Baking Soda & Maple Syrup Cancer Remedy

by Stephanie Relfe, B.Sc. (Sydney)

I had always wondered, since most people’s health problems are partly owing to being too acidic, if it would be a good idea to take baking soda, since it is so alkaline. Well, it turns out that there is a story to that, whereby simple baking soda and maple syrup cooked gently together were said to stop and even heal cancer.

“There is not a tumor on God’s green earth that cannot be licked with a little baking soda and maple syrup.” That is the astonishing claim of controversial folk healer Jim Kelmun who says that this simple home remedy can stop and reverse the deadly growth of cancers. His loyal patients swear by the man they fondly call Dr. Jim and say he is a miracle worker. “Dr. Jim cured me of lung cancer,” said farmer Ian Roadhouse. “Those other doctors told me that I was a goner and had less than six months to live. But the doc put me on his mixture and in a couple of months the cancer was gone. It did not even show up on the x-rays.”

Dr. Jim discovered this treatment accidentally somewhere in the middle of the last century when he was treating a family plagued by breast cancer. There were five sisters in the family and four of them had died of breast cancer. He asked the remaining sister if there was anything different in her diet and she told him that she was partial to sipping maple syrup and baking soda.

Since then, reported by a newspaper in Ashville, North Carolina, Dr. Jim dispensed this remedy to over 200 people diagnosed with terminal cancer and amazingly he claims of that number 185 lived at least 15 more years and nearly half enjoyed a complete remission of their disease. When combined with other safe and effective treatments like transdermal magnesium therapy, iodine, vitamin C, probiotics and other items like plenty of good sun exposure, pure water and clay treatments we should expect even higher remission rates.

It is important not to use baking soda which has had aluminum added to it. The Cancer Tutor site reports that Arm and Hammer does have aluminum but the company insists that is not true. One can buy a product which specifically states it does not include aluminum or other chemicals. (e.g. Bob’s Red Mill, Aluminum-Free, Baking Soda). Sodium bicarbonate is safe and extremely inexpensive.
Some people believe that this works because the cancer cells love sugar and gobble up the maple syrup, and in the process give a free ride for the baking soda right into the cancer cell. The baking soda is like cyanide to cancer cells, for it hits the cancer cells with a shock wave of alkalinity, which allows much more oxygen into the cancer cells than they can tolerate. Cancer cells cannot survive in the presence of high levels of oxygen.

My husband and I take a teaspoon of this daily, every now and again. The key to heating it is to put it on a super, super low temperature. Once the maple syrup is burned, it tastes TERRIBLE. But if you keep it just warm enough to fizz and mix for five minutes, so the two substances get combined, then it tastes quite pleasant. This sure can’t hurt. 100% pure maple syrup is also very good for you
The nice thing about this remedy, is that you can do it at the same time as anything else you are doing.

RECIPE

Mix 3 parts organic maple syrup with 1 part Aluminum free baking soda ( Red Mill Brand) stir with low heat (not over 120 degrees) for 5-10 minutes and take 3 tsp per day for 1 to 2 months. If it tastes terrible, you burned it, which is easy to do. Change diet to no meat, no milk, no sugar and no white flour!

This is How Dairy Affects Your Hormones. Get Ready to Ditch It Today!

By now, it’s common knowledge that non-organic cow’s milk is one of the worst choices you can buy at the store due to the excess hormones, antibiotics, steroids, pesticides and who knows what else it all contains. The food industry has tried to mislead us into believing that organic cow’s milk (and its products) comes with pure innocence and is made from cows that graze gracefully and happily in fields all day with the cleanest of air, water, fresh grass and more. Regardless that most none of this is true, cow’s milk is still one of the worst health food choices you can make for many reasons, no matter what kind of cows it comes from. The main reason is for how it affects your hormones.

All cows that produce milk are pregnant, organically raised, fed, etc. or not. It makes no difference that their milk doesn’t have added hormones considering that alone, cow’s milk contain over 60 different hormones without anything being added to it. Now, while all of us have different hormone situations going on, there is no logical research that says we need to take in added hormones from another mammal.

Why Ditching Dairy is Important for Your Hormones:

Cows are pregnant nearly 300 days of the year and Harvard Health shares that the more times a cows has been pregnant during that year, the more hormones she produces through her milk every time. Cows were not made to stay pregnant 300 days of the year and they develop infections due to this high demand for production, not to mention may be subject to further disease and bacteria when antibiotics aren’t used (such as in organic farming practices).

So, what about a cow’s hormones so detrimental to our own health?

Here are some things to consider:

1. Insulin Issues

One of the primary reasons dairy is linked to acne is that it raises insulin in the body. All dairy contains IG1, or insulin-growth factor. It raises our levels of insulin, which causes blood sugar swings that lead to acne. Acne is strongly influenced by hormonal changes, which is one reason so many teenagers struggle during puberty. Why would we put ourselves through that anymore than necessary? No matter what kind of dairy you choose, you’re taking in excess insulin growth like factor. Sadly, it’s promoted as a healthy option for body builders looking to bulk up, but over time, it’s not a healthy choice and will likely cause insulin problems that lead to overeating, sugar cravings, and poor blood sugar control.

2. Mood Swings

Dairy also contains hormones that can lead to mood swings. Estrogen and testosterone are our sex hormones, and when they get out of balance according to our bodies’ needs, we suffer mood swings as a result. Dairy milk promotes excess estrogen in the body due to it containing estrogen from female cows. At the same time, milk naturally contains androgenic properties, so it raises testosterone in the body and can cause bulking quickly. It’s absolutely chock-full of all these hormones we don’t need scurrying through out bodies. Think about it this way: the dairy you consume contains hormones from the female cow and the male cow that were used during impregnation. That doesn’t sound so healthy or appetizing, now, does it?

Dairy milk accounts for about 80 percent of estrogen consumed through the human diet, along with the fact that milk from pregnant cows (which is how all milk products are produced) contains about 33 times as much estrogen as milk from non-pregnant cows.

Mood swings inarguably happen due to swift hormone fluctuations and women aren’t the only ones to suffer. Men can too, which is one reason dairy isn’t a healthy choice for anyone looking to have a healthier, happy and more stable mood. How about some tastier, much healthier mood foods instead, all hormone-free?

3. Cancer Causing

The jury is in: milk causes cancer in any form, organic or not. Check this out: Harvard Health studies show that dairy milk and cheese products led to testicular cancer in men ages 20-39 and have been found to affect breast, colon, and prostate cancer heavily as well. And then there’s the casein protein found in milk that has also been linked to cancer. Even without hormones or even lactose, casein is a detrimental protein to our health and should be avoided however possible.

Help Your Hormones: Ditch Dairy

Sadly, the food industry would have you believe you need to consume milk to be healthy, but we know that’s not the case. Quit believing the lies around cow’s milk and have some other calcium-rich options instead, all free of these scary hormones.

http://www.onegreenplanet.org

6 Reasons You Should Avoid Dairy at All Costs

Got milk?

These days, it seems like almost everybody does. Celebrities, athletes, and even former president Clinton’s head of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, are all proud to wear the white “milk mustache.” After all, everyone knows that you need milk to be healthy …

Dairy is nature’s perfect food — but only if you’re a calf.

If that sounds shocking to you, it’s because very few people are willing to tell the truth about dairy. In fact, criticizing milk in America is like taking on motherhood, apple pie, or baseball. But that’s just what I’m about to do.

Based on the research and my experience practicing medicine, I typically advise most of my patients to avoid dairy products completely. I like ice cream just as much as the next person, but as a scientist I have to look honestly at what we know. In today’s blog I will explore many of the documented ill-effects of dairy, and give you six reasons you should avoid dairy at all costs.

The Reason I Have Problems with the USDA Food Pyramid

I’m aware that my advice to avoid dairy flies in the face of the new, “up-to-date” food pyramid from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The USDA’s pyramid recommends drinking 3 glasses of milk a day. What’s wrong with that? Well, for one thing, it’s not a recommendation that’s based on strict science.

Some of the “experts” who helped create the pyramid actually work for the dairy industry, which makes the US Department of agriculture’s recommendations reflect industry interests, not science or our best interests.

In fact, Walter Willet, M.D., Ph.D — the second-most-cited scientist in all of clinical medicine and the head of nutrition at Harvard’s School of Public Health — is one of the pyramid’s most vocal critics. He’s even called its guidelines “udderly ridiculous.” That’s not something a Harvard scientist says lightly.

But Dr. Willett is right. The pyramid just isn’t based on key scientific findings about health. In a moment we will take a look at some of the pyramid’s recommendations and why I disagree with them.

But before I dissect why the current food pyramid is harmful to your health, I want to offer a bit of hope. I recently attended a medical conference put on by Harvard Medical School and the Culinary Institute of America called Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives and met Eric Rimm, who works closely with Walter Willett at Harvard School of Public Health and is a member of the 2010 USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee.

I asked him if he felt that science not industry would be shaping the new guidelines and he said there was now only one scientist with industry ties on the new panel and he was objective and agreeable to make changes when presented the data. I am anxious to see how the science matches policy but feel a ray of hope that for the first time in the history of our dietary guidelines we will see science predominate, not industry interests and that the language will be direct, clear and simple to understand for all Americans. The guidelines from the early 1990’s promoting the consumption of 6-11 servings of bread and cereals daily led to the pasta, carb, sugar generation and led to the largest epidemic of obesity in the history of our species.

Let’s hope the new guidelines for 2010 will guide us toward greater health, not an increasing burden of obesity, diabetes and chronic disease. The USDA food policy guidelines form the basis of the school lunch program and it has contributed to a tripling of obesity in children. Let’s hope we can serve up a different lunch menu for our children and our nation.

The simple idea that science should become policy is unfortunately one that has found little traction in Washington. But that seems to be shifting a little now.

Now back to why the last government guidelines from 2005 are harmful to your health!

1. Consume a variety of foods within and among the basic food groups while staying within your body’s energy needs.

Sounds sensible — but which food groups? If you choose dairy, meat, fats, and carbohydrates, the “perfect” meal could be a cheeseburger, milkshake, and fries with ketchup (potatoes and tomatoes are the two top vegetables consumed in America). Generic advice like that is pretty meaningless and potentially harmful.

2. Control your caloric intake to manage body weight.

Again, that sounds good, but as I wrote in my book UltraMetabolism, even the best-trained nutritionists and dietitians can’t come close to correctly estimating their own caloric intake in a day. Also consider this: Is it okay to consume all of your calories from cola or ice cream as long as you stay within my caloric needs? Of course not. So this is more useless advice.

 

3. Increase intake of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and nonfat or low-fat milk products.

Well, fruits, veggies, and whole grains are great. Milk — not so much. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

4. Choose carbohydrates wisely.

Who could argue with that? But how do they define “wisely”? The real advice here should be to cut down sugar intake from 185 pounds per person per year (what we currently consume) to less than a pound, avoid flour products (except as a treat), and stick to whole-food carbohydrates like vegetables, fruit, whole grains, beans, nuts, and seeds.

5. Choose to prepare food with little salt.

That’s not bad advice. But it doesn’t make sense if most of what you eat is packaged or processed foods that you don’t actually prepare. For most Americans who eat half of their meals outside their homes, this isn’t helpful. A better recommendation would be to avoid packaged, processed, canned, prepared, and fast foods (unless you know exactly how they are made).

6. If you drink alcoholic beverages, do so in moderation.

Sounds good — but if you’re usually drinking two bottles of wine a night, then one seems like moderation! I think a better suggestion is to limit your alcohol consumption to half a drink a day or 3 glasses a week (the amount that seems to have the most health benefit).

7. Don’t eat unsafe foods.

Of course you shouldn’t leave your egg salad out in the hot sun or toss your salad with hands that just handled raw chicken coated with salmonella. But the food pyramid guidelines don’t mention pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, or genetically modified foods, despite scientific evidence of their harm. Shame on the USDA!

You can see now why I have big problems with the food pyramid! Its guidelines try to sound sensible — while still protecting the interests of the food industry, the agriculture industry, and all of the lobbyists paying for the elections of the Congress. That way everybody’s happy …

But I’m not, and you shouldn’t be either. The public just isn’t served by this watered down, confusing, and useless pyramid. The next guidelines, I hope will be better, especially with independent scientists like Eric Rimm involved. Worse, some of the recommendations are downright harmful –like the one to drink more milk and dairy products.

The Truth about Dairy

According to Dr. Willett, who has done many studies and reviewed the research on this topic, there are many reasons to pass up milk, including:

1. Milk doesn’t reduce fractures.(i) Contrary to popular belief, eating dairy products has never been shown to reduce fracture risk. In fact, according to the Nurses’ Health Study dairy may increase risk of fractures by 50 percent!
2. Less dairy, better bones.Countries with lowest rates of dairy and calcium consumption (like those in Africa and Asia) have the lowest rates of osteoporosis.
3. Calcium isn’t as bone-protective as we thought.(ii) Studies of calcium supplementation have shown no benefit in reducing fracture risk.Vitamin Dappears to be much more important than calcium in preventing fractures.
4. Calcium may raise cancer risk.Research shows that higher intakes of both calcium and dairy products may increase a man’s risk of prostate cancer by 30 to 50 percent.(iii) Plus, dairy consumption increases the body’s level ofinsulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) — a known cancer promoter.
5. Calcium has benefits that dairy doesn’t.Calcium supplements, but not dairy products, may reduce the risk of colon cancer.(iv)
6. Not everyone can stomach dairy.(v) About 75 percent of the world’s population is genetically unable to properly digest milk and other dairy products — a problem called lactose intolerance.

Based on such findings, Dr. Willet has come to some important conclusions:

• Everybody needs calcium — but probably not as much as our government’s recommended daily allowance (RDA) and calcium from diet, including greens and beans is better utilized by the body with less risk than calcium supplements.
• Calcium probably doesn’t prevent broken bones. Few people in this country are likely to reduce their fracture risk by getting more calcium.
• Men may not want to take calcium supplements. Supplements of calcium andvitamin Dmay be reasonable for women.
• Dairy may be unhealthy. Advocating dairy consumption may have negative effects on health.
  If all that isn’t enough to swear you off milk, there are a few other scientific findings worth noting. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently asked the UDSA to look into the scientific basis of the claims made in the “milk mustache” ads. Their panel of scientists stated the truth clearly:
• Milk doesn’t benefit sports performance.
• There’s no evidence that dairy is good for your bones or prevents osteoporosis — in fact, the animal protein it contains may help cause bone loss!
• Dairy is linked to prostate cancer.
• It’s full of saturated fat and is linked toheart disease.
• Dairy causes digestive problems for the 75 percent of people with lactose intolerance.
• Dairy aggravatesirritable bowel syndrome.

Simply put, the FTC asked the dairy industry, “Got Proof?” — and the answer was NO!

Plus, dairy may contribute to even more health problems, like:

• Allergies(vi)
  • Sinus problems
  • Ear infections
  • Type 1 diabetes (vii)
  • Chronic constipation (viii)
  • Anemia (in children)

Due to these concerns, many have begun to consider raw milk an alternative. But that isn’t really a healthy form of dairy either …

Yes, raw, whole, organic milk eliminates concerns like pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and the effects of homogenization and pasteurization — but to me, these benefits don’t outweigh dairy’s potential risks.
From an evolutionary point of view, milk is a strange food for humans. Until 10,000 years ago we didn’t domesticate animals and weren’t able to drink milk (unless some brave hunter-gather milked a wild tiger or buffalo!).

If you don’t believe that, consider this: The majority of humans naturally stop producing significant amounts of lactase – the enzyme needed to properly metabolize lactose, the sugar in milk — sometime between the ages of two and five. In fact, for most mammals, the normal condition is to stop producing the enzymes needed to properly digest and metabolize milk after they have been weaned.

Our bodies just weren’t made to digest milk on a regular basis. Instead, most scientists agree that it’s better for us to get calcium, potassium, protein, and fats from other food sources, like whole plant foods — vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and seaweed.

So here is my advice for dealing with dairy.

6 Tips for Dealing with Dairy

• Take your Cow for a Walk. It will do you much more good than drinking milk.
• Don’t rely on dairy for healthy bones. If you want healthy bones, get plenty of exercise and supplement with 2,000 IU ofvitamin Ddaily.
• Get your calcium from food. These include dark green leafy vegetables, sesame tahini, sea vegetables.
• Try giving up all dairy. That means eliminate milk, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream for two weeks and see if you feel better. You should notice improvements with yoursinuses, post-nasal drip,headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, energy, and weight. Then start eating dairy again and see how you feel. If you feel worse, you should try to give it up for life.
• If you can tolerate dairy, use only raw, organic dairy products. I suggest focusing on fermented products like unsweetened yogurt and kefir, occasionally.
• If you have to feed your child formula from milk, don’t worry. The milk in infant formula is hydrolyzed or broken down and easier to digest (although it can still cause allergies). Once your child is a year old, switch him or her to real food and almond milk.

Still got milk? I hope not! Remember, dairy is not crucial for good health. I encourage you to go dairy-free and see what it does for you.

Now I’d like to hear from you …

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/dairy-free-dairy-6-reason_b_558876.html

Texas Mayor Shares Secrets Of His ‘Vegan Town’ With Oklahoma

By Kelly Ogle

Marshall, Texas – Diseases of the dinner table continue to drag Oklahoma down. We’re a national leader for heart disease, high-blood pressure, obesity, high cholesterol, stroke, cancer and diabetes.

Being one of the country’s most unhealthy states is costly in sickness, medical and insurance costs, a lower quality-of-life, and early death. However, one Texas town is working to turn the tide on chronic disease.

Marshall, Texas has a population of 25,000. It’s cattle country, with a food culture, like the rest of the south, centered on meat, sugar, processed and fatty fried foods. Like Oklahoma, it’s known as America’s “stroke belt.” But to sit at dinner with Marshall’s Mayor Ed Smith and his wife, Amanda, you’ll hear a different tale.

“If somebody wants to get control of their health, and turn things around, your body will heal itself very quickly,” said Mayor Ed Smith.

Six years ago, Mayor Smith was 40 pounds heavier and diagnosed with prostate cancer. Knowing they needed to make a change, the Smiths Began eating a plant-based, whole foods diet of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, legumes and whole grains. Amazingly, his prostate cancer disappeared.

“Most of these chronic diseases we have in the United States, for the most part, and even a lot of our cancers are driven by what we’re eating.” Mayor Smith said.

Buoyed by his success, the mayor and his wife offered to share what they had learned.

“We’ve had so many people come up to us that we’ve not even met that tell us their success stories, that is so rewarding,” said Amanda Smith.

In fact, once a month, crowding in a room at the fire house, they share home-cooked healthy foods, exchange recipes and tell their success stories.

“I was 60 pounds heavier, so because of a plant-based diet, this is where I am today,” said Bill Dinsmore of Shreveport, Louisiana.

Sharon Clark of Nacogdoches, Texas also saw success.

“I wasn’t even conscious at first that I was losing weight ’til people started saying ‘are you on a diet?’ and I’m thinking, ‘no, I’ve changed my lifestyle is what I’ve done, I’ve gotten healthy,” she said.

Marshall’s Fire Chief Reggie Cooper was 50 pounds heavier and taking medicine every day for Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol. Then he too switched to a plant-based diet.

“In 28 days, what I couldn’t do in five years, I was able to get off all the medications,” Cooper said. “I haven’t been on medication since.”

All because in a world where arterial-stents and open-heart surgeries are considered “normal,” a man in Texas draws headlines for eating his vegetables.

“The end result is it’s been a success in people’s lives that we’ve seen,” Mayor Smith said. “We’ve seen phenomenal changes in people’s health.”

From http://www.news9.com/story/25960139/texas-mayor-shares-secrets-of-his-vegan-town-with-oklahoma

EATING FRUIT – This opened my eyes.

My dear readers, I received this mail from a friend.  I think it’s interesting, so I’d like to share it with you.

Dr Stephen Mak treats terminal ill cancer patients by “un-orthodox” way and many patients recovered. Before he used solar energy to clear the illnesses of his patients. He believes on natural healing in the body against illnesses. (See his article below.)

Thanks for the email on fruits and juices. It is one of the strategies to heal cancer. As of late, my success rate in curing cancer is about 80%. Cancer patients shouldn’t die. The cure for cancer is already found. It is whether you believe it or not. I am sorry for the hundreds of cancer patients who die under the conventional treatments.

Thanks and God bless.

– Dr Stephen Mak

 

EATING FRUIT… 

We all think eating fruits means just buying fruits, cutting it and just popping it into our mouths. It’s not as easy as you think. It’s important to know how and when to eat.

What is the correct way of eating fruits?

IT MEANS NOT EATING FRUITS AFTER YOUR MEALS!  FRUITS SHOULD BE EATEN ON AN EMPTY STOMACH.
If you eat fruit like that, it will play a major role to detoxify your system, supplying you with a great deal of energy for weight loss and other life activities.

FRUIT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FOOD. Let’s say you eat two slices of bread and then a slice of fruit. The slice of fruit is ready to go straight through the stomach into the intestines, but it is prevented from doing so.

In the meantime the whole meal rots and ferments and turns to acid. The minute the fruit comes into contact with the food in the stomach and digestive juices, the entire mass of food begins to spoil….

So please eat your fruits on an empty stomach or before your meals! You have heard people complaining — every time I eat watermelon I burp, when I eat durian my stomach bloats up, when I eat a banana I feel like running to the toilet, etc — actually all this will not arise if you eat the fruit on an empty stomach. The fruit mixes with the putrefying other food and produces gas and hence you will bloat!

Graying hair, balding, nervous outburst and dark circles under the eyes these will not happen if you take fruits on an empty stomach.

There is no such thing as some fruits, like orange and lemon are acidic, because all fruits become alkaline in our body, according to Dr. Herbert Shelton who did research on this matter. If you have mastered the correct way of eating fruits, you have the Secret of beauty, longevity, health, energy, happiness and normal weight.

When you need to drink fruit juice – drink only fresh fruit juice, NOT from the cans. Don’t even drink juice that has been heated up. Don’t eat cooked fruits because you don’t get the nutrients at all. You only get to taste. Cooking destroys all the vitamins.
But eating a whole fruit is better than drinking the juice. If you should drink the juice, drink it mouthful by mouthful slowly, because you must let it mix with your saliva before swallowing it. You can go on a 3-day fruit fast to cleanse your body. Just eat fruits and drink fruit juice throughout the 3 days and you will be surprised when your friends tell you how radiant you look!

KIWI: Tiny but mighty. This is a good source of potassium, magnesium, vitamin E & fiber. Its vitamin C content is twice that of an orange.

APPLE: An apple a day keeps the doctor away? Although an apple has a low vitamin C content, it has antioxidants & flavonoids which enhances the activity of vitamin C thereby helping to lower the risks of colon cancer, heart attack & stroke.

STRAWBERRY: Protective Fruit. Strawberries have the highest total antioxidant power among major fruits & protect the body from cancer-causing, blood vessel-clogging free radicals.

ORANGE : Sweetest medicine. Taking 2-4 oranges a day may help keep colds away, lower cholesterol, prevent & dissolve kidney stones as well as lessens the risk of colon cancer.

WATERMELON: Coolest thirst quencher. Composed of 92% water, it is also packed with a giant dose of glutathione, which helps boost our immune system. They are also a key source of lycopene — the cancer fighting oxidant. Other nutrients found in watermelon are vitamin C & Potassium.

GUAVA & PAPAYA: Top awards for vitamin C. They are the clear winners for their high vitamin C content.. Guava is also rich in fiber, which helps prevent constipation. Papaya is rich in carotene; this is good for your eyes.

Drinking Cold water after a meal = Cancer! Can u believe this?? For those who like to drink cold water, this article is applicable to you. It is nice to have a cup of cold drink after a meal. However, the cold water will solidify the oily stuff that you have just consumed. It will slow down the digestion. Once this ‘sludge’ reacts with the acid, it will break down and be absorbed by the intestine faster than the solid food. It will line the intestine. Very soon, this will turn into fats and lead to cancer. It is best to drink hot soup or warm water after a meal.

A serious note about heart attacks HEART ATTACK PROCEDURE’: (THIS IS NOT A JOKE!) Women should know that not every heart attack symptom is going to be the left arm hurting. Be aware of intense pain in the jaw line. You may never have the first chest pain during the course of a heart attack. Nausea and intense sweating are also common symptoms. Sixty percent of people who have a heart attack while they are asleep do not wake up. Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let’s be careful and be aware. The more we know the better chance we could survive.

A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this mail sends it to 10 people, you can be sure that we’ll save at least one life.

Terry Singeltary, Sr. on the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Public Health Crisis

Today we meet Terry Singeltary, Sr. founder of CJD Watch, a USA-based non-profit organization which tracks occurrences of and raises awareness about Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a neurological condition which has known no cure and is always fatal.

Some scientists say the cause of classic CJD, also known as sporadic CJD, has not been determined, and that variations of the condition, called “variant” and “new variant” Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which are rarely found in the US, come from eating diseased beef.

However the numbers of sporadic CJD cases are growing rapidly and health experts such as Dr. Michael Greger, Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States say that there is scientific evidence linking consuming beef and other kinds of meat to sporadic CJD. Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease comes from consuming cows with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as Mad Cow Disease.

Mad Cow Disease is a lethal condition where the brain of the bovine is infected by abnormal proteins called prions and is eventually destroyed, killing the animal in the process. A common transmission route for BSE is factory farm operators putting bovine parts, essentially slaughterhouse waste, which may contain BSE-tainted nerve tissue, into cattle feed. Cows who eat this tainted food may become infected.

Though many nations have banned this extremely hazardous practice, it is still illicitly done and in the US it is legal to feed bovine parts to other animals such as pigs. Sheep too have a version of BSE called scrapie which has been attributed to sickening consumers of lamb with CJD.

Mr. Singeltary believes that health officials do not have a proper system in place to monitor this condition and are vastly undercounting the number of deaths caused by Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease as well as the amount of infected livestock in the USA and around the world. He is truly committed to making the public mindful of this disease and its true impact on communities. His steadfast determination comes from losing his mother to sporadic CJD a number of years ago.

My mother acquired the Heidenhain variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s disease. It’s one of six different strains of the sporadic CJD. We got a phone call. She said, “You know, I think I’m going blind and I’m losing my mind.” That’s how it started. Ten weeks later, she was dead, and then it happened so fast, we could never catch up with it.

But Heidenhain variant it, happens in the part of the brain behind the eyes. That’s where it manifests itself the worst and it destroys your optical (system). And it’s an exceedingly rare strain of the sporadic type and it’s very rapid.

And what did the medical doctors think was going on with her?

You go through a battery of tests, and they really tried to eliminate the disease because they can’t say, “Well, this is CJD, or this is a prion disease.” What they do is eliminate everything else and then they give you a clinical diagnosis of it. And the only way to 100% (know) is to do a brain biopsy after death.

Test results later confirmed the cause of Mr. Singeltary’s mother’s death to be the Heidenhain variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s Disease.

You know at first they went through everything. I think even Alzheimer’s was questioned at first, but they did diagnose it as Heidenhain variant. Now my neighbor, a year before my mother died of Heidenhain variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s Disease, that was 12/14/1997, on 12/14/1996, my neighbor’s mother died of CJD, and at the time I wasn’t paying attention.

I have her autopsy, but they had diagnosed her as a Alzheimer’s (Disease patient) through the whole thing. And he finally got mad, and had somebody do an autopsy. And if it wouldn’t have been for the autopsy, it would have gone down as (a case of) Alzheimer’s.

Terry Singeltary, Dr. Greger and many others say that possibly thousands have been misdiagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a form of progressive dementia, or other neurological conditions, when in reality CJD is responsible. Anyone consuming beef , beef byproducts, or other meats is at risk of contracting Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s Disease.

The neighbor’s case, she had been taking for years a nutritional supplement that contained bovine. It contained a list of bovine products, but the one that drew my attention was the bovine brain, the bovine eye and the bovine pituitary were in this pill as ingredients. And those are three of the most infectious parts of a cow infected with the prion disease.

And you’ve got these things in these pills, and there’re thousands of pills like this on the market. Basically a little supplement full of these Specified Risk Materials, they’re called SRM’s, it’s the most highly infectious part of a brain, of an animal. They were putting them in these supplements for cattle raising. You had some 300,000 cows die of it.

And we’re doing the same thing for humans over here, putting the same Specified Risk Materials in nutritional supplements and feeding them to people and telling them they’re going to put hair on your head, or cure your heart disease and they are not doing anything but exposing you to Mad Cow Disease.

Even there was a warning from the CDC (US Centers for Disease Control) that came out a couple of years ago, because a lot of nutritional supplements were made from deer antler velvet, and they had found the prion protein in deer antler velvet, and they’re putting those in these supplements, and feeding them to humans as well.

Mr. Singeltary’s experiences led him to look deeply into what caused his mother’s and neighbor’s mother’s deaths. Since the mid-1990’s he has conducted independent research on prion-related diseases which encompass not only Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, but a whole host of other conditions. Prions are so dangerous that even the tiniest particle is capable of infecting a human or animal. Prions are not able to be neutralized though the use of drugs or any other currently known method utilized to treat disease.

You can incinerate the prion agent to 600 degrees Celsius, that’s over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. But you can incinerate a fingernail piece of infectious material, prion infectious material to 600 degrees Celsius to ash, nothing but ash, and you can make biodiesel fuel and it will survive the manufacturing of biodiesel fuel.

One of the main missions of CJD Watch is to advocate for the institution of mandatory testing for and reporting of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in the US because it has been massively underdiagnosed.

There is a researcher at Yale University, USA, and she actually conducted a study. And from that study, she discovered that about up to 13% of cases that were actually labeled as Alzheimer’s Disease were not. They were indeed Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and when you look at that in the terms of actual numbers, they were saying there was about two million cases of Alzheimer’s. And 10 – 13% of that is a very significant number, like maybe, even 120, 000 cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease has been missed.

I don’t know how many cases are being missed, but I know through misdiagnosis and through the, lack of diagnosis there’re many cases being missed, my neighbor for instance. There’re other studies. There was a Duke University, USA study on Alzheimer’s Disease, there was a PH study and there was a Mexican study. All of Alzheimer’s from three to 14%, were misdiagnosed through all four of those studies.

You mentioned that you don’t think there’s a good enough reporting system. Because if you report these diseases, then you can start to identify clustering.

You got to have a questionnaire to get to that and they have just within the past few years gotten a questionnaire. And I don’t even think, they’re not even sending this questionnaire to everybody. They just send it to ones that they think have nvCJD (new variant CJD).

In the final analysis, anyone who consumes meat or meat byproducts risks their life with respect to prion-related diseases. The very best protection from these frightening conditions, and many others, is a plant-based diet.

..Eating cows causes Alzheimer’s Disease. I’m saying there’s a common denominator between prion diseases, Alzheimer’s Disease, and Parkinson’s Disease. If you look at some of these studies that are coming out now from some of these top prion guys around us, scientists around the globe, they’re getting really worried about this Alzheimer’s.

We thank you, Terry Singeltary, Sr. for helping raise the alarm on Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and its variants. May you continue to benevolently assist in bettering public health through your unwavering work, and may humanity promptly be free of this disease.

For more details on Terry Singeltary, Sr. please visit http://www.JustGroundsOnline.com/profile/TerrySSingeltarySr

Dr. Shiv Chopra: Concerned Scientist and Activist for Food Safty

Today, we feature an interview with renowned Indo-Canadian scientist, author and activist Dr. Shiv Chopra, who has worked for decades to promote food safety, public health and human rights around the world.

Dr. Chopra and his colleagues challenged a series of efforts to approve harmful chemicals intended for use in the meat and dairy industries. For example, in the 1990s he testified at Canadian Senate hearings and won court cases against the use of Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) and other harmful drugs. Through his efforts BGH was banned in Canada in 1999 and subsequently in the European Union.

Dr. Chopra has also opposed the use of antibiotics in intensive animal agriculture, and revealed the true causes of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or “mad cow disease.” A native of India, Dr. Chopra has lived in Canada since 1960 and is the author of numerous publications on science, society and religion, including his international bestselling book “Corrupt to the Core” on public food safety.

His academic background includes a bachelor’s degree in veterinary medicine from Punjab Veterinary College in India and a Ph.D. in microbiology from McGill University in Montreal. Dr. Chopra has also received numerous academic honors, including a World Health Organization Fellowship.

Now let’s learn about how Dr. Chopra’s interest in effecting change evolved.

I was born in India, I grew up there, I studied there. I became a veterinarian in India. Then I took a postgraduate diploma in vaccine production. I worked there for two, three years, and then I came to Canada to do a Masters and PhD in microbiology. It was on industrial farming of pigs. I worked another year as a post-doctoral fellow. After that I was director of biological research at Miles Laboratories. And that’s where I started to become quite disillusioned with the profession that I had joined.

Dr. Chopra’s disillusionment with traditional ways of doing science grew while he worked in the pharmaceutical field and after he became a government official.

Originally, it was thought going into science was going to do good to society, you’ll have a respectable profession. And that’s how I got into science, but once I joined the pharmaceutical company, I saw the pressures, that they were not really doing research, and I was head of research. So I felt this way I’ll always be a student, I will never be productive, I mean that was my job to be productive, being head of research. So I gave up there and a job came along to work at Health Canada.

While working for Canada’s national health service, he began to realize that many commonly used vaccines were actually harmful to human health.

During your employment at Health Canada, you were asked to study the toxicity of different molecules used in the meat and dairy industry. Can you give us a few examples of the ones you studied and what they are?

Actually there is a period of 20 years before that, at Health Canada. Originally I started as a vaccine expert. A number of vaccines like mumps and rubella I was opposed to, but there was nothing I could do at that time, because I didn’t have any proof that they would do harm or they would be ineffective. Now I’ve been proven to be right.

And it was still in that area I became a fellow of the World Health Organization, traveling, which took me all over the world. I studied the regulatory system of vaccines. And only after coming back from there, some years later I moved over to my original profession, the veterinary side.

Dr. Chopra’s veterinary background then came into play as he began to see the links between the chemicals administered to industrially farmed animals and human diseases.

That’s when I got to be working on the human safety of drugs or products which are given to food-producing animals, in the Bureau of Veterinary Drugs, that’s where those drugs came, and they had to be looked at from the point of view of human safety. In other words, if a drug is given to the animals, then we have to make sure that nothing goes wrong.

First of all, are there any residues left of the product given to food-producing animals, could it be in their milk, could it be in their meat, could it be in the eggs. Alternatively there were other issues; if you are giving products which residue may not be a problem, is there another way that may harm not just individual, but public health, like through antibiotics resistance.

And then later other products will come up which were not even drugs. It became fashionable in Europe and Canada to feed slaughterhouse waste back to producing animals, to chickens and pigs and cows and back to each other and that caused a serious problem. It was also from that same period, the idea of genetic modification of seeds and animals to stimulate extra food production, other drugs like hormones were given to animals for similar purposes.

And whatever issues there are, they have to be studied by the companies wanting to sell those products. And if there were any problems, the companies will be told that we’re not satisfied, because the law says that the company that sells any product in Canada that directly or indirectly gets into the human food chain, or directly into the human body through water, environment, whichever, has to be proven to be safe under the Food and Drugs Act.

However, despite the apparent safety provided by this legislation, hormones and other harmful substances that directly affect human health were approved for use in the meat and dairy industries.

Then as time went they start to take sex hormones, both male and female, make a concoction of them synthetic and natural, and they started to inject them into cows. Actually not just inject, they used to implant them behind the ears, large pellets and they would remain for the rest of the life of the cattle.

And that’s the beef that people eat to this day, so that hormone remains behind there and when the animal is slaughtered, the ear is cut off and that ear is then boiled to make gelatin and that gelatin with concentrated hormones sitting there now goes into making capsules. It goes into gel, into yogurt, into ice cream, candy, and this children are eating on a regular basis.

What hormones do is they cause cancer and endocrine disruption. So puberty is affected and you cannot determine the lowest level or the maximum level of something that causes cancer. One molecule attached to a cell can induce cancer so you cannot determine the maximum residue limit.

The second product that we’re looking at in a very big way is antibiotics. Antibiotics you can determine the residue but the concern there is only allergic reaction in patients who may be allergic, that is not a very big concern. But there’s a bigger concern when you give antibiotics to every animal for life.

Those antibiotics, once it’s passed through the intestinal tract of the animal, which is full of trillions of bacteria of various kinds, and as the antibiotic will kill off the good bacteria it may leave some pathogenic bacteria. Seventy-five percent of the antibiotic use is in farm animals.

Dr. Chopra sees a number of other threats to public health that are a result of a dysfunctional industrialized global food system. Pesticides are one of them.

And they are now beginning to ban many pesticides. Sweden has just banned 80 pesticides, 80. There are hundreds of pesticides. And usually the Scandinavian countries take the lead on this and so they’re doing very well. When you slaughter an animal only half the animal is meat; the rest is discarded. Now what do you do with this? Because there’re such huge slaughterhouses they don’t want to waste anything.

They take the fat and so on, they process that and that goes into soap or cream and then all kind of things. But the rest of the protein they boil it up, they dry it, and then they feed it back to the animals. And that sets up what’s called bovine spongiform disease or mad cow disease, which then is transmitted to people and called CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease) and kills people.

That was another item and we have pesticides, we have hormones, we have antibiotics, we have slaughterhouse waste and of course the genetically modified organisms, GMOs. There was a huge uproar in Spain, 15,000 people demonstrating because Spain is allowing the use of GMOs. So there is now this issue within the countries, in India the GMOs have become a huge issue.

Dr. Chopra believes that informing the younger generation that growing organic foods, free of pesticides and other unnatural substances, is essential to creating a healthy future for our planet.

Agriculture must be introduced in every school as a compulsory subject with all children growing food in the schoolyards, in their villages, and PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations) should be involved. If everybody wants to go green, the municipalities are collecting green garbage. Well, they can make compost, they can deliver it to schools, one or two football fields can be converted to gardens. And parents and children and grandchildren and everybody should be working together.

You have a happier society. You have a healthier society. We’d be spending much less on treating disease because the disease will not occur. I gave up eating meat for various reasons. First of all, it’s healthier to be vegetarian. Secondly, it’s healthier for the environment. It’s good for the climate. Much of the climate change is due to industrial agriculture. All that can be taken care of if you only grow food in our schoolyard and community gardens.

Dr. Shiv Chopra, we thank you for your enlightening comments on food safety and human health. May you have continued success in informing the public and governments around the world about the vital need to end industrial agriculture and the benefits of community grown organic crops.

For more details on Dr. Chopra, please visit http://www.ShivChopra.com
His book “Corrupt to the Core” is available at http://www.KosPublishing.com
DVDs by Dr. Chopra are available at http://www.MediaReel.net/Chopra

Cup of Green Juice for Life: Eating Light with Michiyo Mori

(Originally in Japanese)

we will be talking with Ms. Michiyo Mori of Japan, a liquidarian and author of the book “I Quit Eating.” Ms. Mori is a licensed acupuncturist with her own clinic in Osaka, Japan.

She has followed the teachings of Dr. Mitsuo Koda who developed a method of healing which incorporates the Nishi System of Health Engineering, fasting and a diet consisting only of small portions of raw vegetables. And she has thrived by consuming a single glass of fresh green juice every day for the past 15 years. To raise awareness of the benefits of such a diet, a documentary was made on the life of this amazing woman entitled “The Age of No Eating – Eating Light for Love and Compassion.”

After I completed fasting 23 years ago, I started a raw vegetable diet. Presently I subsist on a diet of about 60 calories. I have been reducing caloric intake gradually for the last 23 years: 200 calories in 1991, 150 calories in 1992 and 1995. Fifty calories since 1996, and 60 calories at present.

What is a raw vegetable diet? It is a diet eating only raw vegetables and raw brown rice powder. And by eating the raw vegetables we can absorb their energy which can be our life force together with the nutrients. And in the case of mountain hermits or those who have realized the “Tao” or the way, they live on raw vegetables while minimizing intake of food, and then they attain perpetual youth and longevity. Also they acquire supernatural powers to cure intractable diseases or reverse the signs of aging.

Ms. Mori was born in Tokyo on December 25, 1962. She was a premature baby and had to be placed in an incubator. In her youth she was prone to illness and often hospitalized because of bronchial infections. Due to her fragile health condition, she always had an interest in alternative medicine.

When I was a high school student, I would stumble while walking a little. I could not walk on a balance beam, but there was no difficulty in my daily life. I easily got a little tired, so I was interested in something to do with health. So I joined the “Heath Camp” in which some school nurses of elementary school and junior high school were participating, and met Dr. Koda at the first time in my life. He told me about what he had been advocating.

After that when I was a third year high school student, I was hospitalized at the Koda clinic, and experienced fasting and the Nishi System of Health Engineering for the first time. Several years later I was stricken by an incurable disease.

In 1984 at the tender age of 21, Ms. Mori was diagnosed with Spinocerebellar Degeneration, with doctors saying she had only five more years to live at most.

Spinocerebellar Degeneration is a disorder where the cranial nerves are gradually destroyed and fade away. Since it is a syndrome with several patterns, it may affect the cerebellum, or the nuclei, or the olives, or the medulla, or the spinal cord. And in my case, this disease showed a pattern of making only the cerebellum become smaller and smaller.

I went to see a doctor of Western medicine, and found that CT and MRI (scans) could demonstrate the process in which the cerebellum was shrinking more and more. But there is little medicine to cure or stop the progression of this disease. Even if the progression can be stopped, there is no way to reproduce the damaged cerebral nerves.

Dr. Koda believed the condition was treatable. He explained that the disorder is caused by gastrointestinal gas and thus by fasting she would be cured. Ms. Mori decided to follow his treatment plan of fasting, performing various exercises, and making other lifestyle changes. For 24-days her diet consisted of only clear soup. Ms. Mori gradually recovered and has noted many mental, physical and spiritual benefits from a liquidarian lifestyle.

The Nishi System of Health Engineering and Dr. Koda’s treatment includes not only diet but also sleeping on a board. This is to straighten the spine. Also, the treatment involves using a wooden pillow. It is recommended their patients sleep on their back with a semicircular wooden pillow.

In addition, it includes a two minute-long exercise called “Goldfish Movement Exercise” in which you lie on your back and shift the spine to the right and left. You are supposed to do it three times a day. This is an exercise called the “Capillary Vessels Exercise” in which you lie on your back, raising both hands and legs vertically and shake.

You should do it three times a day, two minutes at a time. Also, there is an exercise called “Joining Palms and Soles Exercise,” which you join your hands in prayer, and join your soles together. You should do this three times a day, 100 times at a time.

Ms. Mori says she can see auras clearer and can hear what she calls “the voice of God” as a result of living on one glass of green juice per day.

Then when I was looking at plants on a fine clear day, taking a look all around the vegetable garden behind Dr. Koda’s clinic, I saw bright sunlight shining on the green leaves. And at that time when I saw the verdant leaves grown from the soil, I saw beautiful auras splashing from the plants. I realized that the plants are not things but really beings with lives.

Apart from these spiritual changes, Michiyo Mori has found there are a number of constructive health benefits associated with consuming only raw vegetables, such as an improved immune system.

The movie (The Age of No Eating) also said that in this way medical research done by Dr. Kishida of the Institut Pasteur in Kyoto (Japan) has found that the numerical value of immunity can be read by measuring interferon alpha in the blood. The numerical value of immunity differs according to a person. As for a normal person, it is 5,000 units. As for diabetic and chronic hepatitis patients, 3,000 units. And 1,000 units for cancer and AIDS patients.

So if you check the figures in a blood test, you will know the degree of your immunity. Reading the data of those who have gone on a raw vegetable diet for several years, Data No. 1 (M) is 20,000, and No. 2 is mine, four times more than a normal person. If the immunity is so high, you feel you will not be affected by cancer again. However, the interferon alpha data seems to have increased owing to a raw vegetable diet.

In experiments it has been shown Ms. Mori’s body has been transformed and is super-efficient, particularly with respect to recycling nutrients.

Dr. Okuda, a nutritionist, who had been checking my body has found the following: my body recycles the urea nitrogen in my blood and reproduces protein in my blood instead of it being naturally excreted in urine. Urea nitrogen is a waste product of protein metabolism found in blood that is made by decomposing muscles and other processes.

This is found by the following test: I take in a labeled isotope of urea nitrogen, and then they test my blood an hour or two hours later. Then if the protein in my blood contains the isotope urea nitrogen, it can prove that I can produce protein by the use of urea nitrogen. And the conclusion is that I am using urea nitrogen for the production of protein. I have been decomposing and again recycling protein, which is very rare for a Japanese person.

It has been found that my body is energy-saving and I am making the best use of nitrogen by recycling. Since I only take in fresh green juices, the amount of calcium and phosphorus in my bones are the same or a little more than those of a normal person. It shows about 102 to 107 %. As long as I do physical exercises and take in fresh green juices, I think my bones will never be brittle and hollow.

Furthermore, scientists have measured Ms. Mori’s brain wave activity and found she is typically in a calm, focused, and intuitive state.

Concerning brain waves, there are various waves such as beta, alpha, theta, and delta. Beta wave is awakened and a little nervous even while you are awake. Alpha wave is a relaxed one. Theta wave means your sleep is light. And while my sleep is light, I close my eyes a little with a simplified alpha wave measuring device and they measure my brain waves.

A mid-alpha wave, which is in the middle of alpha waves, is measured. This wave is seen when relaxed and concentrated, and it is called “brain wave of an inventor,” and it appears when inventive ideas are coming out. They said this wave is the highest, and without any training and with a diet alone it has appeared. The blue bar graph shows the wave.

Ms. Mori believes eating small portions of raw vegetables can contribute to world peace.

I think this is the way to make heaven on Earth. And the way to make it happen is nothing but eating light. Eating light can save our world and will be good for our environment. Eating only raw vegetables does not require gas or electricity expenses, and if it can improve our health, we can save our medical care expenses. Furthermore, the body becomes strong so that it does not need any heaters or air conditioners, and the mind is calm, enlightened and very serene, like Buddha.

And if society becomes so beautiful, peaceful, and perfect like paradise, our mind, body and surroundings will be in perfect balance, according to my idea. I am happy if we seek making such a world by practicing eating light. I would like all of you to try to eat light and eat raw vegetables.

Thank you Ms. Michiyo Mori for taking time to share your deep insights regarding the raw vegetable diet and its manifold benefits for humanity. May you enjoy continued success in your mission to inform the world about the connection between diet, health and spirituality.

For more information on Michiyo Mori, please visit www004.upp.so-net.ne.jp/mori-harikyu
Ms. Mori’s book “I Quit Eating” is available at http://www.Amazon.co.jp

May all beings soon adopt compassionate, Earth-protecting plant-based diets to help quickly transform our world into one of love, peace and abundance.

Glow with Gifts from Nature: Living on Raw with David Wolfe – part 1

Today we feature the first of a two-part interview with David Wolfe, a nutritionist, author and lecturer who is an expert on raw foods, natural health, beauty nutrition, herbalism, chocolate, and organic superfoods.

David is quite popular and some of his celebrity fans include co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple, Steve Jobs, and Hollywood actors Angela Basset, James Caan and Woody Harrelson. For the past 16 years, this accomplished individual, who has a masters in nutrition and a law degree, has been informing the world of the benefits of a raw food diet and natural living through over 1,750 live lectures, CDs, DVDs and books.

Some of his best-sellers include: “Eating for Beauty,” “Naked Chocolate,” “David Wolfe on Raw Foods,” “Superfoods: The Food and Medicine of the Future” and “The Sunfood Diet Success System.”

He is the co-founder of TheBestDayEver.com Online Health Magazine and is the founder and president of The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, a non-profit charity whose mission is to plant 18 billion fruit trees across the globe. Through the Foundation’s efforts, thus far tens of thousands of fruit trees have been planted in North America, South Asia, and Africa.

In our interview we asked David to discuss the advantages of a raw food diet. He began by defining the term “raw food.”

What is raw food again? It’s fruits and vegetables, and nuts and seeds, and seaweeds, all raw and organic, flowers, sprouts, grasses like wheatgrass, superfoods and super herbs. One of the great gifts that it gives us, it allows us to really begin to detect what’s going on in our body and it gives us a lot of insight in that way. Of course there’s great nutrition in these foods, and there’s wonderful amounts of antioxidants, vitamins and minerals, and trace minerals, and polysaccharides, which are essential sugars that heal us.

David Wolfe is well known for his uplifting lectures on how raw foods can change one’s life for the better. Why does he feel so passionate about raw food?

Raw food has definitely made me more open to that infinite supply of love that emanates from all living things, and really from everything. It allows you to tune into subtler forces that are available to us. It allows you to tune into beauty, and the beauty ethic, and the power of beauty and in transforming our self and in transforming others. It tunes you into the great depth of the mystery of our world, and the mystery of the cosmos, which to me is so incredible. Because our creator is so deep, and so incredibly rich, that it’s a mystery.

David is a firm believer in the sanctity of life and that our diet should always reflect a respect for all beings.

To bring the vibration of this whole planet up we have got to stop this killing. And it’s not just war. It’s also what we’re having for breakfast. It’s not just there’s people shooting each other. It’s also we’re shooting these animals and we’re destroying these noble life forms. And we can very deeply benefit spiritually from removing ourselves from that karma, and opening ourselves up to other choices: vegan, vegetarian and then beyond that, raw food.

Raw foods feature rich flavors and raw chefs around the world are continually creating healthful new dishes that replicate the taste of their non-raw counterparts.

We can have raw coconut cashew ice-cream. Every flavor you ever wanted. Raw chocolate chip mint ice-cream – no dairy – it’s all made out of coconut, and cashews and pistachios and you eat that and you’re like, “Oh my! This is incredible, what is going on?” And there’s no side effects. So we get all those goodies – no side effects.

According to the World Health Organization, globally cancer accounted for 7.9 million deaths or about 13% of all deaths in 2007. Countless studies have demonstrated that dietary choice is a significant factor in determining the risk of cancer.

If we have a lot of sugar in our diet, if we have a lot of runaway carbohydrates in our diet, like high fructose corn syrup, what happens is we tend to get too much “yin” energy. This is what the problems are of civilization.  This tends to feed into cancer, it feeds into candida, and we have got to cut off that food supply, by taking in rich green pigmented foods – green vegetables, and green juices, and green rich superfoods like marine phytoplankton, and seaweeds. We begin to bring back more of the “yang” energy that isn’t “sugared” out and our body begins to go into a healing process that then allows us to finally get a look at what this cancer really is all about.

Cancer feeds on sugar; cancer is a process of excessive oxidation in our system, immune system collapse; raw food is a tool that helps us (to) spiritually reconnect and in addition to that, helps us to get the nutrients, and the minerals, the polysaccharides, that help us heal from cancer.

We now have an idea about the goodness of raw food, but what about super herbs? David Wolfe says these plants can both prevent and address various common health conditions.

The greatest herbs in the world, we call them tonic herbs. It’s tonic, we can take it all the time. And therefore, it’s preventative and it’s curative, if we’re already in trouble. Those herbs, coming out of Chinese medicine, for example, and Ayurveda and North America and Central America and South America and Europe and Russia and Africa and Australia. Those herbs that we need are just the best of the best.

So, what’s the best of the best coming out of Chinese medicine? Reishi mushroom (Spirit mushroom). It doesn’t just grow in China. It grows in the forests of Canada, I’ve seen it in the forests of Asia. It’s all over the place. And you learn how to use it, making teas out of it. And then you can advance into other tree mushrooms. And the tea mushrooms are the noble herbal mushrooms that gift us with immune system power.

Let’s look at another one and one of my favorites: asparagus root. We all know about asparagus but how about the root of asparagus? (It is) considered in the top three in Chinese medicine and in Ayurveda.

So, we can eat certainly the shoots of asparagus, wonderful, but we can also eat the root of asparagus which activates our immune system, it activates our joint power, it’s a wonderful tonic herb, it generally is an adaptogen so it helps us adapt to stresses of all different kinds. We can grow that in our garden anywhere in the world.

Let’s look over at Amazonia. There we have Cat’s Claw, known as Unghi di Gatto – it tastes great and is a very powerful anti-viral. Pau d’arco, is a very powerful anti-fungal to help us fight these fungi conditions: cancer has a fungal component, candida is a fungus, the stuff on our skin and splotches and finger nail fungus. Pau d’arco is a very powerful remedy and preventative of those things.

Chu Chu huasi. It rejuvenates our kidneys, our reproductive power, our adrenals, and our lower back. And then we have another one: Chanca Piedra , so those of us who speak Spanish, the “breaker of stones.” So it breaks up stone formations, in particular in our kidneys – kidney stones, liver stones, stone formations, and arthritis in our body.

So this is another herb we can add in. Ginseng is a root. What’s interesting about ginseng is it accumulates all these energies over many years. That thing might be 30 years old but it has accumulated all that wisdom and knowledge.

And we have that image in our mind of that great Taoist immortal sage who lives up in the high mountains of China, and is a ginseng eater. Because the energies that we surround that sage with: the psychic insight, the spirituality, the meditation, the oneness with nature, all those energies are in ginseng. They’re part of it so as you take that on, it brings deeper wisdom, deeper connection, and all of it.

In addition to how ginseng can enhance our relationship with the Divine, here are some final thoughts from David Wolfe about how he sees raw foods benefiting our personal and spiritual growth.

My dear teacher, Walter Russell, said to me, “Genius is self-bestowed; mediocrity is self-inflicted.” The activation of our potential begins with this: “I can.” It takes just as much energy to believe you can as believing you can’t.

One of the things about these live foods and this education that we get is it helps to focus on our attention and where our attention goes, energy flows. As we get healthier, we hold onto higher vibrations easier. We can see grander visions of possibility. We can see grander visions of our own work and how we can become more creative in our own work.

We can access much more of our capabilities if we eat well. We tell our body, by eating well, that we believe in ourselves, and that we have high self-esteem, and that we have the courage to actually seek out the best foods. So we are kind of informing our higher-self that we are in the game, that we’re ready to play.

And then as we develop a clear consciousness through healthy food and healthy eating – raw foods, superfoods, the great herbs of the world, living spring water – then we start being able to really access our genetic capacity. We are, each one of us, an incredibly creative being. We have the ability to access the grand halls of our imagination. We have an infinite capacity for knowledge and memory.
Today we feature the first of a two-part interview with David Wolfe, a nutritionist, author and lecturer who is an expert on raw foods, natural health, beauty nutrition, herbalism, chocolate, and organic superfoods.

David is quite popular and some of his celebrity fans include co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple, Steve Jobs, and Hollywood actors Angela Basset, James Caan and Woody Harrelson. For the past 16 years, this accomplished individual, who has a masters in nutrition and a law degree, has been informing the world of the benefits of a raw food diet and natural living through over 1,750 live lectures, CDs, DVDs and books.

Some of his best-sellers include: “Eating for Beauty,” “Naked Chocolate,” “David Wolfe on Raw Foods,” “Superfoods: The Food and Medicine of the Future” and “The Sunfood Diet Success System.”

He is the co-founder of TheBestDayEver.com Online Health Magazine and is the founder and president of The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, a non-profit charity whose mission is to plant 18 billion fruit trees across the globe. Through the Foundation’s efforts, thus far tens of thousands of fruit trees have been planted in North America, South Asia, and Africa.

In our interview we asked David to discuss the advantages of a raw food diet. He began by defining the term “raw food.”

What is raw food again? It’s fruits and vegetables, and nuts and seeds, and seaweeds, all raw and organic, flowers, sprouts, grasses like wheatgrass, superfoods and super herbs. One of the great gifts that it gives us, it allows us to really begin to detect what’s going on in our body and it gives us a lot of insight in that way. Of course there’s great nutrition in these foods, and there’s wonderful amounts of antioxidants, vitamins and minerals, and trace minerals, and polysaccharides, which are essential sugars that heal us.

David Wolfe is well known for his uplifting lectures on how raw foods can change one’s life for the better. Why does he feel so passionate about raw food?

Raw food has definitely made me more open to that infinite supply of love that emanates from all living things, and really from everything. It allows you to tune into subtler forces that are available to us. It allows you to tune into beauty, and the beauty ethic, and the power of beauty and in transforming our self and in transforming others. It tunes you into the great depth of the mystery of our world, and the mystery of the cosmos, which to me is so incredible. Because our creator is so deep, and so incredibly rich, that it’s a mystery.

David is a firm believer in the sanctity of life and that our diet should always reflect a respect for all beings.

To bring the vibration of this whole planet up we have got to stop this killing. And it’s not just war. It’s also what we’re having for breakfast. It’s not just there’s people shooting each other. It’s also we’re shooting these animals and we’re destroying these noble life forms. And we can very deeply benefit spiritually from removing ourselves from that karma, and opening ourselves up to other choices: vegan, vegetarian and then beyond that, raw food.

Raw foods feature rich flavors and raw chefs around the world are continually creating healthful new dishes that replicate the taste of their non-raw counterparts.

We can have raw coconut cashew ice-cream. Every flavor you ever wanted. Raw chocolate chip mint ice-cream – no dairy – it’s all made out of coconut, and cashews and pistachios and you eat that and you’re like, “Oh my! This is incredible, what is going on?” And there’s no side effects. So we get all those goodies – no side effects.

According to the World Health Organization, globally cancer accounted for 7.9 million deaths or about 13% of all deaths in 2007. Countless studies have demonstrated that dietary choice is a significant factor in determining the risk of cancer.

If we have a lot of sugar in our diet, if we have a lot of runaway carbohydrates in our diet, like high fructose corn syrup, what happens is we tend to get too much “yin” energy. This is what the problems are of civilization.  This tends to feed into cancer, it feeds into candida, and we have got to cut off that food supply, by taking in rich green pigmented foods – green vegetables, and green juices, and green rich superfoods like marine phytoplankton, and seaweeds. We begin to bring back more of the “yang” energy that isn’t “sugared” out and our body begins to go into a healing process that then allows us to finally get a look at what this cancer really is all about.

Cancer feeds on sugar; cancer is a process of excessive oxidation in our system, immune system collapse; raw food is a tool that helps us (to) spiritually reconnect and in addition to that, helps us to get the nutrients, and the minerals, the polysaccharides, that help us heal from cancer.

We now have an idea about the goodness of raw food, but what about super herbs? David Wolfe says these plants can both prevent and address various common health conditions.

The greatest herbs in the world, we call them tonic herbs. It’s tonic, we can take it all the time. And therefore, it’s preventative and it’s curative, if we’re already in trouble. Those herbs, coming out of Chinese medicine, for example, and Ayurveda and North America and Central America and South America and Europe and Russia and Africa and Australia. Those herbs that we need are just the best of the best.

So, what’s the best of the best coming out of Chinese medicine? Reishi mushroom (Spirit mushroom). It doesn’t just grow in China. It grows in the forests of Canada, I’ve seen it in the forests of Asia. It’s all over the place. And you learn how to use it, making teas out of it. And then you can advance into other tree mushrooms. And the tea mushrooms are the noble herbal mushrooms that gift us with immune system power.

Let’s look at another one and one of my favorites: asparagus root. We all know about asparagus but how about the root of asparagus? (It is) considered in the top three in Chinese medicine and in Ayurveda.

So, we can eat certainly the shoots of asparagus, wonderful, but we can also eat the root of asparagus which activates our immune system, it activates our joint power, it’s a wonderful tonic herb, it generally is an adaptogen so it helps us adapt to stresses of all different kinds. We can grow that in our garden anywhere in the world.

Let’s look over at Amazonia. There we have Cat’s Claw, known as Unghi di Gatto – it tastes great and is a very powerful anti-viral. Pau d’arco, is a very powerful anti-fungal to help us fight these fungi conditions: cancer has a fungal component, candida is a fungus, the stuff on our skin and splotches and finger nail fungus. Pau d’arco is a very powerful remedy and preventative of those things.

Chu Chu huasi. It rejuvenates our kidneys, our reproductive power, our adrenals, and our lower back. And then we have another one: Chanca Piedra , so those of us who speak Spanish, the “breaker of stones.” So it breaks up stone formations, in particular in our kidneys – kidney stones, liver stones, stone formations, and arthritis in our body.

So this is another herb we can add in. Ginseng is a root. What’s interesting about ginseng is it accumulates all these energies over many years. That thing might be 30 years old but it has accumulated all that wisdom and knowledge.

And we have that image in our mind of that great Taoist immortal sage who lives up in the high mountains of China, and is a ginseng eater. Because the energies that we surround that sage with: the psychic insight, the spirituality, the meditation, the oneness with nature, all those energies are in ginseng. They’re part of it so as you take that on, it brings deeper wisdom, deeper connection, and all of it.

In addition to how ginseng can enhance our relationship with the Divine, here are some final thoughts from David Wolfe about how he sees raw foods benefiting our personal and spiritual growth.

My dear teacher, Walter Russell, said to me, “Genius is self-bestowed; mediocrity is self-inflicted.” The activation of our potential begins with this: “I can.” It takes just as much energy to believe you can as believing you can’t.

One of the things about these live foods and this education that we get is it helps to focus on our attention and where our attention goes, energy flows. As we get healthier, we hold onto higher vibrations easier. We can see grander visions of possibility. We can see grander visions of our own work and how we can become more creative in our own work.

We can access much more of our capabilities if we eat well. We tell our body, by eating well, that we believe in ourselves, and that we have high self-esteem, and that we have the courage to actually seek out the best foods. So we are kind of informing our higher-self that we are in the game, that we’re ready to play.

And then as we develop a clear consciousness through healthy food and healthy eating – raw foods, superfoods, the great herbs of the world, living spring water – then we start being able to really access our genetic capacity. We are, each one of us, an incredibly creative being. We have the ability to access the grand halls of our imagination. We have an infinite capacity for knowledge and memory.

Dr. Neal Barnard:Eating Right for Cancer Survival (part 8)

We are now pleased to show Dr. Barnard’s presentation “Foods and Breast Cancer Survival,” a chapter from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

Welcome, thanks for joining us. Breast cancer is a serious epidemic, and we’re fighting it on every possible front. There are better methods than ever for detecting cancer, and we have better treatments than ever. But I have to say as a doctor, what I like best is the new method for preventing cancer, because if you prevent it, you never have to treat it, you never have to live with this, and the fear that’s involved with it.

Now we’ve known for a long period of time, that diet does make a big difference. Some of the first clues came from Japan. A woman in Japan, compared to a woman in the United States, she’s less likely to develop cancer, and if she’s got cancer, she’s less likely to die from it. She’s more likely to do well, more likely to survive. Why would that be?

Well, the first clue was, well, women in Japan are thinner, and that’s important. Body fat it’s not just there to store calories, body fat actually is a living organ, it makes things, it makes hormones, it makes estrogens. And estrogens make things grow. At puberty, estrogens are responsible for breast development, and during all of a woman’s cycle, it’s responsible for the thickening of the lining of the uterus every single month.

So if you think of estrogens as making things grow, what does that mean for a cancer cell? What it means is, it may make the cancer cell grow too. If I take a test-tube, put breast cancer cells in it, and add estrogen, the cancer cells grow like crazy, it’s like fertilizer on weeds. So, let’s say a woman has more body fat, she has more estrogen in her blood, that’s asking for the cells to start multiplying and to spread.

So well, does it work? If a woman is thinner, will she actually have less risk of getting cancer or will she, if she has it, will she tend to survive? The answer is yes. There was a big study in Shanghai (China) that looked, not just at women who were quite overweight, but women who had different variations, within what we would think of as normal weight.

Do you know the Body Mass Index, BMI? This is a way of talking about body weight, but adjusting it for your height. So your ideal weight is different if you’re six foot four versus, say five foot three okay? So the way we define it is, a BMI, a Body Mass Index under 25, is what we’re going to call, normal, healthy weight.

So in the study in Shanghai, they had a group of women, everybody already had breast cancer, and the question was, “If they are heavier or thinner, would that affect how they do?” Here’s what they found. The women who had a BMI under 23, thin women, their five-year survival was about 87%.

They then compared them with the women who were between 23 and 25, a little heavier, bit really, but still within normal weight. And their five-year survival was a little bit less, about 84%. And then they looked at the women who were over 25. Not seriously overweight, but just a little bit into overweight. Their five-year survival was down to 80%. So the heavier you go, the more likely you are to be vulnerable to this condition, okay?

Well that’s the first thing, but there’s more to it. It’s not just the fat on your body, it’s the fat on your plate. And researchers found that it doesn’t just affect whether a woman develops cancer, it also affects, whether she does well or not so well.

At the State University of New York in Buffalo (USA), researchers did an important study. They brought in about 900 women, everybody already had breast cancer, and all they did was this: They looked at their diet, and then they looked at who did well, and who didn’t do so well. And what they found was stunning. The risk of dying at any point in time was increased by 40%, for every thousand grams of fat the women ate per month.

Now, let me make this practical for you. If I take a typical American diet, I throw in all the fat from the hamburgers that we might eat, and the French fries and the salad oils and you take all that fat and you add it up.

You compare that to a plant based diet, a vegetarian diet, so there’s no animal fat in it, and a diet where we keep the oils pretty low, those two diets differ, by anywhere from 1000 to 1500 grams of fat every single month. That’s good for a 40 to 60% difference in whether you are dead or alive at any single time point in the future. So it makes a big difference.

We’ve put this to work, sometimes in rather unusual ways. I was sitting at my desk one day and the phone rang. And a young woman said, “Dr. Barnard.” I said, “Yes?” “I can’t get out of bed.” I said, “What’s the problem?” She said, “This happens to me every month. For one day my cramps are so bad, I just can’t function, I can’t get through the day without taking enormous amounts of ibuprofen, and I’m scared about the side effects, and I don’t know what to do. And can you give me a more powerful pain medicine so that I can function.”

I said, “Yes I can. Let me give you some painkillers for a couple of days.” But it suddenly struck me, what are menstrual cramps? Every single month, the amount estrogen in the body rises and then it falls, about two weeks in, that’s when a woman is ovulating. And then the next two weeks the amount of estrogen rises, thickening the lining of the uterus.

What’s it doing that for? Because the uterus is the most optimistic organ in the body. Every single month it’s convinced we’re going to get pregnant for sure, so it gets ready. But then about two weeks before the end of the month, it says “Ah, it didn’t happen.” So at that point, the inner lining of the uterus breaks up, it’s lost in menstrual flow, and very maladjusted chemicals called prostaglandins are released. They cause cramping and they cause headaches and they make you feel crummy.

And so as she’s talking on the phone, I’m thinking, “Wait a minute. From breast cancer research we know that if I cut the fat out of my diet, if I bring in the fiber, I can reduce the amount of estrogen. Less estrogen, (means) less thickening, and less cramps. Let’s try it.”

So I suggested this to her. I said, “Let me give you some painkillers for a couple of days, but we want to do an experiment for about four weeks. How about this, no animal products in your diet. If there are no animal products, there’s no animal fat.” And I said, “And keep the oils low. Throw away your bottles of cooking oil and all that stuff. Don’t eat the greasy potato chips and things. Keep it very basic, very low in fat.” She said, “Well I’ll try anything.”

She calls me up four weeks later, “Dr. Barnard, I just have one question.” I said, “What’s that?” She said, “Why don’t doctors tell patients about this?” Her period just sneaked up on her, virtually no symptoms at all. And I thought that was intriguing. So I wrote a book that mentioned this and I started getting calls from women who said, “This is really true!” And she also found that if she deviated from her diet early in the month, a big bag of potato chips, something greasy, she would pay for it at the end of the month.

So I did a research study with some colleagues at Georgetown University (USA) and we found indeed it is true. We brought in a group of women who had serious menstrual cramps. We put them on a diet that was vegan and low in fat for two full menstrual cycles. It shortened the number of days of pain. It shortened the intensity of the pain. And PMS (premenstrual syndrome) symptoms, like water retention and bloating and irritability, all these things got better.

What I’m suggesting is just this. The reason I tell you this story is we imagine that our hormones are controlling us. That’s true, but we have a measure of control over them too. It’s just we never had the instruction manual. Well now we know how to do it.

Now there are some times when research brought us in sort of the wrong direction. Do you know the “Women’s Health Initiative?” The “Women’s Health Initiative” was a very large and I think, very well designed research study but it tested a rather modest diet. The idea was if we bring in a group of women, in this case, not quite 50 000 women and if we reduce the fat content of their diet, will that prevent breast cancer?

Well, they didn’t make anybody vegetarian or vegan. They didn’t really cut the fat out to a great degree. The numbers were like this. At the beginning of the study, the average woman going into it was eating about 38% of her calories from fat. That’s kind of high. The national average is closer to 30%. Then as time went on, they were able to reduce the fat content of their diet down to about 24%, which is in the right direction but it didn’t stay there.

As time went on, they were going back up and back up and back up and by the six year point, they were back up to about 29%, which is very much like the national average right now. Well, what happened? First of all, their breast cancer rates dropped just a little, about 9%. So that’s good, it’s in the right direction but it’s not strong enough. With one exception, progesterone receptor negative cancer, that’s one particular type, dropped 24%.

So that’s good, but here’s why the diet didn’t work. They allowed people to keep eating all the foods that make the American diet risky. They said, have the leaner cuts of beef; have chicken without the skin. The leanest beef is 29% fat. Chicken without the skin is 23%. Fish, some fish like salmon is over 50% fat in a typical cut of Chinook salmon.

Broccoli is 8%, beans are 4%, rice is 1% to 5%. Those are the foods, if you really want to test this in a serious way, have people eating the grains and the beans and the vegetables and fruits. So don’t get me wrong, I think the “Women’s Health Initiative” was a great study, but what it proved wasn’t that diet doesn’t work. What it proved is that small diet changes do very little.

Let me tell you about two other studies that really tackle this problem. One was called “The Women’s Intervention Nutrition Study.” And what they wanted to do was to see if diet makes a difference after a woman already has breast cancer.

They brought in not quite 2,500 women. Everybody had breast cancer and they put them on a diet that was pretty low in fat, about 15% of their calories came from fat. That’s about half the American average. And then they tracked how they did as time went on. What they were specifically looking for, was whether a woman was likely to have a cancer recurrence or a new cancer.

Did you know this, that if a woman has already had breast cancer, she’s at higher risk of getting a new cancer? So what they found was the diet worked. The likelihood of getting cancer recurrence or a new cancer was cut by about 24% and when they looked at those that were estrogen receptor negative, that’s a particular type of cancer, they were cut by about 42%. So diet, it’s not perfect but it’s darn good and we’ll take it.

Now there was another study called “The Women’s Healthy Eating & Living Study” or “The WHEL Study.” And they went a step further. It was low in fat but they also made a point of emphasizing vegetables and fruits and juices in particular, like carrot juice and that sort of thing. And it wasn’t quite vegetarian, but it was going a little further in that direction. The study as we’re recording this now is not yet finished, but I want to share with you some early results because they’re exciting.

I’ve been suggesting that if a woman loses weight, brings in the fiber, cuts the fat out of her diet, she’s going to be able to control her hormones. Does it work? They took a sample of 291 of the women in the study and they actually measured their hormones at the beginning and the end. I’m talking about estradiol and estrone, these are the estrogens in a woman’s blood and indeed they dropped quite significantly just from the diet change alone, no medicines, no exercise, nothing, just the diet change.

But then they went further and they looked at the control group that was not asked to make any diet changes. It was a large group of women, about 1,500 women and they varied. Some of them ate more vegetables, some of them ate less and they did a blood test for carotenoids, Beta-carotene and its cousins. You can measure that in a person’s blood. So if somebody said, “I eat a lot of vegetables,” you know, you can actually tell if it’s true or not.

So they measured them, and what they found was that those women who had the most carotenoids in their bloodstream, meaning they had been doing it, they had been eating the vegetables and fruits, they had about a 45% reduction in their likelihood of having cancer come back.

So bottom line is this: We still have good methods for detecting cancer, we have pretty good methods of treating it, but you know what, I never want to use them. I want to see what we can do to keep cancer beyond arm’s length, and to do that we need to just change what’s on our plate. Thank you very much.

Our heartfelt gratitude Dr. Neal Barnard for allowing us to share your excellent and highly informative presentations from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” series with our viewers. By encouraging the adoption of the vegan lifestyle, you and members of The Cancer Project are on the forefront of improving public health in the United States and beyond. We wish you the very best in your future endeavors.

For more details on The Cancer Project, please visit http://www.CancerProject.org

May the entire world soon adopt the compassionate plant-based diet and enjoy the peak of health.

Dr. Neal Barnard:Eating Right for Cancer Survival (part 5)

Replacing Meat from the DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival”

Hi, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Researchers have tried to tease apart which parts of the foods that we eat, might be actually responsible for increasing our cancer risk and what kind of dietary patterns reduce that risk. And one of the things that they’ve really zeroed their attention in on is meat. Why? Because in countries with a lot of cancer we tend to be meat-eaters and in countries where there’s not a lot of cancer, I’m talking about Asian countries, the staple is something different.

In Japan the staple is not a pork chop; the staple is rice, noodles, that sort of thing. And as these countries have westernized their diets, bringing in meat in a big way, cancer rates have risen. So the point is in these Asian countries, meat is at most just a condiment for other foods as opposed to being the main dish and in some religious traditions, they don’t consume it at all.

Well, why would meat be linked to cancer risk? One of the reasons is that meat itself actually delivers carcinogens to your plate. I mean cancer-causing chemicals. And it works like this: Let’s say I take a burger or a steak or a chicken fillet and I put it on a grill, and I heat it up, and I put it then onto my plate. Well, if I analyze it, you’ll find cancer-causing chemicals were formed sometime while it was on the grill.

What’s happening is that the heat, the intense heat of the grilling process causes a change in the animal muscle tissue, so that carcinogens called heterocyclic amines actually start to form. And if you swallow them, they increase your risk of cancer. Dozens of studies have shown that these cancer-causing chemicals that come from heating up meat are linked to certain forms of cancer.

Now they form in red meat, but they also form in a big way on fish and also on chicken. Now Americans now eat, believe it or not about a million chickens per hour, we eat a huge amount of chicken! And people say “Well I don’t want to eat red meat, I want to eat more white meat,” as if that’s going to be healthier, so they’re eating a lot of chicken.

They’re not realizing that the biggest single source of these carcinogenic, these cancer-causing heterocyclic amines is actually chicken. And people are eating it grilled, because you don’t want to eat it fried, that’s full of fat, that will fatten you up. That’s all true. But the grilled chicken is actually the biggest contributor to these heterocyclic amines in the body.

I’m just trying to cheer everybody up. Okay. You’re thinking back, “Oh, what did I eat yesterday?” Well okay, let’s do an experiment, let say I take a burger and I’m going to take a chicken breast, and I’m going to take a veggie burger. I grill the burger, it gets nice and hot and I analyze it, what’s inside? You got it, the carcinogens are there.

What if I take the chicken breast and I grill that and I send it to the lab, are there carcinogens there? You bet! What happens if I grill a veggie burger? It gets warm! That’s all. The nice thing is that plant products tend not produce these heterocyclic amines, which is a good thing, but that’s not the only reason why meat might contribute to cancer.

In fact, it may not even be the main reason. Meat has a lot of fat in it. It doesn’t have any fiber in it. You know, meat is not plant, so it doesn’t have plant roughage in it. And so what that means, is that high fat, low fiber combination tends to affect your hormones. If you don’t have fiber in your diet, and you have a lot of fat, estrogen in a woman’s body, testosterone in a man’s body starts to increase.

And if I’m centering my diet, not around rice and vegetables but around that big chuck of meat, then my hormones are likely to get out of control. So researchers have put this to the test. Do meat-eaters really have more cancer or not? And the answer is they sure do.

At Harvard University (USA), they’ve looked at colon cancer. And a man or a woman, who eats meat every day, particularly red meat, has about three times the risk of colon cancer, compared to men or women who tend to avoid it. So it makes a big difference.

And you might say, “Well what about fish? I hear fish is okay.” Well, fish has a lot of fat, doesn’t have any fiber, and if I grill fish, same story. I’m going to find those same heterocyclic amines in the fish as well. So, the other thing by the way about the fish, is a lot people say “Well, yes, but it’s got good fat in it.” You know what I’m talking about, the omega-3 fatty acids. That’s true it does. But the omega-3’s are only part of the story.

All fats are mixtures; fish has saturated fat in it, bad fat. Saturated fat is the kind that raises your cholesterol. It’s the kind that’s associated with higher breast cancer risk. So fish fat brings you good fat and it brings you bad fat too. So by now you’re thinking. “Well, I guess maybe the healthiest diet is a vegetarian diet.” Well, it turns out that’s true.

If you compare vegetarians, they’ve got about 40% less cancer risk, compared to everybody else. And when I say vegetarians, I mean casual vegetarians, the vegetarian off the street who’s eating healthy food but also the occasional French fries and barbecued potato chips and whatnot. They have around 40% less cancer compared to other people.

Well what if I’m a careful vegetarian? So I’m avoiding the meats and the dairy products, but I’m really bringing in the vegetables and the fruits and the high fiber foods. You can affect your cancer risk even more. And it’s a good move. Because if you’re just going, as a lot of people do, if you’re just going from beef to chicken, here’s exactly how far that gets you.

The leanest beef is about 29% fat, as a percentage of calories, the leanest chicken, without the skin, without the dark meat, it’s about 23. Fish vary, some are low, some are high… or lower I should say, some are higher, some are a lot higher. Salmon, Chinook salmon are about 50% fat. Broccoli is eight percent fat, beans are four, rice is between one and five, depending on the variety. A potato is one percent fat. A yam, sweet potato is one percent fat. That’s a way to really get away from the fat, really bringing in the fiber.

So if you avoid the meat products, what are you doing? You’re avoiding the carcinogens, you’re avoiding the hormone changing effects that these foods have and you’re allowing room in your diet to bring the healthy things in, all the vegetables and fruits and things are coming in.

Now, you might say, “Well, am I going to get enough protein?” You hear people say that right? Well, vegetarians get enough protein. And Frances Moore Lappé wrote a really good book a few years ago, called “Diet for a Small Planet.” Any of you ever see this book? She said if we follow a vegetarian diet, we could save this planet. We could feed hungry people.

And that’s true, because instead of feeding all the feed grains to animals to get this little bit of meat out, we can eat the grains directly. But she made one mistake. She said to get adequate protein you need to eat food in certain combinations. She had a list of grains and said, eat them with the beans, and if one is missing something, the other will make up for it.

And that’s sort of true, except the American Dietetic Association looked at this and said it’s actually much easier. If you eat any normal combination of plant foods, you get all the protein that you’re ever going to need.

So you don’t need to do this protein complementing. You don’t have to do that, just eat any normal combination of foods that your tastes call for and you’re going to get all the protein that you’ll need. So if you want to complement your proteins, just say something nice about them, that’s all you have to do.

Now, people do freak out about this a little bit. I was flying once and back in the old days, when they used to provide meals in flight, I would always order the vegetarian meal, because you get served first. And there’s a guy sitting there next to me, he says “Why did you get served and the rest of us haven’t?” I said, “Well, I just ordered a special meal.” “What kind?” “It’s vegetarian.” “Oh, you’re a vegetarian are you? Don’t you feel kind of weak?”

So the psychoanalyst in me leapt to the fore and I said, “Well, what’s your image of strong? Give a strong animal.” “Oh,” he said “strong like a bull or a stallion, or a gorilla, elephant.” These are all vegans okay. Well you get the point. A pussy cat is a meat eater, a bull or a stallion gets that massive rippling musculature from plant foods. And what that means is that plants have protein in them.

You may not realize it, but if you take some broccoli, about 40% of it is protein. If you take beans they’re about 30% protein and if you take tofu it’s about 40% protein. So the animal protein is the one you want to get away from. The plant proteins, the same one that makes animals strong is the one that you want to have.

If you look at what is in meat, it’s really just a mixture of protein and fat, there isn’t any fiber in it. There isn’t any complex carbohydrate in it. There isn’t any vitamin C in it. It’s protein mixed with fat, plus the occasional parasite perhaps, but from a nutritional standpoint, it’s really just protein mixed with fat.

Now, we all really grew up with meat-based diets. I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota and that was the only way knew to eat. Today we know better. Today we’re discovering the advantages of plant-based nutrition. Thank you.

Dr. Neal Barnard: Eating Right for Cancer Survival (part 4)

We are now pleased to show Dr. Barnard’s presentation “Discovering Dairy Alternatives” a chapter from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

Discovering Dairy Alternatives from the DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival”

Welcome, thanks for joining us. In today’s program we are going to focus on milk. Most of us grew up with the idea that dairy products were healthy but cancer researchers are showing us a side of dairy products that might really surprise you. Starting with, “What’s in milk?”

Well if you take a typical glass of milk and you send it to a lab the first thing you discover is that about 49% of the calories are nothing but fat. And most of this is what we call saturated fat, some people call it “bad fat.” That’s the fat that causes your cholesterol level to rise.

It’s also associated in some studies with a higher risk of developing breast cancer. So that’s why a lot of people are saying well I don’t want to have whole fat milk, I want to skim that away and have skim or non-fat milk, right? Well, let’s say I send that to the lab.

The biggest nutrient in it, the biggest source of its calories about 55%, is sugar, lactose sugar. That’s where most of the calories in skim milk come from. Now if you have lactose intolerance, meaning that you get a real belly ache from consuming milk, you know all about lactose, but for people who don’t, you have no need for this at all and that’s the primary nutrient in it.

In addition to that, there are proteins in milk. And these proteins for some people trigger arthritis pains or allergies, or for some folks, even allergies and diabetes researchers are showing that early exposure to those dairy proteins might be the cause, or at least a contributor to the kind of diabetes that starts in childhood.

Well what about its link to cancer? Researchers have known for a long time, that countries that consume a lot of dairy products, like Switzerland or Sweden, the other Scandinavian countries, European countries; they have a lot more prostate cancer compared to other countries where dairy is not a big part of the diet. I’m talking about China, Japan or Thailand. Dairy is not a big thing in those countries, at least traditionally.

Well, if it’s true that a higher intake of milk could in some way be associated with a higher risk of prostate cancer, then it ought to be true in this country. Let’s say I compare men who drink a lot of milk, compare them to the men who don’t. Is it true? Do they really get more prostate cancer? At Harvard (University), they did exactly that study. It was called the “Physicians Health Study”.

It was about 21,000 men, all of them were physicians, everybody’s healthy, nobody has cancer. They tracked their diet, and then they watched how the men did as time went on. And it turned out, that those men who were the big dairy consumers, I’m talking about a couple of servings per day, which is not out of the range of what people do. Their risk of prostate cancer was 34% higher compared to the men who generally avoided milk.

They did another study called the “Health Professionals Follow-up Study”. It was health professionals, but not physicians. It was pharmacists and other kinds of health professionals. But they found exactly the same thing, that those men who were the big dairy consumers, a couple of servings per day, had in this case, about a 60% higher risk of developing prostate cancer.

Well, what’s this about? Why should milk do this? Well, think about it. What’s milk’s job? What’s, what’s the purpose of milk?

Okay, it’s there to dunk cookies in. It’s there splash on my cereal. No, no. What milk is for, is to help a calf grow big. Right? That’s what it’s for. It’s to help rapid growth. So, the cow makes the milk, the baby cow, the calf consumes it and that calf is going to grow very rapidly.

Now, that’s for two reasons. One reason is there are nutrients in the milk that support growth. There is a lot of fat, there is a lot of sugar, the lactose sugar, there is a lot of protein. But the other thing is, there are hormones in milk, there are growth factors in milk and consuming it causes these things to change inside a man’s body.

And one that cancer researchers are really zeroing in on is called IGF-1. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this, Insulin-like Growth Factor number 1. IGF-1 it’s a mouthful of a name, but all it really means “Insulin-like,” means it’s like insulin, meaning it helps sugar to get into the cells, out of the blood, into the cells. Growth factor means it is a growth factor.

If I take IGF-1 in a test tube, I add cancer cells to it, they grow like crazy. That’s true for breast cancer cells, that’s true for prostate cancer cells. So, let’s say I stick a needle in a man’s arm, and I measure how much IGF-1 he’s got in his blood, and then I start feeding him a couple of glasses of milk every day. Or let’s say it’s a woman, and I feed her a couple of glasses milk every day.

What you find, is over the course of the next several weeks, the amount of IGF-1 in the blood rises. So this is just like a calf, the calf drinks the milk, and this IGF-1 is built in the blood, and it causes the growth of tissues. Now growth is a good thing at certain times, but it’s not such a good thing when you are an adult, and you’ve got a cancer cell waiting somewhere, growth of that cancer cell is a very dangerous thing.

So, in an international comparisons, when we look at who has the highest risk of cancer, it’s those countries that have a high dairy intake with regard to prostate cancer, and a high IGF-1 may be the reason for it. But other forms of cancer seem to be related to this as well. There is some speculation that breast cancer may or may not be linked to milk consumption. And the evidence is as follows.

Some studies show higher risk, some show lower risk, but when people have looked at IGF-1 levels, I mean, I draw a blood sample, and I look at what it is now, and your risk of getting cancer: the higher IGF-1 is associated with a higher risk of breast cancer. Cancer of the ovary has been looked at as well.

And here, I think we need more research, but there is some suggestion that there is a higher risk among milk drinkers; higher risk of ovarian cancers. For colon cancer it’s probably the reverse. Calcium seems to help prevent cancer. So milk drinkers seem to have a little bit lower risk of colon cancer. But the point is, there are plenty of healthy sources of calcium, you don’t need to drink milk for it, so you can get the protection without the risky factors.

Now you might be saying, “Well, wait a minute, so you’re kind of suggesting here that milk is not a really great thing in your diet.” Well, let me be clear about this, I think babies need milk, they need mother’s milk. A baby should have breast milk, and we should do what we can to help kids to be breast fed. After the age of weaning, there is no physical requirement for milk at all. It’s strictly a cultural thing.

But, “Where am I going to get my calcium?” Well, a couple of points. The first is: researchers have looked at the countries where people consume a lot of milk, you think those people are never going to have a hip fracture because of all that milk they’re getting, and bringing calcium into their diet. You know what? It’s just the opposite.

The countries that get the highest milk intake, have the highest risk of hip fracture. The countries with low intake of milk and relatively low calcium intakes, actually do better. They have stronger bones, and have less risk.

Within this country, at Harvard (University), the “Nurses’ Health Study,” have you heard about this study? The “Nurses’ Health Study” has been going on for many, many years, and tracking women over 18 years, they found that those who got the most milk in their diet, had no protection whatsoever from bone breaks. It didn’t seem to makes any difference at all.

So, there are some things that you can do to protect your bones. First is, if you got calcium in your bones now, let’s keep it, let’s not lose it. Well, how do I do that? Well, avoiding animal protein helps. Did you know that? Animal protein causes the body to lose calcium.

Let me say that again! Animal protein, I’m talking about meat, I’m talking about eggs, even the protein in dairy products, animal protein causes your body to lose calcium. Where is it going? It’s in the blood, it’s going out through the kidney and into the urine. It’s leaving the body.

Sodium does the same thing. A high salt diet, potato chips, salt that we add in the kitchen, that does the same thing, you lose calcium. Caffeine does it too, not the occasional cup of coffee, but if you are a big coffee enthusiast, as some of you may be, ah, a high caffeine intake is associated with some loss of calcium as well.

Exercise is, you know, give your bones a reason to live. Exercise is really the best friend of your bones. If you compare a tennis player, you look at their dominant arm, they’ve got better bone density in that arm than the opposite arm. So, exercise really does help strengthen the bones.

And oddly enough, vegetables and fruits do as well. Vegetables and fruits, some of them have calcium, some of them don’t. But the vegetables and fruits seem to help build up the boney matrix and help the bones stay strong.

Sunlight is also important. Sunlight gives you vitamin D, so you’re out in the Sun. Sun hits your skin, vitamin D is made in the skin, and it travels around through the body, and as it’s activated, it helps your intestinal tract, pull calcium in from the foods that you’re eating. So sunlight is going to help you as well.

Well, are there foods, that aren’t from dairy products that have calcium in them, because I’m going to need some calcium. Well, let me give you two words, “greens” and “beans.” The greens means broccoli and all of its cousins, they have lots of calcium in them. Except for spinach, spinach has lots of calcium, but it’s very selfish, it won’t let you have it. The calcium in spinach is not very absorbable.

But the other greens have a lot of calcium in them, and the absorption rate is actually higher than the absorption percentage from milk. And the other group is the bean group. Beans have a lot of calcium in them, you know they have soluble fiber in them. They’ve got iron in them, they’ve got protein in them, they’ve even got some omega-3 fatty acids in them.

Beans don’t have a good lobby group, but they’ve got all kinds of other good things. So the “greens” and the “beans”, remember them. Now, if you really want to have a huge calcium intake, you don’t need this, but you can, have you seen these fortified orange juice products, fortified soymilk, they’re adding calcium to lots of things, breakfast cereals, you don’t need that huge amount of calcium, but it’s there if you want it.

The point I’m making is that researchers are starting to point a finger at dairy products, and teasing out the risks that it might pose us. You don’t need it. There are plenty of good calcium sources, and really good ways to get away from that and to bring the calcium into your body and to keep it there. And as you replace the dairy products with healthier choices, you’ll keep strong bones, and you’ll keep the rest of your body healthy as well. Thank you!

Dr. Neal Barnard: Eating Right for Cancer Survival (part 3)

We are now pleased to show the conclusion of Dr. Barnard’s presentation “Fueling Up on Low-Fat Foods,” and his talk called “Favoring Fiber,” two chapters from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

If you compare a man in Hong Kong to a man in Sweden, the man in Hong Kong is about half as likely to have cancer cells in his prostate. And if he gets cancer he is about eight times more likely to survive compared to the man in Sweden. So the difference can really be huge. And researchers have put this to the test and found that indeed it works.

Dr Dean Ornish, who became famous for showing that a vegetarian diet along with other healthy lifestyle changes can actually reverse heart disease. In the arteries to the heart they actually open up again, when you get the cholesterol and the animal fat out of the diet and you get healthy vegetables and fruits into the diet.

He did a study in which he brought 93 men into the study. Everybody have prostate cancer, but they all had the form of the disease where you didn’t have to have surgery right yet, you could wait. You track something called PSA. Have you heard of this? It’s prostate specific antigen. It’s just a blood test and it shows you if the cancer is progressing rapidly or very slowly if it’s not progressing rapidly you can wait.

So the men came into the study, half of them followed a vegan diet. Now, vegans are not people from the planet of Vegas. A vegan is a person… is pure vegetarian diet, okay, no animal products and they kept the oils very low and that was the program. And the other group followed whatever diet they came into the program on.

Ninety-three men and what they found was in the control group, I mean the people who didn’t make the diet changes, their PSA levels do just what PSAs do in men with cancer. They got worse. As time went on they went up about six percent. And out of the men in that group, six of them couldn’t wait anymore. They had to have treatment. Their cancer was getting worse.

But the vegan group, something different happened. Their PSAs weren’t holding steady, they were actually on average falling, meaning they were getting healthier and there wasn’t a single man in that group that needed to go on to get treatment in the course of this stuff. So it really does work, it’s a very effective thing.

Getting the fat out of your diet is just the first step, but it’s a very important step. Okay, so we’re going to get the fat out, we’re going to slim down and we’re going to make room for all the healthier foods. Let’s put it to work.

We now present Dr. Barnard’s lecture entitled “Favoring Fiber” from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

When researchers have looked for parts of the diet that can help us against cancer, prevent it or improve survival, or improve health overall, one of the things we’ve really keyed in on is fiber. What is fiber?

Fiber means plant roughage, and by that I mean it’s the part of plants that doesn’t get digested right away and it helps us in many ways. One thing you know is it helps keep you regular, you hear people say that. All that means is it moves things along, but it doesn’t just move food along, it moves carcinogens along.

Let’s say there was something not too healthy in the food I ate, well the quicker it leaves your body, the better off you are. Now that can mean that if something was going to increase the likelihood of developing colon cancer, because it’s attacking the cells of your intestinal tract, it’s gone, it’s gone much faster, that’s a good thing.

Now there’s another thing though: Fiber helps remove things that are circulating in your blood. How does that work? Your liver is filtering your bloodstream, every minute of every day, blood is going through the liver and the liver is looking for things that don’t belong there. It’s looking for hormones like estrogen or testosterone.

You need some of those but you don’t need a huge excess so your liver takes them out. It gets rid of cholesterol, it gets rid of medicines and things like that. And what it does is the liver filters the blood, finds a little excess estrogen, pulls it out of the blood, and sends it down a little tube called the bile duct. And it ends up in the intestinal tract and there this little bit of estrogen goes down attaches to some fiber, that carries it out of the body. Very nice.

So, if you’re thinking well a high amount of estrogen in my blood is linked to too much risk of breast cancer, a high fiber diet helps pull it away. One problem: a lot of people don’t have much fiber in their diet. Let’s say for breakfast I had bacon and eggs. How much fiber is there in that? Well, bacon and eggs aren’t from plants, they don’t have any plant roughage in it.

Let’s say for lunch I had yogurt and chicken breast; how much fiber is there? None, right? So the liver filters the blood, the little estrogen gets pulled out, goes down the bile duct, ends up in the intestinal tract, looking for fiber, looking for fiber, where is it? There isn’t any! It reabsorbs back into the bloodstream.

The estrogen goes around ends up back at the liver. The liver says, “What are you doing here? I thought I got rid of you.” It pulls it out of the blood again, sends it down the bile duct into the intestinal tract, looking for fiber, where is my fiber? There isn’t any, it’s absorbed again. That estrogen will do this cycle over and over and over and over again. It’s called enterohepatic circulation. Entero means intestinal tract, hepatic means liver, like hepatitis.

And this works not just for estrogen but also cholesterol. Cholesterol will go around and around and around until you eat fiber. You hear about oat bran and oat cereals, they will reduce the amount of cholesterol in the blood. That’s all they do. It’s not rocket science. What they do is they grab that cholesterol that the liver has sent down and they make sure it cannot get reabsorbed. That’s a good thing.

Same for testosterone, a man says, “I don’t want those testosterone excesses that are going to increase my risk of prostate cancer.” Fiber is your friend. It puts the lid on it. It helps you to remove those excesses.

Now let me walk you through an exercise. I want to help you to see how much fiber there is in the foods you eat. And inside of just a couple of minutes you are going to know how much fiber there is in just about everything in the store without reading the label. Will you do this with me? Okay.

Let’s take something like a banana. How much fiber is there in a banana? Now you may not know right off hand but give me a guess. Give me a guess. Is there one gram, 16,000 grams, how much fiber would you say there is in a banana? Anybody.

Eight…

Five? Eight? (Two.) 10? Two? Okay, very good. It’s about 2.7 (grams) in an average banana. Okay, so not quite three. How about an apple? Now is it, an apple is kind of like a banana so it’s not going to be 25, how much fiber would you guess is in an apple?

Five. 10. 10.

Ten, three, what? About 3.7. So similar to a banana, a little bit more. How about cantaloupe? Now here is a clue for you. If I take a cup of cantaloupe, it’s a little bit more watery so a little bit less fibrous.

So if a banana is 2.7, and an apple is 3.7, what’s cantaloupe? (One, two.) Okay, one to two. Right, good. About 1.3. So let’s say an average fruit, you walk in the store, an average fruit is going to be about three. Three grams per fruit. Alright.

Let’s take some vegetables. How about if I have a cup of broccoli? Give me a guess. Now here is a clue. It’s maybe, broccoli is not quite as watery as a typical fruit is it? A little more fibrous. So how much fiber would you say is maybe in a cup of broccoli? (Seven. Six.) Six? Seven? (Eight.) Eight? Okay about 4.6. So a cup of broccoli is about 4.6 (grams).

How about carrots? Are they more like broccoli or is a carrot is more like cantaloupe? Well it’s more like broccoli, it’s fibrous, right? So, how much fiber will… (Five.) About five? Very good. About 5.2 in a typical cup of, cup of carrots.

How about iceberg lettuce? (Nothing. Zero.) Well, it’s not zero. It is a plant. Okay? But you also know, you’re thinking right, it’s not huge, it’s not like broccoli. So give me number. (One and a half.) One, one and half? Okay, perfect. 1.2. Alright. So a typical cup of vegetables we’re going to say four. Alright where am I? Fruit, three; vegetables, four. Very easy, unless it’s iceberg lettuce, we’re going to cut that down a little bit.

Give me beans now. How about if I have a half cup serving of black beans? How many grams of fiber in that? Now here is a clue. Beans are not really watery. They’re pretty fibrous. So half cup of black beans? (Eight. Six.) Eight? Six? Seven? Very good. About 7.5.

How about baked beans? (Baked?) Baked beans. Six? Seven? Okay. About 6.4, good. So a typical half cup serving of beans about seven. Alright. Where are we? Fruit, three. Vegetables, four. Beans, seven.

Now let’s go to our grain group. How about pumpernickel bread? Actually a slice of pumpernickel has about two grams about 2.1. It’s less than you’d think. How about white bread? (Nothing. Zero. )Zero? Well now it’s not going to be zero because it is from a plant. Now they’ve done their best to make sure there is no nutrition in there but they did leave a little. So let’s call it about a half, about a half a gram of fiber. Okay?

So a typical bit of a white bread maybe up to a gram or more or whole grain bread, maybe about two. But does that surprise you? Fruits is three, vegetables are four, and beans are seven. The breads which we think of as being high fiber are lower.

Okay. So our fiber champions – the bean group, at about seven for half a cup.

And then the vegetables at about four, fruits at about three and if I have a slice of bread, if it’s white maybe a gram, if it’s whole grain about two. Typical cereals about three. Okay?

You walk in the store and you can look on the left, you can look on the right and you can estimate even for a packaged food …food or a canned food what’s inside and you’re going to have a pretty good ball-park of whether it has fiber or not.

Okay, extra credit. How much fiber is there in a pork chop? (Zero.) Zero? Zero? We agree? Well why? Why? Is it from a plant? (It’s from an animal.) It’s from an animal. Animals don’t have plant roughage so the answer is zero. How about a cup of milk? (Zero!) Zero because it’s from … (animal.) An animal, not a plant.

Wait, how about if it’s skim milk? How about if it’s organic skim milk? (Zero.) Still zero? You’re with me. Okay. How about eggs? (Zero.) Zero. How about eggplant? Okay. Very good! So there’s fiber in eggplant. Okay. So animal… I always like things that are easy to remember: animal products don’t have fiber, plant products do. So what? Does fiber really help? The answer is yes.

Let’s say I want to knock off a few extra pounds one of the best things you can do is pump up the fiber intake in your diet. I’m going to give you a number. Every 14 grams of fiber that are part of your regular daily menu, every 14 grams of fiber cuts your calorie intake by about 10%.

So let’s say a typical person in the United States is eating maybe 12 grams of fiber per day. Add 14, I get 26 (grams), I’m going to feel fuller and even though I think I’m eating the same amount, my calorie intake drops about 10%. So if I go up another 14 from 26 to… where am I now? 40. My calorie intake drops again.

Again, I think I’m eating the same amount but all that fiber fills me up, my calorie intake falls. Something is happening to my scale. I’m losing weight automatically, without ever going hungry. Fiber is a good thing. It improves your digestion, it slims your waist line, it reduces cholesterol and it will reduce your cancer risk too. That’s the power of healthy fiber. Thanks.

Dr. Neal Barnard: Eating Right for Cancer Survival (part 1)

According to the World Health Organization, cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Each year over 12 million people across the globe are diagnosed with cancer and 7.6 million succumb to the disease. The numbers are projected to continue rising, with an estimated of 12 million deaths in 2030.

Today we have the honor to share series featuring excerpts from The Cancer Project’s “Eating Right for Cancer Survival,” a two-set DVD of presentations by esteemed nutrition researcher and author Dr. Neal Barnard, MD that is a companion to the book The Cancer Survivor’s Guide written by Dr. Barnard and registered dietician Jennifer Reilly.

Dr. Barnard is the president of The Cancer Project, a US-based non-profit organization advancing cancer prevention and survival through nutrition education and research. Since its founding in 2004, the Project has strived to promote the vegan diet as the answer to cancer.

The Cancer Project is an affiliate of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group created by Dr. Barnard in 1985 that is comprised of physicians and concerned citizens in the US wishing to improve public health. The Committee is also actively involved in raising awareness of the benefits of a plant-based diet through such projects as the 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program and seeking to amend federal nutrition guidelines.

Dr. Barnard has served as the principal investigator on many clinical studies examining the links between diet and health and his work has been published in top scientific and medical journals. He is often interviewed by the national media in the US for his perspectives on important issues in nutrition, health and medicine. We are now pleased to show a segment from “How Foods Fight Cancer,” a chapter from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

Welcome, thank you for joining us. In today’s program we’re going to zero in on how nutrition affects not just our risk of getting cancer or helping us to stay free of cancer, but also if we have this condition already how we can use nutrition for better survival.

Now, I have two points before we get started. The first is let’s set aside blame. There is a natural tendency. If you’ve got any kind of serious health condition to think, “What caused this? Did I cause this? Or did somebody else cause it?” Well, I understand that but for now let’s just set that aside.

And the second point is work with your doctor or health care provider. All of the information that you are about to receive is designed to be used in addition to the tests or treatments your doctor might prescribe, not instead of them. Okay, let’s get started.

First of all, what is cancer? Cancer starts in the inside of a cell. Inside the nucleus is DNA. That’s the blueprint that makes each cell what it is, and makes you what you are. But that DNA can be easily damaged. And when it is, instead of that cell staying put and doing its normal job, it starts multiplying out of control. It’s like a weed that then sends roots into the flower bed disrupting the other plants.

And a little bit of it can break off, get into the bloodstream and spread somewhere else in the body where it does the same thing, spreading and damaging other tissues. That’s what cancer is. But there are certain things that make it worse and certain things that can help make it better.

In the worse category are hormones. If a woman has breast cancer, the female sex hormones – estrogens, they tend to fuel its growth and they make it more likely not only that it will occur in the first place but more likely to spread. If a man has prostate cancer, the male sex hormone – testosterone does exactly the same thing. It encourages its growth, and encourages its spread.

Now the first inklings that cancer had anything to do with diet came from comparisons between different countries. If you compare Japan to the United States for example, a Japanese woman is much less likely to develop cancer compared to an American woman. But if she gets cancer she is much more likely to survive. Why would that be?

Well, the first theory was well Japanese women are thin. And that’s important because body fat actually acts as a factory for making estrogens. The more fat you have, the more it cranks out estrogens, I mean the female sex hormones, into the bloodstream. And as they are coursing around through the blood they are just looking for that one cancer cell. And they act like fertilizer on weeds. They make it grow, they make it spread. They make the disease much more aggressive. Well, that’s part of it.

Diet plays a role even if a woman is not heavy. And if a woman is on a diet that’s high in fat and very low in fiber… you know what I’m talking about when I say fiber? I mean plant roughage.

That kind of diet also increases the amount of estrogen in her blood, the amount of fertilizer on the weeds if you will. Well, how does that happen? Well, researchers learned a long time ago that if a woman goes on a diet that has a lot of fat in it and not very much fiber, the amount of estrogen in her bloodstream goes up within just a couple of weeks. It’s measurably higher than it was before. Part of the reason for this is that fiber helps your body get rid of the extra estrogens.

Pictures this – your liver is filtering your blood every minute of every day and it’s looking for things that don’t belong there. And it will find extra estrogen and it’s in the blood, the liver pulls it out, it sends it down through a little tube called the bile duct into the intestinal tract and sends it out with the wastes.

So the liver is filtering the blood, hears an estrogen, “I don’t think we need you anymore, let’s get rid of you.” It pulls it out, sends it down the bile duct, into the intestinal tract, out it goes. Good system.

Only problem is it depends on one thing and it depends on fiber. If you ate plenty of fiber, I mean vegetables, fruit, beans, whole grains, then that little estrogen that the liver found, it sent it down to the bile duct into the intestinal tract, it hooked onto the fiber and the fiber is what carried it away. But let’s say my lunch was skimmed milk, yogurt, chicken breast.

How much fiber is in those foods? Well, they’re not plants; they don’t have plant roughage. There is no fiber in any of those foods. There is no fiber in anything from an animal. So what happens? The liver is filtering the blood finds the estrogen, sends it down the bile duct into the intestinal tract. Where is my fiber? Where is my fiber? Where is my fiber? There isn’t any fiber! So what does it do?

It goes back into the bloodstream. It’s reabsorbed again. And it circulates around the body and then it arrives back at the liver and the liver says, “What are you doing here?” And the liver actually removes that estrogen again, sends it down bile duct into the intestinal tract. Looking for fiber, looking for fiber, looking for fiber, there isn’t any, it’s reabsorbed again!

And this estrogen does this circle we call enterohepatic circulation. “Entero” means intestinal tract, “hepatic” means liver, like hepatitis. And this works not just for estrogen, it also works for testosterone. A man who is at higher risk for prostate cancer, if he can get rid of extra testosterone he uses that same system. If he has lots of fiber in his diet, his testosterone level will be adequate, but not excessive because the liver finds the testosterone and gets rid of it.

Same thing for cholesterol. You’ve heard about how oats will reduce cholesterol, you know what I’m talking about. Well, this is how it works: You ate oats, they’re rich in fiber. The liver finds the cholesterol, sends it down the bile duct and its going down there and if the oats or other kinds of fiber are there it carries it out with the waste and your cholesterol level goes down.

Now that’s the theory, does it actually work? Well, the answer is yes it does. There have been a number of studies that have looked at the effect of changing the diet on not only hormones but also on cancer rates. And there are two that I want to share with you very quickly.

One was at the State University of New York at Buffalo (USA). They looked at women who already had breast cancer; there were about 900 of them. And what they found was that as the time went by the risk of dying of that disease increased by 40% for every thousand grams of fat the women consumed per month.

Now to picture what I’m talking about. Let’s say you’re on a plant- based diet, without animal products, without a lot of added fat. There is really not much fat in that kind of diet. For comparison purposes let’s take a typical American diet that might have lots of cheeseburgers and gravy and French fries, a lot of fat in it right?

Those two differ by a good thousand to 1500 grams of fat every single month. That’s good for a 40 to 60% difference in whether you are dead or alive at any time point down the road.

Now another study called the Women’s Intervention Nutrition Study, the WINS Study, was very important. They brought in women who had breast cancer. And what they did was they asked them to lower the fat content in their diet, and the women did this. They compared the women on the diet who were getting about 30, 33 grams of fat. That’s really low. They compared them to a control group, that got about 51 grams of fat, that’s lower than average but not as good as the people on the special diet.

They then tracked one thing. These women had been treated for breast cancer, did it come back? Or did they get a new kind of cancer because as you may know, if you’ve been diagnosed with cancer before, breast cancer, you are more likely not only to get a recurrence but to get a new cancer again.

And what they found was absolutely being on this diet did help prevent it. It cut the risk of a recurrence or a new cancer by 24%. Same thing with prostate cancer. Researchers have looked at men with prostate cancer, changed their diets, and looked to see does this really make a difference for me? The answer is yes.

Dr. Dean Ornish, do you know his work? He did the research studies on showing that you could actually reverse heart disease. He used a low fat vegetarian diet, exercise, and stress reduction which is why he didn’t do the study in Washington D.C. (USA) where I live. And what he found is that it does reverse heart disease. But then he put this to work for men who had prostate cancer and the results were amazing.

Ninety-three men, everybody had prostate cancer… As you may know if you have prostate cancer you don’t necessarily have to have treatment right away. Many of these men are older, they can sometimes wait and they track a blood test called PSA – Prostate Specific Antigen. If it’s not going up too fast you just wait. If it is going up fast, you need treatment, you can’t wait anymore.

And what they found was that half of the group put on a vegetarian diet compared to the other half that didn’t change their diet. The men on the vegetarian diet showed their PSA wasn’t rising, it started to fall. It fell about four percent over the course of this trial. That’s good. That means we’re re-gaining our health and there wasn’t a single person in that part of the study that needed to have treatment.

But in the control group, their PSA was going up. It went up about six percent and when you looked at the group, out of 49 men in that part of the study, six of them couldn’t wait, their cancer was aggressively advancing. They had to have treatment.

And there’s another wrinkle in all of this. There’s a specific effect apparently, of dairy products. Men who consume more dairy products, seem to be at higher risk of prostate cancer. Now we need more research on this but two large Harvard (University) studies have shown that when men consume a lot of dairy products, their risk of prostate cancer is substantially higher than that of other men.

And the reason, maybe, is that dairy products change a man’s bloodstream. What they do is they increase the amount of something called IGF-1. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this? IGF-1 “Insulin-like growth factor number one.” I think of it as a little bit like cholesterol. You know how if I take cholesterol, a blood sample and I measure cholesterol, that tells me what? It tells me, are you going to have a heart problem down the road? Not necessarily right now, but 10 years from now.

If I draw a blood sample and I check your IGF-1 level, “Insulin-like growth factor number one,” if it’s higher, that means your risk of certain cancers is higher too. Prostate cancer for men, breast cancer for women. Why would milk cause IGF-1 to increase? Which it does.

Well think about this: What’s milk’s job? What is milk for? Milk’s job is to help a little baby calf grow fast. And once the calf is big enough to graze, there’s no need for milk anymore, right? So, if milk’s job is to make things grow, it includes not just protein, not just fat, not just sugar, that’s the lactose that’s in the milk, it also contains hormones and growth factors. And inside the calf’s body, it causes the production of more growth factors that allow the tissues to grow.

One of these – IGF-1 is a very potent stimulus for cancer cell growth. If I mix IGF-1 in a test tube with cancer cells, they grow like crazy! Well, a man or a woman who drinks three glasses of milk per day, has a 10% rise in the amount of IGF-1 in his or her bloodstream. So, it’s very rapid. It happens very, very quickly.

So many researchers are now saying, “Well, if I don’t want to have things growing in my body, maybe I should not be having food that causes growth factors to be produced.”

We deeply appreciate Dr. Neal Barnard’s important work in the field of cancer prevention and for actively seeking to enhance overall public health. We firmly support him in his call for everyone to quickly adopt the vegan diet, the key to well-being and longevity.

For more details on The Cancer Project, please visit http://www.CancerProject.org
The two-set DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” and The Cancer Survivor’s Guide, a free to download e-book, are available at the same website

Lowering Healthcare Costs and Promoting Wellness Through the Vegan Lifestyle (part -1)

This time we examine how the vegan lifestyle can significantly lower the cost of food, health insurance and healthcare while promoting wellness.

We’ll hear the views of three individuals in the US who’ve made important contributions to the field of public health: Dr. Pamela Popper, a vegan nutrition expert, naturopath, and founder and Executive Director of the Wellness Forum;  Dr. Neal Barnard, a vegan physician, researcher, bestselling author and President of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and Ellen Jaffe Jones, a vegan former Emmy-winning TV investigative reporter and anchor, certified personal-fitness trainer and author of “Eat Vegan on $4 a Day.”

We hear first from Ms. Jaffe Jones, who shares how a plant-based diet, free from meat, fish, eggs and dairy products, can substantially reduce our grocery bills.

I wrote, “Eat Vegan on $4 a Day” because I saw so many stories on the news that said you can’t eat well on a budget. I just felt like reporters need more resources than that very biased opinion that, in order to eat healthy, it has to cost a lot of money. I have eaten this way most of the last 30 years. So I knew personally that it wasn’t true.

And I also knew that it costs so much money when you don’t eat this way, not only at the grocery store, but then when you start getting the diseases of affluence like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. You know, a bypass surgery in the United States can cost upwards of US$100,000 to US$200,000.

So if you really average out, as we liked to do when I was a financial consultant, the cost of that bypass surgery into the cost of a US$5 burger, that US$5 burger may actually cost like US$100 or US$1,000, depending on how many years you live and how many burgers you eat.

So it’s not just as simple as what you save at the grocery store. It’s the amount of money you have to pay when you get sick or when you have to go to the hospital or when you have to hire people to help you when you are so debilitated.

How is it possible to eat on just US$4 a day? It is simpler than one might think.

The big secret to eating well on US$4 a day is buying foods in bulk, and buying them when they’re on sale. For example, a big bag of beans at a big box store is about 10 cents for a four-ounce serving of cooked beans, with high fiber, and is a great source of protein. You compare that at the same big box store to the cheapest form of hamburger meat.

Now that’s going to be 30% fat. I don’t know what else is in the other 70%, stuff you wouldn’t want to eat anyway. But that is going to cost about 60 cents. So burger meat is six times more expensive than bean protein. And if you start going to more expensive cuts of meat like tenderloin, for example, it’s going to be even more expensive. And if you go to a restaurant, it’s going to be even more expensive.

So, you really save a lot of money by eating bean protein. And even if you don’t buy the biggest bag of beans, canned beans are only twice as expensive as cooking beans from scratch. And it’s just not a big deal to cook beans from scratch. My book has a lot of tips on how to do that in a quick way, in an easy way. I give all the proportions of water to beans. So if people have never cooked beans from scratch, it’s not a big deal.

Ms. Jaffe Jones has several recommendations regarding shopping for groceries. First, make sure you eat before going shopping, as we tend to buy “impulse foods” when we’re hungry. Second, purchase fruits and vegetables when they’re in season or on sale. Third, if the price of some of the fruits or veggies is exceptionally good, buy extra quantities and freeze or dehydrate them for use in the winter months when prices are much higher.

There’s a great deal of variety in a plant-based diet, even eating on US$4 a day. The big secret to eating on US$4 a day, is, “beans, greens, and grains.” The more extended answer is to cook foods in their natural states. Stay away from the frozen processed food aisles. Shop the perimeter of the store.

But it’s very easy to have beans be the source of your protein, whether it’s lunch or dinner. You can combine it with a wholegrain, and even grains are only about 5 cents to 10 cents more expensive per ounce than beans. So when you combine those two, you get all your calories.

And then you have plenty of money left over to go buy the vegetables and the fruits that might be a little more expensive. But even a banana costs only 22 cents. So it is nature’s perfect “fast food.” You just don’t need to buy Twinkies.

For the price of one Twinkie, you can have three servings of bean protein. So you really can save your health so much by looking at different options in the plant kingdom. People say, “Well, isn’t that kind of a boring diet?” And I go, “Excuse me? There are 90 different fruits and vegetables out there. So if you don’t like one or two fruits or vegetables, try another one.”

Produce comes in a wide range of colors, and for good reason.

Nature gave us these beautiful colors and foods. Why? So we would eat them; so we would be attracted to them. And I like to say, “Eat the colors of the rainbow, because nature did a great job in putting almost every color with an associated anti-oxidant or nutrient or vitamin that makes you just want to crave that purple cabbage or the eggplant or a red apple or a yellow squash.” There are just so many different colors out there. They’re great and they’re cheap.

Many meat-based recipes can easily be converted into delicious, money-saving vegan dishes.

An example of a specific recipe would be if you’re used to making chili with hamburger meat. Given the example of beans costing 10 cents versus the same quantity serving of hamburger meat costing 60 cents, just in that meal alone, if you’re cooking for your family, you can see how this would multiply out not only over that meal but over that day, the course of a week, the course of a year and a lifetime.

The savings are really phenomenal when you start multiplying this out. And that’s just the food that costs money at the grocery store. When you figure out that you don’t need the US$100,000 bypass surgery, the savings are tremendous.

One of the best ways to save money and improve one’s health is to avoid purchasing processed foods.

Cookies and crackers are probably some of the worst kinds of processed foods that you can buy, in part because they’re so addictive, but they’re also very expensive. So if you are eating rice as a whole grain by itself, that’s going to cost you maybe 10 cents to 15 cents for a quarter-cup serving (45 grams), and that’s going to fill you up for that meal, as opposed to a package of cookies, which costs maybe US$3-US$4.

Another big one would be cereals that are very processed and very expensive, in the big boxes. Then when you look inside the box there’s not quite so much inside, and a whole a lot of sugar, a lot of high fructose corn syrup in many products, a lot of added sugar in different forms. What I like to eat in the morning is a quarter cup of oats, and that cooks into a half-cup serving.

And I add some fruit to that and that costs me maybe 20-25 cents; verses 50 cents to a dollar for a grocery store serving of the same quantity. And that doesn’t even include the fruit.

Once people experience how wonderful they feel and how much money they save on a plant-based diet, they become enthusiastic advocates of the vegan way.

My book has only been out four months and already I’m getting a tremendous response from people on Facebook. I have close to 4,000 followers, and the response really has been amazing. People are getting the book and within a week of reading it saying, “I’m already seeing a difference.” And some of the people are already vegan. Some of them are not.

So especially, when they’re not vegan and they trade out a few meat meals a week for bean protein, for example, they really start to see some significant savings. And if it’s more than just them, say they have a family of four, it’s really quite noticeable. And I give a lot of tips in the book about how to save money at the grocery store.

And it’s important to understand that it’s not just looking for beans in quantity but there are other ways to save money, like understanding that products, especially the more expensive products, are placed right in front of your eyes, at eye level, so you will be sure to buy those things. And understanding what the stores are doing to try to get us to buy is important, too.

But saving money on grocery bills is only the beginning. Consuming animal products leads to many serious, life-threatening illnesses which are entirely preventable.

It is really important that you understand you will save not only money in the choices of the food that you buy, but by avoiding the diseases and illnesses that making poor food selections will cause. Many people tell me, and I certainly have had this experience, that once they adopt a vegan diet, they don’t get sick. Every time when I was younger and I used to run a great distance like six miles, I would get sick like clockwork.

And since I have adopted a plant-based diet, I just never get sick. When most people make this change, they never go back. They are amazed how delicious the food tastes, how colorful and vibrant it is, how energized they feel by it. And then, when they start saving money on their medical bills, they’re going like, “Well, why didn’t I start this 20 years ago?”

And how much time is lost because they didn’t start it sooner. So my advice would be: “Do it now. Don’t waste another minute.” You’re going to have so much energy. You’re going to save so much money, and I think it’s something that you will never regret.

Consumption of animal products is the primary cause of heart attacks and strokes which, according to the World Health Organization, are the world’s most common diseases, and account for about 23% of all annual deaths globally.

We know that in the United States, the cost of a (coronary) bypass surgery, just one bypass can be between US$100,000 and US$200,000. So if you are able to avoid that surgery, whether you pay for it, the insurance company pays for it or the government pays for it, that is just for one person. If you multiply that by all the heart procedures that could be avoided, I think billions of dollars could be saved, billions.

And the bottom line is preventable diseases are just not sustainable. It doesn’t matter who pays for them. It’s not only the medicine that is used to treat cancer, but the caregiver expenses that must be maintained. Again, billions of dollars will be saved if we can avoid just one of these diseases.

So many people, especially in the United States are going bankrupt because they can’t afford either insurance or the diseases that they’re getting, that insurance companies won’t pay for, or can’t pay for.

So I think this is really, at least in my mind, very much a solution, that if everybody went vegan, we would save so much money in insurance and medical costs.

And I’m amazed at how many women probably could have avoided a hysterectomy if they’d had a doctor who said, “Why don’t try a plant-based (diet).” And I am also astounded at the amount of money that could be saved with women who are seeking answers in the medical community for menopause treatments. If they could just try a plant-based diet. Food really is powerful medicine.

Ellen Jaffe Jones http://www.VegCoach.com

Dr. Richard Teo – I had to learn it through the hard way.

In Memory of Dr. Richard Teo (1972 – 2012) Below is the transcript of the talk of Dr. Richard Teo, who is a 40-year-old millionaire and cosmetic surgeon with a stage-4 lung cancer but selflessly came to share with the D1 class his life experience on 19-Jan-2012. He has just passed away few months ago on 18 October 2012.

Hi good morning to all of you. My voice is a bit hoarse, so please bear with me. I thought I’ll just introduce myself. My name is Richard, I’m a medical doctor. And I thought I’ll just share some thoughts of my life. It’s my pleasure to be invited by prof. Hopefully, it can get you thinking about how… as you pursue this.. embarking on your training to become dental surgeons, to think about other things as well.

Since young, I am a typical product of today’s society. Relatively successful product that society requires.. From young, I came from a below average family. I was told by the media… and people around me that happiness is about success. And that success is about being wealthy. With this mind-set, I’ve always be extremely competitive, since I was young. Not only do I need to go to the top school, I need to have success in all fields. Uniform groups, track, everything. I needed to get trophies, needed to be successful, I needed to have colors award, national colors award, everything. So I was highly competitive since young. I went on to medical school, graduated as a doctor. Some of you may know that within the medical faculty, ophthalmology is one of the most highly sought after specialties.

So I went after that as well. I was given a traineeship in ophthalmology, I was also given a research scholarship by NUS to develop lasers to treat the eye. So in the process, I was given 2 patents, one for the medical devices, and another for the lasers. And you know what, all this academic achievements did not bring me any wealth. So once I completed my bond with MOH, I decided that this is taking too long, the training in eye surgery is just taking too long. And there’s lots of money to be made in the private sector. If you’re aware, in the last few years, there is this rise in aesthetic medicine. Tons of money to be made there. So I decided, well, enough of staying in institution, it’s time to leave. So I quit my training halfway and I went on to set up my aesthetic clinic… in town, together with a day surgery centre. You know the irony is that people do not make heroes out average GP (general practitioner), family physicians. They don’t. They make heroes out of people who are rich and famous.

People who are not happy to pay $20 to see a GP, the same person have no qualms paying ten thousand dollars for a liposuction, 15 thousand dollars for a breast augmentation, and so on and so forth. So it’s a no brainer isn’t? Why do you want to be a GP? Become an aesthetic physician. So instead of healing the sick and ill, I decided that I’ll become a glorified beautician. So, business was good, very good. It started off with waiting of one week, then became 3weeks, then one month, then 2 months, then 3 months. I was overwhelmed; there were just too many patients. Vanities are fantastic business. I employed one doctor, the second doctor, the 3rd doctor, the 4th doctor. And within the 1st year, we’re already raking in millions. Just the 1st year. But never is enough because I was so obsessed with it. I started to expand into Indonesia to get all the rich Indonesian tai-tais who wouldn’t blink an eye to have a procedure done.

So life was really good. So what do I do with the spare cash. How do I spend my weekends? Typically, I’ll have car club gatherings. I take out my track car, with spare cash I got myself a track car. We have car club gatherings. We’ll go up to Sepang in Malaysia. We’ll go for car racing. And it was my life. With other spare cash, what do I do? I get myself a Ferrari. At that time, the 458 wasn’t out, it’s just a spider convertible, 430. This is a friend of mine, a schoolmate who is a forex trader, a banker. So he got a red one, he was wanting all along a red one, I was getting the silver one. So what do I do after getting a car? It’s time to buy a house, to build our own bungalows. So we go around looking for a land to build our own bungalows, we went around hunting. So how do I live my life? Well, we all think we have to mix around with the rich and famous. This is one of the Miss Universe. So we hang around with the beautiful, rich and famous.

This by the way is an internet founder. So this is how we spend our lives, with dining and all the restaurants and Michelin Chefs you know. So I reach a point in life that I got everything for my life. I was at the pinnacle of my career and all. That’s me one year ago in the gym and I thought I was like, having everything under control and reaching the pinnacle. Well, I was wrong. I didn’t have everything under control. About last year March, I started to develop backache in the middle of nowhere. I thought maybe it was all the heavy squats I was doing. So I went to SGH, saw my classmate to do an MRI, to make sure it’s not a slipped disc or anything. And that evening, he called me up and said that we found bone marrow replacement in your spine. I said, sorry what does that mean? I mean I know what it means, but I couldn’t accept that. I was like “Are you serious?” I was still running around going to the gym you know.

But we had more scans the next day, PET scans – positrons emission scans, they found that actually I have stage 4 terminal lung cancer. I was like “Whoa where did that come from?” It has already spread to the brain, the spine, the liver and the adrenals. And you know one moment I was there, totally thinking that I have everything under control, thinking that I’ve reached the pinnacle of my life. But the next moment, I have just lost it. This is a CT scan of the lungs itself. If you look at it, every single dot there is a tumor. We call this miliaries  tumor. And in fact, I have tens of thousands of them in the lungs. So, I was told that even with chemotherapy, that I’ll have about 3-4months at most. Did my life come crushing on, of course it did, who wouldn’t? I went into depression, of course, severe depression and I thought I had everything. See the irony is that all these things that I have, the success, the trophies, my cars, my house and all. I thought that brought me happiness.

But i was feeling really down, having severe depression. Having all these thoughts of my possessions, they brought me no joy. The thought of… You know, I can hug my Ferrari to sleep, no… No, it is not going to happen. It brought not a single comfort during my last ten months. And I thought they were, but they were not true happiness. But it wasn’t. What really brought me joy in the last ten months was interaction with people, my loved ones, friends, people who genuinely care about me, they laugh and cry with me, and they are able to identify the pain and suffering I was going through. That brought joy to me, happiness. None of the things I have, all the possessions, and I thought those were supposed to bring me happiness. But it didn’t, because if it did, I would have felt happy think about it, when I was feeling most down.. You know the classical Chinese New Year that is coming up. In the past, what do I do? Well, I will usually drive my flashy car to do my rounds, visit my relatives, to show it off to my friends.

And I thought that was joy, you know. I thought that was really joy. But do you really think that my relatives and friends, whom some of them have difficulty trying to make ends meet, that will truly share the joy with me? Seeing me driving my flashy car and showing off to them? No, no way. They won’t be sharing joy with me. They were having problems trying to make ends meet, taking public transport. In fact I think, what I have done is more like you know, making them envious, jealous of all I have. In fact, sometimes even hatred. Those are what we call objects of envy. I have them, I show them off to them and I feel it can fill my own pride and ego. That didn’t bring any joy to these people, to my friends and relatives, and I thought they were real joy. Well, let me just share another story with you. You know when I was about your age, I stayed in king Edward VII hall. I had this friend whom I thought was strange. Her name is Jennifer, we’re still good friends. And as I walk along the path, she would, if she sees a snail, she would actually pick up the snail and put it along the grass patch. I was like why do you need to do that? Why dirty your hands? It’s just a snail.

The truth is she could feel for the snail. The thought of being crushed to death is real to her, but to me it’s just a snail. If you can’t get out of the pathway of humans then you deserve to be crushed, it’s part of evolution isn’t it? What an irony isn’t it? There I was being trained as a doctor, to be compassionate, to be able to empathize; but I couldn’t. As a house officer, I graduated from medical school, posted to the oncology department at NUH. And, every day, every other day I witness death in the cancer department. When I see how they suffered, I see all the pain they went through. I see all the morphine they have to press every few minutes just to relieve their pain. I see them struggling with their oxygen breathing their last breath and all. But it was just a job. When I went to clinic every day, to the wards every day, take blood, give the medication but was the patient real to me? They weren’t real to me. It was just a job, I do it, I get out of the ward, I can’t wait to get home, I do my own stuff. Was the pain, was the suffering the patients went through real? No. Of course I know all the medical terms to describe how they feel, all the suffering they went through.

But in truth, I did not know how they feel, not until I became a patient. It is until now; I truly understand how they feel. And, if you ask me, would I have been a very different doctor if I were to re-live my life now, I can tell you yes I will. Because I truly understand how the patients feel now. And sometimes, you have to learn it the hard way. Even as you start just your first year, and you embark this journey to become dental surgeons, let me just challenge you on two fronts. Inevitably, all of you here will start to go into private practice. You will start to accumulate wealth.

I can guarantee you. Just doing an implant can bring you thousands of dollars, it’s fantastic money. And actually there is nothing wrong with being successful, with being rich or wealthy, absolutely nothing wrong. The only trouble is that a lot of us like myself couldn’t handle it. Why do I say that? Because when I start to accumulate, the more I have, the more I want. The more I wanted, the more obsessed I became. Like what I showed you earlier on, all I can was basically to get more possessions, to reach the pinnacle of what society did to us, of what society wants us to be. I became so obsessed that nothing else really mattered to me. Patients were just a source of income, and I tried to squeeze every single cent out of these patients. A lot of times we forget, whom we are supposed to be serving. We become so lost that we serve nobody else but just ourselves. That was what happened to me. Whether it is in the medical, the dental fraternity, I can tell you, right now in the private practice, sometimes we just advise patients on treatment that is not indicated. Grey areas. And even though it is not necessary, we kind of advocate it. Even at this point, I know who are my friends and who genuinely cared for me and who are the ones who try to make money out of me by selling me “hope”. We kind of lose our moral compass along the way. Because we just want to make money.

Worse, I can tell you, over the last few years, we bad mouth our fellow colleagues, our fellow competitors in the industry. We have no qualms about it. So if we can put them down to give ourselves an advantage, we do it. And that’s what happening right now, medical, dental everywhere. My challenge to you is not to lose that moral compass. I learnt it the hard way, I hope you don’t ever have to do it. Secondly, a lot of us will start to get numb to our patients as we start to practice.

Whether is it government hospitals, private practice, I can tell you when I was in the hospital, with stacks of patient folders, I can’t wait to get rid of those folders as soon as possible; I can’t wait to get patients out of my consultation room as soon as possible because there is just so many, and that’s a reality. Because it becomes a job, a very routine job. And this is just part of it. Do I truly know how the patient feels back then? No, I don’t. The fears and anxiety and all, do I truly understand what they are going through? I don’t, not until when this happens to me and I think that is one of the biggest flaws in our system. We’re being trained to be healthcare providers, professional, and all and yet we don’t know how exactly they feel. I’m not asking you to get involved emotionally, I don’t think that is professional but do we actually make a real effort to understand their pain and all? Most of us won’t, alright, I can assure you.

So don’t lose it, my challenge to you is to always be able to put yourself in your patient’s shoes. Because the pain, the anxiety, the fear are very real even though it’s not real to you, it’s real to them. So don’t lose it and you know, right now I’m in the midst of my 5th cycle of my chemotherapy. I can tell you it’s a terrible feeling. Chemotherapy is one of those things that you don’t wish even your enemies to go through because it’s just suffering, lousy feeling, throwing out, you don’t even know if you can retain your meals or not. Terrible feeling! And even with whatever little energy now I have, I try to reach out to other cancer patients because I truly understand what pain and suffering is like.

But it’s kind of little too late and too little. You guys have a bright future ahead of you with all the resource and energy, so I’m going to challenge you to go beyond your immediate patients. To understand that there are people out there who are truly in pain, truly in hardship. Don’t get the idea that only poor people suffer. It is not true. A lot of these poor people do not have much in the first place, they are easily contented. for all you know they are happier than you and me but there are out there, people who are suffering mentally, physically, hardship, emotionally, financially and so on and so forth, and they are real. We choose to ignore them or we just don’t want to know that they exist. So do think about it alright, even as you go on to become professionals and dental surgeons and all.

That you can reach out to these people who are in need. Whatever you do can make a large difference to them. I’m now at the receiving end so I know how it feels, someone who genuinely care for you, encourage and all. It makes a lot of difference to me.

That’s what happens after treatment. I had a treatment recently, but I’ll leave this for another day. A lot of things happened along the way, that’s why I am still able to talk to you today. I’ll just end of with this quote here, it’s from this book called Tuesdays with Morris, and some of you may have read it. Everyone knows that they are going to die; every one of us knows that. The truth is, none of us believe it because if we did, we will do things differently. When I faced death, when I had to, I stripped myself off all stuff totally and I focused only on what is essential. The irony is that a lot of times, only when we learn how to die then we learn how to live. I know it sounds very morbid for this morning but it’s the truth, this is what I’m going through. Don’t let society tell you how to live. Don’t let the media tell you what you’re supposed to do. Those things happened to me. And I led this life thinking that these are going to bring me happiness.

I hope that you will think about it and decide for yourself how you want to live your own life. Not according to what other people tell you to do, and you have to decide whether you want to serve yourself, whether you are going to make a difference in somebody else’s life. Because true happiness doesn’t come from serving yourself. I thought it was but it didn’t turn out that way. Also most importantly, I think true joy comes from knowing God. Not knowing about God – I mean, you can read the bible and know about God – but knowing God personally; getting a relationship with God. I think that’s the most important. That’s what I’ve learnt. So if I were to sum it up, I’d say that the earlier we sort out the priorities in our lives, the better it is.

Don’t be like me – I had no other way. I had to learn it through the hard way. I had to come back to God to thank Him for this opportunity because I’ve had 3 major accidents in my past – car accidents. You know, these sports car accidents – I was always speeding , but somehow I always came out alive, even with the car almost being overturned. And I wouldn’t have had a chance. Who knows, I don’t know where else I’d be going to! Even though I was Baptized it was just a show, but the fact that this has happened, it gave me a chance to come back to God. Few things I’d learnt though:

1. Trust in the Lord your God with all your heart – this is so important.

2. Is to love and serve others, not just ourselves.

There is nothing wrong with being rich or wealthy. I think it’s absolutely alright, because God has blessed. So many people are blessed with good wealth, but the trouble is I think a lot of us can’t handle it. The more we have, the more we want. I’ve gone through it, the deeper the hole we dig, the more we get sucked into it, so much so that we worship wealth and lose focus. Instead of worshipping God, we worship wealth. It’s just a human instinct. It’s just so difficult to get out of it.

We are all professionals, and when we go into private practice, we start to build up our wealth – inevitably. So my thought are, when you start to build up wealth and when the opportunity comes, do remember that all these things don’t belong to us. We don’t really own it nor have rights to this wealth. It’s actually God’s gift to us. Remember that it’s more important to further His Kingdom rather than to further ourselves. Anyway I think that I’ve gone through it, and I know that wealth without God is empty. It is more important that you fill up the wealth, as you build it up subsequently, as professionals and all, you need to fill it up with the wealth of God.

Ten Superfoods for Super Health

What are the most beneficial and nutritious foods on Earth for enhancing energy, health and happiness, the so-called superfoods? Interestingly, it’s not necessary to go to a mountaintop, jungle or secret cave to obtain these foods. They’re actually quite common, widely available and often overlooked by consumers.  We’ll look at the top 10 superfoods and see why experts suggest including them in our diet. Please remember God has blessed us with many superfoods and this list is just one possibility!

Superfood #1: Walnuts

Among the elements needed to maintain good mental health are omega-3 fatty acids. Studies show that a lack of these vital nutrients may lead to depression, learning disabilities, behavioral problems, and even sleep disorders. So how can we make sure we get enough omega-3 fatty acids in our diet?

It’s actually quite simple. Grab a handful of walnuts! Walnuts have often been referred to as “brain food” because their high concentration of essential fatty acids helps keep our brain cells functioning properly. Walnuts also contain a natural form of melatonin, a hormone that relaxes the mind and helps us sleep better. It’s interesting to note that a walnut even looks like a tiny brain!

Superfood #2: Broccoli

Another widely recognized superfood is broccoli. This humble, little vegetable, available around the world, is a powerhouse of nutrients. It’s rich in calcium and vitamin K, which help maintain healthy bones and prevent osteoporosis, and it also contains abundant potassium and magnesium. Have you ever wondered what to do for sunburn? Well, help yourself to some broccoli!

Rich in glucoraphanin, broccoli helps repair the skin. Glucoraphanin is also an anti-cancer agent. In fact, the American Cancer Society recommends eating broccoli regularly, as it contains phytochemicals that help prevent cancer. And the good news doesn’t stop there. Broccoli contains beta-carotene, as well as the trace minerals, zinc and selenium, all of which strengthen the immune system.

Superfood #3: Avocados

And speaking of enjoyment, how about the taste of a rich, creamy avocado? What’s even better is the fact that this beautiful, green fruit is bursting with valuable nutrients. An excellent source of folic acid and vitamins C, K, E, and B6, avocados also contain calcium, copper, iron, phosphorus and magnesium, and 60% more potassium than bananas.

But doesn’t an avocado contain a lot of fat? It does, but it’s “heart-friendly,” monounsaturated fat. In fact, avocados can actually improve one’s cholesterol profile, as it helps reduce LDL or “bad” cholesterol, while increasing HDL (good cholesterol). Recent studies show that the monounsaturated fats in avocados help protect against breast cancer and slow the growth of prostate cancer.

Having problems with your eyes? Get some avocados. Like broccoli they contain the carotenoid lutein, which helps protect against macular degeneration and cataracts. In fact, avocados contain more lutein than any other common fruit. So put a few slices on your salad, or make one into a “green smoothie” and see the difference in your vision!

Superfood #4: Nutritional Yeast

One of the common concerns about switching to the vegan diet is obtaining enough Vitamin B12. But if we add a small amount superfood #4, the issue is solved. What is superfood #4? It’s simply good tasting, nutty, nutritional yeast, which may be used as a delicious, healthful condiment. Besides being a great source of B vitamins, nutritional yeast is high in protein.

When buying this food, check the label to see if it’s been fortified with vitamin B12, because this vitamin does not occur naturally in nutritional yeast. It’s a bacteria that is produced separately and then added later. Secondly, B12 is light sensitive, so make sure the yeast you buy is not being stored in clear plastic, but rather in a canister that blocks the sun. Nutritional yeast can be sprinkled on steamed veggies, and will add a delicious, cheesy flavor to lightly salted popcorn, pasta, or scrambled tofu.

Superfood #5: Dark Leafy Greens

Despite differences in opinion about which fruits, grains and vegetables are superfoods, almost every expert agrees on the next candidate: dark leafy greens, possibly the most concentrated source of nutrition of any food. A rich source of minerals such as iron, calcium, potassium and magnesium, greens should definitely be included in our daily diet. They also contain vitamins K, C, E and many of the B-vitamins, and are a powerful source of phytonutrients such as beta-carotene, lutein, and zeaxanthin, which keep our cells healthy.

Concerned about osteoporosis? Then dig into the dark green veggies! Collards, kale and many others are excellent sources of easily absorbed calcium, which helps build healthy bones. Arugula, whose peppery flavor enhances any salad, is an excellent source of vitamins A, C and calcium. Also, the spicy taste of mustard greens livens up any sandwich or salad, and these greens are packed with vitamins A and K, folate and iron. So bring out the salad bowl, or add a handful to your favorite smoothie, and just feel the burst of energy they bring!

Superfood #6: Blueberries

One fruit that is on almost everyone’s superfood list is the delightful blueberry. This small fruit is a veritable powerhouse of nutrients, such as lutein, important for healthy vision. Low in calories and high in fiber, blueberries are an excellent source of fiber and vitamin C. In a study by the United States Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Center which sought to find the best source of antioxidants among 40 fresh fruits and vegetables, blueberries ranked #1 as they help neutralize the free radicals that lead to cancer and other age-related diseases.

This humble, little fruit helps promote a healthy urinary tract and reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke by preventing the buildup of “bad” cholesterol. Moreover, blueberries are delicious and can be eaten plain or made into smoothies – guaranteed to put a blueberry “smile” on your lips.

Superfood #7: Quinoa

Most lists of superfoods contain at least one grain, and among the most frequently recommended is quinoa, regarded as a sacred food by the Incas. Quinoa provides 22 grams of protein per 250 milliliters of uncooked grain, more than almost any other cereal grain. It also contains all eight of the essential amino acids required for tissue development, and is thus considered to be a complete protein.

In addition, quinoa contains calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, iron, copper, manganese and zinc, in higher concentrations than wheat, barley or corn. It’s also low in fat, gluten-free, and thus ideal for those who are gluten intolerant. With its unique, delectable taste, quinoa can be lightly seasoned and made into a wide variety of delicious dishes and is an excellent substitute for rice in many recipes.

Superfood #8: Beans and Lentils

Did you know that by incorporating certain foods into your diet, you can slow the aging process? According to world- renowned dermatologist and bestselling author Dr. Nicholas Perricone, a healthy diet is the most effective way to increase your energy, improve your well-being, and look younger! On his list of superfoods he recommends beans and lentils.

Dr. Perricone says that these legumes are unusually high in phytochemicals, protein and vitamins, all of which are essential to prevent aging. They are also low in fat and calories, thus helping to maintain ideal weight, and contain essential fatty acids, especially omega-6. Beans help prevent diabetes and manage blood-sugar disorders. Being low on the glycemic scale, they prevent spikes in blood-sugar levels, unlike refined grains and baked goods.

Beans and lentils have been part of the human diet for thousands of years, and are still among the most nutritious foods on Earth. Their varieties include kidney, black, navy and pinto beans, chickpeas (garbanzo beans) soybeans and dried peas, as well as several different types of lentils.

Superfood #9: Sesame Seeds and Tahini

Besides being a pleasant condiment, sesame seeds are chock full of nutrition, making them a worthy candidate for our superfood list. They contain phytosterol, which lowers cholesterol, as well as vitamin E, an antioxidant that makes the hair soft, shiny and healthy. Sesame seeds are also loaded with calcium for strong bones and teeth, and high in vitamin A and essential fatty acids as well as the B vitamins. Being very nutritious, they are 20% protein and among the best sources of methionine, an essential amino acid. Sesame seeds also contain lecithin, which reduces fat levels in the blood and helps protect the body from environmental toxins.

In addition, they’re rich in minerals, containing copper, magnesium, potassium, iron and phosphorus, which help keep joints, muscles and blood vessels healthy. Sesame seeds can be used in many ways, such as sprinkled over rice, salads or vegetables.

They can also be made into tahini, ground sesame-seed butter, and thus used as a spread, dip or dressing. Moreover, oil may be pressed from the seeds for use in seasoning salads, grains, or fresh veggies. In Japan, sesame is ground and mixed with salt to make gomashio, a delicious dry condiment.

Superfood #10: Sunshine!!

The last superfood on our list isn’t really a food at all, but is essential to the life of almost every plant on Earth. It’s sunshine! It is the easiest, most reliable and most delightful way to get vitamin D. Vitamin D is essential to good health because it helps absorb calcium and build strong bones. A vitamin D deficiency can result in osteoporosis or rickets. Recent research reveals that about one person in seven is deficient in vitamin D, indicating that we should spend more time in the sunshine.

How much exposure to the sun will give us enough vitamin D? Elderly people need to spend 30+ minutes twice a week, while younger people need less, perhaps only 10 to 20 minutes. Avoid wearing sunscreen as it blocks the absorption of vitamin D. Those with darker skin need more time in the sun to absorb the same amount of vitamin D as a lighter skinned person.

And sunlight has other benefits, too. It increases cell function, which, in turn, increases our body’s ability to purify itself. Sunlight stimulates the pineal gland to produce more of the powerful antioxidant melatonin. And best of all, sunshine is widely abundant and free of charge. Supreme Master Ching Hai often speaks about the benefits of spending time in the sunshine, as in the videoconference with Supreme Master Television staff in October 2010.

‘The sun has a lot of benefits: the sun cures many diseases. For example, in the old time, they did not have tuberculosis medicine yet, they would put the patient in a sunny room, or sunny area, and open a window, let the sun come in to cure the TB.

The sun cures your aches and pain, it eliminates toxins through sweat – when it’s hot, you sweat – and also it cures some of the diseases or other ailments. The sun gives also people happiness, carefree feeling. The sun is necessary for all on Earth’.

Please try some of the delicious, vegan superfoods we’ve covered today. We are sure you will love them all!  May all enjoy health, happiness and sunshine in a peaceful, vegan world.

For more information, please visit http://www.SupremeMasterTV.com

George Eisman: Growth Hormones in Animal Products Equals Cancer

George Eisman, a highly respected vegan registered dietitian in the United States, will explain how consuming animal products causes cancer as well as how the animal agriculture industry destroys public health.
Mr. Eisman served as a faculty member in dietetics and nutrition at several universities and colleges and has worked in a children’s hospital and a nursing home, as well as for public health agencies in four states. He founded The Association of Vegetarian Dietitians and Nutrition Educators, is the co-founder and first Chairman-Elect of the Vegetarian Nutrition Practice Group of the American Dietetic Association, is the director of the Coalition for Cancer Prevention Through Plant-Based Eating and is also an Advisory Board Member of EarthSave International. Mr. Eisman is the author of two books, “The Most Noble Diet” and “A Basic Course in Vegetarian and Vegan Nutrition.”

I’ve been vegetarian for over 40 years now. And I’ve been vegan for about 28 years. And my life’s work is trying to make people aware of the connection between what they eat and their risk of diseases like cancer. And a vegan diet is by far the best way to lower your cancer risk.

There was a study done in Japan a few years ago that found when people in rural areas went from eating animal products just once a week to three times a week, the breast cancer rate went up by 70%. If you can find a drug that would lower people’s breast cancer rate by 70%, you could make a billion dollars. So all you have to do is get them to cut animal products out of their diet and it goes down by that much.

There were an estimated 12.7 million cancer cases diagnosed around the world in 2008, and this number is expected to rise to 21 million by 2030. Cancer is a term used for more than 100 diseases and is characterized by out-of-control cell reproduction.

To be healthy, the body needs a constant supply of new cells and their regulation is an orderly path of growth, division, and death. When this process is damaged, some cells do not end their lives as a normal part of the cell life cycle. These irregular ones grow uncontrollably and divide, forming a mass of abnormal cells. The complex mechanism of cell regulation is tightly controlled by growth hormones.

The best thing about a vegan diet, from a standpoint of cancer risk is that a vegan diet contains no growth hormones. Growth hormones are proteins that promote growth. And cancer is a disease of abnormal growth. So to put growth hormones in your body, when you’re trying to fight cancer or prevent cancer, is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. It’s just going to make it worse, because it’s going to promote growth.

And growth hormones are animal products, because all the animals that are slaughtered for us are killed when they’re still fairly young, so they’re still growing. And of course, dairy products are meant to grow a baby calf into a thousand pound cow in a year, so they’re full of growth hormones. And eggs are full of growth hormones. So in order to get these growth hormones out of our diet, we have to go to a plant-based diet, and use plant-based milks and egg-substitutes made from plant foods, and of course, things like veggie burgers and tofu and other plant products in place of meat and other animal products.

Organic meats and grass-fed, non-hormone enhanced meats, still are full of growth hormones, because of the age of the animals. We don’t let them get old before we slaughter them, we eat them when they’re still young. So these growth hormones are in their bodies, whether they’re enhanced, injected with them, or they’re just naturally there. Those growth hormones are in our animal products that we consume. These growth hormones are proteins; they’re not fats. So if you eat low-fat meat and low-fat dairy products, it’s actually worse because they have more protein than they do fats, so they have more growth hormone.

Mr. Eisman learned about how dietary growth hormones cause cancer from the work of Professor Jane Plant, a cancer victim herself whose tumor went into remission shortly after she adopted a vegan diet.

I came across this book in 1999 called “The No Dairy Breast Cancer Prevention Program” by a woman named Jane Plant, who was one of the top scientists in England. And this book opened up my eyes to the link between cancer and dairy products, and as well as all other animal products. So dairy products are the one food that people think is healthy for them, and it really isn’t. It’s just as unhealthy as meat and chicken and eggs, because it has these growth hormones that encourage abnormal growth.

And that’s why she features this. And that’s inspired me as a dietitian, because we dietitians are also brainwashed into thinking that dairy products are necessary foods. And they’re not only not necessary, but they are not even healthful. And they actually shorten our lives by raising our risk of this deadly disease of cancer.

Let me tell you the story of Jane Plant herself. Jane Plant was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1987. And after five operations, which she lost all of one breast and part of the other breast, she was told she had at most six months to live. Her breast cancer had spread to her neck. She traveled around the world to countries where breast cancer was not a common disease, and compared it to countries where breast cancer was a common disease.

And she said this pattern was very clear to her that the more dairy products, and actually other animal products as well in a diet, the higher the country’s rate of breast cancer. And so she gave up eating all animal products. And within a few weeks, the tumor on her neck started to itch, and it started to shrink. And when she went back to her doctor six months later, instead of being dead, she was cancer-free. And 15 years later she’s still writing books.

Why is it that not enough nutritionists and medical doctors know about this?

Well, first of all medical doctors are doctors of medicine. They’re not doctors of health, they’re not doctors of nutrition, they’re not doctors of food. They are doctors of medicine. My brother is a medical doctor, and he says, “We never learn anything about food. I learn about what each vitamin might do in your body, but I don’t learn about what foods they’re in. If someone, wants to get that vitamin, I prescribe a pill.”

And if you think about it, if people are healthy from what they eat, there’s not a lot of sickness and there is not a lot of business for the hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry. It’s not the doctors themselves, but the doctors are pushed by the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry to treat disease and not to prevent disease.

Dietitians are not trained to prescribe diets. They’re trained to teach people how to follow diets that are prescribed by doctors. But the ideal diet is not something that is really pushed, because it’s not economically beneficial for anybody except the individual.

With much of the medical community not informed as to the innumerable benefits of a plant-based diet, it is no wonder the misconception exists that this diet lacks sufficient protein. However nothing could be further from the truth.

Most people think you need to have a lot of protein in your diet, and you really don’t need to have very much. Just a couple of ounces of a day is all you need. And it’s easily gotten from plant foods. And you don’t have to even eat things like soybeans, which are very high in protein. You can eat other beans, things like kidney beans, garbanzo beans, black beans, but also vegetables and grains and nuts and seeds. They all have adequate amounts of protein to meet our needs.

In the US, one can purchase a hamburger at a fast-food outlet for 99 cents. A study by the Center for Science and Environment estimated that the true cost of a hamburger in the US, including government subsidies to the livestock industry, the harm to public health from consuming beef and environmental damage caused by producing it is US$200.

What we really should stop doing is stop subsidizing the meat and dairy industry. We have these farm bills that pass every year, and meat and dairy get most of the money, that’s our tax money subsidizing those foods. They’re the unhealthiest foods. And those are the foods that should be the most expensive. Instead they’re the cheapest because of the subsidies.

Every farm animal is bred intentionally so if we stop consuming them, we can stop breeding them tomorrow and there won’t be millions of them to be producing all these pollutants that are destroying the atmosphere and polluting the water, as well as creating all this unhealthy food. We can stop the breeding of farm animals tomorrow.

On top of all the wonderful things that a vegan lifestyle brings to us in terms of health and well-being, it has many other beneficial effects as well.

But if we really care about our health and the health of the environment and the health of other people, and the health of the animals that we’re trying to spare unnecessary suffering, then a whole foods plant-based diet is a win-win-win situation for everybody concerned. We don’t get hurt, the animals don’t get hurt, the beautiful dog on your lap, and the cows, and the pigs, and the chickens, and the sheep, they have the same feelings that that dog does. And if somebody were to snatch that dog off your lap and try to eat it, people would be so upset. And yet we do that everyday with these other animals who have the same feeling of wanting to survive, of wanting to not be harmed.

Our sincere gratitude, George Eisman, for providing such essential information about the plant strong diet that ensures cancer-free, fulfilling lives. May you always enjoy utmost success on your noble path.

For more information on the Coalition for Cancer Prevention Through Plant-Based Eating, please visit http://www.CoalitionForCancerPrevention.org
Mr. Eisman’s books, “The Most Noble Diet” and “A Basic Course in Vegetarian and Vegan Nutrition,” are available at the same website and http://www.Amazon.com

Casey Affleck and Summer Phoenix

Casey Affleck

Born Caleb Casey McGuire Affleck-Boldt on August 12, 1975. He is an American actor and film director. He’s the younger brother of actor and director Ben Affleck and married to Summer Phoenix. He played supporting roles in movies like Good Will Hunting, Ocean’s Eleven and Chasing Amy. He gained recognition and critical acclaim for his work in Gone Baby Gone and The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, which gained him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

But did you know that one of his most important roles was banned from TV networks?

Casey took aim at the meat industry in a PETA public service announcement (PSA) by exposing its abuse of animals, but television networks refused to air it. A toned-down version of the PSA was created just to get it on the air.

In both versions of the PSA, Affleck shares his reasons for going vegan: “When people ask me why I don’t eat meat or any other animal products, I say, ‘Because they are unhealthy and they are the product of a violent and inhumane industry.'” Casey doesn’t mince words about how animals suffer in factory farms and slaughterhouses: “Chickens, cows, and pigs in factory farms spend their whole lives in filthy, cramped conditions, only to die a prolonged and painful death.”

Casey urges his fans to avoid meat—which he aptly calls “poison”—not only because it is the product of a cruel industry but also because it is a health nightmare, “proven to contribute to heart disease and cancer.”

Casey wanted to show his fans exactly what happens behind the scenes of the meat industry—images that most people never see. However, when the networks wouldn’t air the whole truth, Casey and PETA agreed to make a version of the same PSA with softer, toned-down images that the networks would agree to air.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Casey says, “All the videos that the wonderful people at PETA make that I see online and on TV resonate with me each and every time I watch them.” He made his video with the original images because he wanted others to get a glimpse of what goes on in factory farms.

It’s easy to improve your health and help animals, like Casey Affleck does. Take PETA’s Pledge to Be Veg for 30 Days, and we’ll e-mail you our tips on the best places to eat, our favorite recipes, the tastiest animal-friendly snacks, and the most delicious vegetarian convenience food.

Summer Phoenix

Born Summer Joy Bottom on December 10, 1978. She is an American actress, singer and model. She is the younger sister of River, Rain, Joaquin and Liberty. She is married to Casey Affleck. She sometimes sings in her sister Rain’s bandPapercranes. They were also both members of the rock band The Causey Way.

She started as a child actress, having guest roles in Murder She Wrote, Growing Pains and Airwolf. She played the younger sister of Joaquin in the television movie Russkies. She also had roles in several other movies, including Wasted, Dinner Rush, Esther Kane and Suzie Gold. In 2002, she played in the play This is Our Youth with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck at the Garrick Theatre in London.

Together with her friends Odessa Whitmire and Ruby Canner, she opened the vintage clothing boutiques Some Odd Rubies.

Quotes by Summer Phoenix:

“I’ve been vegan all my life for ethical reasons, and I’m saddened that more people aren’t educated in this way of life that my parents taught me. I don’t think anybody eats stuff like burgers and dairy products out of maliciousness but as a result of ignorance and lack of awareness.”

“I think that it’s really unfortunate that the thought of the vegan diet is automatically associated with raw and disgusting food. I just love my scrambled tofu breakfast and there is such a variety of delicious vegan meat substitutes.”

“I don’t like to preach – I really do believe in every man for himself – but if somebody asks me about it then I’ll let ’em have it.”

At age 13 she said:

“I’m a vegan because I don’t believe in hurting animals. First of all, it’s for the animals. Health reasons are just a bonus. I think my contribution really adds up – not killing a turkey for Thanksgiving, not killing a cow every year for a hamburger. I contribute some money to animal rights groups too.”

Nutritionist Jeff Novick on Eating Right

This is an insightful interview with award-winning vegan dietician and nutritionist Mr. Jeff Novick conducted during the October 2011 Healthy Lifestyle Expo held in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Mr. Novick is based in the US and currently serves as vice president for Executive Health Exams International and is the Director of Nutrition for the Meals for Health community project that helps “empower low-income families to achieve optimal health.”

He is also a lecturer for two programs which assist people in transitioning to a vegan diet: the McDougall Program run by famed vegan physician Dr. John McDougall as well as the Engine 2 Immersion program started by vegan fireman Rip Esselstyn, the bestselling author of “The Engine 2 Diet.” He has also produced a line of DVDs on wellness including “Jeff Novick’s Fast Food,” “Should I Eat That? How To Choose The Healthiest Foods,” and “Calorie Density: How To Eat More, Weigh Less and Live Longer!”

Mr. Novick received the Indiana State Public Health Excellence in Health Science Award from the governor of Indiana, and Indiana State University, USA awarded him the Graduate-of- the-Last-Decade Award. He’s been interviewed by national media outlets such as Fox News and appeared in the American documentary “Processed People.”

When I went on a really healthy plant-based diet I noticed a lot of different changes. I didn’t have heart disease, diabetes or any of those problems that drives a lot of people. I was just exploring ways to optimize my life and lifestyle. I had been plagued on and off with allergies over the years and those seemed to go away, most all of them, so now, it’s really an occasional thing that might happen. But the biggest change was my energy levels. I was always an active, energetic person, but it really changed when I cleaned up my diet and changed the way I live. And getting up was a joy now and I just felt so much better.

Animal products are the prime cause of many dangerous health conditions from diabetes and cancer to heart disease. Current research conducted by esteemed nutrition experts such as Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Dr. John McDougall and Dr. Dean Ornish among others, has shown that not only are these diseases preventable but they are reversible too. Eating a whole foods plant-based diet, meaning a diet free from processed foods and any animal products conveys huge health benefits.

I’ve been fortunate to work with many, what we call “immersion-style programs” over the last two decades. And so, I get to see the power of a plant-based diet in a controlled setting where we really get to implement it in a person’s life for anywhere from three to five days to several weeks or more even in some of the places I’ve worked, where we’ve kept people in a residential setting for weeks and months at a time.

And, diabetes goes away, heart disease goes away; high blood pressure goes away; metabolic syndrome goes away; weight loss is, you don’t have to count calories. They get to eat whenever they are hungry till they’re comfortably full. So a lot of the struggles that people have with food and health, just seem to start going away the more they do that. Of course there is valid physical scientific reasons why that happens, but in the big picture, that’s what happens. And in addition, we see things, allergies go away or auto-immune conditions get better; lupus and arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis.

And currently I’m involved with Dr. McDougall, and we’re running a study, on the effects of a whole foods plant-based diet on multiple sclerosis. And so, we are doing that now, it’s been about two years we’re running a study.

Many people who have made the switch to a vegan diet have noticed improvements in their mental and emotional state.

Some of the mental benefits are, sometimes maybe not something that you can directly measure, but I know personally and from working with people over the years, a much clearer mind, ability to think and focus and attention really becomes much sharper. Also, in general, (you experience a) better mood, you feel better, (and experience) less depression and anxiety, especially when you couple it with an active lifestyle. Eating well and exercising and being active have shown to be very effective in reducing mild to moderate depression. So people having anxiety or mental issues, it can also really help.

There is an unfounded concern that by adopting a vegan diet one will not consume enough protein. However this is completely untrue as plant-based proteins are vastly superior to those derived from animals which are detrimental to health. Dr. Neal D. Barnard, founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine noted that “A healthy diet of beans, grains, vegetables, and fruits provides all the protein you need. In fact you are better off getting protein from plant sources. While animal protein can be hard on the delicate tissues of the kidneys, plant proteins appear to be free of this problem. They are also free of the risks of calcium loss and kidney stones associated with animal protein.”

Another one of the myths of a vegan or plant-based diet is not getting enough protein and to be honest, it’s amazing that this one has actually lasted the decades that it has, because it’s virtually impossible not to get in enough protein. If you consume enough calories from whole plant foods, you’re getting enough calories to maintain a healthy weight and you eat a variety of foods, then getting in enough protein it’d be impossible not to do it. So it really isn’t a problem. So again vegetables, you eat a lot of vegetables, you eat a lot of whole grains, and you eat a lot of beans.

Beans are probably one of the best sources of protein there is. What people don’t realize is when you use animal foods for protein, you’re also getting in saturated fat and cholesterol and you’re not getting in any fiber. Yet when you eat beans, not only are you getting in lots of good protein, you’re also getting in lots of fiber, you’re getting in virtually no saturated fat, you’re getting no cholesterol. So when you look at it as a total package, there’s no comparison.

With so much information available today on what foods we should eat as well as the various diets and fads, knowing what is good for us in terms of nutrition can be challenging. Thankfully Mr. Novick has the following useful advice.

And what we look at is the overriding body of evidence and we look at that, it really hasn’t changed that much in 50 years. Fruits and vegetables are still good for you and junk food is still bad for you. And a lot of these peripherals that they argue about aren’t really the health issue.

The basics are really simple, your diet should predominantly be based on fruits, vegetables, starchy vegetables, intact whole grains, legumes with a little bit of nuts and seeds. And those foods can make up all of your diet, all of your calories, and it would be the healthiest diet. It’d be the least processed, it would be nutrient adequate, more than nutrient adequate and that would be the best.

Apart from what we eat, our lifestyles and thoughts have a big effect on our lives. Exercise, clean air and fresh water, all enhance our well-being.

So physical fitness is part of it. In addition, getting in pure air and getting in pure water. A lot of the water is polluted, and the air, most Americans don’t smoke anymore. But for the 20% or so that still do, they put out second-hand smoke and what’s now called third-hand smoke. So, even though I’ve never smoked, I’m exposed to smoke. So it’s important for me to make sure I have fresh air and clean water. I also need to make sure I get adequate sleep, rest and relaxation, and an emotional poise so we’re not too stressed out. And that may be through meditation.

Mr. Jeff Novick also recommends “vitamin S” or sunshine to enjoy the best mental and physical health.

Sun and sunshine is important to us. And again, on an emotional level, we all know it, because we know how good we feel when we get out to the sunshine. And look where people go on vacation and everything. They don’t go to dark caves. They go to the sunny areas of the world and they spend their time out in the sunshine because it makes them feel so good. And we know there’s a Seasonal Affective Disorder where, when the sun isn’t around as much, people get depressed.

Clearly the way to optimize health, wellness and happiness is through the adoption of a whole foods organic vegan diet. This compassionate lifestyle choice not only benefits us and our loved ones but also holds the key to reversing climate change and many of the other urgent environmental problems we face. Our appreciation Jeff Novick, for taking time from your busy schedule to speak about wellness issues and your benevolent health promotion work over the years. Let many more people hear your wonderful message of vegan health in the future.

For more information on Jeff Novick, please visit http://www.JeffNovick.com
Mr. Novick’s DVDs are available at the same website

May all people soon adopt the organic vegan diet, for prime health and a kinder, more caring world.

REMOVING GALLSTONES NATURALLY

 By Dr Lai Chiu-Nan

It has worked for many. If it works for you please pass on the good news.

Your reward is when someone, through your word of mouth, benefits from the regime. Gallstones may not be everyone’s concern.

But they should be because we all have them. Moreover, gallstones may lead to cancer. “Cancer is never the first illness,” Chiu Nan points out. “Usually, there are a lot of other problems leading to cancer. In my research in China, I came across some materials which say that people with cancer usually have stones. We all have gallstones. It’s a matter of big or small, many or few. One of the symptoms of gallstones is a feeling of bloatedness after a heavy meal. You feel like you can’t digest the food. If it gets more serious, you feel pain in the liver area.” So if you think you have gallstones, Chiu Nan offers the following method to remove them naturally.

The treatment is also good for those with a weak liver, because the liver and gallbladder are closely linked.

Regimen:

1. For the first five days, take four glasses of apple juice every day. Or eat four or five apples, whichever you prefer. Apple juice softens the gallstones. During the five days, eat normally.

2.On the sixth day, take no dinner.

3. At 6 PM, take a teaspoon of Epsom salt (magnesium sulphate) with a glass of warm water.

4. At 8 PM, repeat the same. Magnesium sulphate opens the gallbladder ducts.

5. At 10 PM, take half cup olive oil (or sesame oil) with half cup fresh lemon juice. Mix it well and drink it. The oil lubricates the stones to ease their passage.

The next morning, you will find green stones in your stools. “Usually they float,” Chiu Nan notes. “You might want to count them. I have had people who passes 40, 50 or up to 100 stones. Very many.”

“Even if you don’t have any symptoms of gallstones, you still might have some. It’s always good to give your gall bladder a clean-up now and then.”

Good luck.

Why Do Vegetarians Live Longer?

by Kathy Freston  Health and Wellness Activist, Author    www.huffingtonpost.com

 

 

Nearly a decade of extra life — that’s what you get when you move away from eating animal foods and toward a plant-based diet. This is really exciting science for anyone seeking healthy longevity (and who isn’t?)!

According to a recent report on the largest study of vegetarians and vegans to date, those eating plant-based diets appear to have a significantly longer life expectancy. Vegetarians live on average almost eight years longer than the general population, which is similar to the gap between smokers and nonsmokers. This is not surprising, given the reasons most of us are dying. In an online video, “Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death,” Michael Greger, M.D. explores the role a healthy diet can play in preventing, treating, and even reversing the top 15 killers in the United States. Let’s take a closer look at what the good doctor has pulled together…

Heart disease is our leading cause of death. The 35-year follow-up of the Harvard Nurses Health Study was recently published, now the most definitive long-term study on older women’s health. Dietary cholesterol intake — only found in animal foods — was associated with living a significantly shorter life and fiber intake — only found in plant foods — was associated with living a significantly longer life. Consuming the amount of cholesterol found in just a single egg a day may cut a woman’s life short as much as smoking five cigarettes daily for 15 years, whereas eating a daily cup of oatmeal’s worth of fiber appears to extend a woman’s life as much as four hours of jogging a week. (But there’s no reason we can’t do both!)

What if your cholesterol’s normal, though? I hear that a lot. But here’s the thing: having a “normal” cholesterol in a society where it’s “normal” to drop dead of a heart attack is not necessarily a good thing. According to the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Cardiology, “For the build-up of plaque in our arteries to cease, it appears that the serum total cholesterol needs to be lowered to the 150 area. In other words the serum total cholesterol must be lowered to that of the average pure vegetarian.”

More than 20 years ago, Dr. Dean Ornish showed that heart disease could not just be stopped but actually reversed with a vegan diet, arteries opened up without drugs or surgery. Since this lifestyle cure was discovered, hundreds of thousands have died unnecessary deaths. What more does one have to know about a diet that reverses our deadliest disease?

Cancer is killer number two. Ah, the dreaded “C” word — but look at this hopeful science. According to the largest forward-looking study on diet and cancer so far performed, “the incidence of all cancers combined is lower among vegetarians.” The link between meat and cancer is such that even a paper published in the journal Meat Science recently asked, “Should we become vegetarians, or can we make meat safer?” There are a bunch of additives under investigation to suppress the toxic effects the blood-based “heme” iron, for example, which could provide what they called an “acceptable” way to prevent cancer. Why not just reduce meat consumption? The meat science researchers noted that if such public health guidance were adhered to, “Cancer incidence may be reduced, but farmers and [the] meat industry would suffer important economical problems…” Hmmm, so Big Ag chooses profit over health; what a surprise.

After Dr. Ornish’s team showed that the bloodstreams of men eating vegan for a year had nearly eight times the cancer-stopping power, a series of elegant experiments showed that women could boost their defenses against breast cancer after just two weeks on a plant-based diet. See the before and after here (nutritionfacts.org/video). If you or anyone you know has ever had a cancer scare, this research will make your heart soar. Because there is real, true hope — something you can do to stave off “the big C.”

So, the top three leading causes of death used to be heart disease, cancer, then stroke, but the latest CDC stats place COPD third — lung diseases such as emphysema. Surprisingly, COPD can be prevented with the help of a plant-based diet, and can even be treated with plants. Of course, the tobacco industry viewed these landmark findings a little differently. Instead of adding plants to one’s diet to prevent emphysema, wouldn’t it be simpler to just add them to the cigarettes? Hence the study “Addition of Açaí [Berries] to Cigarettes Has a Protective Effect Against Emphysema in [Smoking] Mice.” Seriously.

The meat industry tried the same tack. Putting fruit extracts in burgers was not without its glitches, though. The blackberries “literally dyed burger patties with a distinct purplish color,” and though it was possible to improve the nutritional profile of frankfurters with powdered grape seeds, there were complaints that the grape seed “particles became visible” in the final product. And if there’s one thing we know about hot dog eaters, it’s that they’re picky about what goes in their food!

Onward to strokes: The key to preventing strokes may be to eat potassium-rich foods. Though Chiquita may have had a good PR firm, bananas don’t even make the top 50 sources. The leading whole food sources include dark green leafy vegetables, beans, and dates. We eat so few plants that 98 percent of Americans don’t even reach the recommended minimum daily intake of potassium. And if you look at killer number five — accidents — bananas (and their peels) could be downright dangerous!

Alzheimer’s disease is now our sixth leading killer. We’ve known for nearly 20 years now that those who eat meat — including chicken and fish — appear three times more likely to become demented compared to long-term vegetarians. Exciting new research suggests one can treat Alzheimer’s using natural plant products such as the spice saffron, which beat out placebo and worked as well as a leading Alzheimer’s drug.

Diabetes is next on the kick-the-bucket list. Plant-based diets help prevent, treat, and even reverse Type 2 diabetes. Since vegans are, on average, about 30 pounds skinnier than meat-eaters, this comes as no surprise; but researchers found that vegans appear to have just a fraction of the diabetes risk, even after controlling for their slimmer figures.

Kidney failure, our eighth leading cause of death, may also be prevented and treated with a plant-based diet. The three dietary risk factors Harvard researchers found for declining kidney function were animal protein, animal fat, and cholesterol, all of which are only found in animal products.

Leading killer number nine is respiratory infections. With flu shot season upon us, it’s good to know that fruit and vegetable consumption can significantly boost one’s protective immune response to vaccination. Check out the short video “Kale and the Immune System,” and you’ll see there’s not much kale can’t do.

Suicide is number 10. Oh yes, vegan food even has something good to offer on this one! Cross-sectional studies have shown that the moods of those on plant-based diets tend to be superior, but taken in just a snapshot in time one can’t tease out cause-and-effect. Maybe happier people end up eating healthier and not the other way around. But this year an interventional trial was published in which all meat, poultry, fish, and eggs were removed from people’s diets and a significant improvement in mood scores was found after just two weeks. It can take drugs like Prozac a month or more to take effect. So you may be able to get happier faster by cutting out animal foods than by using drugs.

Drugs can help with the other conditions as well, but instead of taking one drug for cholesterol every day for the rest of your life, maybe a few for high blood pressure or diabetes, the same diet appears to work across the board without the risk of drug side-effects. One study found that prescription medications kill an estimated 106,000 Americans every year. That’s not from errors or overdose, but from adverse drug reactions, arguably making doctors the sixth leading cause of death.

Based on a study of 15,000 American vegetarians, those that eat meat have about twice the odds of being on antacids, aspirin, blood pressure medications, insulin, laxatives, painkillers, sleeping pills, and tranquilizers. So plant-based diets are great for those that don’t like taking drugs, paying for drugs, or risking adverse side effects.

Imagine if, like President Clinton, our nation embraced a plant-based diet. Imagine if we just significantly cut back on animal products. There is one country that tried. After World War II, Finland joined us in packing on the meat, eggs, and dairy. By the 1970s, the mortality rate from heart disease of Finnish men was the highest in the world, and so they initiated a country-wide program to decrease their saturated fat intake. Farmers were encouraged to switch from dairies to berries. Towns were pitted against each other in friendly cholesterol-lowering competitions. Their efforts resulted in an 80 percent drop in cardiac mortality across the entire country.

Conflicts of interest on the U.S. dietary guidelines committee may have prevented similar action from our own government, but with our health-care crisis deepening, our obesity epidemic widening, and the health of our nation’s children in decline, we may need to take it upon ourselves, families, and communities to embrace Food Day ideals of healthy, affordable, sustainable foods by moving towards a more plant-centered diet. If we do, we may be afforded added years to enjoy the harvest.

The Truth behind Your Food

By  Hui-Ming Toh, Auckland, New Zealand (Originally in English) The author is a 17-year-old student in her final year of secondary school. The article was an internal assessment for which she was awarded the top grade of excellence. It is available in 30 languages…

Would you ever open your fridge, pull out twenty plates of pasta and chuck them into the bin, and then, eat only one plate of food? How about leveling fifty-five square feet of rainforest for one lunch or dumping two-thousand-five-hundred gallons of water down the drain? Of course you wouldn’t. However, just eating half a kilo of meat will cause this. Eating meat will cause inefficient use and destruction to our resources and environment, cause immense animal suffering, and have detrimental effects on our health. So, if roasting a dog to complement your mashed potato disturbs you, then why roast any other gentle animal?

Waste Lagoon: Circle Four Farms, a Utah-based pork producer, hosts a three-million gallon waste lagoon. When lagoons like this spill into rivers and lakes as happened in North Carolina in 1995, the result can be environmentally catastrophic.

A UN report has identified that “cows not cars, are the top threat to our environment.” It gives evidence that the world’s rapidly growing herds of cattle is the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife. Farmed animals produce one-hundred-and-thirty times more excrement than the entire human population of the United States and this concentrated slop ends up polluting water, destroying top soil and contaminating our air. Furthermore, their bodily gas and manure emit more than one third of methane, which warms the world twenty times faster than carbon dioxide. Meat-eaters are responsible for the production of one hundred percent of these wastes which is about eighty-six-thousand pounds per second. But, by giving up animal products, you will be responsible for none of these.

Moreover, our taste for meat is taking a toll on our supply of non-renewable resources. A staggering two-thousand-five-hundred gallons of water is needed for the production of each pound of beef, but, in contrast, it takes only twenty-nine gallons to produce a pound of tomatoes and a hundred-and-thirty-nine gallons for a pound of whole wheat bread. Half the water, eighty percent of agricultural land in the United States, almost all the soy bean harvest and over half of the world’s grain is used to raise animals for food. While we are doing this, one billion people are suffering from hunger and malnutrition and twenty-four-thousand children die every day alongside fields of grain destined for the West’s livestock. However, world starvation would be eliminated if our scarce resources were utilized efficiently by converting land to raising crops for feeding people.

Somali Famine Victims: Somalian famine victims line up for food handouts. Producing a pound of beef requires 4.8 pounds of grain, and critics of our modern agricultural system say that the spread of meat-based diets aggravates world hunger.

 

Are you aware that one-hundred-and-thirty million animals are murdered annually in New Zealand? Most animals are raised on factory farms, the system which strives to maximize output at minimum costs. As a result, the animals suffer immense pain mentally and physically every second of their lives. They are crammed into filthy windowless confinement systems and will never raise their families, rummage in the soil or do anything that is natural to them. They won’t even feel the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks, destined for slaughter. Over ninety million animals in New Zealand suffer these conditions and many remain conscious as their throats are cut, then, left to bleed to death.

Another cruel practice farmers often carry out is the deprivation of food from birds for fourteen days in order to shock their bodies into laying more eggs for human consumption. And, because male chicks are useless in the meat industry, each year a hundred million of them are ground up alive or tossed into bags to suffocate. What’s more, at the slaughter house, the chickens throats are cut, and they are immersed in scalding hot water to remove their feathers while many are still alive.

Even nowadays, to mark cows for identification, ranchers push hot fire irons into their flesh as they bellow in pain. Consequently, third degree burns occur and male calves’ testicles are ripped from their scrotums all without pain relief. To add to their suffering, the land which cattle graze on has air saturated with chemicals and these fumes cause chronic respiratory problems, therefore making breathing painful.

Cows used for their milk are repeatedly impregnated and their babies taken away so that humans can drink the milk intended for the calves. They are hooked up to machines several times daily and using genetic manipulation, powerful hormones, and intensive milking, they are forced to produce ten times more milk as they naturally would. This contributes to the immensely painful inflammation of their udder which up to fifty percent of dairy cows suffer from.

Animals on today’s factory farms have no legal protection from cruelty that would be illegal if it were inflicted on household pets: neglect, mutilation, genetic manipulation, and drug programs that cause chronic pain and crippling and, violent slaughter. Robert Louis Stevenson, a novelist and poet said, “We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own.” Yet, farmed animals are no less intelligent or capable of feeling pain than are the dogs and cats we cherish as companions.

This is demonstrated by the frequent reports of cows leaping over a six-foot fence to escape a slaughterhouse, walking seven miles to be reunited with a calf and swimming across a river to freedom. Pigs, too, are insightful animals as discovered by Dr. Donald Broom, scientific advisor to the British government – “[Pigs] have the cognitive ability to be quite sophisticated. Even more so than dogs and certainly three-year-olds.”

The most important step you can take to save our planet and diminish both human and animal suffering is to go vegetarian. A meat free diet rich in complex carbohydrates, protein, fiber, omega-three, vitamins and minerals provides optimal nutrition, forming the foundation for dietary habits that support a lifetime of good health. Compelling evidence can be found in the book “The China Study” by Professor T. Colin Campbell which says, “in the next ten years, one of the things you’re bound to hear is that animal protein is one of the most toxic nutrients of all…risk for disease goes up dramatically when even a little animal protein is added to the diet.” Studies have shown that vegetarian kids have higher IQs than their classmates and vegetarians live, on average, six to ten years longer than meat-eaters. In addition to this, they are fifty percent less likely to develop heart disease and cancer, plus, meat eaters are nine times more likely to be obese than vegans are. Vegetarian foods provide us with all the nutrients we need, minus the saturated fat, cholesterol, and contaminants.

Conversely, many argue that plants are alive too. This is true, but plants have only ten percent consciousness while animals have consciousness equivalent to humans. Since plants cannot locomote, the sensation of experiencing pain would be superfluous. Thus, plants differ completely physiologically from mammals. If you cut a branch or leaves off a tree, it will flourish and grow more. On the other hand, animals do not desire regular pruning. Can you cut off a leg from a cow and expect it to grow four more legs?

Raising animals for food is wreaking havoc on Earth. The environment, resources and our health are deteriorating and although most of us do not actively condone killing, humans have developed the habit, supported by society, of eating meat without any real awareness of what is being done to the animals we eat. It is said that, “one visit to a slaughterhouse will make you a vegetarian for life. Because it is us who created their screams of pain and fear.” So, if you ever decide to roast a gentle animal again…remember you are consuming the flesh of one equivalent to your much loved pets. But, the only difference is that this animal was tortured.

There are many shocking pictures on the following website:

http://www.viva.org.uk/photogallery/galleryindex.htm

The Emotional Lives of Animals

by Marc Bekoff

Grief, friendship, gratitude, wonder, and other things we animals experience.

Scientific research shows that many animals are very intelligent and have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Dogs are able to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes and warn humans of impending heart attacks and strokes. Elephants, whales, hippopotamuses, giraffes, and alligators use low-frequency sounds to communicate over long distances, often miles; and bats, dolphins, whales, frogs, and various rodents use high-frequency sounds to find food, communicate with others, and navigate.

Many animals also display wide-ranging emotions, including joy, happiness, empathy, compassion, grief, and even resentment and embarrassment. It’s not surprising that animals—especially, but not only, mammals—share many emotions with us because we also share brain structures—located in the limbic system—that are the seat of our emotions. In many ways, human emotions are the gifts of our animal ancestors.

Grief in magpies and red foxes: Saying goodbye to a friend

Many animals display profound grief at the loss or absence of a relative or companion. Sea lion mothers wail when watching their babies being eaten by killer whales. People have reported dolphins struggling to save a dead calf by pushing its body to the surface of the water. Chimpanzees and elephants grieve the loss of family and friends, and gorillas hold wakes for the dead. Donna Fernandes, president of the Buffalo Zoo, witnessed a wake for a female gorilla, Babs, who had died of cancer at Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo. She says the gorilla’s longtime mate howled and banged his chest; picked up a piece of celery, Babs’ favorite food; put it in her hand; and tried to get her to wake up.

I once happened upon what seemed to be a magpie funeral service. A magpie had been hit by a car. Four of his flock mates stood around him silently and pecked gently at his body. One, then another, flew off and brought back pine needles and twigs and laid them by his body. They all stood vigil for a time, nodded their heads, and flew off.

I also watched a red fox bury her mate after a cougar had killed him. She gently laid dirt and twigs over his body, stopped, looked to make sure he was all covered, patted down the dirt and twigs with her forepaws, stood silently for a moment, then trotted off, tail down and ears laid back against her head. After publishing my stories I got emails from people all over the world who had seen similar behavior in various birds and mammals.

Empathy Among Elephants

A few years ago while I was watching elephants in the Samburu National Reserve in Northern Kenya with elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton, I noticed a teenaged female, Babyl, who walked very slowly and had difficulty taking each step. I learned she’d been crippled for years, but the other members of her herd never left her behind. They’d walk a while, then stop and look around to see where she was. If Babyl lagged, some would wait for her. If she’d been left alone, she would have fallen prey to a lion or other predator. Sometimes the matriarch would even feed Babyl. Babyl’s friends had nothing to gain by helping her, as she could do nothing for them. Nonetheless, they adjusted their behavior to allow Babyl to remain with the group.

Waterfall Dances: Do animals have spiritual experiences?

Do animals marvel at their surroundings, have a sense of awe when they see a rainbow, or wonder where lightning comes from? Sometimes a chimpanzee, usually an adult male, will dance at a waterfall with total abandon. Jane Goodall describes a chimpanzee approaching a waterfall with slightly bristled hair, a sign of heightened arousal. “As he gets closer, and the roar of the falling water gets louder, his pace quickens, his hair becomes fully erect, and upon reaching the stream he may perform a magnificent display close to the foot of the falls. Standing upright, he sways rhythmically from foot to foot, stamping in the shallow, rushing water, picking up and hurling great rocks. Sometimes he climbs up the slender vines that hang down from the trees high above and swings out into the spray of the falling water. This ‘waterfall dance’ may last 10 or 15 minutes.” After a waterfall display the performer may sit on a rock, his eyes following the falling water. Chimpanzees also dance at the onset of heavy rains and during violent gusts of wind.

In June 2006, Jane and I visited a chimpanzee sanctuary near Girona, Spain. We were told that Marco, one of the rescued chimpanzees, does a dance during thunderstorms during which he looks like he’s in a trance.

Shirley and Jenny: Remembering Friends

Elephants have strong feelings. They also have great memory. They live in matriarchal societies in which strong social bonds among individuals endure for decades. Shirley and Jenny, two female elephants, were reunited after living apart for 22 years. They were brought separately to the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tenn., to live out their lives in peace, absent the abuse they had suffered in the entertainment industry. When Shirley was introduced to Jenny, there was an urgency in Jenny’s behavior. She wanted to get into the same stall with Shirley. They roared at each other, the traditional elephant greeting among friends when they reunite. Rather than being cautious and uncertain about one another, they touched through the bars separating them and remained in close contact. Their keepers were intrigued by how outgoing the elephants were. A search of records showed that Shirley and Jenny had lived together in a circus 22 years before, when Jenny was a calf and Shirley was in her 20s. They still remembered one another when they were inadvertently reunited.

A Grateful Whale

In December 2005 a 50-foot, 50-ton, female humpback whale got tangled in crab lines and was in danger of drowning. After a team of divers freed her, she nuzzled each of her rescuers in turn and flapped around in what one whale expert said was “a rare and remarkable encounter.” James Moskito, one of the rescuers, recalled that, “It felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing it was free and that we had helped it.” He said the whale “stopped about a foot away from me, pushed me around a little bit and had some fun.” Mike Menigoz, another of the divers, was also deeply touched by the encounter: “The whale was doing little dives, and the guys were rubbing shoulders with it … . I don’t know for sure what it was thinking, but it’s something I will always remember.”

Busy Bees As Mathematicians

We now know that bees are able to solve complex mathematical problems more rapidly than computers—specifically, what’s called “the traveling salesman problem”—despite having a brain about the size of a grass seed. They save time and energy by finding the most efficient route between flowers. They do this daily, while it can take a computer days to solve the same problem.

Dogs Sniffing Out Disease

As we know, dogs have a keen sense of smell. They sniff here and there trying to figure who’s been around and also are notorious for sticking their noses in places they shouldn’t. Compared to humans, dogs have about 25 times the area of nasal olfactory epithelium (which carries receptor cells) and many thousands more cells in the olfactory region of their brain. Dogs can differentiate dilutions of 1 part per billion, follow faint odor trails, and are 10,000 times more sensitive than humans to certain odors.

Dogs appear to be able to detect different cancers—ovarian, lung, bladder, prostate, and breast—and diabetes, perhaps by assessing a person’s breath. Consider a collie named Tinker and his human companion, Paul Jackson, who has Type 2 diabetes. Paul’s family noticed that whenever he was about to have an attack, Tinker would get agitated. Paul says, “He would lick my face, or cry gently, or bark even. And then we noticed that this behavior was happening while I was having a hypoglycemic attack so we just put two and two together.” More research is needed, but initial studies by the Pine Street Foundation and others on using dogs for diagnosis are promising.

It’s Okay To Be A Birdbrain

Crows from the remote Pacific island of New Caledonia show incredibly high-level skills when they make and use tools. They get much of their food using tools, and they do this better than chimpanzees. With no prior training they can make hooks from straight pieces of wire to obtain out-of-reach food. They can add features to improve a tool, a skill supposedly unique to humans. For example, they make three different types of tools from the long, barbed leaves of the screw pine tree. They also modify tools for the situation at hand, a type of invention not seen in other animals. These birds can learn to pull a string to retrieve a short stick, use the stick to pull out a longer one, then use the long stick to draw out a piece of meat. One crow, named Sam, spent less than two minutes inspecting the task and solved it without error.

Caledonian crows live in small family groups and youngsters learn to fashion and use tools by watching adults. Researchers from the University of Auckland discovered that parents actually take their young to specific sites called “tool schools” where they can practice these skills.

Love Dogs

As we all know, dogs are “man’s best friend.” They can also be best friends to one another. Tika and her longtime mate, Kobuk, had raised eight litters of puppies together and were enjoying their retirement years in the home of my friend, Anne. Even as longtime mates, Kobuk often bossed Tika around, taking her favorite sleeping spot or toy.

Late in life, Tika developed a malignant tumor and had to have her leg amputated. She had trouble getting around and, as she was recovering from the surgery, Kobuk wouldn’t leave Tika’s side. Kobuk stopped shoving her aside or minding if she was allowed to get on the bed without him. About two weeks after Tika’s surgery, Kobuk woke Anne in the middle of the night. He ran over to Tika. Anne got Tika up and took both dogs outside, but they just lay down on the grass. Tika was whining softly, and Anne saw that Tika’s belly was badly swollen. Anne rushed her to the emergency animal clinic in Boulder, where she had life-saving surgery.

If Kobuk hadn’t fetched Anne, Tika almost certainly would have died. Tika recovered, and as her health improved after the amputation and operation, Kobuk became the bossy dog he’d always been, even as Tika walked around on three legs. But Anne had witnessed their true relationship. Kobuk and Tika, like a true old married couple, would always be there for each other, even if their personalities would never change.

Jethro and the Bunny

After I picked Jethro from the Boulder Humane Society and brought him to my mountain home, I knew he was a very special dog. He never chased the rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, or deer who regularly visited. He often tried to approach them as if they were friends.

One day Jethro came to my front door, stared into my eyes, belched, and dropped a small, furry, saliva-covered ball out of his mouth. I wondered what in the world he’d brought back and discovered the wet ball of fur was a very young bunny.

Jethro continued to make direct eye contact with me as if he were saying, “Do something.” I picked up the bunny, placed her in a box, gave her water and celery, and figured she wouldn’t survive the night, despite our efforts to keep her alive.

I was wrong. Jethro remained by her side and refused walks and meals until I pulled him away so he could heed nature’s call. When I eventually released the bunny, Jethro followed her trail and continued to do so for months.

Over the years Jethro approached rabbits as if they should be his friends, but they usually fled. He also rescued birds who flew into our windows and, on one occasion, a bird who’d been caught and dropped in front of my office by a local red fox.

Dog and Fish: Improbable Friends

Fish are often difficult to identify with or feel for. They don’t have expressive faces and don’t seem to tell us much behaviorally. Nonetheless, Chino, a golden retriever who lived with Mary and Dan Heath in Medford, Oregon, and Falstaff, a 15-inch koi, had regular meetings for six years at the edge of the pond where Falstaff lived. Each day when Chino arrived, Falstaff swam to the surface, greeted him, and nibbled on Chino’s paws. Falstaff did this repeatedly as Chino stared down with a curious and puzzled look on her face. Their close friendship was extraordinary and charming. When the Heaths moved, they went as far as to build a new fishpond so that Falstaff could join them.

An Embarrassed Chimpanzee: I didn’t do that!            

Embarrassment is difficult to observe. By definition, it’s a feeling that one tries to hide. But world famous primatologist Jane Goodall believes she has observed what could be called embarrassment in chimpanzees.

Fifi was a female chimpanzee whom Jane knew for more than 40 years. When Fifi’s oldest child, Freud, was five and a half years old, his uncle, Fifi’s brother Figan, was the alpha male of their chimpanzee community. Freud always followed Figan as if he worshiped the big male.

Once, as Fifi groomed Figan, Freud climbed up the thin stem of a wild plantain. When he reached the leafy crown, he began swaying wildly back and forth. Had he been a human child, we would have said he was showing off. Suddenly the stem broke and Freud tumbled into the long grass. He was not hurt. He landed close to Jane, and as his head emerged from the grass she saw him look over at Figan. Had he noticed? If he had, he paid no attention but went on being groomed. Freud very quietly climbed another tree and began to feed.

Harvard University psychologist Marc Hauser observed what could be called embarrassment in a male rhesus monkey. After mating with a female, the male strutted away and accidentally fell into a ditch. He stood up and quickly looked around. After sensing that no other monkeys saw him tumble, he marched off, back high, head and tail up, as if nothing had happened.

Animal Rescues: Feeling Compassion for Those in Need

Stories about animals rescuing members of their own and other species, including humans, abound. They show how individuals of different species display compassion and empathy for those in need.

In Torquay, Australia, after a mother kangaroo was struck by a car, a dog discovered a baby joey in her pouch and took it to his owner who cared for the youngster. The 10-year-old dog and 4-month-old joey eventually became best friends.

On a beach in New Zealand, a dolphin came to the rescue of two pygmy sperm whales stranded behind a sand bar. After people tried in vain to get the whales into deeper water, the dolphin appeared and the two whales followed it back into the ocean.

Dogs are also known for helping those in need. A lost pit bull mutt broke up an attempted mugging of a woman leaving a playground with her son in Port Charlotte, Florida. An animal control officer said it was clear the dog was trying to defend the woman, whom he didn’t know. And outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina, a dog rescued an abandoned baby by placing him safely among her own newborn puppies. Amazingly, the dog carried the baby about 150 feet to where her puppies lay after discovering the baby covered by a rag in a field.

Raven Justice?

In his book, Mind of the Raven, biologist and raven expert Bernd Heinrich observed that ravens remember an individual who consistently raids their caches if they catch him in the act. Sometimes a raven will join in an attack on an intruder even if he didn’t see the cache being raided.

Is this moral? Heinrich seems to think it is. He says of this behavior, “It was a moral raven seeking the human equivalent of justice, because it defended the group’s interest at a potential cost to itself.”

In subsequent experiments, Heinrich confirmed that group interests could drive what an individual raven decides to do. Ravens and many other animals live by social norms that favor fairness and justice.