This week's show covers The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith, the dangers and detriments of agriculture on the earth's soil and the health detriments of a vegetarian and high carbohydrate diet. The pet health segment covers the top ten lies told by the veterinary industry.
Running Time: 01:32:00
Download: MP3
Here's a summary of the show:
This week's show starts off with a brief mention of how the fast food industry is involved in a marketing campaign in order to try and change their image from being unhealthy to healthy. In an article called 'Argentina, the country that Monsanto poisoned with agrochemicals' about the current events in Argentina. Monsanto has turned Argentina into the world's third largest producer of soy. The chemicals contaminate other crops, homes, and drinking water. The article cites a survey conducted on farming communities and villages found that the cancer rate in these areas is 2-4% higher than the national average. The people have also experienced an increase in other conditions, such as chronic respiratory disease and hyperthyroidism.
The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith talks about the dangers of agriculture and genetically modified organisms. From the book, "The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet and more of the same won't save us. In service to annual grains humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate and destroyed the topsoil -- the basis of life itself." In addition to The Vegetarian Myth some more information on research comes from Vandana Shiva. She speaks out against genetically modified organisms and bio-piracy.
According a United Nations Food and Agriculture organization report called: 'State of the World's plants, genetic resources for food and Agriculture.' This report states that Big Agriculture has pushed 75% of bio diversity to extinction. This ties into what Lierre Keith is saying that agriculture is an assault against the planet. The justification used by Big Ag -- that they need all of these chemicals to feed everyone -- is not the truth. Lierre Kieth states that hunger has actually grown with billions of people permanently hungry or suffering from food related illness such as malnutrition. This is because the food system is based off of making profits and not health or sustainability.
From Mercola.com "A 2014 study showed that GMO crops have lead to a four hundred and four million pound increase in pesticide use. From the time of it's introduction in 1996. That is an increase of 7% a year." The more the crops are sprayed with pesticides the more insects adapt to them, then the farmers have to use more or different chemicals to get rid of them, and so on and on. Agriculture is like an ethnic cleansing. It wipes out the natural inhabitants so their land can be taken. It is biocide. From Vandana Shiva: "That is agriculture, it is carnivorous. It eats ecosystems and swallows them whole."
"Agriculture has it's roots in war. An industry that has grown by making explosives and chemicals for war remodeled it's self as the ago-chemical industry when these wars ended." Many of the factories that made explosives for wars switched to making synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, which they used for making explosives and chemicals. In 1984 the Bhopal gas tragedy is a good reminder.
An internet search will pull up much research that intensive chemical farming is not good for the environment or people. Many vegetarians use moral arguments that it is less cruel to eat that way, but there is more death per plate of vegetables than a high fat and meat diet. If a person ate two pounds of meat per day, they would still not even eat one cow a year. However, the one plate that the vegetarians eat will decimate a whole ecosystems.
The argument that many vegetarians have is simply to switch to organic farming, but this still would not be sufficient to restore balance to the environment. It is agriculture itself that is destroying the topsoil and removing the bio-diversity of a region by doing such things as mono-cropping.
A study that claims to have found that red meat causes cancer. This study is very flawed because they only studied only one protein and force fed it to genetically engineered mice in big quantities and, lo and behold, the mice developed cancer. However, this is not how things work and taking one small part of a diet and isolating it from the everything else is not how things happen in reality. The media got a hold of this study and touted that eating red meat causes cancer and so that is what a lot of people think because it was in the headlines.
Generally people who consider themselves meat eaters are also eating other unhealthy things like, wheat, food additives, and sugar. So it is not just one component of a diet that can cause cancer.
People who are on a vegetarian diet are consuming so many anti-nutrients from plants and they don't realize it. The amount of soy vegetarians eat is much higher than the amount that is normally consumed by East Asian cultures and elsewhere.
Anti-nutrients are a plant's natural defense mechanism. They cannot run or fight a predator so they develop chemicals that act as a pesticide to keep predators away. Humans that eat plants are taking in these harmful chemicals too and they can make you very sick. The anti-nutrients in wheat, for example are very harmful to the heart, joints, and intestines. Ingestion of wheat can cause an auto-immune response and is overall very destructive to humans.
The question was asked: Is it reasonable to say that a vegetarian diet demineralizes the bones? Many vegetarians have health problems and digestive issues. The digestive issues stem from the anti-nutrients that are in grains and vegetables that eat away at the gut lining creating digestive issues. To restore gut health after eating grains one has to increase the amount of fat eaten. Jonathan shares his experience with moving towards a high fat, low carb diet. He first removed processed foods from his diet, then he found the elimination diet, then the Paleo diet and from there the Ketogenic diet. During this process he found that his joint pain was getting better to the point where it was eventually gone all together.
People don't really know how bad they feel until they start taking this stuff out of their diet and realizing that they feel better and are losing weight. Even things like energy levels go unnoticed as being poor until we start removing things from our diet and observing how our bodies react.
Even things like our mood can be effected by the foods we are eating. People who have eliminated grain, vegetables, legumes, etc. from their diet and increase the amount of fat they eat have noticed positive changes in their mood. Humans need tryptophan which is the precursor to serotonin also known as the happy hormone. There is no plant source of tryptophan, it only comes from animal sources.
Our perception that being skinny means you are healthy is not correct and if you were at your ideal weight you would not look like a runway model.
An argument that many people bring up when talking about the health benefits of eating meat and fat is that a lot of meat is factory farmed and since you are saying that eating meat is good, then you are advocating for eating meat that comes from factory farms. This is a false argument. The meat that comes from factory farms does not have the nutrient content that meat from a small farm has. The animals from factory farms are very sick and unhealthy because they are not meant to eat grains either.
Erykah recommends the documentary Food Inc. if you want to know more about the agriculture system and what cows have to go through in a factory farms: From being force fed corn to the use of antibiotics and more. Check it out!
This brings up the moral argument that many vegetarians have is that eating meat is cruel and no one should do it. However, there is a proper way to raise animals and show them respect, while proving the best life possible for them. The vegetarians will say "well you're still going to kill that animal so you are immoral." The presenters argue that is a fallacious argument because life requires suffering and pain. There is no way, in the world we live in now, to not have suffering and pain. The idea that we can abolish suffering is incorrect, all we can do is try to minimize as much as possible. A lot of vegetarians think that they don't cause animal suffering and that is not the case.
Diet should not contain moral arguments, but scientific and objective arguments of what is the most nutritious for the human body. No one is delighting in the suffering of an animal, but it is part of process that all humans are involved in. The moral argument misses the big picture of where humans fit in the life cycle. During each stage of this grand cycle of life, matter is converted to a more complex form. Starting from rocks that are broken down by microbes and other things, which will nourish the plants that need those nutrients. Then the animals eat the plants for nourishment and then humans eat the animals. At each stage the matter has become more complex, and it seems that vegetarians want to circumvent the natural cycle of things. The fact is that plants do not contain the complex nutrition that humans need to live, animals need to eat plants in order to create these more complex fats, such as omega 6 and long chain fatty acids. These fats allow us to fulfill our purpose on this planet by using our higher intellectual functions.
This is the natural cycle of life on Earth. There are predators and there are prey and it seems that vegans and vegetarians do not want to accept that. They try to remove themselves from the natural cycle of life but, that is impossible because this is the way reality functions.
Cleve Baxter has done studies on plant perception back in the 60's. He hooked the plants up to a polygraph and found that when the plant was threatened with harm or actually harmed the polygraph registered an electrical change. Jagadish Chandra Bose discovered that music played in the area of plants made them grow faster. In 1902 and 1926 he wrote two books about how plants can feel pain and understand affection.
These studies demonstrate that plants do indeed have a type of consciousness, it may not be cognitive, but it is some form of consciousness. So when vegetarians think that they are not causing pain to anything they are wrong. There have also been studies that have shown that plants can communicate with each other. Trees in the forest will alert each other, either through chemicals or telepathy, that there is a predator about. Also, trees have been reported to feed other trees that cannot feed themselves.
It is important to do research, get the knowledge and have the facts at hand as to why one should not eat raw kale and other vegetables. Or why eating fat is more nutritious for humans.
Weston Price was a dentist who did a study, where he traveled to different indigenous cultures looking at the condition of their teeth, because a lot of his patients has sever dental disorders and he wanted to know what was the cause. What he found is that all of these cultures he visited, all of their diets emphasized eating animal fats. Even if they were not eating the most optimal foods, they still emphasized eating animal fats. Their teeth were fine and in good condition. If some of the cultures were eating a vegetarian diet, it was not by choice. Then in more modern times you have Sally Fallon that started the Weston A. Price foundation. She wrote a book called Nourishing Traditions.
She talks a lot in her book about how nutritious fat and saturated fat are. It is mostly a cookbook but she also gives more information about other things.
Expanding on that, a saturated fat is a long carbon chain that has its bonds taken up by hydrogen. An unsaturated fat means that some of those bonds have a double bond leaving more space for more hydrogen. This changes the shape of the molecule to be more curved than the saturated fat. They both have different functions in the body. Unsaturated fats make cells more flexible and saturated fats protects the cells from damage. Because, unsaturated fat has those double bonds means that they are more susceptible to oxidation and saturated fat can protect you against that. So, you can eat all of the fish oil you want, but without saturated fat, the fatty chains are getting damaged.
A common misconception about eating a high fat diet is that it is bad for your heart or that eating a lot of fat will cause heart attacks. This is a false belief because it is the quality of fat that matters. If you are eating a lot of fat from animals that are not treated well and have lower level of nutrients, and in addition eating a lot of carbohydrates this is what causes arteries to get clogged and causes heart attacks. But, eating higher quality fat from farm raised animals means you will have higher quality fat in your body and your cells will be protected.
The vegetarian diet contains high amounts of sugar and carbohydrates which are detrimental to the body. Sugar is a carbohydrate. All sugar and carbohydrates get broken down into glucose in the blood, and that causes your pancreas to secrete insulin. Insulin is needed to make glucose go into the cells. So, a lot of sugar and carbohydrates put your pancreas into overdrive and this can cause it to swell, which can lead to pancreatic cancer down the line.
Technically, there are two different types of diabetes. Type one occurs when your pancreas does not produce any insulin at all. Then there is diabetes type two, where your body is insulin resistant. Your pancreas is still producing insulin, but your body is not picking up the signal. But, there is another type of diabetes. Diabetes type three, is where your brain becomes insulin resistant. In addition to your pancreas producing insulin, your brain also produces a small amount of insulin and this can cause memory problems, Alzheimer's, dementia, and other cognitive disorders.
When someone is on a high fat diet and they are still experiencing some health difficulties, they need to watch out for the glycating effect. When there is a high level of sugar in the blood, the sugar will attach to protein stopping them from doing their job and the cells become caramelized and non-functional. The HBA1C blood test will test how caramelized your cells are, or how much sugar is coating you cells.
The information that people have learned about why eating fat is bad is incorrect and driven by politics and economics. The corporations that are making all of these products that are "good for you" actually do not have your best interest at heart. In the US the people telling you what to eat comes from the USDA, which is in the industry of agriculture. And they are in the business of selling more agricultural products to make money. So there is a conflict of interest here between you and the USDA on what to eat. The USDA has also created the food pyramid that is completely wrong. It should be turned upside down, with fat as the basis and the grain and sugar, eaten in tiny amounts or removed completely.
The USDA used the seven country study to make the food pyramid, but the study is false and an example of how not to do science. Basically, the author of the study cherry picked his data to show that eating fat causes heart disease. The author also stated that correlation is causation, which it is not. But, behind this study was corporate interest, such as the edible oil industry that had interests in reducing the amount of natural animal fat people ate. Synthetic oils and margarine along with processed foods came into use at the turn of the century. This correlates with the increase of heart attaches around this time.
Try to get in touch with farmers in your area or join the Weston Price foundation to get connected with farmers in your area. They are on the web at WestonAPrice.org and there is a lot of info there. Some more resources are LierreKeith.com and the forum at SOTT and the diet and health section of the forum. Also see the article Burying the Vegetarian Hypothesis by Doug.
Pet Health by Zoya
Zoya talks about the ten main lies told to us by the veterinary industry. It is important to educate yourself on veterinary information and pet nutrition, which will help your pet have a long and healthy life. One lie is that dry food is good for your pet. Dry food is one of the main reasons for metabolic and hormonal diseases in pets. The solution is to feed your pet a natural raw food diet.
There is a very big lie that you have to take your pet for yearly vaccinations in order to maintain their level of immunity. This is not true and will harm your pet's immune system. Other lies include your pet needs to take medications instead of trying to find holistic solution for any kind of health issue, such as steroids for skin conditions, and medicine for hairballs, etc. Another big lie is that you need to neuter your pets early, but this has a correlation to many metabolic disorders and problems with the immune system.
Now being a responsible pet owner takes a new form. Surgery for a pet should be a last resort, there are some homeopathic remedies that will be discussed in later shows. Also in other shows Zoya will talk about flea, tick, and de-worming solutions and how they can be poisonous for many dogs. She will present some natural solutions.
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