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June 20 - June 26, 2023
Yes, physicians overprescribe antibiotics as well, but the FDA estimates that 80 percent of the antimicrobial drugs sold in the United States every year now go to the meat industry.
At this rate, the CDC predicts that one in three Americans will be diabetic by midcentury.
Over time, this extra sugar can damage the blood vessels throughout the body. That’s why diabetes can lead to blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks, and stroke.
Even among healthy individuals, a high-fat diet can impair the body’s ability to handle sugar.
Not all fats affect our muscle cells in the same way. For example, palmitate, the kind of saturated fat found mostly in meat, dairy, and eggs, causes insulin resistance.
On the other hand, oleate, the monounsaturated fat found mostly in nuts, olives, and avocados, may actually protect against the detrimental effects of the saturated fat.
vegans they were studying so that they could see whether plant-based diets had a direct effect beyond the indirect benefit of pulling fat out of the muscles by helping people to lose weight.
The result? There was significantly less fat trapped in the deep calf muscles of vegans than in those of comparably slim omnivores.
At around age twenty, the body stops making new insulin-producing beta cells. After that, if they are lost, they may be lost for good.
What’s the big deal? A nationwide study found that people with the highest levels of pollutants in their bloodstreams had an astounding thirty-eight times the odds of diabetes.
A massive study with an equally massive name, the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer–Physical Activity, Nutrition, Alcohol, Cessation of Smoking, Eating Out of Home, and Obesity—commonly known as EPIC-PANACEA—was comprised of hundreds of thousands of men and women who were followed for years.
These results had led to the suggestion that gastric bypass surgery improves diabetes by somehow altering digestive hormones, but this interpretation ignores the fact that patients are placed on a severely limited diet for up to two weeks following the procedure to recover from the surgery. Extreme calorie restriction alone can reverse diabetes. So is the success of surgery the result of the operation itself or due to the restrictive diet?
This wasn’t over the course of months or years, either. This was after eating a plant-based diet for an average of only sixteen days.
The diabetics lost an average of ten pounds, their blood sugar levels dropped, their insulin needs dropped in half, and, in five of the patients, not only was their painful neuropathy cured, so was, apparently, their diabetes.
Think about it. Patients walk in with one of the most painful, frustrating, and hard-to-treat conditions in all of medicine, and three-quarters of them were cured in a handful of days using a natural, nontoxic treatment—namely, a diet composed of whole plant foods. This should have been front-page news.
The trillion-dollar processed food industry uses dirt-cheap added salt and sugar to sell us their junk.57 That’s why it’s not easy avoiding sodium on the typical American diet, since three-quarters of salt comes from processed foods rather than a saltshaker.
By hooking you on hypersweet and hypersalty foods, your taste buds get so dampened that natural foods can taste like cardboard. Indeed, the ripest fruit may not be as sweet as Froot Loops.
There’s a reason bars put out free baskets of salted nuts and pretzels, and it’s the same reason soda conglomerates own snack-food companies. A cold drink and a salty snack go hand in hand. It may be no coincidence that Pepsi and Frito-Lay are part of the same corporation.
The poultry industry commonly injects chicken carcasses with salt water to artificially inflate their weight, yet they can still be labelled “100 percent natural.” Consumer Reports found that some supermarket chickens were pumped so full of salt that they registered a whopping 840 mg of sodium per serving—that could mean more than a full day’s worth of sodium in just one chicken breast.
The ruby-red phytonutrient found in cranberries is a powerful antioxidant, but the high-fructose corn syrup added to cranberry cocktail acts as a pro-oxidant, canceling out some of the benefit.
A subsequent study found the consumption of four or more cups of coffee a day was associated with 92 percent lower risk among smokers dying from chronic liver disease.
Chicken meat is often injected with phosphates to improve its color, to add water weight (and thus to increase profitability since chicken can be sold by the pound), and to reduce “purge,” the term used to describe the liquid that seeps from meat as it ages.
A class of carcinogens in cigarette smoke called nitrosamines are considered to be so harmful that even so-called thirdhand smoke is a concern.
Around 80 percent of nitrosamines from cigarette smoke can remain in a room, even with normal ventilation,101 so always try to choose smoke-free hotel rooms.
Nitrosamines are one of the reasons you can’t smoke indoors without endangering others, even if you smoke without anyone present.
Did you know that one hot dog has as many nitrosamines (and nitrosamides, which are similar tobacco carcinogens103) as four cigarettes and that these carcinogens are also found in fresh meat, including beef, chicken, and pork?
What about “uncured” bacon? It says right on the package: “No nitrites or nitrates added.” But study the fine print and you may see a little footnote that reads something like “except those naturally occurring in celery juice.” Vegetables do contain nitrates that can be fermented into nitrites, so adding fermented celery juice to bacon is just a sneaky way of adding nitrites.
Nitrites only become harmful when they turn into nitrosamines and nitrosamides.
Some breast cancers may even start in the womb and be related to your mother’s diet.
Your body can rapidly rid itself of these toxins once exposure ceases. In fact, urine levels of PhIP can drop to zero within twenty-four hours of refraining from eating meat.
But diet is not the only source of PhIP. HCA levels in vegetarians who smoke may approach those of nonsmoking meat eaters.
For example, a study of nearly 1,500 women found that remarkably simple behavior changes—such as eating just five or more servings of fruits and veggies per day along with walking for thirty minutes six days a week—were associated with a significant survival advantage.
Apple antioxidants are concentrated in the peel, which makes sense: The skin is the fruit’s first line of defense against the outside world.
Researchers found something in the peels of organic apples (presumably present in conventional ones as well) that appears to reactivate a tumor-suppressor gene called maspin (an acronym for mammary serine protease inhibitor).
Research has shown that if you feed people broccoli and brussels sprouts, they clear caffeine more quickly—meaning that if you eat a lot of cruciferous vegetables, you’d have to drink more coffee to get the same buzz because your liver (the body’s purifier) has become so revved up.
This finding suggests that not only might a heaping side of broccoli with your steak decrease carcinogen exposure but also that eating your veggies days or even weeks before the big barbecue may help shore up your defenses.
Sulforaphane, a dietary component of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, has been shown to suppress the ability of breast cancer stem cells to form tumors.
The women whose mushroom consumption averaged just about one-half a mushroom or more per day had 64 percent lower odds of breast cancer compared with women who didn’t eat mushrooms at all.
“Milk is a natural.” But is it? Think about it. Humans are the only species who drink milk after weaning. It also does seem a bit unnatural to drink the milk of another species.
Men who consume two and a half or more eggs per week—basically an egg every three days—may have an 81 percent increased risk of dying from prostate cancer.
The choline in eggs, like the carnitine in red meat, is converted into a toxin called trimethylamine40 by bacteria that exist in the guts of those who eat meat.
Prostate cancer can be so slow growing and the side effects of treatment so onerous that men diagnosed with it often choose to be placed in a medical holding pattern called “watchful waiting” or “expectant management.” Because the next step is often chemotherapy, radiation, and/or radical surgery that may leave men incontinent and impotent, doctors try to delay treatment as long as possible.
Biopsies taken before and after the diet and lifestyle intervention showed that the expression of more than five hundred genes was affected.
There is a rare form of dwarfism called Laron syndrome that is caused by the body’s inability to produce IGF-1. Affected individuals grow to be only a few feet tall, but they also almost never get cancer.
The release of IGF-1 appears to be triggered by the consumption of animal protein.
Even mothers who were breast-fed as infants themselves tend to have higher levels of pollutants in their own breast milk when they grow up, suggesting a multigenerational passing down of these chemicals.
The top source for lead? Dairy. For mercury? Seafood.16
Hexachlorobenzene, another pesticide banned nearly a half century ago, today may be found mainly in dairy and meat, including fish.
By now you are probably wondering how these chemicals get into your food in the first place. One reason is that we’ve so thoroughly polluted our planet that the chemicals can just come down in the rain.
Consider that before she’s slaughtered for meat, a dairy cow may eat seventy-five thousand pounds’ worth of plants.
