Happy Healthy Gut (12 page)

Eggs

Like meat, eggs can have a lot of claims associated with them. If you are going to eat eggs, the best solution is to find a local family farm who sells them. The eggs should be from hens that are not caged, and free to roam and peck as they please. You should be able to visibly see them doing so. Again, these hens will not have the need for antibiotics, and their feed is straight from the earth, so no growth hormones or genetically modified ingredients are involved. These eggs are generally not much pricier than what you could buy at the grocery store. If you initially feel that this sounds like a lot of work, please bear in mind that once you have a great contact, you will know where to go from then on. Also, knowing where these products come from, how they are processed, how the animals were treated, and what’s in them (or, more importantly, what’s
not
in them), will give you immense satisfaction.

Again, I still hold the opinion that consuming zero animal products is best for those in the throes of digestive unease, but the second best option would be this one. As for taste, they taste much better than the supermarket variety, hands down. They are also typically varied in size, shape, and color, because they have not been bred to produce eggs of specific, uniform size. It’s also nice to know that the hens themselves are not all deformed and featherless or kept in
overcrowded battery cages. These hens have a pretty sweet life in comparison.

Ah, the life of a happy pecker . . .

Dairy

Dairy is difficult. If you think about how milk gets from the cow to our refrigerators, it’s tough to make any sort of case for milk, unless you are milking your own cow. (Which is still weird.) Conventional cows’ milk is full of antibiotics and hormones, but even worse is the suffering that factory-farmed dairy cows are routinely subjected to. The whole process of industrialized milking is kind of gross.

If you’re going to consume dairy while considering the adoption of more humane practices when it comes to food animals, and still working towards the goal of healing your digestive issues, you need to find a farmer who allows her cows to pasture-feed naturally, milks them personally and individually (without the assistance of a large, un-manned machine), and does not keep them perpetually pregnant. They should be given no growth hormones or antibiotics. They should be healthy and happy. If you can find such a farm in your area that offers dairy being derived in this manner, then that’s your best bet.

Some people are really into raw (unpasteurized) milk. The major benefit one receives from drinking raw milk instead of pasteurized milk, is that raw milk still holds all of its original nutrients. When milk is pasteurized, most of the original nutrients are killed along with the bacteria that pasteurization is designed to kill. Then, those nutrients are added back into the milk in the form of “added nutrients,” or fortification. It’s a lose-lose situation in my opinion. Because I truly believe that milk is nowhere near the perfect food for humans, I have a hard time making a case for pasteurized versus raw milk. Pasteurized, technically, does not carry the harmful bacteria that raw milk can, but raw milk is technically less processed and therefore more nutritious than its counterpart.

There’s really no good solution on the dairy front. Please remember that cow’s milk is for cows, and our bodies cannot handle it well, even if the condition in which the milk is produced is optimal for all parties concerned. I recommend you skip this whole cow milk thing, and go buy yourself some organic, unsweetened almond milk. Yum!

“I don’t understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives.”
¹¹²

—Dean Ornish, MD, Preventative
Medical Research Institute

The following information is a compilation of statistics that I have found really makes me question our nation’s food choices and ideas about proper health. Many of these stats or facts may seem unreal, yet all are true.

Concerning Our Health

1. “In 1952, just 11% of American corn was treated with pesticides and herbicides; today the statistic is over 95%.”
   ¹¹³
   
2. “Americans spent almost $300 billion dollars at supermarkets in the past year, with the number one item being carbonated beverages, which clocked in at about $12 billion.”
   ¹¹⁴
   
3. “Number of U.S. medical schools: 125. Number requiring a course in nutrition: Thirty.”
   ¹¹⁵
   
4. “The number of underfed and malnourished people in the world? 1.2 billion. The number of overfed and malnourished people in the world? 1.2 billion.”
   ¹¹⁶
   
5. “More people die because of the way they eat than by tobacco use, accidents or any other lifestyle or environmental factor.”
   ¹¹⁷
   
6. “
   Americans choose to eat less than 0.25% of the known edible food on the planet.”
   ¹¹⁸
   
7. “On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime.”
   ¹¹⁹
   If you take into account the incredibly large percentage of diseased animals that make it through processing, that’s an obscene amount of diseased meat that we’ve all purchased and eaten.
   
8. (Approximately) “95% of chickens become infected with
   E.coli
   . . . and between 39–75% of chickens in retail stores are still infected.”
   ¹²⁰
   
9. Historically speaking, we are entering into the first generation of children who may not live as long as, or longer than, their parents. This is due to the sheer prevalence of “western diseases” that are completely preventable by dietary alteration.
   

The following five statistics are from
Forks Over Knives
; edited by Gene Stone:

1. “Obesity rates for North American children have doubled in the last thirty years.”
   
2. “In the last decade alone, the incidence of diabetes has grown 90%.”
   
3. “70% of deaths in the United States stem from chronic diseases.”
   
4. “Every day, 1500 people die from cancer.”
   
5. “Every minute, somebody in the United States dies from heart disease.”
   ¹²¹
   

Concerning Animals

1. Egg-laying hens get less space in which to live their “lives” than what constitutes an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of foolscap paper.
   ¹²²
   
2. 99% of meat we eat comes from factory farms.
   ¹²³
   Two generations ago, that statistic was less than 1%.
   
3. “Number of animals killed for meat per hour in the United States: 660,000.”
   ¹²⁴
   
4. About
   95% of America’s eggs are produced by chickens living in battery cages.
   ¹²⁵
   
5. “Each year, hundreds of thousands of pigs arrive at slaughterhouses dead, dying, or diseased.”
   ¹²⁶
   
6. Globally, roughly 70 billion land animals are now factory farmed every year.
   ¹²⁷
   
7. “Chickens once had a life expectancy of fifteen to twenty years, but the modern broiler is typically killed at around six weeks. Their daily growth rate has increased roughly 400%.”
   ¹²⁸
   
8. Dairy cows only live for about five years before being considered “spent.” Calves that will become veal will live for four months. If left alone, allowed to graze naturally in the open air, cows live for upwards of twenty-five years.
   
9. Most of us are all effectively eating genetically mutated poultry, even when it’s free range and “natural.” Factory farmed poultry can’t even reproduce anymore without scientific intervention.
   ¹²²⁹
   
10. Most cases of the “twenty-four-hour flu” are actually caused by a food-borne pathogen, not influenza.
    ¹³⁰
    

Concerning the Environment

1. “Omnivores contribute seven times more greenhouse gas emissions than vegans do.”
   ¹³¹
   
2. “Modern industrial fishing lines can be as long as seventy-five miles—the same distance from sea level to space.”
   ¹³²
   
3. “Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.”
   ¹³³
   
4. “Years the world’s known oil reserves would last if every human ate a meat-centered diet: thirteen. Years they would last if human beings no longer ate meat: 260.”
   ¹³⁴
   
5. “A single dairy cow produces approximately 120 pounds of wet manure a day.”
   ¹³⁵
   
6. “Five
   tonnes of animal waste is produced for every person in the United States.”
   ¹³⁶
   
7. “On average 16,000 litres of water are required to produce one kilogram of beef.”
   ¹³⁷
   
8. “More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to grow grain for livestock.”
   ¹³⁸
   
9. “Raising chickens, turkeys, pigs and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined.”
   ¹³⁹
   
10. “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.”
    ¹⁴⁰
    

As you can see, there are many ways in which the business of meat production is harmful. While I know firsthand that it might be hard to imagine your life without meat being a major part of your meals, there are so many amazing and compelling reasons to ditch it for good, or to at least find somewhere to purchase better quality fare. Digestive health is definitely affected by our average consumption of factory-farmed animal products, but so are many other things. If you can’t give up meat for yourself, maybe you can reduce it as a way of helping out on some of the other causes associated with meat and its production.

Question
: What makes the topic of eliminating animal meat and dairy such an emotional and passionate subject for people? Is it a health reason? Is it a question of tradition? Is it a misleading connotation? What does giving up meat and dairy mean to you?

W
ell, this is a super fun topic. However, if you have ever had to endure the symptoms associated with food poisoning, I can guarantee you that it’s no laughing matter. An incredibly large portion of food-borne disease is traced back to meat. Remember these?

• 1993:
  E. coli
  outbreak in Jack-in-the-Box in the Seattle area is responsible for the deaths of four children.
  ¹⁴¹
  
• 1997:
  E. coli
  outbreak in Colorado involving beef from Hudson Foods.
  ¹⁴²
  
• 1998:
  Listeria
  outbreak in Michigan involving Sara Lee products results in twenty-onepeople dead.
  ¹⁴³
  
• 2008:
  Listeria
  in lunch meat from Maple Leaf Foods in Toronto kills twenty-three people.
  ¹⁴⁴
  Or more recently (and more locally for myself):
  
• 2012:
  E. coli
  outbreak in Alberta-based meat packing company forces massive XL Foods recall.
  ¹⁴⁵
  

Animal meat itself is not entirely to blame. Mostly it’s the animals’ living conditions in which they are kept, and the result of careless
processing that encourage deadly bacteria, such as
E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter
and
Listeria
to become exposed to meat intended for human consumption. Countries that care for their animals more humanely by permitting them to grass-feed, allowing the implementation of natural grazing habits, and then practicing careful and skillful “kills,” have a way lower rate of food-borne disease than countries like the United States and Canada, whose factory-farmed quick and careless form of meat processing is, to put it mildly, very dirty. Animal flesh intended for human consumption becomes contaminated when, during processing, the gut of the animal is accidentally or carelessly sliced, allowing for the bacteria that lives in the animals’ intestines to become exposed to other parts of the carcass, or the assembly line on which it’s being processed.
¹⁴⁶
This happens all the time.

Sometimes it’s not the animals’ living conditions, or the way in which they are terminated: it’s the feed. Unlike humans, cows possess four separate digestive compartments within one stomach. The second compartment is called a rumen, and it’s that compartment that I find the most interesting. Its purpose is to ferment grasses in order to digest them better, and more readily absorb the nutrients associated with feeding from the earth. The rumen contains way less acid than our stomachs do, and when
E. coli
passes from the cow to their meat, and in turn to humans who consume that meat, it is usually killed off in our highly acidic digestive tracts.

Well, this is not necessarily the case anymore. For the past few decades, cows being fattened up on feed lots have been routinely fed corn, which has created a huge, unforeseen problem. The corn changes the pH of the rumen, making it more acidic, and
E. coli
is learning to adapt to this acidity. When the pathogen is consumed by humans, it is not being killed off in our stomachs as effectively. As a result of this fairly new situation, we are getting sick.

Remember that particularly terrifying epidemic of Mad Cow Disease that originated in the U.K. in 1986, leaving many people dead after experiencing psychosis from tainted beef products?
¹⁴⁷
That
horrific situation was essentially caused by cattle being fed feed that contained beef by-products, or bone-meal. Unassuming consumers ate the meat from the infected cows, and now we have a human form of the disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The FDA made the practice of feeding cattle beef by-products illegal in 1997.
¹⁴⁸
This means that before that year, cows, which are vegetarian animals, were eating their own species, and then we ate that product.