Name:QuebecIndieAnna •
Title: Forks Over Knives, World Peace & Whole •
Date posted: 08/19/13 4:45
Q: .
Monday August 19th 2013 00:11 a.m.
Hello cyberspace abyss.
I watched "Forks Over Knives" recently.
It is a report on why we all should stop eating animal protein.
It reports that growing edible plants (instead of growing meat to eat), would do 2 things in one simple step :
- solve world food shortages
- reduce the healthcare bills by 90 %
...Oh my gosh! This documentary also reports that the US government spends 5 times more on healthcare than it does on DEFENSE !
Fell off my couch on that one.
Flipped to another channel on the TV :
- ranchers in the drought-ridden US are paying a fortune to bring in hay and corn to feed their cattle, in order to fatten them up so they can sell them for the meat.
- why not divert the Mississippi, irrigate, and sew edible plants?
They did that with the Jordan in Israel, no?
I would like to list the sequence of events between 1974 and 2012 that produced the knowledge in the documentary "Forks Over Knives". It is fascinating. Just fascinating.
A soft-spoken man by the name of Campbell (born in 1933) grew up to be a researcher in the field of nutrition.
Esselstyn (born in 1934), grew up to be a breast-cancer surgeon and then he morphed into treating his heart-diseased patients with diet.
Strange that these two farm boys who milked cows every morning have come to believe that consuming beef protein kills.
These two men would come to that conclusion thanks to something China's Premier Zhou Enlai did.
Zhou Enlai was Premier of China from 1949 to 1976.
In 1974, because he himself was diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer, he commissioned 650 thousand researcher in China to collect information 900 million people, resulting, years after his death, in 1981, in a now famous China Cancer Atlas.
What an incredible undertaking!
I am still amazed by this feat.
This Cancer Atlas of China would be shown to Campbell by a Chinese doctor by the name of Chen, because Chen went to Cornell University in 1980.
These two men (Chen and Campbell), noting a 400 fold difference in disease prevalence from one county to another in China, and at the same time, noting only 2 fold differences in disease prevalence from one state to another in the US,
decided to do further research to try to create another atlas of China, this time, not on cancer occurrence, but of nutritional habits.
They would then compare the data from the two 'atlases'.
Why are these 2 studies so amazing?
Because China is (was) a place where people eat what is produced locally; that is why the two men (Chen and Campbell) noted a 400 fold difference in cancer rates from one county to another in China.
In 1983, they began to analyze the nutritional data they collected.
Analyzing the data and comparing their nutritional data to Zhou Enlai's cancer atlas data would take years.
What Chen and Campbell came up with would lead Esselstyn (the doctor trying to reverse heart disease) (in 1990) to make one major change to his clinical work :
the elimination of dairy products from the diet of his patients.
My brain is still processing it all.
One of the Youtube Esselstyn clips jarred me tremendously :
- he goes off to MacDonalds or Burger King with a bus load of athletes
- he makes them eat a different meal
- he takes their blood before and after the meal
He shows that a single meal of the wrong food can cause plaque in the vascular system.
I want to eat poutine tonight.
And a small pizza.
My brain tells me I have to eat only a whole foods, plant-based diet for 4 years before I risk having another slice of pizza or another poutine.
Oh, there is one famous person who has been on the hearth-disease-reversing diet for a while: former President Bill Clinton. I thought he was ill, because of significant weight loss in the past couple of years. Apparently not. He has changed what he eats.
Boy, to I have to kick myself in the butt.
I want to have a final poutine, pizza fling.
My brain says "Wait for 5 years".
Oh, the title of this page :
- the first part, you probably get
- the last word is the title of Campbell latest book (Whole)
- the middle part of the title of this page just sounded good.
