Fwd: DOCTOR YOURSELF Newsletter (Vol. 4, No. 9 April 5, 2004)

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" Andrew W. Saul "

DOCTOR YOURSELF Newsletter (Vol. 4, No. 9 April 5, 2004)

Mon, 5 Apr 2004 12:38:43 -0400

 

 

To for free: dynews-

 

" A vegetarian diet can prevent 97% of our coronary occlusions. " (JAMA, Vol.

176, No. 9, June 3, 1961, p 806.)

 

 

The DOCTOR YOURSELF NEWSLETTER (Vol. 4, No. 9 April 5, 2004)

 

" Free of charge, free of advertising, and free of the A.M.A. "

 

Written and copyright 2004 by Andrew Saul, PhD, of

http://www.doctoryourself.com , which welcomes a million visitors annually.

Commercial use of the website or the contents of this Newsletter is strictly

prohibited.

 

WHOLE LOTTA BACON GOIN' ON

 

It's porcine genocide to be sure. Pigs are monthly murdered by the millions.

And there are so many of them lined up to die. Why, the pig population in

North Carolina alone is so huge that that state's hog farms produce as much

sewage as the entire human population of New York City. (TBS Network Earth,

February 4, 1996) Now think of all the other, and even larger, livestock all

throughout the other 49 states, and breathe deep.

 

There is simply nothing cuter than a baby pig. They are pink, clean, snuggly

little characters. They are smart, affectionate and covered with tiny

glistening silvery-toned hairs. Their miniature snouts make them look like

they are smiling, and though they wriggle a bit, piglets are nice and warm

to hold. I personally didn't raise pigs, but some farmer friends of mine

did. For a while, anyway. They quit years ago, and profit was never the

issue. It finally got to them that these adorable babies were doomed to be

hacked up into bacon.

 

As it sits on your kitchen counter, bacon is loaded with fat and salt and

additives. Gentlemen, you might be interested in this: one of the principal

chemical ingredients used to " cure " meats is sodium nitrate (NaNO3), a

compound functionally identical to potassium nitrate (KNO3), commonly known

as saltpeter.

 

Saltpeter is a male sterilizing agent.

 

And sure enough: sodium nitrate is also known as " chile saltpeter. " Sodium

nitrite (NaNO2), which differs by a single oxygen atom, is also used to

preserve meat.

 

That's why I usually struggle to conceal a grin when a big, muscular, hairy

guy intones in a deep voice, " I'm a meat-and-potatoes man! "

 

Right.

 

But, all that said, here's what really did it for me.

 

WHY I STOPPED EATING BACON

 

I remember the very day. There I was, opening a package of ordinary

supermarket bacon. As I separated the slices for frying, I noticed an

odd-looking area, about the size of a nickel, at the same relative location

on each slice. Upon closer examination (and I have taught tissue biology

(histology) at the college level), I saw that the funny-looking spots were

actually neatly presliced sections of a tumor. The pig that had been killed

for that particular one-pound bacon package, and probably a hundred others

like it, evidently had at least one tumor, and who knows how many more. The

government should know this, but they all too obviously never looked: the

opened bacon package I had in front of me had the " USDA Inspected " seal

prominently displayed on the front. The package failed to mention the nice 2

cm diameter tumor inside.

 

When I get an attack of the BLT munchies, I make it with beans, lettuce and

tomatoes. As with dead baby cows (veal), which I walked away from in my

youth, I will cheerfully go hungry before I ever eat bacon again. Tumors are

bad enough to look at. There is no way we should be eating them.

 

THERE'S THE BEEF

 

If you liked vegetarian cattle rancher Howard Lyman's website

http://www.madcowboy.com , and my related Newsletter comments two issues ago

(http://www.doctoryourself.com/news/v4n7.txt), well, you will really get a

kick out of the man's book, MAD COWBOY. My new review follows below:

 

" Why should you call me to account for eating decently? " (George Bernard

Shaw, in The Vegetarian, 15 January 1898.)

 

When I first began writing pro-vegetarian material some 25 years ago, two of

my finest and favorite teachers volunteered to proofread for me. As a

consequence, both stopped eating meat. What a nice compliment. But my

writing is small 'taters compared to that of Howard Lyman. Mr. Lyman, a

raised-to-graze, fourth-generation dairy farmer and cattle rancher, is that

arch heretic of animal husbandry: he's a vegan. Lyman and his expert

collaborator, Glen Merzer, have written MAD COWBOY, a concise, in-your-face

book full of meat-busting facts.

 

This book really homes in on the range.

 

For example, Lyman writes that cattle are fed " ground-up dead horses, dogs,

cats, pigs, chickens, and turkeys, as well as blood and fecal material of

their own species. " (p 12) Then he lets us in on a little cattle-raising

trade secret: steers are regularly fattened on chicken feces. (p 13)

 

This is gross. And wonderful reading, too.

 

Face it: the government is certainly not protecting you. (Remember my bacon

episode, above?) Slaughterhouse quality control, such as it is, is simply

not working. " About 80 per cent of food poisonings come from meat, " Lyman

says. (p 13) And he is no friend of Col. Sanders, either: " Approximately 30

percent of chicken consumed in America is contaminated with salmonella, and

70 to 90 percent with another deadly pathogen, campylobacter, " which he

cites as a cause of Guillain-Barre syndrome (1), a rapid-onset paralytic

disease. (p 38)

 

Oversight and inspection by the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the Food

and Drug Administration is so lax because they " can generally be counted on

to behave not like public servants but like hired hands of the meat and

dairy industries. " (p 20) Lyman says, " The government is going to inspect

one out of every two hundred fifty thousand carcasses. " (p 58)

 

Mr. Lyman is just warming up. " Nearly all meat in America is contaminated

with such man-made carcinogens as dioxins, a family of chemicals related to

Agent Orange, and DDT. " (p 21) Cattle feed is higher in pesticides than

crops grown directly for human consumption. A New England Journal of

Medicine study (2) " found that the breast milk of vegetarian women had only

1 to 2 percent of the national average of pesticide contamination. " (p 22)

 

" Meat kills, " Lyman bluntly declares, citing the all-too-familiar coroner's

equation: fat plus cholesterol equals cardiovascular deaths. We have all

heard this before, but we often ignore two important facts: there is very

little fat in plant foods, and plant foods contain zero cholesterol. Meat

has plenty of both. " It kills us just as dead as tobacco kills us, but far

more frequently. " (p 23) " (W)e have to do all we can to keep our young

people from getting hooked on those fat-and-cholesterol delivery systems

know as hot dogs, hamburgers, scrambled eggs, and ice cream. " It looks to

Mr. Lyman that, supersized or not, those McArtery meals have got to go. To

him, Ronald McDonald must seem to be little more than a badly-dressed

Marlboro man.

 

And he's probably right.

 

In the one hundred years since Sinclair Lewis published The Jungle (3),

practically nothing has changed. You had best put down those chicken fingers

before reading this: " Slaughterhouses are efficient factories for spreading

pathogens from one chicken to the next. . . covered with feces, bile and

feed . . . (I)ndividual chicken inspectors examine about 12,000 chickens a

day, each for about two seconds. " (p 38) Lyman writes that, in America,

contaminated chicken kills over one thousand people annually, and sickens

perhaps 80 million more.

 

He does not allow eating fish, either. In addition to citing evidence of

bacterial contamination in seafood that would make Captain Nemo blush (p

39), Lyman relentlessly adds that omega-3 fatty acids, considered to be one

of the main benefits of eating seafood, " can just as easily be obtained " by

eating seeds, vegetable oils, wheat germ and vegetables. Important though

those sources be, I think that for many people, fish remains the surest way

of consuming adequate amounts of omega-3's. But on the other hand, Mr.

Lyman's relentless listing of pollutants now found in seafood (p 40)

deserves renewed appreciation of vegetarian alternatives.

 

Many more of the most powerful vegetarian arguments ever made are compiled

in Mad Cowboy, with supporting research ably summarized. For instance,

studies of tens of thousands of Seventh Day Adventists " found the rate of

heart disease mortality to be one-third as high for the lacto-ovo (egg and

dairy) vegetarians as for the meat eaters. For the vegans, the rate was

one-tenth as high. " The massive Cornell University China Health Project (4)

" determined that those who eat the least animal products have the lowest

rates of cancer, heart disease and several other degenerative diseases. " (p

26) Specifically, Lyman indicts osteoporosis, diabetes, obesity and

hypertension as maladies due largely to our habitual feasting on dead animal

muscle. And " feasting " is the correct word: Americans eat ten times the

animal protein as do the Chinese. And the few Chinese that can afford to eat

as much meat as we do get the same diseases as Americans already have. (p

45)

 

Wisely, Lyman backs up his statements, citing additional studies from around

the world, and providing unobtrusive but exact footnotes for easy reference.

An index, recommended reading list, and several pages of sources and

bibliography complete the work.

 

Mad Cowboy is by no means the only well-written, concise book on the

rationale for a meatless lifestyle. Twenty years back, I'd read a charmingly

illustrated yet profound little paperback called, What's Wrong with Eating

Meat? (5). Many readers have become familiar with the best selling Diet for

a Small Planet from 1971 (6), and others know of the century-old vegetarian

essays by Bernard Shaw or Gandhi. The writings of physicians such as Tilden,

Jackson and Trall of the Natural Hygenic movement in the 19th century

predate the lot. (7)

 

A young Mr. Lyman knew nothing of these. Doing farm chores at age five,

castrating calves at age ten, and paying his way through agricultural

college on his poker winnings, he was bound and determined to make a success

of feedlot farming. And so he did, lacing his 7,000 steers' feed with

antibiotics, diethylstilbesterol (DES) and an array of other " suspect " drugs

purchased in quantity just before they were banned.

 

It was a rough life, especially for the cattle. " The flies can get so thick

they actually threaten a cow's ability to breathe. . . Every morning I would

fill up a fly fogger with insecticide and spray great clouds of it over the

whole operation. . . (and) covering their backs with insecticide that was

absorbed through the skin. " (p 56-57) In following such practices, dangerous

as they are to animals, farmer and the public, Lyman's cattle operation was

not unusual.

 

His own particular claim to fame stems from 1996 when he, along with Oprah

Winfrey, was sued for " food disparagement " by a group of Texas cattlemen. In

1998, he won. The result was Mad Cowboy (and www.madcowboy.com). What at

first glance might pass for just another brief celebrity turn actually

delivers far more. There is not a dull paragraph to be found in Mad Cowboy.

I absolutely loved reading it, even though compared to the vegan Mr. Lyman,

I am merely a moderate, or what I call a " near vegetarian. " Unlike Mr.

Lyman, I think fish and dairy products remain nutritionally important. Even

Lyman acknowledges that Dr. Dean Ornish allows nonfat milk, nonfat yogurt,

and egg whites in the diet he prescribes to reverse coronary diease. (p 30)

But surely we overconsume protein foods in general and flesh foods in

particular. And like Mr. Lyman, I once was a dairy farmer. I now advocate

sharp reductions in meat intake, ones that will save human lives, along with

saving literally ten billion animals each year, in America alone, from a

walk onto the killing floor. And yes, ten " billion " is not a misprint. (8)

 

Of course, Mad Cowboy addresses Mad Cow disease (bovine spongiform

encephalopathy), and does so in considerable detail in Chapter Five. Chapter

Six discusses recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), given to cows to

force higher milk production. The chapter is an attack on cow abuse (and on

the Monsanto Chemical Corporation) that you have to read to believe. When I

was a dairyman, I personally milking a hundred head twice daily. Since then,

I have presented many a college lecture on rBGH. Lyman knows exactly what he

is talking about. The hidden (and taxpayer-supported) costs of the meat

industry, and livestock-caused environmental destruction are covered in

Chapter Seven. Chapter Eight presents vegetarian diet as the ideal weight

loss technique, which it is. Lyman and co-author Merzer literally rip into

high-protein diets (such as Atkins or " The Zone " ) with such well-developed

criticism as to show for all time why veggie dieting is the way to go.

 

For such a relatively short book (189 pages), Mad Cowboy contains

meat-munching, myth-mangling facts by the trainload. But what draws you in

most is Mr. Lyman's personal writing style. Lyman is talking directly to

you, and he's one fine raconteur. ( " I came in with so much herbicide on my

clothing that my mere presence killed off the houseplants. " [p 60]) I wonder

if this could serve as the chemical farmer's new twist to, " Hi, honey, I'm

home. " Hide the phycus, dear!

 

But there is no humor to be found in Mr. Lyman's account of his

ever-increasing health problems that finally forced his reconsideration of

the ethics and the consequences of his livelihood (Chapter Four). Even after

serious spine surgery, a meat-fed Mr. Lyman says " I weighed 350 pounds, my

cholesterol was over 300, my blood pressure was off the charts, and I was

getting nosebleeds " in addition to eyesight problems. His response was to

change his entire life: he became an organic farmer, ran for Congress in

1982 and very nearly made it, and became a vegetarian. " Within a year of

eating no meat, my health problems all started to go away. . . Everything

revolved around the fork. " (p 80-1) Lyman asserts, " Since I became a

vegetarian eight years ago, I have lost 130 pounds steadily, gradually, and

without trying. I never gained any of the weight back, and never felt

hungry. I never went on a diet, never counted my calories. . .I simply

stopped eating animal products. . . My cholesterol count declined from 300

to 140, my blood pressure went from dangerously high levels to normal ones,

and my energy levels increased. " (p 167)

 

Having raised my children in an ovo-laco vegetarian household, I have

observed and experienced many of the health benefits of which Mr. Lyman

speaks. Though I may personally prefer near-vegetarian nutritional reform to

vegan nutritional revolution, compromise is possible. Lyman presents

transitional eating hints and insights in pages 174-8. They are practical

and do-able in every way. This is a book does not require your agreement,

just your action. From cover to cover, Mad Cowboy speaks with power, and

that is the main reason you should read it. Lyman effectively says, to Hades

with half measures: just stop eating meat. The benefits are many and

significant, as any sane cow would likely agree.

 

Lyman HF and Merzer G. Mad Cowboy: Plain truth from the cattle rancher who

won't eat meat. NY: Scribner, 1998. ISBN 0-684-84516-4.

 

(By the way, I do not sell this book, but any bookseller will. Naturally the

Mad Cowboy website carries it (http://madcowboy.com) . If you are short on

cash, check your public library. If your library does not have it, ask the

librarian to get it for you via interlibrary loan. But in my opinion, this

book is a keeper and you'll want your own copy.)

 

Notes:

 

1. " (T)here is no effective treatment " for Guillain-Barre syndrome. " Perhaps

50% of cases occur shortly after a microbial (viral or bacterial)

infection. " Vaccination may also be a cause.

http://www.guillain-barre.com/overview.html

 

2. Hergenrather J, Hlady G, Wallace B, Savage E. Pollutants in breast milk

of vegetarians. 1981 Mar 26;304(13):792). " Nursing infants of vegetarian

women whose diets are low on the food chain are exposed to less chemical

pollution. "

 

3. Sinclair U. The jungle. NY: New American Library, 1960. Originally

published 1906. Reviewed at http://www.doctoryourself.com/news/v3n4.txt

 

4. (http://www.doctoryourself.com/news/v3n16.txt and

http://www.doctoryourself.com/news/v3n18.txt , with a comment by study lead

author Dr. Colin Campbell of Cornell University)

 

5. Parham B. What's Wrong with Eating Meat? Denver, CO: Ananda Marga, 1979.

 

6. http://www.dietforasmallplanet.com/about

 

7. Natural Hygiene Society (of America), The Greatest Health Discovery,

Natural Hygiene Press, Inc., 1972. (Reviewed at

http://www.doctoryourself.com/morebooks.html)

 

8. http://www.all-creatures.org/articles/ar-anag2003.html That ten billion

figure does not include fish, just birds and mammals.

 

ANOTHER REVIEW OF DOCTOR YOURSELF: Natural Healing that Works

 

" Expertly written by biologist and naturopathic teacher Andrew Saul (who has

served as a consulting specialist in natural healing for more than

twenty-five years), Doctor Yourself: Natural Healing That Works is a

straightforward and " non-specialist reader friendly " guide to organizing

one's diet to promote health and nutrition. Promoting nutritional therapy as

a preventative and treatment for many diverse ailments, and offering solid

advice for adjusting one's diet plan to better live with everything from

Diabetes, to PMS, to Parkinson's Disease, Doctor Yourself is a very helpful

guidebook which is filled from cover to cover with gems of information that

aren't usually discussed in most other nutrition books. It should also be

mentioned that Andrew Saul has also developed an impressive website at

DoctorYourself.com with additional information on the scientific studies

behind the protocols referenced in his book and offers any interested party

more than additional 4,000 references. (Midwest Book Review, Vol 3, No 3,

March 2004.)

 

http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/mar_04.htm#health)

 

My book " DOCTOR YOURSELF: Natural Healing that Works " is available through

all booksellers. Of course, getting your copy directly from me means you

also get it autographed. Please go to

 

http://www.doctoryourself.com/saulbooks.html for more information and

 

http://www.doctoryourself.com/order.html to order.)

 

WHY WATER

 

M. L. writes:

 

" I make a point to drink plenty of water every day. Recently, I have been

told that people do NOT need to drink six to eight glasses of water a day.

Are other readers as confused about this as I am? "

 

Likely so. Our bodies need a lot of water for several reasons. In addition

to the fact that we lose water by sweating, speaking and even breathing, we

also lose water every time we urinate. If that urine has any deep color to

it, it typically means that it is overly concentrated. Although they are

quite capable of it, it is harder for your kidneys to concentrate urine, and

easier for them to excrete wastes when they can be diluted. An illustration

of this would be kidney stones, which are strikingly difficult to form in

dilute, fast-moving urine. (http://www.doctoryourself.com/kidney.html)

 

Because most Westerners eat far too much protein, they have to excrete a

whole lot of excess nitrogen. Proteins are huge molecules. Proteins are made

out of zillions of linked-up amino acids, and every " amino " group is formed

out of nitrogen. High protein diets mean more nitrogenous wastes to get rid

of, and the kidneys punch the overtime clock. More water, once again, makes

their job easier.

 

So if you keep your mouth shut, keep your legs crossed, and don't eat meat,

can you lower your water intake? I guess you could; a non-talking

knock-kneed vegetarian giraffe can go over a month without drinking. But

who'd want to?

 

As for me, I lowered my protein intake, and upped my water, and noticed the

improvement immediately.

 

WATER HUMOR, SORT OF

 

A doctor on a house call was walking up the lawn to an old farmhouse when he

fell headlong into a well. When the local judge heard about this, he said,

" Tell that doctor to tend to the sick, and leave the well alone. "

 

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