The Gift
A basic reason that billions of animals suffer confinement and slaughter is our cultural belief that we need to eat animal-derived foods to be healthy, yet one of the most common motivations many of us have to reduce or eliminate animal food consumption is improving our health!
We can notice our organ of eating, our human mouth. We see how small it is, how small our teeth are, and how we lack long, sharp canines to tear tough flesh as well as the strong, heavy jawbone and jaw muscles of carnivores and omnivores. We notice also how soft human teeth are, compared to the much harder teeth of carnivorous animals that are able to crush bones to gain access to bone marrow. Our teeth and jaw are obviously not designed for ripping flesh and gnawing bones; like frugivores and herbivores.
Our jaw is especially hinged to provide side-to-side movement. This is a jaw construction shared by herbivorous mammals for grinding various types of plant material; omnivorous and carnivorous mammals have jaws that are rigidly hinged and just snap up and down. …The purpose of the dominant enzyme in our saliva, ptyalin, is to break down the complex carbohydrates in plant foods into glucose for energy. These carbohydrates are the fuel our bodies were designed to use; animal flesh contains none.
Unlike carnivores, we don’t have strong stomach acids to quickly dissolve flesh, or short, smooth-walled intestines to pass decaying flesh from our bodies quickly. Instead, we have the weaker stomach acids and the much longer and more highly convoluted intestines of herbivores and frugivores for slowly extracting nutrients from plant foods as they pass through and are broken down.
Our digestive system requires high-fiber foods to keep these intestinal walls clean and functioning properly. Animal foods are not only devoid of fiber but also tend to be more clogging than plant foods as they decompose.
We may best be classified as frugivorous herbivores, designed primarily for fruits, seeds, vegetables, nuts, and succulent roots and leaves. Most physiologists, though, still claim humans to be omnivorous by nature. Yet even horses can be taught to eat venison, and cows, sheep, and goats are taught to eat and relish the flesh of fish, chickens and pigs in modern confinement feeding operations—how much of our daily food choices are the result of being taught what to eat?
Like all animals, we are essentially spiritual beings, manifestations of a universal, loving intelligence that has given us bodies designed to thrive on the abundant foods that we can peacefully nourish and gather in orchards, fields, and gardens. Our bodies reflect our consciousness, which yearns to unfold higher dimensions of creativity, compassion, joy, and awareness, and longs to serve the larger wholes—our culture, our earth, and the benevolent source of all life—by blessing and helping others and by sharing, caring, and celebrating. We have, appropriately, a physiology of peace.
The Constituents of Animal Foods
Eating the large quantities of animal foods typical of our culture’s meals leads to many problems. …Animal flesh is completely devoid of the fiber that we require in our digestive systems and of the carbohydrates that our cells are designed to burn for energy.
The highly touted animal protein that we are all cowed into believing we must ingest in order to be healthy may have toxic properties also, especially in the large amounts consumed in our culture today. Animal foods contain more concentrated protein than plant foods, which can be unhealthy because it is more difficult for our bodies to derive energy from protein than from the naturally occurring carbohydrates in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and other plant foods.
We humans actually need relatively little protein to function well, the excess protein inherent in animal foods drains our body’s energy, which must find a way to dispose of it somehow. Nutritionists understand that our actual protein needs are relatively small: between four and eight percent of our calories should be in the form of protein.
The body, in its wisdom, constantly regulates the blood’s pH, which must stay within a narrow range. With modern Western diets, the body must work hard to keep the blood from becoming overly acidic from the excess animal protein being eaten. To do this, it uses alkaline bone tissue substances such as bicarbonates and calcium. This can lead to the loss of bone density and helps explain the high rates of osteoporosis in cultures where people eat large quantities of acidifying animal foods.
Scientific studies have linked many other diseases with high intake of animal foods, such as heart disease; diabetes; breast, prostate, and colon cancer; gallstones; strokes; and liver and kidney disease. Many books and articles document these findings, but there is little financial incentive to publicize the information, and enormous financial incentive to ignore it and fund pseudo-studies and advertising campaigns to confuse the public about the effects of eating animal foods.
The skin, as the largest organ of elimination, is also severely burdened by the toxins in animal foods, and many of the skin maladies and allergic reactions we experience may be attributable to the body’s attempt to cleanse itself by passing toxins out through the skin. Our skin may be adversely affected by the excess fat and cholesterol in dairy products, which can clog the pores and may contribute to acne, allergic reactions, and excess body odor. Many people comment about how switching to a plant-based diet not only helped them lose weight, but also gave them clearer, fresher-looking skin tone, reducing the need for cosmetics.
The Fat of the Matter
To understand obesity and body weight, we simply need to understand what agribusiness animal fatteners figured out long ago: eating excess calories and fat makes confined herbivore animals fat. The same is true for us. The key is to realize and remember that all foods have just three basic components: carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids (fat). Carbohydrates are the necessary fuel we burn for energy.
Why do so many of us mistakenly believe carbohydrates are fattening? There are two main reasons. One is that our culture has created and mass-produced a completely unnatural type of carbohydrate, the refined white sugar and white flour that are used by the food industry to make junk foods that are also high in fat. …The second reason is that these unnatural refined carbohydrates have become the scapegoat of our herding culture, for the last thing we want to admit is that the source of our obesity and other problems is the animal foods that define us. So we erroneously blame “carbohydrates,” which are actually the healthy and natural fuel on which our physiology of peace is designed to run.
Ending obesity will remain difficult, mysterious, complex, and a losing battle as long as we continue to eat diets rich in high-fat animal flesh, eggs, and dairy products. Of course it is possible to eat a high-fat plant-based diet if we consume large quantities of avocados, nut butters, refined oils, potato chips, or other high-fat foods, but it is very easy and quite natural to eat a low-fat, plant-based diet, and virtually impossible to eat a low-fat diet based on animal foods.
Excess fat puts a considerable strain on our body, and, like a self-imposed prison we carry with us, it can reduce our ability to express, create, and move freely. The fat slows down blood flow, makes the blood gluey, and clogs veins and arteries, causing cells to deteriorate. Unnecessary weight makes the heart pump harder than it should have to, and increases blood pressure. It saps energy and puts a strain on the spine and nervous system. Diabetes is linked with excess fat. The immune system also has to work harder to patrol the host of unnecessary baggage cells that often become dumping grounds for the toxins that come in through eating, drinking, and breathing. They thus tend to be more likely to become cancerous, and indeed obesity has been linked to increased risk for cancer. Obesity often causes us low self-esteem and other psychological problems as well.
Toxins
When we get our protein from animal sources, we bring into our bodies much higher levels of toxic contaminants than we do by eating plant foods directly, because livestock feed grains are heavily sprayed with pesticides and these poisons tend to concentrate in animal flesh, milk, and eggs.
One problem is that diets rich in animal protein put you high on the food chain, not a good place to be. … One consequence of eating high on the food chain is that you take in much larger doses of toxins, because environmental toxins concentrate as you move up from level to level. The fat of domestic animals often contains high concentrations of toxins that exist in much lower concentrations in grains, for example. An independent problem is that the methods we use for raising animal sources of protein further load them up with unhealthy substances.
The industrialization of food production has created large scale Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), also called factory farms, that imprison animals in crowded, toxic environments that reduce labor costs and allow for lower prices of animal foods by relying on cheap fossil fuels and subsidies. To lower costs, the confined mammals, birds, and fish are bred for rapid weight gain and given steroid hormones to further shorten the time between birth and slaughter.
The stress, stench, insects, feces and urine build up, insecticides, and overcrowding create ideal conditions for disease, and the antibiotics and other drugs routinely administered also end up in the animals’ flesh, milk, and eggs. There is virtually no over-sight on the drugs used on animals in factory farms.
The Meat-Medical Complex
We’ve been trained by our eating habits to look without seeing.
The toxic fat, cholesterol, and protein in our diets are the foundation of a huge medical complex that continues to reap profits from our sickness. Weight reduction is a large and expanding industry, with both alternative and conventional programs offered, most of which seem to distract people from the simple truths and complicate the subject to their own advantage. Lucrative pharmaceutical and surgical invasions, such as drugs, liposuction, stomach stapling and gastric bypass, are often preferred by the medical complex to the simpler measure of advising people to eat a more plant-based diet.
With fast-food chain franchises and menus rich in animal products setting the example in hospitals, the medical industry is assured that repairs are temporary and that as patients continue eating flesh, eggs, and dairy products, they will be repeat customers.
The enormous irony is that changing to a plant-based diet is considered more radical even than having one’s body repeatedly stabbed, sawed, mutilated, drugged, and potentially killed. Perhaps it is actually more radical, for in a herding culture, nothing is more subversive to the established order of exploitation and privilege than consciously refusing to participate in buying and eating the animal foods that define the culture.
The Placebo Effect
Our bodies thrive on a conscious plant-based diet, and that this diet is infinitely more compassionate to animals and people and more environmentally sustainable than eating animal foods.
The power of shared, culturally molded belief is enormous. It forms a force field around us, determining our thoughts, attitudes, and actions. In the herding culture into which we were all born, the core attitude is exclusion and domination, and the core action that reinforces this attitude is eating animals. As our culture teaches our separateness from nature, animals, and the divine, it has also taught us that our mind and body are basically separate. Though this dualistic view is being challenged, it still dominates our worldview, making it difficult to understand that what we believe and how we think and feel have direct reverberations in our body, and that the state of our body intimately affects our mind as well.
It was pounded into us practically from birth, by those closest to us and in the positions of highest authority, that we’d be weak or sick if we didn’t get our “protein”—our cheese, eggs, and meat—and their voices naturally still live within us. Subconsciously, when we switch to a plant-based diet, we may expect we’ll feel weak or get sick, and so our bodies may manifest this.
Therefore, when we let go of eating animal foods, it’s important to let go consciously of the ingrained cultural beliefs that we need animal foods to be healthy. We swim in an emotionally charged thought-sea created by generations of omnivores, and this mass consciousness may make it more difficult for some of us to believe at deep levels that we can and will be more vibrantly healthy without eating animal foods.
On top of this, researchers have noticed that placebos are more effective if they are unpleasant. Bitter-tasting and expensive placebos, for example, like bitter and costly drugs, “work” better—because we have to go through some trauma and sacrifice to ingest them, we subconsciously expect their effects to be more powerful.
We find vultures repulsive because they eat carrion, but we eat exactly the same thing! Sometimes it’s euphemized as aged beef. And yet, because we’ve been taught to attribute strength and energy to eating animal foods, that expectation helps our quite miraculous and flexible psychophysiology to partially overcome the essentially disturbing and toxic nature of these foods so we can survive and function. As children, we had no other choice.
There are two other reasons we may experience difficulty switching to a plant-based diet. One is that when we stop ingesting the saturated fat, cholesterol, and other toxins in animal foods, our body may take this as a welcome opportunity to clean house. Fruits and vegetables are natural blood cleansers and detoxifiers, and as our body switches from a mode of survival and of storing toxins away in our fat cells to a mode of cleansing, renewing, and reducing the fat cells, stored toxins begin to flow into our bloodstream to be eliminated. Instead of feeling better, we may feel worse for a week or two as drug and toxin residues are cleaned out. This is actually a cause for rejoicing because those poisons are no longer lingering in our tissues. Keep in mind that if we go to a medical practitioner for advice during this cleansing time, we will probably find that he or she is antagonistic to a plant-based diet and may derail the beneficent cleansing, warning us of the dangers of “fad diets” and counseling us that we “need” animal foods to be healthy.
It’s helpful to remember that with so much medical information to be conveyed in medical schools, teaching nutrition is a low priority. Most doctors know little about nutrition because less than a quarter of medical schools have a single course in nutrition, and what little they do learn is heavily influenced by the meat, dairy, and egg industries as well as by our culture’s underlying orientation.
There is no similar force advocating for plant foods. It’s well known that the animal food establishment funds university research, publishes promotional pieces posing as educational materials, and engages in questionable arrangements with professional medical research organizations.
An old saying has it that if we spend our money in the first half of our life on a rich, meat-based diet, we’ll spend our money in the second half of our life on doctors. So when we stop eating animal foods, we may feel worse for a few weeks as we cleanse, but the benefits of the change are clear.
When our intelligence is reduced, we use drugs to force our body as we would force an innocent animal. For example, when our body in its wisdom attempts to cleanse itself of the congestion and toxins introduced to it through our diet, and generates a cold or fever to aid in this cleansing process, we often ingest pharmaceuticals in order to try to suppress the uncomfortable symptoms, thus derailing the natural healing process.
Intelligence would realize that our body is our most precious friend. It works ceaselessly to maintain health and harmony and is our vehicle for expression and experience in this world. What could be more valuable and worthy of care and protection? It never works against us, but always does its best with whatever it has to work with. It is a shame that so many of these immeasurably valuable gifts from the loving source of all life, beautiful expressions of spiritual creativity, are distracted and harmed unnecessarily, saddled with heavy burdens that were never intended or foreseen by nature, and tragically destroyed by ignorance, fear, and a lack of caring. Radiant physical health is such a treasure; yet how rare it is today, particularly among those of us who abuse animals for food.
