Authors: Rip Esselstyn
The only creatures in the world that really groove on fecal and fertilizer runoff are algae. In the Chesapeake Bay, algal blooms due to farm runoff have caused the crab population there to drop by 70 percent. In the Gulf of Mexico, the blooms have created a dead zone (where not enough oxygen is present to support aquatic life) roughly the size of Connecticut.
What about seafood, then? According to a recent United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report, 72 percent of the world’s marine fish stocks are being harvested faster than they can reproduce. On top of that, 25 percent of the total yearly catch is made up of bycatch, i.e., waste fish that usually die. In 2003, that amounted to roughly 27 tons of “waste.” Halibut fishing is one of the worst culprits: 95 percent of the fish it pulls in are bycatch, including a fish market’s worth of endangered or overfished species.
In 2006, a group of scientists from five different countries studied the viability of the world’s marine fisheries. Their conclusion? If catch rates continued unabated, the populations of all currently fished species would collapse by the year 2048.
That’s just thirty-five years from now.
Agriculture ain’t perfect. In a 2003 report, leading environmental scientist David Pimentel of Cornell University wrote that neither meat nor plant-based diets were sustainable given current farming practices. But we can’t stop eating altogether, so the best way to limit the environmental impact of farming is to cut out the farming that takes the heaviest toll. The average American consumes around 200 pounds of meat a
year. When you consider that producing one pound of “factory-farmed” beef requires seven pounds of grain and 2,400 gallons of water, it’s easy to see where to begin.
In my opinion, eating meat or fish after you’ve read about the impact it has on the planet is as appalling as driving around a gas-guzzling Humvee instead of doing what you can to lighten your carbon footprint. It’s time to stop growing plants only to feed animals and start growing them to feed ourselves. Eat some Swiss chard today and save the world tomorrow!
Q
uestion: Where’s a good place to find contaminants, besides in your garbage can and your local dump? Answer: In meat!
All those pesticides, heavy metals, antibiotics, and other toxicants floating around farms accumulate in the fat of animals and enter your body when you eat them. The list of contaminants that can be found in meat reads like something out of a meth lab: arsenic, lead, ammonia, copper, penicillin, nitrites, and the scariest: ivermectin, a neurotoxin that can actually kill your brain cells.
Those are just the beginning. There are so many contaminants in meat that no one is sure exactly how long the list has gotten. The FDA estimates that it contains between 500 and 600 different unnatural chemicals.
Unfortunately, the government only tests for sixty of them. Among the ones that they
don’t
test for are most carcinogens, chemicals that cause birth defects, and some dioxins, a class of ultra-nasty toxicants that is linked to reproductive and developmental problems, immune system damage, and, of course, cancer. More than 90 percent of human exposure to dioxins is through meat.
The United States General Accounting Office puts the number of possible contaminants a little lower, at precisely 143. Of those, forty-two can cause cancer, twenty are linked to birth defects, and six, according to the
New York Times
, “are suspected of causing mutations.” Even the USDA, which is supposed to be protecting consumers from these poisons, has admitted twice that it has failed in its job to monitor them.
In his book
Diet for a Poisoned Planet
, David Steinman estimates that 90 to 95 percent of all the toxic chemicals humans ingest come from meat, fish, dairy, and eggs. On top of that, meat contains fourteen
times more pesticides than plants do, and dairy has five times more. Although plants can also contain contaminants, they aren’t treated with, and exposed to, the same number as animals are, nor do they store the toxic substances in the same way.
Farm animals are bombarded with toxicants every day: They eat food containing pesticides, they take drugs to make them grow faster and keep them healthy, and they may even drink water that has been accidentally contaminated with fertilizers and heavy metals. All of this “shawowzie” is stored in their fat deposits, where it accumulates until meat eaters unknowingly consume it.
Some of the toxicants in animals that are turning up in meat aren’t even legal and some haven’t been used for thirty years. They are called Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), and range from pesticides like DDT to industrial coolants (DDT has been linked to cancer, miscarriages, and infertility while coolants are linked to diabetes). Even though most were banned in America in the 1970s and 1980s, their residues are still hanging around in the environment. A new class of toxic flame retardants is also ending up in our bodies; these have been shown to disrupt the functioning of healthy endocrine glands.
By the way, you fish fans: It’s not just furry animals that contain these poisons—a 2004 study found the highest levels of coolants in farmed salmon.
One reason that toxic chemicals remain in the food chain is because factory farmers feed their animals what’s known as “litter,” a slurry of feces, dead animals, fur, feathers, and feed remnants that were themselves contaminated; this litter has been linked to all kinds of things from mad cow disease to food poisoning.
According to the USDA, contaminated animal flesh is the cause of 70 percent of food poisoning cases every year. One of the biggest culprits is natural but nasty: a little guy called
E. coli
—a normally helpful bacterium that lives in our intestines but can wreak major havoc if we ingest it. Despite causing tens of thousands of cases of food poisoning every year, it was actually legal to sell meat tainted with
E. coli
until 1994, when a massive outbreak via a chain of popular fast-food restaurants killed four kids.
E. coli
gets onto animals when they are in contact with feces, and it remains there when they are slaughtered and their flesh turned into meat. It is often cooked off, except in the case of hamburgers; this is
because they are a putrid mash of fat, gristle, and low-grade cuts of meat mixed up and formed into a patty. You might cook the
E. coli
dead on the outside, but the inside might still remain contaminated. According to the
New York Times
, many big slaughterhouses refuse to sell meat to grinders who test for
E. coli
.
Unfortunately, the response by the meat industry to these issues hasn’t been to improve standards but to pump their animals full of still more toxic chemicals. In order to get rid of
E. coli
, some meat producers treat it with ammonia—the same stuff that’s in your window cleaner. Meanwhile, many chickens are kept bacteria-free with food that contains arsenic, one of the most toxic natural substances known to man.
If an animal is turned into processed meat—hot dogs, bacon, luncheon meat, or basically anything on a club sandwich—its flesh is pumped full of nitrites as a way of preserving, flavoring, and coloring it. The problem is that nitrites can combine with the meat’s amino acids during the curing process to form nitrosamines, aka carcinogens. A study by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) found that a person’s risk of getting colorectal cancer increases by 21 percent for every 50 grams of processed meat consumed daily. That’s just one hot dog!
To add insult to injury, meat won’t only make you sick, it will keep you from getting better. Many beef farmers give their cows antibiotics at what doctors call “sub-therapeutic” levels. In plain English, it’s not to cure them of disease, it’s to make them grow faster. It’s been estimated that farmers use fifteen to seventeen million pounds of antibiotics every year just fattening their cows.
And what happens to germs when they see the same antibiotics over and over again? They become resistant to them—bad news if
you
need some antibiotics to actually fight an illness. Doubly bad news if you got that illness from meat, which is often contaminated with antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. There is even some evidence that antibiotic resistance can be transferred by eating meat. In 2010, the FDA issued a warning to meat producers saying that dosing cows was “a serious public health threat.”
With 99 percent of the meat in America coming from factory farms, you can never be sure of its quality, or how the livestock it comes from were raised. The one thing you can always bet on is that it will be oozing toxic substances that have no business being in it, or in you.
A
dopting a plant-based diet means giving up some foods you’re fond of. When President Clinton started following my father’s program to reverse heart disease, he had to ditch fried chicken and cheeseburgers, which for a stubborn Southern boy like him was almost like telling a bear to give up honey.
That doesn’t mean you have to give up everything you love. Some of your favorite, most delicious, most satisfying, and seemingly sinful foods aren’t necessarily bound for the compost heap along with the pork, turkey, milk, and ice cream. What foods, you ask? Well, how about 70 percent or more dark chocolate!
Some of your animal-eating friends may assume that chocolate bats for their team because it tastes so good, but the truth is that dark chocolate, in its purest and most natural form, is plant based.
Unfortunately, some of the junk that passes for chocolate today is so refined and stuffed with so many additives that it more closely resembles a frightening science experiment than an actual chocolate treat. Take a look at the ingredients label on a typical candy bar. You may not have noticed it, since it’s cleverly concealed in tiny print behind that plastic flap. For something like chocolate, there are a heck of a lot of ingredients that don’t sound very chocolatey, such as cornstarch, lactose, dextrin, titanium oxide, and lots of milk fat.
One of the cheapest and least pure forms of chocolate—the stuff you find in most candy bars—is packaged milk chocolate. Some of these products contain so little actual chocolate that they have to stuff them full of artificial flavoring and milk fat just to give them some taste. The result is an extremely fattening chunk of chemistry that offers almost no nutritional value.
Dark chocolate doesn’t have as many ingredients. It is derived from the pods of the glorious
Theobroma cacao
tree—or cocoa tree for short, and generally contains chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, cocoa powder, and a sweetener.
Chocolate is an excellent source of antioxidants, which support all kinds of health. And new research has shown that naturally occurring cocoa phenols can discourage plaque buildup in your arteries. Studies have found that the health benefits of chocolate increase dramatically with its purity; in other words, the more chocolatey and plant-based the chocolate, the better it is for you!
So make sure you check the label closely when buying chocolate. Lots of brands try to pass themselves off as “dark” or, my personal favorite, “all natural.” Make sure there’s no added milk, and apply the general rule that if you have a hard time pronouncing the ingredients, or it takes a while to read through all of them, it’s probably not real chocolate.
When Bill Clinton appeared on the David Letterman show in 2011, Letterman asked Bill why he looked so good, and Bill mentioned his plant-based diet. Letterman remarked he didn’t want to give up meat and dairy and that he had a tendency to “fudge” too much. Bill responded that speaking of “fudge,” even the most militant plant-based eating doctor, Dr. Esselstyn, would eat some chocolate every New Year’s Eve. Letterman responded with “Wow! He goes crazy New Year’s Eve!”
The truth is my father does eat some chocolate every New Year’s Eve. But it isn’t just a little bit and it usually isn’t even dark chocolate. He has between twelve and fifteen Reese’s peanut butter cups!
No one is saying that a lot of dark chocolate is healthy—it has too much fat and can contribute to weight gain in a hurry. Don’t go out and eat a bunch of chocolates now. But what I am saying is that the plant-based world is filled with wonderful treats, whether it’s ripe tropical fruits, creamy rich nuts, or, yes, even a little lip-smacking good chocolate now and then.
Q
uestion: What disease will kill one out of every two men and women? Answer: Cardiovascular disease. Question: What is the first clinical sign of heart disease in men? Answer: Erectile dysfunction. That’s right. The canary in the coal mine when it comes to male heart disease is an underperforming penis. What’s the best way to avoid it? Is it by downing handfuls of red meat? No! Is it by downing handfuls of blue pills? No! The best way to perform in bed is by downing handfuls of leafy green vegetables and whole plants.
The idea that meat is good for sex is just another in a long line of medical myths. For example, the nineteenth-century dietary crusader Sylvester Graham (famous for the cracker named after him) thought that meat encouraged “sensuality.” Even odder, English schoolteachers in the early twentieth century told their pupils to skip meat in order to reduce their urges to do what teenage boys do when they are alone. Fat chance of that!
Another school of thought was that impotence was caused primarily by psychological issues, and that eating meat made the male ego stronger and, therefore, more psychologically fit to get sexually aroused.
Wrong on all accounts. Doctors now believe that around 85 percent of impotence issues are caused by medical or physical problems. And for the thirty million American men who suffer from erectile dysfunction, meat is actually part of the problem. Why?
What makes an erection really great is good blood flow. When men become aroused, their bodies release a chemical called nitric oxide that has the same effect on their Johnson that nitrous oxide has on a car: It supercharges it. Blood flows to the penis and increases it to roughly twice its normal size, and, just like that, you’re off to the races. But you won’t be racing anywhere if your blood isn’t racing down there.