The Meaty Truth (16 page)

By taking the artificial growth hormones out of our milk products and, even better, removing dairy completely from our diets, we could do more for breast cancer awareness than all the pink ribbons on our food products. We need to start a new movement that actually focuses on prevention. Next time we run with our fellow mothers, sisters, and daughters for the cure, bring banners that say, “Dodge the Dairy.” Others deserve to know that we possibly have the cure for 90 percent of breast cancer cases. Imagine how many mothers and daughters would be cured if we actually implemented it?

The Calcium Catastrophe

One of the more concerning myths about dairy is the claim that it promotes strong bones. Women and young girls have grown up under the illusion that if we don’t drink milk or eat yogurt to get calcium, we will develop osteoporosis. Osteoporosis, or the weakening of our bones, causes 1.5 million fractures per year, of which three hundred thousand are broken hips.
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However, there has yet to be a study that proves consuming dairy is a deterrent to osteoporosis. Reviews of over fifty studies by the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that there was little evidence to support the claim that children need milk for strong, healthy bones. A study by the National Dairy Council found that the high protein content in dairy actually leaches calcium from our bones. This means dairy doesn’t prevent osteoporosis but actually promotes it. The United States has the highest consumption of dairy products and the highest rates of osteoporosis.
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When Japanese women began adopting the Western diet, the rates of osteoporosis increased as their dairy intake did. In reality, the countries with the highest dairy intake have the highest rates of osteoporosis and are still obsessed with calcium intake from dairy. We are caught in a calcium paradox. Ironic, isn’t it?

The truth is that dairy products are not a good source of calcium, because they are damaging to our bone health. Let us explain. We are so hyped up about getting enough calcium that we are actually getting too much and from the wrong sources.
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There are two ways our body gets calcium—from eating calcium-rich foods (from plants, the good way!) or leaching calcium stored in the bones.
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Our bodies like to stay in an alkaline-balanced state, but animal products produce acidic environments in our bodies. The body quickly needs to regulate and restore its preferred alkaline pH state that keeps it functioning properly. To do so, our bodies draw calcium from our bones to stabilize our inner pH balance.
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Put simply, too much protein-rich animal foods cause our bodies to take calcium away from our bones, achieving the very thing we are aiming to prevent in the first place—brittle bones.

Friends, we are making ourselves sick by aiming to do the right thing for our health with the wrong information! Stop worrying about calcium and protein intake. As Harvard studies indicate, there are much better sources for calcium than dairy. We can get enough calcium and protein from eating leafy green foods such as kale, collard greens, and broccoli. An added benefit of these vegetables is that they are high in vitamin K, which regulates calcium.
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Clearly, the beneficiaries of consuming animal products are the dairy and meat industries themselves and big pharma. Out with the false information that we have been fed for too long and in with the real science!

Ditch the Dairy

While hard to believe, the truth is that dairy products, with their genetic modifications, added contaminants, and their natural use of growing a calf into a full-sized cow, are linked to a whole host of health problems, including autoimmune diseases, gastrointestinal diseases, asthma, and cancers. While we have touched on the basics of the dangers of consuming dairy and how it is responsible for contributing to America’s failing health, we suggest you read
The China Study
by Dr. Colin T. Campbell,
The Food Revolution
by John Robbins,
Whitewash
by Joseph Keon, and
Milk: The Deadly Poison
by Robert Cohen.

There is absolutely no benefit from eating dairy. Science doesn’t support it, our health is suffering from it, and our pocketbooks are emptying because of it. Do yourself a favor and drop that dairy!

Know your Sh!t Solutions:

1) Try holding the cheese on your pizza. Use hummus, pesto, or the many, varying, vegan-cheese flavors instead. Some of our favorite brands include Treeline, Daiya, Follow Your Heart, and Kite Hill.

2) There are healthier alternatives to those creamy foods we love. Avocado, a true superfood, makes an excellent creamy substitute. A sample of avocado’s health benefits includes a healthy heart, sharp mind, and anti-aging and anti-inflammatory agents.

3) Toss cashews, almonds, walnuts, or other nuts into a blender with lima or cannelloni beans, and spice it up with your favorite herbs and flavors as a fabulous spread for just about anything.

4) You don’t have to give up bagels and cream cheese. Tofutti and Galaxy make amazing vegan cream cheeses in a variety of flavors.

5) Replace your milk (and pus!) with soy, rice, or almond-based milks. With so many brand choices to select from, it is hard to pick a favorite.

CHAPTER 7

The United Corporation of America

“We found significant influence from the [meat and dairy] industry at every turn: in academic research, agriculture policy development, government regulation, and enforcement.”

~Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, Johns Hopkins University

O
ur government and its subsidiary organizations—the USDA, FDA, and EPA—are not always working in the public’s favor to protect our food, but rather for the benefit of corporate interests. Agribusiness is one of the most powerful lobbies in Congress and continues to effectively “buy” favorable legislation. This is why the FDA and USDA knowingly
allow feces to remain in your meat, the animals you eat to be injected with growth hormones and antibiotics, rendered animals to be put into animal feed, and rocket fuel and pus to stay in your milk—all practices that other industrialized countries such as Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom have banned.

Although the general conception of the American public is that the FDA and USDA were created to ensure food quality for the public benefit and Congress was created to protect the public’s interests, the reality is that, based on government organizations’ actions, current policies work to protect the interests of the corporations in the food industry. While America was founded on the principle of freedom of speech, factory farming and agribusiness are rapidly taking away the American people’s rights to free speech and safe food. Agribusiness-corporate interests are controlling America by spending corporate dollars, lobbying Congress about legislation, and silencing community voices. To restore order, it’s time to stand up to USDA, Inc., FDA, Inc., and Congress, Inc. and take the money out of politics.

The USDA: Not Working for the People

President Abraham Lincoln established the USDA—the United States Department of Agriculture—in 1862. The USDA was first formed to help American farmers. While it claims it still fulfills Lincoln’s vision as a “People’s Department,” the reality is very different, as the people’s health and best interests come behind corporate interests. The USDA might touch “the lives of every American, every day,” but today it does not have the positive impact that Lincoln obviously intended.
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On its website, the USDA claims two missions: one is “expanding markets for agricultural products” and “further developing alternative markets for agricultural products and activities” and the other mission is “enhancing food safety by taking steps to reduce the prevalence of foodborne hazards from farm to table.”
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Although on the surface these two goals aren’t mutually exclusive, the USDA’s activities clearly favor one over the other. Protecting our food safety has taken a backseat.

For example, let’s look at the USDA’s messages on cheese. On the one hand, the USDA has the consumers’ best interests at heart by urging us to eat less cheese and saturated fat. It even asks consumers to consider holding the cheese on their pizza. At the same time, the USDA provides funding to the marketing group it created called Dairy Management that seeks to promote the consumption of cheese. While the USDA is asking the public to limit cheese, in 2010 the Dairy Management group partnered with Domino’s to provide 40 percent more cheese on pizzas.
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The USDA provided $5 million in funds to the Dairy Management group a year earlier. It seems the USDA is speaking out of both sides of its mouth. So which mission does it believe in, health or industry interests? Clearly, the two are not compatible. It’s time the USDA picked a team.

The problems with the USDA do not stop at its mixed messaging. It has gone through massive deregulation without the public’s knowledge. The Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point Program, instituted under the Clinton Administration in 1998, is one clear example. Under HACCP, the USDA leaves regulation and inspection plans up to the food-processing plants. The USDA only checks the paper versions of the plans to ensure that the processing plant doesn’t openly have any problems. After companies adopt the plans, they are presumed to be making safe food products.
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We all know that from plan to implementation, there can be numerous problems.

This means even though the USDA never inspects the actual food products, they still receive the USDA stamp of approval. The public was never notified of this change. Like many of you, we were shocked to learn that the USDA stamp of approval doesn’t actually correlate with real inspection. This means we are tricked in to believing that our food products are inspected, regulated, and safe when in fact the opposite is true.

In fact, the USDA only minimally tests food products on its own. Ann Veneman, the Agriculture Secretary appointed by President George W. Bush from January 2000 until January 2005, vetoed a program that would test all cows for mad cow disease.
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It is important to note that Ann Veneman was linked to a company that produces the bovine-growth
hormones for cows and to a major meatpacking corporation at the time she made this decision. Only twenty thousand cattle were tested in 2003 out of the thirty-five million slaughtered that year. Testing all of the animals is not impossible. Japan tests each and every one of its cows killed for human consumption to ensure a safe food supply.
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Aside from lax testing, the USDA has even falsified records to sell contaminated meat. Lester Friedlander, a former USDA veterinarian, spoke out and stated that he was told that if he found evidence of mad cow disease, he needed to keep that information a secret. He confirmed that the USDA has overturned laboratory tests of cows that had tested positive for mad cow disease.
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The USDA has been known for adulterating reports and telling their employees to lie about test results to cover up mad cow disease. Secrets and lies. This is the USDA’s approach to food safety.

In all fairness, conflicting corporate interests have made the USDA less powerful than we think in regulating and enforcing food recalls. During the peak of food recalls and foodborne illness sweeping the nation between 2000 and 2004, the USDA Inspector General openly admitted that the meat eaten in the United States is contaminated with sh!t and that this contamination is “continuous.”
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Where was that statement publicized? Anyone?

Despite this knowledge, zero enforcement action was taken to remedy the situation. When there were nineteen beef recalls in 2007, the USDA failed to trace the beef products back to the slaughterhouse and meat-packing processors. The USDA actually can’t disclose where contaminated meat comes from, as this is considered “proprietary” information.
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In fact, if a company decides to voluntarily recall a contaminated product, they are under no obligation to notify the public. The state of Minnesota managed to trace one outbreak to Cargill. The lawsuit was settled out of court for an unknown sum, in order to prevent the public from knowing the extent of the outbreak. The twenty-five million pounds of
E. coli-
contaminated beef products recalled had the USDA stamp of approval.
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What is depressing is, year in and year out, food recalls and safety aren’t improving. Most recently, in January of 2014, nine million pounds of beef, the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of beef production, was
recalled by the California company, Rancho Feeding Corp, due to lack of federal inspection that resulted in it using unhealthy animals to process meat.
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The level of deception and adulteration, such as trimming off cancerous tumors on the animals and using fake stamps of approval, emphasizes the glaring oversight in our food-safety policies.
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One major problem with the ability of our governmental organizations to do their jobs is the division of labor between the FDA and the USDA that is complex and even nonsensical, which allows gaping holes for oversights. The FDA and the USDA are both tasked with the job of regulating our food system. In simple terms, the USDA is in charge of overseeing meat and poultry, and the FDA is in charge of overseeing seafood. Yet it gets quite complicated.

For instance, let’s take eggs. The FDA oversees the safety of whole, shelled eggs, whereas the USDA oversees the processing of eggs and the packaging and labeling of whole eggs. The question is who is in charge when there is a safety hazard such as
salmonella
poisoning of whole eggs? It seems the USDA is in charge of regulating the facility where the eggs are produced, but the FDA is accountable for the safety hazard of the eggs themselves. Even more interesting, open-faced sandwiches are inspected by the USDA and close-faced sandwiches by the FDA.
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Sausage is regulated by the USDA, but pepperoni is regulated by the FDA. Confused? Don’t worry, we are probably just as confused as the USDA and FDA.