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Meat Is the New Tobacco
March 5, 2012 Kathy Freston | Huffington Post
For
many years, tobacco companies were able to maintain a strong pro-tobacco façade.
Smoking focuses the mind. It's good for you (doctors smoke!). It's great for
weight loss. It's sexy. It's cool. The tobacco industry spent big bucks to keep
these ideas in the mind of the public for as long as it could.
And for many years after the lethal
effects were universally known and undeniable, some of our nation's smartest and
most successful businessmen continued to believe, because it was in their
interest to believe, that "nicotine is not addictive." (Watch the seven most
powerful tobacco executives of 1994 make exactly that statement, under oath, to
Congress -- not even a decade ago.)
I was reminded of how far tobacco has fallen reading the
New York Times
magazine interview with perhaps the most successful screenplay writer in
history, Joe Eszterhas, who has lost 80 percent of his larynx to tobacco, and
has apologized for his glamorization of smoking in such films as
Basic Instinct.
When I think about the effect of animal products on human health, I'm reminded
of how quickly we've done a national about face on tobacco, and I look forward
to the day when the Times
magazine has a similar apology from someone who promoted animal products --
because the evidence is in and it continues to grow: Animal products kill a lot
more Americans than tobacco does.
The West's three biggest killers -- heart disease, cancer, and stroke -- are
linked to excessive animal product consumption, and vegetarians have much lower
risks of all three. Vegetarians also have a fraction of the obesity and diabetes
rates of the general population -- of course, both diseases are at epidemic
levels and are only getting worse.
But much more important than the vegetarian community's general statistics are
what can be done with the right vegetarian diet: For some years now, doctors
have been not just preventing, but even reversing, heart disease using a low-fat
vegetarian diet.
That's right -- the disease that kills almost as many Americans as everything
else combined can be not just prevented, but reversed, with a low fat
plant-based diet, as documented by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn in
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease.
There's a link from animal product consumption to our country's No. 2 killer,
too: According to the American Institute for Cancer Research, about as much
cancer could be prevented by diet and exercise as is caused by smoking -- and
you know what's causing all that cancer? It's not whole grains, legumes, fruits,
or vegetables. Dr. T. Colin Campbell has documented the link between cancer and
animal products.
There's a lot of money in the meat industry, just like there's a lot of money in
big tobacco. For many years, the tobacco establishment pointed to elderly
smokers like George Burns and millions of others as proof that their
very-natural product could not be harmful. Even long-distance runners and
members of the military could be found smoking a cigarette at the end of a long
run or intense drill.
Similarly, today the meat industry points to the fact that there are an awful
lot of old meat-eaters, conveniently ignoring our sky-high heart disease and
cancer rates, as well as our ballooning rates of obesity and diabetes, all of
which are linked to their products.
Bill Clinton went on what he was told was a healthy diet after his emergency
quadruple-bypass in 2004, and yet he didn't lose weight or feel better, and he
required follow-up surgery in 2010. After that surgery, he was introduced to the
work of Dr. Esselystyn and Dr. Campbell, and he went vegan -- which allowed him
to lose 24 pounds in a year and feel better than ever, as he discusses with Wolf
Blitzer on CNN.Eszterhas wrote in his tobacco mea culpa, "My hands are bloody;
so are Hollywood's. My cancer has caused me to attempt to cleanse mine. I don't
wish my fate upon anyone in Hollywood, but I beg that Hollywood stop imposing it
upon millions of others."
He could just as easily have been writing about animal foods, which is why I was
delighted to read Mark Bittman's recent
New York Times
column in which he noted that meat
consumption is down more than 10 percent since 2007.
It seems that more and more people are catching on to the
perils of animal foods.
In large part, that's thanks to the work of Doctors Esslestyn and Campbell, so
I've also been delighted by the success of the film "Forks Over Knives," an
entertaining documentary that chronicles the success of their work. Ellen and
Oprah have both plugged the movie, but perhaps even more importantly, Dr. Sanjay
Gupta called Forks Over Knives "a great film," and Dr. Mehmet Oz said to his
fans, "I loved it and I need all of you to see it."It may be awhile before
eating a chicken wing is seen, as it should be, as the heath equivalent of
smoking a cigarette -- the meat industry is still more powerful than tobacco has
ever been, and most of the medical establishment is not yet as nutrition-focused
as progressive scientists and doctors like T. Colin Campbell and Dean Ornish.
But the best research clearly points in that direction, and more and more, I'm
seeing cause for optimism. Happy Eating! (hyperlinks removed)
Read more:
Is dairy the new tobacco?
Be sure to visit
our Factory Farming &
Ethics Pages for additional info.
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