Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [41]
PROMISE 4:
You Will Take Yourself Out of Harm’s Way
Did you know?
All food poisoning—all foodborne viruses, bacteria, and antibiotic-resistant infections—comes from animals, including humans. (Yes, even the bacteria carried on spinach and tomatoes. See below.)
Over 95 percent of the meat, dairy, and eggs we eat comes from factory farms, where the animals are pumped full of drugs to keep them alive and to speed up their development and productivity. In fact, chickens get twice the antibiotic dosing that cattle do, because the conditions they are raised in are the worst of the worst and therefore require more medicine just to keep them alive long enough to be killed for their meat.
On average, the immune cells of vegetarians are twice as effective at destroying their targets—not only cancer cells, but virus-infected cells as well—as the immune cells of meat eaters.
In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control reported finding fecal contamination in 90 percent of poultry, 75 percent of beef, and 43 percent of the pork.
Dairy cow and pig factories routinely dump millions of gallons of putrefying waste into massive open-air cesspits, which can then contaminate the water used to irrigate our crops. That’s how a deadly fecal pathogen like E. coli O157:H7 can end up contaminating our spinach.
I recently came across this truly shocking fact: More people per year die from antibiotic-resistant infections than from prostate and breast cancer combined. And the numbers are going up at an alarming rate.
Why? Why have so many infections become resistant to drugs? Because factory farms are breeding grounds for ever more sophisticated bacteria. And why is that? Because when you try to keep animals in horrifically cramped conditions, literally living in their own waste, they are extremely susceptible to germs, so you have to dose them prophylactically (preventively) with antibiotics to increase their odds of surviving long enough to get fat enough for market. With these antibiotics in such widespread use, there is massive opportunity for resistant strains to emerge and flourish.
We call them superbugs. And we humans are increasingly vulnerable to their antibiotic-resistant ways. Farm animals are also pumped full of antiviral drugs, leading to the emergence of drug-resistant strains of viruses. Combined with the stress of confinement impairing the animals’ immune systems, these farms are perfect incubators for new viruses, which are now mutating like never before and becoming increasingly difficult to control.
I’m no expert on viruses and bacteria, so for this chapter I rely particularly heavily on an interview with someone who is—Michael Greger, MD. I recently read Dr. Greger’s book Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching (it can be found free online at www.birdflubook.org), which is about the potential of a deadly flu pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen, and I went directly to him to find out more. In the book, Dr. Greger very clearly delineates how a new virus begins, mutates, and becomes dangerous. And as with so many problems we are seeing lately—water pollution, climate change, you name it—factory-farmed meat seems to be a big part of the cause.
A graduate of the Cornell University School of Agriculture and the Tufts University School of Medicine, Michael Greger serves as the director of public health and animal agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States. His recent articles in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, Critical Reviews in Microbiology, and the International Journal of Food Safety, Nutrition, and Public Health explore the public health implications of industrialized animal agriculture.
According to Dr. Greger, more than 95 percent of the meat, dairy, and eggs we eat comes from factory farms. Not only are dangerous flu viruses mutating because of these concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) but we are also being exposed to some other very serious bacteria