waging an all out war to regain prominence in the American diet. In a published source book, it described how "from 1938 to 1956 the American Meat Institute worked successfully against a declining rate of meat consumption by sponsoring an education and promotional program. The Institute invested more than 30 million dollars in consumer advertising in the last 17 year period to convince Americans that meat is a fine food."

 

The American Meat Institute carefully plotted its every move in route to totally duping the wide-eyed American public. It ran ads in the American Dietetic Association Journal claiming "magical results" from eating meat. It was presented as a cure all that reversed everything from pernicious anemia to pellagra. It was even held up as the "nutritional necessity for the steadily drinker and smoker," as if these blatant drug abuses could be ameliorated by complimenting the diet with pork or beef. More bluntly meat was advertised as "the health guardian for men, women, and children." These quotes are directly from the advertising in The American Dietetic Journal. Eating meat seemed to be as important as avenging the attack on Pearl Harbor.

 

"To argue as some governmental economists and experts do it was reasoned in meat three times a day that Americans should reduce their standard of living by ten percent through substitution of grains for a portion of meat, eggs, and milk that they now consume is to misunderstand the spirit of Americans and what lies back of our country's greatness and productivity. Instead of talking about how low our meat consumption can be cut and conditioning researchers to discover whether or not an ounce or two a day is sufficient we should be working at increasing meat to a pound of day or even more." The dairy industry was not to be outdone.

 

Americans had shunned dairy products and milk was generally known to create too much bodily mucous and allergic reactions. Many mothers nursed their babies or had them tended to by professional wet nurses. Cow's milk had been much criticized for the health hazards it posed to infants. The National Dairy Council struck back. The largest provider of nutrition education material for our schools systems. It boasted the merits of milk and cheese. Sponsored self-serving research and ultimately won the hearts of Americans. Infants were pulled from their mothers' breasts and introduced to the milk bottle while milk in the classroom is now as common as beer to a bar. The America public was not to be taken lightly. The meat and the dairy industries were not newcomers to public education and mass appeal techniques.

 

Knowing full well that the public could be convinced with some supporting government reports and statistics they enlisted the aid of the United States Food and Drug Administration and the USDA. The USDA proposed the dietary concept of a basic four-food group, but mind you the dairy and meat and egg industries were right in on those meetings and so were their friends in high places. Those friends always knew you don't want to sass back the people who you may be working for in the future. After all how many times have we seen that government agencies bend over backwards to take care of their friends?

 

Along with The American Dietetic Association, an avid almost rabid meat and dairy industry supporter, it proceeded to grossly oversimplify the guidelines to proper nutrition. Any close examination of the diet suggested by the basic four-food group concept reveals a regimen that does not do anything to assure proper nutrition. It is grotesque. It does assure a very healthy profit for agribusiness. The plan suggests that each person eat from the basic four food groups to be sure of receiving "the recommended daily allowance of all nutrients." The four food groups also aimed exclusively of course at meat and dairy product.

 

The four-food groups were preceded in the 1930's by the 12-food group, and then that became the seven-food group. By the 1940's the 12 food groups were milk and milk products, potatoes and sweet potatoes, dried mature peas, beans and nuts, tomatoes and citrus fruits, leafy greens and yellow vegetables and other fruits and vegetables, eggs, lean meats, poultry, fish, flour and cereal, butter and other fats and sugars. Well that's actually not bad if you eliminated milk and milk products as number one. Then your top eight are all good. Then the basic seven had three fruit and vegetable groups and that was good, but neither of these groups sufficiently supported the public education demands of the meat and dairy industries. With too many people eating from the 12 food groups and the basic seven groups, not enough animal products were being consumed to satisfy their profit plans.

 

Let's take a look why agribusiness is very happy to offer not 12 or seven but only four food groups, which by the way even though they are totally challenged today as outmoded still have not been fully replaced. The basic four are well known to most consumers in the United States. Why not? We were indoctrinated with them. The milk group contains dairy products like butter and cream and cheese and milk, and the USDA recommends three to four servings a day for children, two for adults, and three for pregnant women and four for lactating women. A cup of milk is considered a single serving. In The Dairy Council's Milk's The One commercials the word glassful was substituted for cups. So that four to six ounces above even USDA's recommendations were actually being recommended. The meat group includes beef and pork and fish and poultry and eggs. Two daily servings are recommended.

 

By the very name of the group though and because they're listed as secondary sources, the non-meat items are easily overlooked. Vegetarians and meat eaters alike are likely to be misled into presuming that the meats contain a better quality and greater quantity of protein. In actuality the vegetarian items are just as good and frequently better in this regard. Still the public is left with the impression that protein deficiencies - ah oh - are going to result if you're a vegetarian. Not true. Now of course you can take someone who is misinformed and misguided who is applying vegetarianism in an extreme way and yes you can find someone who gets sick. But no more so than someone that overeats all of the standard foods and gets sick.

 

What you have to do is look at someone who's doing something correctly. Then take a look at the hormones in their bodies, c-reactive proteins, fibrinogen, and homocysteine. The meat eaters are going to have elevations. When you have elevations, have greater heart attack, greater cancer, and greater stroke. Vegetarians you have less stroke, less cancer, less heart attacks, and less diverticulitis and other digestive conditions and you're going to live longer. It's plain and simple. It's in the science. The vegetable fruit group is the third category. It includes all the fruits and vegetables in a wide variety of foods. It certainly deserves to be classified but not as a subgroup. But instead they are. Four servings is the daily recommendation, but four servings of fruits and vegetables are not enough. All the science today shows that the one thing that you can do to help your body prevent disease is to have antioxidants, and antioxidants are the single best preventative of disease. Plain and simple. Why? Because they block free radicals. Your fruits and vegetables are a good source of that. Nine servings minimum a day of fruits and vegetables are important.

 

Yet we're not getting it because when people saw that fruits and vegetables we're not one of the main categories they kind of thought well. As long as I get my primary dishes in - you know my meat dishes, my dairy dishes, then I'm okay. So people got their meat and dairy, and then didn't have an appetite or desire for the fruits and vegetables. Occasionally an apple or banana or orange and maybe a pear in season. Grapes sometimes. Fresh peach. But those were not regular daily items. Oh but they had to have that meat three times a day. To be a good conscientious homemaker yes you prided yourself. I remember my family. They all had to have their meat three times a day. Treats. Canadian bacon or sausage.

 

I remember my older brother eating like seven sausages and bacon and eggs and white bread toast and coffee in the morning. No vitamins. Of course he smoked. Grilled cheese sandwiches and hamburgers for lunch and roast beef or something like that or pot roast for dinner. Vegetables were rare and when they were they were overcooked. Fruits. Not a whole lot of fruits. No such thing as a fresh fruit juice. It didn't exist. Milk. Plenty of milk. Plenty of cheese. All over the place. My younger brother would take a piece of cheese and stick his thumb with the cheese or finger with the cheese in the mustard jar or the mayonnaise jar. Of course that killed it for everyone else unless they were equally as gross. Never drank out of a glass I don't think in his life. He always preferred drinking directly out of the container. Fine.

 

But I guess we were just like most typical homes and everybody thought they were getting everything they needed, but it wasn't true. We were living by propaganda. Of course the last group is the bread cereal group, and while four servings are again recommended the question is what were the benefits. Well the benefits are close to zero based upon how most people actually consume that basic four. It's in refined carbohydrates causing a myriad of conditions from overweight to gluten intolerances to digestive difficulties, ph imbalances, extra mucous throughout your body all because processing of the grains.

 

Since Americans have been force-fed the propaganda of the basic four food groups, they have taken a beating in so many ways. While the profits in the meat and dairy industries have increased greatly, the average consumer has had to be in a position to pay for their own health consequences. Now of course when we start changing over to a vegetarian diet every thing can change for the better. Let me just give you some examples of this, and I want to focus some attention on one specific area. That is can we be healthy eating meat. Now there's a healthy case for relying on organic whole grains and vegetables and legumes for our nutrients. But what about the anti meat side of the vegetarian argument?

 

Meat can contain substances that are potentially harmful to the human body. For example meat is strongly susceptible to bacteria and antibiotics are often injected in to it. The problem has long been recognized. In fact Science Newsletter reported in 1948 that in 1947 "40 million pounds of unfit meat reached the unsuspecting American public." Now in this case the problem was mainly a matter of inadequate inspection of poultry, but the poultry, which was inspected, 20 percent was declared unfit for human consumption. Clearly this whole issue merits a closer examination.

 

Animals like humans continuously eliminate waste products from their tissues and cells to the surround blood. This natural process comes to an abrupt halt when the animal is slaughtered. All of the waste material present inside the body inside the tissue remains intact. And as such when you eat any flesh you're ingesting all of the unsavory substances that should have been excreted. By doing so you add unnecessary stress to your organs of elimination. The human body already has plenty of waste to get rid off: worn out cells, byproducts of digestion. Polluting the system with additional animal waste may cause wear and tear on this biological mechanism. In the five organs of elimination - the lungs, the bladder, the kidneys, the sweat glands, and liver - may bear the brunt of the waste overload by developing any of the several degenerative diseases.

 

To make matters worse meat unlike fruits and vegetables starts to decay the moment the animal dies and continues to degenerate during the processing, packaging, and transportation to the market or butcher. After slaughter a steer is sectioned and moved into cold storage. Now depending upon the cut the meat is then aged for a designated period of time to make it tender. It may be stored in a meat warehouse before being sent to a butcher or a supermarket where it is packaged. There it sits in the meat section of the market until the unsuspecting consumer picks it up and finally prepares it and cooks and eats it. Whoever eats that meat ingests hundreds of millions of pathogenic bacteria in every piece of meat. Even if the meat looks fresh, it is still replete with bacteria.

 

Each gram of sausage stored at room temperature for nearly 20 hours increases live bacteria count by 70 million. Each gram of beef - that' a gram of beef - that's a tiny amount - by 650 million bacteria per gram. Each gram of smoked ham a whopping 700 million additional bacteria per gram. Consumer Reports says that "50 percent of the government inspected frankfurter sampled had begun to spoil and contained at least 20 million bacteria per ounce." Now what's an average hotdog or frankfurter weigh about four ounces? Well how about 100 million bacteria in your body from one hotdog?

 

You may reason that you would never leave meat out to spoil at room temperature for such a long time. However you really can't know how this perishable item was handled before you bought it. The recent mystery meat scandal in Denver, Colorado led to the conviction of a man for doing something really terrible with meat. Lengthy testimonies against the owner of a cattle meat packing company exposed his methods of operations. He ordered his workers "not to throw anything away. To use every bit and piece even the blood clots as a matter of practice." That packing company added rotten meat in with the chopped beef and brought dead animals into the slaughterhouse. Inspectors also cited the plant for unsanitary conditions including rodent and cockroach infestation, paint chips, people urinating on the floor, repackaging of re-returned tainted meat, and falsification of inspection dates.

 

The plants' health inspectors apparently weren't watching. Many of the illegal happenings occurred while they were on their breaks. If you're a hamburger lover you should know that before it's shut down that particular cattle venture was a major supplier of meat for The Department of Defense, many supermarkets, and for the Roy Rogers and Wendy's fast food chains. They also supplied nearly one-fourth of the hamburger meat designated for our nation's school lunch programs. The breaking of this scandal prevented an estimated 20 million pounds of questionable meat from entering the food market. We'll never know how much tainted meat had already been consumed by the public, and how much is presently being sold. That's just one case. Not an isolated case.

 

Nebraska Beef Processors was recently charged with shipping rancid meat and changing USDA inspection stamps and was cited for the violations. USDA has had to provide additional inspectors for 13 meat packing plants experiencing chronic problems. So when you go to eat a piece of meat how do you know it's fresh? You don't. How do you know how much bacteria is in it? You don't. There's a big question because these problems are happening everywhere. Admitting the health violations of that particular incident, its attorney commented, "Well those things happen like they do in every other meat packing plant in the United States." That was his excuse.

 

The whole inspection system is inadequate. Many meat inspectors are poorly trained and often over the period of a single day they're expected to check more than 1,000 chickens and a hundred head of cattle in one day without the use of a microscope. It's a joke. Hundreds of billions of bacteria go marching on. Where do they go? In to your system. Just look at The Center For Disease Control. It says, "Although commercially ready to eat pork products are required by law to be cooked, frozen or otherwise treated to kill spirulus larva, federal and state inspection procedures do not actually include examining of the pork for the presence of the larva at the time of slaughter. The burden of the responsibility lies on the consumer."

 

Hello. Did anyone tell you the last time you had a piece of pork you better go have this inspected for the T-spirulus, which can cause you a lot of problems. No. That wasn't happening. Then again the average American is just unaware of how bad it is. I'm Gary Null. I want to thank you very much for listening to this part of our program. We will continue with our next segment. (End of Meat, Protein and Dispelling the Myths Part Three)

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Meat & Protein:

Dispelling the Myths (Part 4)

Transcript of Gary Null's Radio Show

 

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GARY NULL: Hi everyone. I'm Gary Null, and I'd like to welcome you to this program. Today we are taking an in depth look at a very important topic. One that impacts upon virtually all people on the planet. Protein and all the different ways we can get it. This is a continuation of our in depth investigative reporting series on Meat, Protein and Dispelling the Myths. Today we're going to talk about what is vegetarianism and why would you want to choose it as a way of life. Well despite its quirky food fad connotations of the past, vegetarianism has in the last 30 years become a way of life for at least four million new Americans who have shifted to that diet. Some people still think being a vegetarian means a life sentence of brown rice and broccoli. The truth is far from boring, and we are going to dispel some of those myths now.

 

In point of fact vegetarianism does not imply vegetables as some people have mistaken. To the contrary it's from the Latin vegetera, which means to enliven. Vegetarians are eating a health enhancing life food. Now being a vegetarian means nothing more than abstaining from the flesh of warm-blooded animals, but there is more than one way to do this. Total vegetarians thrive solely on plant foods. They eat not only vegetables, but also fruits and nuts and grains and seeds and legumes and herbs of various types. Most people who are vegetarians today don't appreciate that you can have degrees of vegetarianism.

 

For example, a vegan abstains from all animal foods and dairy products, but also they do not wear any leather or wear any wool. Not wool sweaters or wool blouses or suits. They have no silk on their body or in their living environment. Lacto vegetarians will include milk and milk products, but primarily subsist on non-flesh foods except for milk. Lacto-ovo vegetarians will eat eggs along with milk and vegetables. Pesco vegetarians allow fish in their diets, and prime examples would be the hundreds of millions of Asians who live on the staples of rice, beans, fish, and fresh and root vegetables. Polo vegetarians eat generally some form of poultry either free range hens or wild game birds, but still don't eat all other forms of red meat.

 

So you could say well can I be a vegetarian and consume wild birds or can I be a vegetarian and still wear silk or wear a wool suit? And the answer is you have many definitions of vegetarianism. You can be a vegetarian and still not be as specific as other types of vegetarians. So it's really what you want to do, and that's why there's no one single concept of a vegetarian. Even those who are vegan and who will stand loud and tall on the platform espousing the benefits of veganism - if you look carefully you'll frequently see them wearing a leather belt or leather shoes or wool socks. And therefore they're not as pure. So you might say it's much like a religion. You can be ultra orthodox or orthodox or reform or conservative or very liberal. There's a full spectrum, and yet you still all believe in the same God. You still all have the same basic concepts of an identity associated with something. A lot of times people will say well I'm a vegetarian because I have a certain ethic towards animals. Less so on the hygiene.

 

But let's look throughout the world why three-quarters of the world's population subsist fairly much on a vegetarian way, and where we in the West and other western societies like England, Germany, France, and Italy are more of a meat consuming and dairy consuming society. We also consume far more processed carbohydrates. The US alone today has approximately nine million vegetarians. Now that number is increasing, but not rapidly and not in the adult population. The largest single increase in the concept of vegetarianism in the last ten years has been in people under the age of 18. In fact young people, including children, represent a very large group, and where not always are their parents vegetarian. You can go into restaurants now and find gourmet vegetarian entrees. You can read meatless cookbooks. Even tuning into the radio programs today, you'll have more programs talking about vegetarianism than ever before.

 

Let's look at health. Not only is health a major - perhaps the major - reason for most people becoming vegetarian it's one of the reasons many stick with it. Cutting out fatty meats and substituting lighter plant proteins can have amazing effects on general health and well being. Not only that but vegetarianism can in many ways actually prevent disease. For example, the saturated fats, the arachidonic acids, and the high inflammatory proteins and fats that can produce what we call c-reactive protein or homocysteine and elevated cholesterol and the bad LDL cholesterol, those are principally from meats and dairy products. Those in turn can lead in time to gene alterations, which can through gene alterations and hormonal imbalances - because the more animal proteins you take in the more adverse effects to your hormones, especially the dominance of estrogen in men and women. When men have a dominance of estrogen you lose testosterone and you can end up with impotency, prostate cancer, excessive abdominal fat, and heart disease. In women excess estrogen from a high protein diet can lead to breast and colorectal and uterine cancer.

 

So these bad fats also contribute to hardening of the arteries and over-consumption of animal proteins has definitely been associated with diseases of osteoporosis, stroke, liver and kidney disorders, arthritis, and dementia. The brains of people who are vegetarians and supplement properly are not going to have the same type or concentration of amyloid plaques that can lead to senility and Alzheimer's. Quite frankly your brain is going to live longer and you'll be mentally healthier on a vegetarian diet. Vegetarianism isn't a cure for these life threateners, but by deleting meat and dairy products from your diet you're taking a very smart preventative step.

 

As if it weren't bad enough as it is, meat is often contaminated with hormones, antibiotics, tranquilizers, preservatives, additives, and pesticides. These toxins can have negative long-term effects on health, and recently have been connected with cases of salmonella and E. coli and listeria. It's only the elimination of meat that makes vegetarianism such a healthy lifestyle to some. Putting more fiber rich vegetables and grains in the diet by eliminating the meat improves the functioning of your digestive tract. That prevents colorectal cancer and diverticular conditions and lessens constipation and gas. Lowering your cholesterol. Lowering your blood pressure. Also improves when you go on a meatless diet because along with meat frequently comes a lot of salt. And with the combination of salt, meat, dehydration, high blood pressure is the consequence. But there are other reasons including economics.

 

The economics of vegetarianism are hard to beat. Ounce for ounce plants that are of full spectrum of which are available are thriftier choices than meat across the board. Heading for the produce stand or the farmer's market or the food coop, which is the most economic way of buying organic fresh produce. You can save upwards of 30 percent in a lot of food coops if you work there, and if you don't frequently 20 percent. Farmers markets like the one at least in Manhattan on the weekends you can save upwards of 40 percent on a lot of items. They're fresher. They're organic and there's greater variety. In fact if you go to a health food store in the mornings and I've done this. When I first came to New York City. You find that when the produce comes in day old produce, which is completely nutritious - there's nothing wrong with it. It's just may not look as perfect or when they're taking the apples out and there might be a little scale on an apple. A scale's not bad. Or the lettuce is too large. They have to trim out all the outer leaves.

 

Well they'll throw cases and cases of completely nutritious good produce away each day. I use to collect all that and take it to a soup kitchen over on West End Avenue at 73rd Street. Then I'd take the rest home and juice it and have my juice for the day for free. A little effort, but it was worth it. If you go to stores you can always find ways of making deals, but people don't want to be bothered. Well if you can afford not to be bothered fine. But dollar for dollar you will save upwards of 30 percent on a vegetarian diet as versus a traditional diet. The biggest single expense in a non-vegetarian diet saved is junk foods.

 

Junk foods are always more expensive. What do you pay for a pound of organic potatoes? About 83 cents. What do you pay? That's what I just checked last night. What do you pay for a pound of potato chips made from nonorganic potatoes with all that fat and all that salt and virtually worthless nutritionally? You're paying almost 16 dollars. So 16 dollars versus 83 cents. Getting something that's nutritious with alpha lipoic acid and vitamin C and minerals like magnesium you'll get in the potato. You don't get anything in the potato chip except making yourself sick.

 

On a larger scale vegetarianism can also produce beneficial effects. Agribusiness rules the meat industry roost. Their enormous corporations rely on high tech, high cost methods of meat producing making it virtually impossible for the small farmer to compete. A general switch to vegetables or grains or nuts or seeds or legumes or fruits could provide the smaller farmer with a new lease on life. In fact I've taught classes on sustainable agriculture to little farmers who have no way of competing in the large market, but now have a whole boutique market to themselves doing micro greens or dried organic fruits. There's always a way when the person is smaller in resources to be able to compensate.

 

Recently someone emailed me a letter talking about how the conservative media was consistently attacking the idea of organic or vegetarian because people would starve, and only by mechanized large-scale farming with pesticides could we save the hungry. Well on previous programs I've dismantled that entire myth. In point of fact, large scale industrialized farming depletes the soil. Robs it of its nutrients. Plant foods such as corn that do not give nitrogen back to the soil, but takes an enormous amount out. Do not do cover crops, and do not do any natural fertilizing. They pollute the ground water. Pollute artesian wells. Pollute deep springs so that over 60 million American families and individuals no longer have safe water to drink in rural American or even suburban America where those aqua streams travel to because of the run off of commercial farming.

 

We also have too much - far, far away too much soil that's eroded each year, but we're almost deceived because we do artificial fertilizing, which gives the impression that something is richer than what it is. In fact we're closer to the Great Dust Bowl in economic devastation than we would imagine. Very little quality topsoil is left in the United States. And you produce mono crops. Mono crops and the crops we produce such as corn and soy are fed to cattle and pigs, and the wheat goes into processed refined carbohydrates: bread and pastas and pastries. So we're really getting almost no nutritional value for 85 percent of all of the cropland in the United States that goes towards these types of grains.

 

Whereas if we did small sustainable agriculture - let's say you take a 100-acre farm and you plant it in sections. You do a section in your root vegetables like rutabaga and parsnips and turnips and potatoes and leeks. Then herbs like garlic and shallots and onions and rosemary and thyme and dill and oregano. Then you do a whole section of fruit trees and nut trees. Then you have your different grains like amaranth and quinoa and you have beehives for honey. In fact my beehives I have so much honey left over that the bees actually swarm. Meaning that they keep swimming because I have too much honey, and I generally don't get around to taking the honey except maybe once a year because there's so much variety of trees around that they're constantly pollinating. But when you take the honey a small part and you leave the majority for them, you'll get something that is enormously beneficial. It's one of nature's most perfect medicines: raw organic unheated unfiltered honey. It's almost perfection in food, and is the only food in the world that will never go bad. We don't do that.

 

We use sugar instead of honey - what a difference nutritionally. Even if they were both the same caloric content, which is where most people keep their argument, and that's the wrong argument to take because one is full of life and the other is dead. It's like saying well they're both 15 calories per teaspoon. That's not what's relevant. One is filled with enzymes, phytonutrients, healing natural antibiotics. You take it. It helps soothe your throat. It can help protect you. I take a teaspoon of honey every time I get on an airplane because I want anything I'm breathing in helped to be killed by a natural antibiotic resistance in the honey. It works. Bee propolis from the beehives also works, but most importantly the bees are there to pollinate; and when you pollinate my goodness you get such better crops. You get healthier crops. By giving natural fertilizers to the soil and natural regular treatment such as spraying sesame oil on plants instead of using toxic pesticides will keep nymph toads and all other forms of problems. But we're not doing that because we think it's not practical. In point of fact it is the only way of feeding people in the future. It's having sustainable agriculture. So their argument is simply bogus.

 

Now we should also look at conservation of natural resources. The breeding and slaughter of animals and the subsequent producing, packaging of the meat and chicken and dairy requires an inordinate amount of food, water, energy, land, and raw materials. Many people opt for vegetarianism as a personal contribution to the necessary preservation of our fragile eco system and our limited natural resources.

 

Let's also examine food resources. Similarly the ideal of eating simply so that everyone may eat often leads people to an animal free diet. The logic is the land is capable of supplying food for nearly 14 times as many people when it's used to grow food for people rather than crops to feed livestock. Remember when you're growing crops for livestock you're growing one crop like corn, and when you grow corn it's one of your most absolutely nutritionally worthless foods. That soil is depleted. On that same 100 acres you could grow 100 different crops and feed 100 families.

 

How do I know? I've done it. I took a bankrupt farm. I bought it on the steps of a courthouse upstate, and there was the farmer and his daughter standing in a little pickup truck. He had his arm in a sling and had a red jacket on. I never will forget that face he looked at me with. He came over after I bought this property and he said well how long do I have to get off the property. I said who you are. He said I'm the owner. I said how long have you lived there. He said my family has had it for 100 years. It was 200 acres in Goshen. I said why do you feel you lost it. He said well you know between the labor costs of the migrant labor and the tough market in onions and celery and the high cost of equipment I just couldn't make it. I said well tell you what I'm going to do. You don't have to leave your property. So I went in the bank and I deeded him back 35 acres including his house, his barn and his garage on a choice spot overlooking everything. I said it's yours. You own it for free. You have no debt to anyone now. At the end of a year I'll let you have the whole farm back for a dollar if you follow what I do.

 

He said okay. He had nothing to lose. Right? So I went about turning this old beaten up regular farm in Goshen into the finest organic farm in this part of the United States. In fact by midsummer I had tractor-trailers every single health food store from Boston to Washington, DC all the food came off of it. Over 70 varieties of fruits and vegetables and all done with one laborer - one human being - me. The other farmers came by in pickup trucks and would just sit there and look and shaking their heads. What's he doing now? What's that? Why has he got all those chickens out there? What's he doing in that little moped driving up and down the aisles? Why put cleats into the tires of a moped? So while they'd be out there paying someone to pick the weeds or putting pesticides on or herbicides to get rid of the weeds I was simply driving up and down the rows once every two days. It took me about a half hour. It would tear up the little root structure of the weed, and then I brought in 100 chickens. The chickens would eat the bugs off of the baby seedling plants so they were getting healthy eating the bugs. Scraping the soil. Leaving their fertilizer. Giving eggs. He took the organic free-range eggs to the local health food coop. I told him you can't kill the chickens, but you can take the eggs because otherwise the chicken's going to lay an egg and these may or may not be fertile eggs.

 

So anyhow he took the advice and watched. I showed him how to plant rotational crops and plant edible flowers. He had never had an edible flower. Well within a year, one season, the experiment was over. He has back his farm. I've never gone back. I really should, but a lot of you came. Remember? I said you could come and have all the free produce you want. You did. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of free produce. I asked people who belonged at the synagogues and churches and inner city programs bring the kids. We must have had two to three thousand kids come up from inner city who watched how organic farming was done and sustainable agriculture. I was up there every Friday, Saturday and Sunday for that year. But it worked. That's one farm out of thousands, but all it takes is one. All it takes is showing someone once how to do it to show that it can be done. So we've gotten it all wrong when it comes to thinking that we can't do it. We can't turn it around. Sure we can. We can do anything if we want.

 

Let's also not forget the respect for animal life. Many vegetarians are against animal slaughter feeling that the breeding of livestock for food is inhumane. Their vegetarianism is a cry against cruelty and suffering. It's based upon the belief that they can help to save the lives of innocent creatures. I had a program at my ranch in Texas where the school systems would bring in kids every day when I was there and when I wasn't my brother Howard would do it. We made like a little lunch for the kids. Mainly these were handicapped kids in some way. They were brought in. They had never had a chance to actually interrelate with animals, and here would be a giant eight-foot élan with a giant horn on its head and be as gentle as it could be. They'd have a chance to go out and pet buffalo and Scottish Highlander cattle and antelope and all kinds of animals.

 

I had over 400 animals on the ranch of 200 acres down there in Texas. The most fun they had were with the little deer and the little heifers, the little calves. They just can't give you enough love. They'd look forward. They'd ask can we come back and play with the animals. Yes. You can. Can we? And their eyes would get real wide. As they were leaving the ranch they'd have their little faces pressed against the window with their eyes out and waving at their little new friend animals they'd made. Now that over and over again bonding with these animals whenever they wanted - thousands.

 

Sometimes I'd fly in and as I was pulling up to the ranch at little place called Tygo (sp?), Texas north of Dallas there'd be generally a local sheriff or a deputy sheriff or state police guiding people on where they could park in one area. I've seen as many as 500 people on a weekend up on the ranch. Nothing was ever stolen. In fact I built an old Wild West town for them. On the weekend all the locals would come and have their dance and everything. Never anything broken. Left it clean. Just nice people. Nice people. Respect for life. Respect for animal life. Those kids are not going to want to go eat a hamburger after that. So we have to teach people early in life.

 

Then there's religion, and let us not forget the power of religion to mold a concept in our mind and reinforce it with the support of other people within that religion. They can make a difference. There are many religious disciplines both contemporary and ancient that incorporate a meat free diet. Now there are reasons for endorsing vegetarianism. They stem from a belief that human life may be reincarnated as animal life or vice versa for some religions like the Hindu religion or the Jainism religion and or from ethical considerations against the taking of life or even from considerations of the health benefits or combinations.

 

Then we have personal taste. For many a taste for meat is an acquired one starting in childhood. It's not due to an innate craving for protein. For those who choose to skip the steak and burgers for whatever reason the taste for them usually fades fast. No wonder with the endless variety of protein providing plant foods available and the tasty ways they're being combined and seasoned and prepared. Today is an easy time for vegetarians to get what they want.

 

Now let's take a look at some other aspects of vegetarianism. Many people throughout the ages made the decision to forego red meat after much thought. It's fascinating to follow the evolution of the vegetarian lifestyle from ancient to modern times. Noting the varied reasons famous vegetarians had given for their own styles. Like Gandhi the Indian leader and pacifist for example felt such a strong kinship with the animal life he couldn't bear the thought of using innocent creatures for food. He said, "To my mind the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body."

 

In ancient Greece Socrates and Plato taught that vegetarianism was the ideal diet. Buddha in India and Mohammed in Arabia also advised against meat consumption. This diet has also been embraced by many well known artists, writers, scientists including: Leonardo da Vinci, Leo Tolstoy, Sir Isaac Newton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, and Charles Darwin. Another legendary figure who was a vegetarian was Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer echoed Gandhi's philosophy when he wrote that, "There slowly grew up in me an unshakable conviction that we have no right to inflict suffering and death on another living creature unless therein some unavoidable necessity for it." And that we ought to feel what a horrible thing it is to cause suffering and death out of mere thoughtlessness.

 

George Bernard Shaw viewed meat consumption as cannibalism with its heroic dish removed. He attributed his long productive life as a social political analyst and writer to his healthy diet. He said, "I flatly declare that a man fed on whisky and dead bodies cannot do the finest work of which he is capable. I have managed to do my thinking without the stimulus of tea or coffee." He said that he felt seldom less than ten times as well as an ordinary carcass eater. Shaw felt so strongly about his vegetarianism and way of life that he published in 1918 "The Vegetarian Diet According to Shaw" in order to dispel the misconceptions about this dietary style. He said, "An underfed man is not a man who gets no meat or gets nothing but meat. He is one who does not get enough to eat no matter what he eats. The person who is ignorant enough to believe that his nourishment depends upon meat is in a horrible dilemma." Shaw further believed that naturally harvested foods organic foods continuously nourish the life force within. He wrote, "Think of the fierce energy concentration in an acorn. You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into a giant oak. Bury a sheep and nothing happens but decay." Think about that for a moment. Wise words from a brilliant man.

 

Philosopher Henry David Thoreau dedicated pages to the ideals of vegetarianism. He felt as he said, "It is a part of the destiny of the human in its gradual improvement to leave off eating animals as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with an advanced civilization." Thoreau like Shaw felt that avoidance of meat improved his artistic endeavors. In his masterwork "Walden" he wrote, "I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic facilities in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food." His personal abstinence from meat as well as from coffee and tea was not so much for health reasons, but because he said, "There are not good agreeable to my imagination."

 

Perhaps the most inspiration for a person on the brink of going vegetarian is a pair of well known modern day meat shunners: Helen and Scott Nearing. They wrote several books in which they recount their experiences with the vegetarian lifestyle with much joy and reverence for life. No wonder. Both reaped the health benefits of the practice living long and productive lives. Scott lived to be almost 100, and Helen I don't know how long she lived. I don't even know if she still is living. I visited them on a few occasions. They visited me on my farm upstate in New York on one occasion. Wonderful people. They just had such capacity to feel, to experience and to share.

 

Now their meals consisted of concoctions of fresh fruits and whole grains and vegetable soups and nut butters and molasses. Their story is more than a tale of amazing longevity however. As newlyweds in the '30s, the Nearings left busy city life and settled in the peaceful atmosphere of Maine. Here they worked hard and together to become monetarily independent and self-sufficient. They said we are rich in the fresh air and fresh water and sunshine. Scott exalted. Growing themselves most of what they ate. They enjoyed a freedom that no one dependent on commercially packaged meats and other foods could imagine. Their freedom of he said being the master of each day.

 

More recent vegetarians have included well known athletes and everyone from Oscar winner Cloris Leachman who attributes her vibrant health to vegetarianism and Dennis Weaver, Paul Newman, Cicely Tyson, and of course ones who I knew from an older generation. I was very young. I was in my 20s and had some best selling books. So I befriended all the old ones. Ginger Rogers was a friend. Gloria Swanson was a very close friend. Hedy Lamar. All of them because they all knew each other and they all wanted to get healthy. So when one had arthritis I'd get a call. They were very, very strong on it. Some of them got to it a little late in life. Bob Dylan. Paul McCartney. Robbie Shankar. Susan Smith. There are a lot of them.

 

Vegetarianism has been around for a long, long time. In fact the book of Genesis advocates a diet of fruits, seeds, nuts, and clearly that's decidedly vegetarian. Other roots of vegetarianism date back to the early history of the eastern nations. Here ancient religious beliefs in the transmigration of the human soul to lower life forms led followers to maintain a vegetarian diet out of respect for animal life. Buddha later commanded in his writings, "Do not butcher the ox that ploughs thy field. Do not indulge a voracity that involves a slaughter of animals." Buddhism quickly spread eastward from India and became the state religion of China around 500 AD. Finally flowed to Japan a century later. Vegetarianism for the Japanese Buddhist included the belief that eating animal flesh polluted the body for 100 days.

 

Vegetarianism in the Hindu religion of India is founded on health standards formulated in the Hindu epic poem that "those who desire to possess good memory, beauty, long life with perfect health and physical moral and spiritual strength should abstain from all animal foods." Jainism, more a philosophy than a religion, is based on the principle of nonviolence and abhors the killing of animals, fish or fowl for food. Yoga another oriental discipline follows the vegetarian beliefs of the Hindus and Buddhists teaching that all life is formed and sustained through prana or the life force. The ideal foods according to this philosophy are those containing life energy including vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes, and grains. Accordingly the meat of dead animals, which have lost their prana, is useless and should be avoided. Again you may have some take offs on this, but that is the principle thought.

 

Analysts of the intestinal contents of mummies have unearthed yet another race of vegetarians the Egyptians. These ancients have earned the modern nickname the eaters of bread, and much later in the Middle East Mohammed's holy book of Islam, the Koran, prohibited the eating of "dead animals, blood, and flesh." But it's ancient Greece that boasts the beginnings of what we call the real vegetarian movement. Founded by Pythagoras and supported by the likes of Plato and Socrates in what began as a religious policy grew into a feeling that vegetarianism was natural and hygienic. Therefore it was necessary to healthy living. An unlikely vegetarian race was the Romans who conquered the known world with an army fed on bread and porridge and vegetables and wine and fish. It was historian Will Durant who said, "The Roman army conquered the world on a vegetarian diet. Caesar's troops complained when corn ran out and they had to eat meat."

 

After the fall of the Roman Empire vegetarianism fell out of popularity for some 1,200 years. Only the devotion and dedication of a few cloistered orders of the Catholic Church, the Benedictines and the Cistercians, kept vegetarianism alive until the Renaissance revived the ancient teachings and modern vegetarianism got under way. The new ideologies had the same support from many influential people as the old. Among the famous vegetarians in the political, literary and scientific arenas were Sir Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Benjamin Franklin. Perhaps because of the increase in meat eating by the 19th century most European countries saw the organization of whole vegetarian movements. It was one of Great Britain's most revered vegetarians, Reverend William Metcalfe who carried the movement across the waters to America in 1817.

 

Also John Wesley, the founder of Methodism who promoted the idea that vegetarianism was more healthy than any other way to sustain your life. The result was a convention in 1850, which established The American Vegetarian Society. The cause was furthered by Anna Kingsford, a 19th century medical practitioner who dedicated much of her scientific writing to the subject of vegetarianism. She reported that the strongest animals in the world including the horse, the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, and the camel were herbivores eating only plant foods. Paralleled this fact with the amazing athletic prowess of the ancient Greeks who avoided meat.

 

Real strides in scientific vegetarianism came out of World War I when food scarcity prompted scientists in the United States to reevaluate the national diet. Forced to find alternative sources of protein, they discovered the healthy benefits of non-meat eating at the same time. The American way of handling meat shortages was adapted by other countries as well. Denmark in 1917 adopted a simple meatless wartime diet based upon whole grains, vegetables, and dairy products. The result was overall improved health and lowered mortality rates. During World War II Norwegians drastically cut their meat and sugar consumption and depended upon whole grain cereals, potatoes, and other root vegetables. Once again vegetarianism improved the country's health and lowered the death rates. Not surprisingly these health statistics flipped over when the war ended, and the normal meat consumption resumed and so did an increase in death and disease.

 

Around the early 1940's the number of vegetarians living in the United States was about two million. Since then the ranks have swelled. In the mid 1970's it went up to seven million. In the '80s however there was actual decline. It did not go forward. In the 1990's a lot of younger people became vegetarians. Now it's around nine million. Well nine million even rounded off to ten million compared to what 287 million shows you that we're very, very short on the percentages. It means 95 percent of the American population - actually 97 percent of the population is still meat eaters; but we've remained at about three percent of the population vegetarian now for quite some time - about 30 years.

 

Now will the rise in health consciousness inspire more Americans to improve their lifestyle and become vegetarian? It depends. It depends upon what we're willing to give up. It depends upon how many myths we're willing to dispel. Let's unravel some of those myths now.

 

As a long term advocate of the benefits of a vegetarian diet I was pleased to see an article in The New York Times entitled "Vegetarianism More Popular If Less Pure." It said, "Vegetarians no longer need to defend their diets at parties. While some unrepentant carnivores may sneer at these individuals as assorted seaweed eaters with occasional foray into nuts and berries, there's clearly a growing interest in the vegetarian way of eating." Vegetarian magazines, organizations, and cooking classes are thriving. Tofu and soybean curd that once seemed exotic is sold in small town supermarkets. Mexican, Indian and other restaurants that use grain and beans are more popular in consumption of fresh vegetables has grown 12 percent since 1980 according to the Agriculture Department.

 

Now when The New York Times prints an article about changing trends in the health and nutrition field you can pretty much be assured that that latest trend has been around for at least five to ten years before they write about it because they're generally about ten years behind on anything that's really relevant. This is not a put down of the Times per say, but it merely reflects the tendency of the established press to cover controversial dietary issues only when most of the controversy has dissipated.

 

What's exciting in this article then is not the newness of the idea it presents, but rather that many Americans are now making the conscious decision to move towards a healthier diet. Some of the so called purist vegetarians out there would find fault with The New York Times article and contend that the new vegetarianism is heralding not new vegetarianism because it's just getting people to give up meat. But what if they give up meat and have more pizzas? Well pizza could be vegetarian, but it's not healthy. Or more pastas. Well-processed pastas are not necessarily healthy.

 

So we can have many different ways that we can approach the subject of vegetarianism. I don't find it particularly useful to bicker over the semantics of what this new diet should or should not be called. What's important is that at long last many Americans are beginning to realize that optimal health and well being comes from a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and grains and juices and legumes and nuts and seeds instead of products like meats, cheese, eggs, and processed carbohydrates.

 

Even The American Cancer Society and The American Heart Association have been telling us to eat more fruits and vegetables. Yet I remember when I first got in the field there was no such message. The high fat high calorie high protein diet of Americans, which is very popular and that's why your high protein diet books are so popular is because really you don't have to change anything. You can still eat a lot of the pleasure foods that you're used to, but you're not going to be healthier. You will lose weight. Yes.

 

The myths about protein abound in the western world making it one of the most misunderstood areas in nutrition. Many of these myths are so entrenched in our psyche we find it difficult if not impossible to let go of them even though the recent scientific data shows them to be false. Concept of what protein does, where it comes from, what will happen to us if we don't get enough are all parts of this myth. If you have thought about becoming a vegetarian, chances are that you've been discouraged from believers of these myths who have told you that you will not be getting enough protein. Over the years this nation has become one of protein fanatics. Even vegetarians can become fanatical on how much protein. In fact most vegetarians get too much protein. Athletes have been led to believe that they have to eat massive amounts of meat in order to have strength and endurance. Well that's not true.

 

I did the USA Track and Field National Masters Championship Race yesterday. I took first place in all age groups meaning the first person to cross the finish line. First man. I was the only vegetarian in the race. Well it didn't make me less strong or fast and especially kicking halfway through a race with 12 laps to go. And yet not a person - not one person came over and said how did you do that? The assumption is well it's just you must have been training faster than someone else. What about the living strength of a body? Feed a body dead and denatured proteins and you'll create protein, but you don't create the vital life force that goes with it. Feed the body high quality protein less than a meat eater would take, but much, much higher vital life force and now the body has a vital life force.

 

It's like a 100 hundred watt bulb versus a 30-watt bulb. I compare the meat eaters who get their protein as 30-watt bulbs. They'll illuminate, but not as bright or sustained. It's in the sustaining. You may also remember being in science or health class as a youngster and being shown the different food groups. In these classes I at least was led to believe that protein was synonymous with meat, dairy and egg products and that vegetables, fruits and grains well. They were good sources of vitamins and minerals but not of protein. That was simply wrong. It was wrong.

 

The most commonly held beliefs about protein are animal products are our only source of protein. If you go on a vegetarian diet, you'll become protein deficient and then weak and sick and anemic. Meat promotes virility and sexual potency. Real men need meat. We cannot get too much protein. Any excess will be stored in the muscles. Animal protein is low in calories and will keep us slim. Carbohydrates are fattening. Man was made to eat meat and animal products are our only source of B12. Every one of those is wrong. Every single one. We have to go through this step-by-step, and I'll show you the myths behind these particular statements so that we are not misled any longer on this. When we think for a moment how many times have we been stopped from doing something because we felt that we were not doing the right thing? And that if we did not stop that we'd hurt ourselves. Well I remember very clearly being an athlete in a small town, and I've always been an athlete. My brother Howard he was the best athlete. He was a state champion and set records in ten different events. So my house was always the house of the jocks. Every night after school we'd all hang out there mainly because we had a very laid back and relaxed attitude. So everybody could eat before they went home to eat because my mom was a great cook and she always had a lot of stuff. Everybody felt comfortable there. So when you grew up in a small town and you're always doing sports you want to improve at it. You want to do the best you can.

 

Of course when it came to being fit we all were of the belief that you had to have a high protein diet. So people would be taking in a lot of protein. I remember when the protein powders first became the rage. They consisted of egg whites and nonfat dried milk. We'd take three or four quarts of milk and five or ten tablespoons of that a day not realizing how much damage it was doing to us. But it was doing some harm. I remember when I took dairy. I didn't eat any meat or flesh, but I did have dairy because that's what I believed was important. But when I stopped taking it my energy improved. Some dark circles under my eyes went away. Puffiness went away. So let's try to dispel some of those myths and separate it out.

 

Animal products are not our only source of protein. Every single grain, nut, seed, legume, fruit and vegetable contains all eight essential amino acids in different combinations, and in your spirulina and chlorella are very high. In fact these single celled algae are the highest single source of protein far exceeding the amount of protein you get in any other animal protein. Not only do you get the protein in your grains and legumes you also get high quality fiber and B complex. They're non-polluting. So when you hear about people eating rice and beans or in the Middle East chickpeas and sesame seeds, you're seeing people who are living long and healthy lives assuming that there's something else that's not going to hurt them like a plague or nutritional shortages. But when people are able to eat a good quality diet they live long.

 

The recent scientific literature in this country is revealing that other civilizations such as the Hindu and the Japanese have known for thousands of years that we do not need any dairy or meat in order to sustain life and to maximize our health. In fact it's becoming increasingly apparent that the healthiest civilizations are those eating little or no meat and leading essentially vegetarian lifestyles. The scientific literature at just a cursory review will give you over 400 articles. That's 400 articles showing you that you can expect to live longer and have less heart disease, cancer or arthritis with a vegetarian diet.

 

The truth of the matter is that meat probably zaps more energy than it imparts. It's very difficult and time consuming to digest remaining in the stomach for up to six hours, and in the intestine for about three days. Just the digestion of meat is an energy consuming procedure for the body that can leave you tired and sluggish. Meat also tends to putrefy in the intestines sending toxins through the body further weakening it. Constipation, diverticulitis, spastic colon, colorectal cancer those are all in part caused by too much meat, too many refined carbohydrates, and generally the two go together. When someone has a consciousness not to eat meat more often than not they also have the consciousness and hopefully the discipline not to be eating the refined carbohydrates.

 

As to virility and potency that real men and women need meat is well they need meat as much as they need prostate cancer or gout or liver or kidney failure and heart disease, which are all promoted by the eating of meat. So it is absolutely a fallacy on every level that meat or high protein is important for potency. Excess protein contrary to the myth is not stored in the body at all. In fact the increase leads to cell damage and thus speeds up the aging process. So the more protein you have in the body the faster you age, especially from animal proteins. Protein metabolism products called urea, which is filtered through the kidneys, can harm the kidneys. Hence one of the reasons we have more kidney disease today than ever before is because we're on more high protein diets. Excess protein causes excess urea, which in turn leads to that kidney disease and kidney stress and also kidney stones. This is especially serious for those who have preexisting kidney damage.

 

Animal protein is extremely high in calories because it's usually accompanied by large amounts of fat. An average 16-ounce steak has 1,500 calories. So there's little doubt that excess meat consumption is one of the major causes of obesity in our country. Carbohydrates on the other hand other than refined carbohydrates and sugars which should not be eaten are much lower in calories than animal products and have the added advantage of being high in fiber.

 

Physiologically man was made a vegetarian. He has a long digestive tract measuring 22 feet. Carnivorous animals have very short intestinal tracts so that meat remains within their bodies only a short period of time. A tiger, a lion can gorge up to one-third their body weight. They can digest bone, visceral and the type of ligaments that you would never be able to digest. They can. With man's long alkaline intestines meat can stay within the body for three to four days during which it begins to decompose and putrefy at a constant 98.6 degrees heat. The putrefaction sends bacteria that are toxic throughout the body, and that is one of the causes of prostate and colorectal problems.

 

B12 is manufactured by microorganisms. So it's not normally found in the fruits and vegetables that you eat. However it is present in fermented foods: miso, soy sauce, tempeh, and of course you can get it in vegetarian non dairy yogurts because it's added to it. While it's more difficult to get this vitamin through the foods, it sure isn't hard to get it when you simply supplement with 500 or 1,000 micrograms of B12 a day. So those are just some of the reasons why we don't have to have this kind of protein overload all the time.

 

Finally one way that we should appreciate the myths of protein is that you get up in the morning. You can have a hot bowl of cereal. Let's say you have some quinoa or amaranth or spelt cereal or maybe just take a protein shake. Take two scoops of a protein powder - a rice protein or soy protein powder. Well in that bowl of cereal you're getting about eight grams of protein, but if you supplement, which is what I suggest, and you put a tablespoon of vegetable protein powder in that cereal now you're up to 35 grams of protein. For most women between 35 to 60 grams of protein (* note different than what's mentioned in Part One) with the exception of pregnancy, lactation, and recovery from surgery and cancer you'll be able to cover your protein requirements. For most men between 40 to 80 grams (*note different than what's mentioned in Part One) of protein a day with some exceptions you'll be able to cover.

 

So when I get up in the morning and I take a blender and I throw in some fresh fruits or I made myself already some berry juice and I put in some blackberry, blueberry, raspberry, or strawberry juice. Throw in some rice milk, and then add two scoops of high quality vegetable protein powder. I now have 55 grams of protein. Now I'll drink some of that then, and mid morning I'll have another drink of that. So between the time I get up in the morning, which is four, and noontime I have had about 50 grams of high quality protein. It replaces the worn out tissue. If I've exercised hard it will replace the tissue. If I need branch (?) amino acids to expand the cells from a workout so I hold a good low body fat weight, which lengthens your lifespan. By the way the lower your body fat and maintaining your optimal health, the longer your body will live. Now I have low calories and excess calories speeds up the aging process. It speeds up the death of the cells.

 

So then in the early afternoon I have my primary meal. I could have sea vegetables. I could have grain. I could have beans. I could have starchy vegetables. I could have dark field greens like kale and Swiss chard and collard greens or bok choy or have a salad or a soup. That's going to give me another 20 grams of protein. So any more protein that day that I'm going to have is redundant. It's not needed. So it's easy to get your protein on a quality vegetarian diet with proper supplementation. So that way we can give our body what it needs when it needs it and not overload it.

 

Think of it this way. If we simply changed our concept and realized that we are eating ourselves to death, we're overfed and undernourished. Who benefits from us continuing to eat meat and dairy? What would we gain if we stopped? Then you realize how we've been misled, and the real myths are that we've been told what we've needed from people who directly profited from it. We don't have to support that any more. Hope you've enjoyed this series, and it's given you some insights as to why it's time maybe today to take that step in becoming a vegetarian. I'm Gary Null. I want to thank you very much for taking your time to listen to this series. (End of Meat, Protein and Dispelling the Myths Series)

 

 

From GaryNull.com

Great place for recipes (some fish, just skip those)

Great free radio show archive downloads

and much more info. Not bad. If I do say so myself. lol

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Oh

I know Jay, it was and is very heartbreaking. That sweet little thing. May her/his spirit be at peace for eternity.

Yours too.

 

 

I hope this article will help vegans and nonvegans sort out fact from fiction when it comes to protein. Even though many people have agendas, I believe this article sums it up the best, without sacrificing our health.

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  • 2 years later...
Vegetarianism in the Hindu religion of India is founded on health standards formulated in the Hindu epic poem that "those who desire to possess good memory, beauty, long life with perfect health and physical moral and spiritual strength should abstain from all animal foods." Jainism, more a philosophy than a religion, is based on the principle of nonviolence and abhors the killing of animals, fish or fowl for food. Yoga another oriental discipline follows the vegetarian beliefs of the Hindus and Buddhists teaching that all life is formed and sustained through prana or the life force. The ideal foods according to this philosophy are those containing life energy including vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes, and grains. Accordingly the meat of dead animals, which have lost their prana, is useless and should be avoided. Again you may have some take offs on this, but that is the principle thought.

 

More than anything.. "High Prana" Foods are to be consumed more than anything else. I dont have the full scale on it yet, but basically our LIFE (PRANA) is driven by OXYGEN (BREATH: 1st need) & WATER (Hydration since we are 80-90% water) & then EARTH (The 5 Elements). Hence, fruits foods that are Hydrating (Watermelon > Musk Melon > Apples > Cucumber, Tomatoes > Bananas??) are on the highest LIFE / PRANA scale. They are the most energizing & LIGHT, nutrient (micronutrients are more important than the FAT, CARB, PROTEINS) food items. Whats the point of a food that "DEHYDRATES" you & makes you feel HEAVY & SLUGGISH.

 

If anyone has a Full Detailed scale of PRANA foods I'd love to have it. I created this in discussion with someone but its more of an approximation.

 

The funny thing is Vedic (Ancient) Science & Scriptures talk a lot of food & health but there is no mention of Proteins, Carbs & Fats from what I've heard at all.

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Try these for size, they are said to contain the highest level of 'life force', being high in minerals and mostly eaten raw:

 

Wheat Grass

Phytoplankton

Raw chocolate

Seaweed

Almonds

Raw Cacao

Spirulina

Lemons

Goji Berries

Mangosteen

Limes

 

2nd highest 'life force' foods, from the trees:

 

Apples

Blueberries

Coconut

Avocado

Melons

Raspberries

Pineapple

Mango

Strawberries

Bananas

Peaches

Lychees

Grapes

Cherries

Oranges

'Raw' nuts

Dates

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  • 3 weeks later...

Nice list. Where did you get it from?

 

I'd like to figure out the sources that list foods which are HIGHEST on PRANA. I am sure there might be discrepancies & differences between various sources & their lists. It would be interesting to co-ordinate and put them all together.

 

Thoughts?

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While Gary Null makes some good points, he's also trying to sell something and that something is fear. A quick look at his website would give the impression that vaccinations are bad (god forbid we go back to the days of increased childhood death), that there is a vast conspiracy in AIDS medicine (there's an old one), that he has the "perfect food" (if you buy two of his powders and his aloe), and he can give you some anti-aging skin "food"(and it's new and improved - with testimonials). Too much preaching and too many contradictory ideas all around for me. But he did have some good points.

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