Escape the Meatrix
for Your Health
The data in this book is something the Meatrix doesn’t want you to know, and it works to keep this information hidden from you so you will continue to purchase their products. As you’ll see, the evidence presented in the following pages affects not only your health but the health of our planet because it’s becoming alarmingly clear that is what is at stake.
As I mentioned in Chapter 1, most people on the planet spend their entire lives living inside the Meatrix without ever consciously choosing to do so. My family introduced me to the Meatrix at a very early age. As a result, eating meat was a mindless act, similar to the young woman who cut off the end of her roast without understanding why. We repeat habits and ways of eating learned in childhood without considering all the costs involved.
However, there are many reasons people like me choose to escape the Meatrix. For some, it’s about the animals; for others, they are more concerned with climate change and the environmental impact. Still others choose to live outside the Meatrix to improve their health.
Generally speaking, there are seven reasons for choosing to live outside the Meatrix. I will discuss each of these in the following three chapters. They are: health, pandemics, and emerging infectious diseases; climate change and the environment; and treatment of animals, humans, and spirituality.
Health
The Meatrix is big pharma’s best friend because eating within the Meatrix makes us sick. Yes, that is a bold statement that this section proves to be true. The Meatrix fuels many chronic diseases that plague countless Americans, and big pharma cashes in by advertising drugs to address these health conditions. This may sound cynical, but it’s a vicious cycle, and it’s why I say we don’t have a healthcare system in the US, but a sick-care system.
In his bestselling book Fiber Fueled, gastroenterologist Dr. Will Bulsiewicz explains the powerful impact food has on our health in the following way: the average American eats three pounds of food a day, or roughly one thousand pounds each year. Therefore, throughout a lifetime, the average American eats approximately eighty thousand pounds of food. Unfortunately, for most people, these eighty thousand pounds are composed of the standard American diet, full of animal-based foods proven to be detrimental to our health. Dr. Bulsiewicz says this unhealthy diet often leads to a common symptomology of tiredness, body aches, poor digestion, depression, and a litany of chronic diseases. Unfortunately, Western medicine attempts to counteract eighty thousand pounds of an unhealthy diet with isolated compounds in pharmaceuticals and supplements rather than addressing the root cause: the diet
But wouldn’t it be better if we never contracted these chronic conditions in the first place? As this section will prove, plant-based lifestyles offer protection from, slow down, and even reverse many of the chronic conditions our sick-care system is frantically trying to address.
The following graph from the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker lists 2021’s top eleven causes of death daily in the US. In this chapter, I’m going to present scientific evidence that a plant-based lifestyle can protect you from nine of the top ten leading causes of US deaths. These are not one-off studies, but part of a growing mountain of evidence—all pointing to a powerful and singular choice: a plant-based lifestyle as a potent antidote to the dangerous side effects of our typical Western dietary pattern.
Since joining the plant-based movement in 2008, and based on my research and experiences, there’s no doubt in my mind that a well-balanced, whole-foods, plant-based lifestyle improves one’s health significantly. We’ve all seen the recommendations to eat more fruits and vegetables and fewer animal products, and it makes sense. Fruits and vegetables have many benefits, such as the vitamins and minerals needed for a healthy body.
In fact, LiveScience reports that the United States Department of Agriculture “notes that consuming a phytonutrient-rich diet seems to be an ‘effective strategy’ for reducing cancer and heart disease risks.” Phytonutrients are chemical compounds produced by plants that have antioxidants for combating free radicals and anti-inflammatory benefits. The article also reports that phytonutrients may enhance immunity and improve intercellular
Plant-based foods also provide dietary fiber, which offers benefits “such as helping to maintain a healthy weight and lowering your risk of diabetes, heart disease, and some types of cancer,” according to the Mayo
I’ll now go through the list of the top eleven daily causes of death in 2021 and share research on how a plant-based lifestyle can help prevent suffering from these chronic conditions.
1. Heart Disease
In addition to suggesting we eat more fruits and vegetables, nutritionists often recommend reducing our consumption of saturated fats found in butter, cheese, meat, and other animal-based foods. For instance, research presented by the American Heart Association found that plants with monounsaturated fats—avocados, nuts, seeds, and vegetable oils—are associated with a lower risk of dying from heart disease and other causes, while saturated fats found in animal products increased that
The research followed over ninety-three thousand people for twenty-two years and looked for patterns (not causes and effects). Marta Guasch-Ferre, one of the lead researchers in this project, said, “We have observed a beneficial role of monounsaturated fats for the prevention of cardiovascular and total mortality when plant-based foods are the primary
Thinking of the decreased mortality rate of those eating primarily plant-based monounsaturated fats reminds me of a conversation I had at my gym with Ted, a lifelong runner. He had recently had a heart attack and received treatment typical in the US: a stent and four medications. Curious, I asked if his doctor suggested any dietary changes, and he said no. I about fell over. I thought the doctor would have at least said something about the importance of limiting saturated fats. In today’s world, with all the information now available linking the consumption of animal products to heart disease, I would call that malpractice.
Heart disease and cancer are the number one and two causes of death in the US, and together they account for 46 percent of all A quote attributed to Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, is, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food.” Generally speaking, people seem to fall into the “food as thy medicine” camp or the “medicine as thy medicine” camp. Ted’s doctor was obviously in the latter.
Unfortunately, Ted’s doctor might not be an outlier. Despite overwhelming evidence that consuming animal products can be harmful to one’s health, few doctors ask their patients about what they eat. Researchers in the late 1990s determined that doctors failed to discuss diet and nutrition with their patients in a “comprehensive and effective manner”; unfortunately, little has changed in the past twenty years, as doctors continue to report that they rarely have conversations about diet and nutrition with their
One reason physicians rarely broach nutrition with their patients may be due to medical students receiving very little training in diet and nutrition. According to an article published by US News and World medical students receive an average of only 19.6 hours of dietary education spread across four years of However, “nutrition is a cornerstone of cardiovascular health,” according to a 2017 study published in the journal Current Cardiology “yet the training of cardiovascular specialists in nutrition has been called into
In Fiber Dr. Will Bulsiewicz writes that most medical students spend months learning “the nuances of drug pharmacology, but formal nutrition training can be just two weeks or less.” For Dr. Bulsiewicz, his nutritional training occurred in his second year of medical school. He wouldn’t complete his training to be a licensed gastroenterologist for another ten years. And, during those ten years, his training never included nutrition again. He further explains that even if he provides nutritional counseling to his patients, as a gastroenterologist, he’s unable to bill for the time he spends doing so. As a result, he says, “Our system penalizes doctors for taking the time to discuss
The critical role nutrition plays in health is further confounded when specific medical journals offer advice contrary to the evidence. A blatant example of this occurred in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2019, when researchers recommended that consumers continue to eat red and processed meat at their current levels. The authors’ recommendation was not based on the peer-reviewed science cited in their study, but rather on human nature, saying that people derive pleasure from eating meat and are unlikely to change their behavior. It’s worth noting the study referenced many articles with research funded by the beef and pork
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine questioned whether the articles are mere clickbait, published in anticipation of a media and Walter C. Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said of the Annals article, “It’s the most egregious abuse of data I’ve ever
I believe what we eat has significant impacts on our overall well-being, and whole-foods, plant-based eating is a powerful medicine for the body and soul. But you don’t need to take my word for that. The European Journal of Pharmacology published an article that concluded that “increasing evidence shows that, particularly during the early stages of disease, sustained lifestyle changes are by no means inferior to drug treatment, and often even more efficacious in stabilizing or even reversing the
Thinking of “food as thy medicine” reminds me of something that recently happened in my partner’s life. She has lupus, and her doctors monitor the progression of the disease through bloodwork. Recent labs indicated her potassium levels were low. After saying she didn’t want to go on one more medication, her doctor suggested she try to eat more potassium-rich foods to see if it would bring her potassium levels up to a normal range. Two weeks later, after she enriched her meals with potatoes, avocados, and other potassium-rich foods, her potassium levels were above the normal range. The efficacy of the changes she made in only a couple of weeks is a powerful example of the effectiveness of food as medicine.
Another less personal example of food being powerful medicine can be found in the 2014 Journal of Family Practice study showing how plant-based foods can reverse coronary artery disease in severely ill patients in as little as three weeks. This study, led by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, documents a non-pharmaceutical approach that not only helps prevent heart disease but can also reverse it, even in late
Dr. Esselstyn’s study consisted of 198 patients who adopted plant-based eating. After a mean of 3.7 years, 177 (89 percent) participants had maintained a plant-based lifestyle and were less likely to experience a significant cardiac event. In fact, only one major cardiac event (stroke) occurred in the plant-based group (a recurrent event rate of 0.6 percent), compared to thirteen major cardiac events occurring in the twenty-one people in the non-plant-based group (a recurrent event rate of 62
Similarly, years earlier, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported findings of another clinical trial involving patients who also observed a plant-based lifestyle. This study, led by Dr. Dean Ornish, Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, tracked, among other things, all cardiac events over five years between the control group and the experimental group that adopted a plant-based lifestyle. Over the five-year study, the non-plant-based group had 2.25 cardiac events per patient compared to 0.89 cardiac events per patient in the plant-based
After only one year, the plant-based patients had a 91 percent reduction in reported frequency of angina (chest pain or pressure often due to insufficient blood flow to the heart) while the non-plant-based patients had a 186 percent increase in reported frequency of angina. Additionally, the non-plant-based patients experienced a progression of coronary atherosclerosis of more than twice the plant-based
Getting back to my friend Ted, one of the medications his doctor prescribed him was a statin. Statins comprise one of the most widely prescribed medications globally, accounting for more prescriptions in the US since 1990 than any other. In the US, 28 percent of people over the age of forty take a
According to an analysis by the Cochrane Collaboration, of one thousand people with no history of cardiovascular disease (CVD) treated with statins for five years, only eighteen (1.8 percent) avoid a major CVD
NNT stands for Number-Needed-to-Treat. The NNT website says,
We are a group of physicians that have developed a framework and rating system to evaluate therapies based on their patient-important benefits and harms as well as a system to evaluate diagnostics by patient sign, symptom, lab test, or study. We only use the highest quality, evidence-based studies (frequently, but not always Cochrane Reviews), and we accept no outside funding or
NNT.com also concludes, “After 5 years of daily statin therapy study, subjects achieved a 1.2 percent lower chance of death, a 2.6 percent lower chance of heart attack, and a 0.8 percent lower chance of stroke.” It’s worth noting the NNT website reports the potential risks from taking statins include muscle breakdown, diabetes, and I believe patients would be more motivated to try other modalities, such as lifestyle changes, if they were more aware of statins’ risks and low effectiveness. No patient goes to a doctor asking for a medication that will reduce their chance of death by only 1.2 percent.
The decision becomes crystal clear when comparing statins’ measly protection to only one major cardiac event (stroke) out of 177 diet-compliant patients in Dr. Esselstyn’s study. His plant-based group had a 99.4 percent lower recurrence rate without any negative side
With 28 percent of people in the US over the age of forty taking it’s a financial windfall for big pharma and the Meatrix when people choose to ignore the health impact of the food they eat and instead rely on pills. Don’t forget that, like all corporations, statin manufacturers and meat producers are not looking out for you but their own bottom line. Not only does relying on pills reinforce our dependence on pharmaceuticals, but it also robs millions of people of the opportunity to live longer, more productive lives by adopting healthier plant-based lifestyle changes.
While it seems that many people are content to take medication rather than make lifestyle changes, in the past sixty years, we have seen Americans make a gradual yet dramatic shift away from eating artery-clogging red meat to chicken (jumping from 2.61 billion tons of meat chickens in the US in 1961 to over 19.57 billion tons in 2018) as a way to lower their cholesterol and prevent heart Switching from red meat to chicken sounds like a smart choice, but a recent study’s findings indicate that the move to chicken hasn’t been an effective strategy for those wishing to lower their cholesterol levels.
In 2019, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported that white chicken meat raised LDL cholesterol (low-density lipoprotein, i.e., “bad” cholesterol) just as much as red meat. The researchers, who assumed that only the red-meat-eating group would have increased LDL levels, were surprised by the study’s findings. The study also showed that those who ate the plant-based protein diet had no increase in LDL According to the American Heart Association, LDL cholesterol can build up in a person’s blood vessels, increasing the risk of a heart attack or
While many people made the shift away from red meat to chicken as a way to lower their bad cholesterol, fewer people replaced the animal protein on their plate with plant-based alternatives. Unfortunately, this can have dire consequences for people’s health. In the last sixty years, Americans have simply replaced one bad source of saturated fat with another bad source.
2. Cancer
According to further research done by the CDC, the total number of Americans dying from heart disease is rising. The CDC also reports that cancer deaths have tripled since 1950 and continue to rise as Some medical professionals attribute the rise in cancer to Americans living longer, but “many of the risk factors for heart disease also increase the risk for cancer, especially smoking and poor diet,” said Dr. Mariell Jessup of the Penn Heart and Vascular Center at the University of Pennsylvania (and former president of the American Heart
The same food-as-thy-medicine approach employed by Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Ornish to reverse heart disease can also help prevent cancer. In fact, the Mayo Clinic says that cancer is the number-two cause of death in America, and diet and nutrition alone could prevent up to 33 percent of all cancers. In addition, the Mayo Clinic states, “In fact, vegans—those who don’t eat any animal products including fish, dairy or eggs—appeared to have the lowest rates of cancer of any diet.” They go on to say that plant-based eating is so effective at preventing cancer because plant chemicals (phytochemicals) reduce cell damage and are
In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), of the World Health Organization (WHO), classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen to humans. WHO considers processed meat to be that which “has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes that enhance flavor or improve preservation.” These meats include bacon, hotdogs (frankfurters), ham, sausages, corned beef, beef jerky, and canned meat, as well as meat-based preparations and sauces. WHO designated processed meats as a Group 1 carcinogen because “there is convincing evidence that the agent causes WHO spoke specifically of colorectal cancer, but further evidence from the same IARC study also links processed meats with pancreatic and prostate
Recently I was shopping at our local Good Foods Co-op. These days, to be competitive with Whole Foods, our co-op offers a wide variety of animal-based products. As I approached the checkout lane, I noticed a free-standing display rack of beef jerky—products that, as mentioned above, have been labeled as carcinogenic by WHO. The Meatrix is so pervasive and persuasive that they could garner a prime location in a health food grocery to display their cancer-causing products. (After I spoke with management, the display has been moved.)
According to 2013 data from the Global Burden of Disease Project, 644,000 deaths attributed to diets high in processed meats occur each year globally. Their analysis of data from ten different studies estimated that a daily intake of fifty grams of processed meat increases one’s risk of colorectal cancer by 18 Two pieces of lunch meat or one hotdog exceeds this amount. My childhood was filled with hotdogs and bologna sandwiches for lunch. How about yours?
It’s not only red and processed meats associated with an increased risk of cancers and mortality; dairy products are proven to increase the risk of death from prostate cancer. The International Journal of Cancer reported the results of a ten-year Physicians Health Study that monitored the dairy intake of 926 men diagnosed with prostate cancer. Men who consumed three or more servings of dairy products daily increased their risk for death by 76 percent. This same group had a 141 percent higher risk of death due to prostate cancer than those who consumed less than eight ounces of dairy daily. The study found no evidence of low-fat dairy products offering any protection. The researchers believe the saturated fat, hormones, and calcium found in dairy products account for the increased
3. COVID-19
While the Peterson-KFF chart above lists COVID-19 as the third leading cause of death in 2021, the number of daily deaths it reports, 727, was from August 1–24. As of December 29, 2021, the average number of US deaths due to COVID is 1,243, much higher than August but still a fraction of the record 4,327 set on January 12,
In his frequent COVID-19 updates, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear reminds Kentuckians, “We are going to get through this, and we’re going to get through this together.” One of the things that he says we all need to do is be healthier. He includes himself in this. I mentioned earlier that Kentucky is not a haven of good health. Looking at obesity alone, in 2018, the University of Kentucky reported the state obesity rate was 36.6 percent (and 43.8 percent for ages 45 to 64), up from 21.7 percent in 2000. It’s important to know that obesity has been linked to more than sixty chronic diseases, including higher rates of (see the “Obesity” section later in this chapter).
It’s encouraging to see how some leaders realize the connection between diet, health, and our ability to withstand the current pandemic and possible future ones. In 2020, Mexican epidemiologist Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez, spokesperson for the task force addressing the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico, said, “Decades of poor eating habits in the country have created an epidemic of obesity, diabetes and other related health complications that make its people more vulnerable to the novel
While many others have also observed a link between dietary habits and poor COVID-19 outcomes, no scientific data was available until an article was published in the BMJ in June 2021.
Between July 17 and September 25, 2020, 2,884 healthcare workers from six countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, US) with high exposure to the coronavirus completed a survey. Participants reported whether they followed any dietary pattern in the year preceding infection and their COVID-19 symptoms and duration of symptoms. The study determined plant-based eaters had a 73 percent lower chance of moderate to severe That is excellent news for all those who have escaped the Meatrix and offers hope for those wishing to increase their chances of surviving this and perhaps future pandemics.
You would think when a prestigious medical journal releases data showing plant-based eaters have a 73 percent less chance of experiencing moderate to severe COVID-19, it would get a lot of media coverage—especially at a time when the delta variant was raging, and COVID-19 cases were rising dramatically around the globe. However, most major news media outlets declined to report this groundbreaking and relevant study.
A few months into this pandemic, healthcare workers saw a pattern in those with the worst COVID-19 outcomes. One article noted five preexisting conditions and their role in COVID-19 outcomes: heart disease, chronic respiratory disease, diabetes, depression, and All five of those conditions can be avoided or improved with a plant-based lifestyle.
We just discussed heart disease and cancer (and will discuss diabetes later in this chapter), but what about depression and anxiety? Can dietary patterns lessen the impact of these conditions? The short answer is yes! Escaping the Meatrix gives you more than a healthy body that’s able to meet the demands of a busy lifestyle. It’s also beneficial for your mood. I’ve already mentioned some of the ways that plant-based eating boosts my physical and emotional states. But what does science say?
A 2017 Psychiatry Research article found that “a dietary pattern characterized by a high consumption of red and/or processed meat, refined grains, sweets, high-fat dairy products, butter, potatoes, and high-fat gravy, and low intakes of fruits and vegetables is associated with an increased risk of
A 2016 study published in Nutritional Neuroscience “showed that overall, vegans, and to a lesser extent vegetarians, reported less stress and anxiety than omnivores. More specifically, male vegans and vegetarians reported significantly lower anxiety scores than did male omnivores, and female vegans reported significantly lower stress scores than did female Another article from two years earlier reported similar
So if you want to lower your anxiety and stress, here are ten vegan foods to help you do just that: almonds, ginger root, leafy greens, beans, bananas, soybeans, black currants, guava, bell peppers, and
4. Accidents
A plant-based lifestyle offers no protection from accidental deaths from vehicular accidents, falls, etc.
5. Stroke
If a plant-based lifestyle can reverse even late-stage cardiovascular disease, what about 2021’s fifth leading cause of death in the US, stroke?
In March 2021, the American Academy of Neurology published the findings of a study to determine if a plant-based lifestyle offered any protection from total, ischemic, and hemorrhagic stroke. Participants in the study consisted of 73,890 women in the Nurses’ Health Study (1984–2016), 92,352 women in Nurses’ Health Study II (1991–2017), and 43,266 men in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (1986–2012). All participants were cancer-free and without cardiovascular disease at the beginning of the study. After following more than 200,000 participants, the study concluded a “lower risk of total stroke was observed by those who adhered to a healthful plant-based
6. Chronic Respiratory Disease
In March of 2015, the National Institute of Health found that “the dietary patterns associated with benefits in respiratory diseases include high fruit and vegetable intake…while fast food intake and Westernized dietary patterns have adverse
Another NIH article from June of 2019 reported an association between Western diets consisting of processed and animal-based foods and decreased lung function and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The article further stated plant-based foods and healthy fats have the opposite effect by preserving lung function and preventing COPD. In conclusion, the report found that “the magnitude of effect of diet on lung function is estimated to be comparable to that of chronic Is it a coincidence that the same plant-based lifestyle that reverses heart disease, reduces cancer rates, decreases the risk of moderate to severe COVID, and lowers incidents of stroke also preserves lung function? Clearly a pattern is emerging!
7. Alzheimer’s Disease
According to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a plant-based lifestyle can also improve cognitive brain function and offer protection from Alzheimer’s
Almost everyone wants to live a long, happy life and gracefully age with minimal decline physically and mentally. Do diets rich in the saturated fat and cholesterol found in animal-based foods affect our brains and cognitive function? The answer is a definitive yes.
Currently, 44 million people worldwide live with Alzheimer’s disease, with only one diagnosis in every four people living with Alzheimer’s disease. In addition, 5.5 million Americans of all ages have Alzheimer’s disease, and two-thirds of them are In the US, one person is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s every sixty-six seconds. However, it’s estimated the time will be halved to thirty-three seconds by the middle of the century!
Before COVID, Alzheimer’s disease was the sixth leading cause of death in the US, ahead of breast and prostate cancers. In addition, the average life expectancy of someone diagnosed with Alzheimer’s is four to eight So you can see there’s an Alzheimer’s disease pandemic occurring in the US (and other Western countries).
According to an article from the National Institute on Aging:
The disease is named after Dr. Alois Alzheimer. In 1906, Dr. Alzheimer noticed changes in the brain tissue of a woman who had died of an unusual mental illness. Her symptoms included memory loss, language problems, and unpredictable behavior. After she died, he examined her brain and found many abnormal clumps (now called amyloid plaques) and tangled bundles of fibers (now called neurofibrillary, or tau, tangles).
These plaques and tangles in the brain are still considered some of the main features of Alzheimer’s disease. Another feature is the loss of connections between nerve cells (neurons) in the brain. Neurons transmit messages between different parts of the brain, and from the brain to muscles and organs in the body. Many other complex brain changes are thought to play a role in Alzheimer’s,
But is Alzheimer’s disease caused by genetics or something else? Generally speaking, there are two types of Alzheimer’s disease: early onset and late onset. Early-onset Alzheimer’s is genetic, while the other, late onset, may have a genetic component. Still, risk factors for late-onset Alzheimer’s include hypertension and diabetes, two conditions plant-based living helps prevent. Fortunately, only 6 to 7 percent of Alzheimer’s disease is early onset, meaning most people can avoid Alzheimer’s entirely by reducing and managing risk factors for this disease, which currently afflicts one out of nine Americans sixty-five years and
According to the article titled “Ethnic Differences in Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease,” by Jennifer J. Manly and Richard Mayeux, Japanese-Americans’ risk of Alzheimer’s disease is closer to other Americans than Japanese living in Japan. The same article reports that the Alzheimer’s disease rate is five times lower for Africans living in Nigeria than for African Americans living in Minneapolis. When people immigrate to the US from countries with more plant-based diets, they often replace those healthy foods with the standard American diet. The increased risks for Japanese Americans and African Americans living in the US who adopt a Meatrix-based diet suggest the risk for most Alzheimer’s is not For example, an article from the journal Neuroepidemiology found meat eaters (including poultry and fish) had dementia rates more than double their vegetarian counterparts. The gap increased when past meat consumption was taken into
According to the Alzheimer’s Research & Prevention Foundation website, avoiding a diet high in trans and saturated fats is an excellent way to feed your brain for better
The great news is that avoiding these fats is easy once you escape the Meatrix because very few plant-based foods contain saturated fats and zero whole plant-based foods contain trans fats. Fats from animal products like beef, cheese, and ice cream, increase inflammation and free radicals in our bodies. Of course, free radicals are a normal part of the body’s metabolism, but high quantities of them can damage and even kill brain cells, according to the Alzheimer’s Research & Prevention Foundation, so it’s best to avoid animal-based products, especially red meat.
Of course, we need healthy fats in our diets. According to Harvard Medical School, healthy fats are liquid, not solid, at room temperature and consist of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. A few of the benefits of healthy fats are reducing our risk of stroke and heart disease, lowering bad LDL cholesterol and raising good HDL (high-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, and helping our bodies absorb fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, as well as offering protection from memory loss and dementia. Plant-based foods high in healthy fats include nuts, seeds, edamame, tofu, cacao nibs, and
Research shows that those eating a typical Western diet consuming high levels of cholesterol, saturated fats, and excess calories while eating low amounts of fiber, fruits, and vegetables have an elevated risk for We know that cholesterol and saturated fats in the body create a plaque that can clog arteries. But the identical plaques that clog arteries can also restrict blood flow to areas of the brain, reducing neurotransmitters—brain chemicals that transmit our brain’s messages from one neuron to
Cholesterol also leads to increased oxidation and inflammation (see the section on the Maillard Reaction in Chapter 9 for more information), which harms healthy brain function. The great news is you can lower your risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease by avoiding the saturated fats and cholesterol found in animal-based foods like red meat, chicken, fish, eggs, dairy products, and butter. You can then replace those foods with plant-based foods high in antioxidants like blueberries, pecans, strawberries, artichokes, goji berries, raspberries, kale, red cabbage, and beans. Antioxidants, especially vitamins C and E, lower oxidative stress in our bodies by removing free radicals that are byproducts of
Elevated levels of the amino acid hom*ocysteine are risk factors for both heart disease and memory loss, and we get hom*ocysteine mostly from eating In fact, hom*ocysteine is formed during the metabolism of the amino acid methionine, which is abundantly found in meat, fish, and dairy
Healthy people convert hom*ocysteine into a benign product, but hom*ocysteine builds up in the body when it’s not metabolized properly. This elevation is significant because high hom*ocysteine levels are one biomarker for increased risk of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and heart You can lower your hom*ocysteine levels simply by escaping the Meatrix.
I talk about advanced glycation end products (AGEs) in Chapter 9, but I want to mention here that they are a risk factor for developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. A Meatrix-centered diet is high in AGEs, and elevated concentrations of AGEs may predict cognitive decline. In a 2016 article, Dr. Michael Greger wrote, “If you measure the urine levels of glycotoxins flowing through the bodies of older adults, those with the highest levels went on to suffer the greatest cognitive decline over the subsequent nine Thus, lowering your AGEs is another excellent reason to escape the Meatrix.
If you have a family member with Alzheimer’s disease, you may have a genetic predisposition for it, but that doesn’t mean you’ll contract it. Fortunately, you can decrease your likelihood of Alzheimer’s by reducing the risk factors mentioned above, exercising, and increasing your consumption of whole plant-based foods. In fact, Dr. Chris Walling, Vice President for Education at the Alzheimer’s Research & Prevention Foundation, says, “Plant-based foods are beneficial to the brain and may help prevent Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Research has also shown how plant-based diets significantly reduce depression, anxiety, and
8. Diabetes
As I mentioned in the Introduction, Kentucky has, to put it nicely, a lot of health challenges. For example, the CDC ranks Kentucky fifth among the fifty states with the most cases of diagnosed
But how prevalent is diabetes in the rest of America? According to the CDC, one-third (88 million) of all adults in the US are pre-diabetic (where blood sugar levels are abnormally elevated), and 34.2 million Americans (more than 10 percent of the total population) are living with
Sadly, as a result, diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in Kentucky (although in 2021 it dropped to eighth due to deaths from But the good news is that most of us can avoid this horrifying disease that causes blindness and ravages the body until it brings death. The National Institute of Health reported that “diet and lifestyle, particularly plant-based diets, are effective tools for type 2 diabetes prevention and
9. Other Diseases of the Respiratory System
Chronic respiratory disease, chronic lower respiratory disease, and other diseases of the respiratory system such as asthma are also improved through a plant-based lifestyle.
A randomized controlled trial of the antioxidant intake of adults with asthma found that those who ate high amounts of fruit and vegetables for three months experienced a reduction in asthma exacerbation compared to test subjects who consumed low amounts of fruits and
But it’s not only adults with asthma who benefit from the abundance of antioxidants in fruits and vegetables. For example, the NIH reported that school children aged eight to twelve who ate fruit saw a reduction in wheezing and that children who ate green vegetables had a lower prevalence of both wheezing and
That article further reported that a meta-analysis of twelve cohort studies, four population-based case-control studies, and twenty-six cross-sectional studies also revealed increased fruit and vegetable consumption reduces wheezing in children and is associated with lower asthma risk in children and
In conclusion, the article stated:
A whole foods approach to nutrient supplementation—for example, increasing intake of fruit and vegetables, has the benefit of increasing intake of multiple nutrients, including vitamin C, vitamin E, carotenoids and flavonoids and shows more promise in respiratory diseases in terms of reducing risk of COPD and incidence of asthma
A sixteen-week study reported by Cambridge University Press in June of 2010 found that the immune response to Pneumovax II (a pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine) was more significant in elderly patients who consumed at least five servings of fruits and vegetables daily. The study concluded that “increased fruit and vegetable intake may improve antibody response to vaccination in older people, linking an achievable dietary goal with a potential improvement in immune
10. Renal Disease (Chronic Kidney Disease)
In the 1960s, scientists determined that overall lower protein consumption protected kidneys in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). However, the source of the protein was rarely studied in those patients, but multiple 2019 studies showed there was a big difference. For instance, one study showed that patients with CKD could eat increased amounts of plant-based protein while still protecting their kidneys. In addition, the article found patients with CKD could easily meet all their nutritional-related goals with plant-based
A second article reported that the primary health conditions that cause CKD are lower in those who eat a plant-based diet. Two of the three leading causes of CKD are hypertension (high blood pressure) and type 2 diabetes, which a plant-based lifestyle helps reverse or prevent. The article continues by noting that a plant-based “dietary pattern is associated with a reduced risk of all-cause mortality in CKD patients” and that “plant-based diets should be included as part of the clinical recommendations for both the prevention and management of
The National Kidney Foundation published an article that found “other disciplines of the health care field have used plant-based diets to their benefit in treating heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.” In addition, it stated that “food can be seen as being complementary to pharmacologic therapies for patients with CKD. Instead of running away from these foods, and perhaps incurring harm by doing so, we should be embracing these foods to our collective
11. Suicide
Suicide, the eleventh leading cause of US deaths in 2021, is never an easy thing to discuss. There are innumerable reasons one might choose this route, but poor health, despair about the world, and seeing so much cruelty to humans and animals can play a role. If you suffer from severe depression or have thoughts of self-harm or know someone who does, I strongly encourage you to seek help. The toll-free number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the US is 1-800-273-8255. Also, please look at section three (COVID-19), which discusses lowered rates of depression and anxiety in those following a plant-based lifestyle.
Other Illnesses
The following health conditions did not appear on the list of the top eleven causes of US deaths in 2021 but are worth mentioning because they affect the lives of millions of Americans. A plant-based lifestyle is a way to reverse or avoid these conditions.
Hypertension
High blood pressure (hypertension) is commonly referred to as “the silent killer” and is associated with a Western diet high in processed and animal-based foods. As already discussed, the Meatrix contributes to many of the chronic health conditions in the US, and cholesterol-reducing statins aren’t the only medication big pharma has created to address a common ailment that plant-based eating can reverse or even prevent. In August 2020, the GoodRx.com website listed the statin Lipitor as the number one prescribed pharmaceutical in the US, and the second medication on their list was lisinopril, often prescribed for high blood Lisinopril is an angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor. The renin-angiotensin system (RAS) plays a critical role in regulating our body’s blood pressure. ACE inhibitor drugs like lisinopril prevent the production of angiotensin II, a vasoconstrictor that narrows blood vessels. This narrowing of blood vessels can lead to high blood pressure, which, among other things, forces your heart to work
In 2019, lisinopril was prescribed over ninety-one million times in the US And like those taking statins, patients taking ACE inhibitors for high blood pressure, heart failure, and diabetic kidney disease are on them long term, often for the rest of their lives. Also, like statins, ACE inhibitors have side effects including headache, cough, muscle weakness, connective tissue problems, erectile dysfunction, loss of libido, hair loss, and liver and pancreas
In January 2022, a pandemic-related increase in hypertension in the US was reported. An observational study of about a half-million Americans enrolled in employee-sponsored wellness programs found no elevation in hypertension in the 15 months prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (January 2019 through March However, the same study reported that hypertension increased in the remaining nine months of 2020, a period of lockdowns and self-isolation. From April 2020 to December 2020, the average systolic, or top number, rose by an average of two millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) while the diastolic, or bottom number, saw a slight increase, too. “That’s concerning,” said Luke Laffin, M.D., the study’s lead author and co-director of the Center for Blood Pressure Disorders at the Cleveland Clinic. “On the individual level, that [2 mm Hg increase] doesn’t seem like a lot. But we know that a small increase in blood pressure can cause a significant increase in strokes and heart attacks across the population.” ¹²⁸ The same study reported that nearly half of all adults in the US have hypertension, but only 24 percent have it under control.
Fortunately, lifestyle changes, such as plant-based eating, can often control high blood pressure—an important fact because an article in the Journal of Geriatric Cardiology reported that eighty million Americans twenty years of age and older were living with high blood pressure. The article states that first-line therapies are weight loss and exercise. However, the article continued that a small cross-sectional study found that “a plant-based diet is the more important intervention.” That study found that sedentary plant-based eaters had lower blood pressure than those “consuming a Western diet and running an average of 48 miles per week.” After citing a variety of clinical trials and studies, the report concluded, “The totality of evidence taken from these studies indicates that plant-based diets have a meaningful effect on both prevention and treatment of
Obesity
Like the other diagnoses mentioned above, obesity has been linked to a poor diet. Obesity is a significant problem in the US and other parts of the world and has been climbing steadily for years. Obesity in the US was just over 10 percent in 1975 and has risen every year since to 42.4 percent in 2020. More than sixty chronic diseases are associated with
In 2012, the American Cancer Society reported that one-third of the 572,000 cancer deaths each year are linked to excess body weight, poor nutrition, and physical The World Health Organization also stated that “the risk of coronary heart disease, ischaemic stroke and type 2 diabetes grows steadily with increasing body mass, as do the risks of cancers of the breast, colon, prostate, and other Obesity costs anywhere from $147 billion to $210 billion per year in the US alone and is also connected to absenteeism, with overweight and obese people missing 56 percent more workdays than employees of average weight, which costs employers $4.3 billion annually due to lower work
Sugary sodas were linked to obesity in the 1990s, launching an effort to reduce their consumption. According to the Associated Press, soda drinking peaked in 1998, with the average American consuming about fifty-four gallons per In 2017 soda consumption in the US was at a thirty-one-year low, a trend that is expected to That’s great news, but if sugary sodas were causing obesity, why haven’t we seen a drop in the obesity rates, too?
Obesity is clearly on the rise, but how is obesity determined? Most doctors in the US use the body mass index (BMI) to assess whether someone is a healthy weight, overweight, or obese. This system has its advantages and disadvantages. Critics highlight that BMI doesn’t consider a patient’s age, sex, race, or body composition. However, doctors argue that using BMI gives them an objective, clinical, and non-observational way to discuss body weight, which helps preserve the patient–clinician relationship. BMI is calculated by dividing weight (in pounds) by height (in inches) twice and then multiplying that number by A healthy weight is a BMI between 20 and 25, overweight is a body mass index from 25 to 30, and obese is anything over 30.
If soda consumption is at a thirty-year low and obesity rates are at an all-time high, could the actual culprit be the Meatrix? Between 2002 and 2007, researchers studied 71,751 Seventh Day Adventist men and women with an average age of fifty-nine. The study found that vegans had a lower body mass index (BMI) than any other group—carnivore, omnivore, pescatarian (eating fish), or lacto-ovo-vegetarian (eating dairy and
So it seems in addition to lowering your risks of death from nine of the ten leading causes of US deaths in 2021, escaping the Meatrix is excellent for your waistline! (In fact, it’s worth mentioning that in the diet-adherent group in Dr. Esselstyn’s study mentioned above, each participant lost an average of 18.7
As I said in the opening to this chapter, the Meatrix doesn’t want you to know that not only your health but the health of the planet is what’s currently at stake. Instead, it gaslights you with bogus, industry-funded studies, sacrifices your health, and denies its role in climate change (see Chapter 4) entirely for corporate profit. Fortunately, the National Institute of Health knows and has passed along to the medical community what would help bring healing to their patients: “Physicians should consider recommending a plant-based diet to all their patients, especially those with high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or
This update to physicians was in 2013! Why isn’t this information displayed in every doctor’s office rather than advertisem*nts for insulin and cardiac medications? Why aren’t patients with cardiovascular disease, cancer, respiratory disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline, hypertension, obesity, and diabetes told that one simple yet vital lifestyle change could prevent, reverse, or stabilize their chronic health conditions?
Study after study and report after report recommend a plant-based lifestyle full of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, seeds, and nuts in order to to have a healthier life. And we now know that a plant-based lifestyle can help you not only feel great but avoid common chronic diseases, many of which were the top killers in the US in 2021.
Fascinating Facts
•The average person consumes 80,000 pounds of food in a lifetime.
•The average medical student spends only 19.6 hours studying nutrition in medical school.
•33 percent of cancer deaths are related to poor nutrition and diet.
•An estimated 644,000 people globally die due to processed meat per year.
•Plant-based eaters have a reduced risk of severe to moderate COVID-19 of 73 percent.
•The dementia rate for meat eaters is two times that of vegetarians.
•A study following 71,751 Seventh Day Adventists men and women determined that plant-based eaters had the lowest body mass index of any other dietary pattern.
Pandemics and Emerging Infectious Diseases
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Nineteenth-century Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with that aphorism. It’s true our knowledge of history provides us vital context for the present day and can help guide our decisions as we plan for our future. With that in mind, this section contains many historical references that offer context for today’s coronavirus pandemic. With knowledge comes power, and I hope this information empowers you to make positive decisions for your future, a future firmly grounded in fully understanding and learning from our past mistakes, lest we end up repeating them.
As I’m writing this, the global coronavirus pandemic is far from over. In the early days of the pandemic, some downplayed the seriousness of the virus, claiming it was no worse than the flu. But the pandemic’s impact has been far worse than the seasonal flu. We’ve seen multiple surges as well as new, more contagious variants emerge. One metric we can use to measure the seriousness of the pandemic is excess mortality rates and decreased life expectancy. US mortality rates for the first twelve months of the pandemic increased by 646,514, with 83.4 percent attributed directly to Additionally, the coronavirus has become the third leading cause of US deaths in 2021, and the US has experienced the most significant drop in life expectancy since World War II!
A USA Today story from July 2021 attributes only 74 percent of decrease in life expectancy to COVID-19, with drug overdoses (perhaps indirectly related to COVID-19) accounting for the According to the CDC, in 2020, the life expectancy of white Americans went from 78.8 years to Sadly, the falling life expectancy rate is two and three times higher for the Black and Hispanic Americans, respectively.
In October 2021, ABC News reported that the US had experienced even more deaths in 2021 from COVID-19 than the ten months of the pandemic in This statistic is especially startling considering 2021 saw the widespread availability of effective vaccines and a greater understanding of effective treatments for patients with COVID-19.
Climate change and biodiversity loss (both of which, as we’ll discuss, are Meatrix-fueled) are often drivers of emerging infectious diseases (EID), including zoonosis and
Most scientists agree the environments that give rise to both emerging infectious diseases and pandemics are fueled in many ways, if not entirely created, by human activities. However, the good news is since they’re often of our own making, it’s possible to mitigate the worst-case scenarios by changing how we live our lives. I will speak about how the Meatrix contributes to climate change in the next chapter, but how does the Meatrix contribute to emerging infectious diseases?
The novel coronavirus is the most recent emerging infectious disease to have resulted in a worldwide pandemic. While there has been much debate concerning the origins of the coronavirus, in February 2022, The New York Times reported two extensive studies that point to the wild animal market in Wuhan as the origin of
However, some continue to believe the virus originally escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located only eight miles away from the wild animal This scenario was posed most famously by some senior Trump administration officials in the spring of 2020. Scientists who disagree with the leaked lab theory believe the novel coronavirus has a natural origin, that the virus made the leap from animal to human via contact at the Wuhan market, known as a “wet” market, where one can purchase live rare wild and exotic animals considered delicacies. These types of markets are relatively unknown in the West but are popular in some parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where traditional medicine claims that consuming certain exotic species imparts unique healing properties to the human body.
Sadly, human culpability plays a role in both of the above scenarios when it comes to the coronavirus. In the first, our negligence allowed the virus to escape a lab, and in the second, our obsession with meat and wild animals brought us into contact with a dead-end host of the virus.
It’s been well established that coronaviruses have made the leap from animals to humans in the past, such as the 2002 SARS-CoV outbreak, the first pandemic of unknown etiology in the twenty-first century (I’ll go into a bit more detail on that outbreak below). A February 2021 article reported a probable bat origin to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, saying, “SARS-CoV-2 related viral genome sequences from bats have been reported from Eastern China and Japan, and from pangolins in But, regardless of its origins, SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), as of spring 2022, is still wreaking havoc all over the planet, and it’s not over yet.
I recently ran across a 2008 video by Dr. Michael Greger, who was then Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture for the Humane Society of the United States. In his video, Dr. Greger outlined a history of pandemics. “Medical anthropologists have identified three major periods of disease since the beginning of human evolution, and the first started just ten thousand years ago, with the domestication of
Certainly, hunter-gatherers had infectious diseases. But the concentration of populations due to the advent of agriculture and the domestication of animals was the perfect storm for pandemics to arise. In the video, Dr. Greger said, “When we brought animals into the barnyard, they brought their diseases with
The WHO defines zoonosis as “an infectious disease that has jumped from a non-human animal to humans. Zoonotic pathogens may be bacterial, viral or parasitic, or may involve unconventional agents and can spread to humans through direct contact or food, water or the Zoonotic viruses, such as the coronavirus, are considered novel because humans have no prior history with them and therefore no acquired immunity. Unfortunately, we’ve seen firsthand just how disruptive and deadly emerging infectious diseases can be.
But the novel coronavirus is simply the most recent pandemic to emerge out of a line of emerging infectious diseases that have unleashed ineffable devastation on humans throughout the centuries. So what are some of these emerging infectious diseases, how have they impacted humanity, and how are they connected to the Meatrix?
Smallpox
In the twentieth century, smallpox was eradicated, but not before it wreaked global havoc. Caused by the variola virus (VARV), it is a highly contagious and lethal disease thought to have first infected humans in East Africa around three thousand to four thousand years ago. According to the National Institute of Health, genome testing demonstrates that VARV emerged from camelpox (CMLV) around six thousand years A BBC article estimated that three hundred million people died of smallpox in the twentieth century alone. The total number of victims of this gruesome disease is estimated to be five hundred million people. Researchers believe the combination of domesticating animals (including camels) and large human settlements made possible by agriculture created the favorable conditions for smallpox to
Measles
The measles virus (MeV) is most closely related to the Rinderpest virus (RPV). According to the Virology it’s generally accepted that the MeV evolved in an environment where cattle and humans lived close to each The domestication of cows, like camels and smallpox, allowed for the Rinderpest virus to more easily mutate and infect humans with lethal consequences. In his video, Dr. Greger claimed that in the last 150 years, 200 million people have died from According to the WHO, over 140,000 people died from measles in 2018 alone, with most of them children under the age of These deaths occur despite the availability of a safe and effective vaccine.
I learned in grade school that when the Spanish landed in the New World in 1492, they brought diseases that the native populations had never encountered. These zoonotic diseases brought by the Europeans decimated the native peoples. According to an article by Michael S. Rosenwald, smallpox alone killed 80 to 95 percent of the Indigenous population in the century and a half following Columbus’s landing. Before then, the Americas had no flu, smallpox, or
But why did the Europeans remain comparatively healthy and not contract diseases from the native populations? According to a PBS article, the answer lies in the exploitation of and proximity to animals. The indigenous people of the Americas had no domesticated animals. The one exception, the llama, was geographically isolated from other regions. Also, unlike the Europeans, the Indigenous populations in the Americas didn’t share their living spaces with their llamas or drink their milk, and they rarely, if ever, ate their The colonists conquered the indigenous cultures of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa more quickly due to the zoonotic diseases the Europeans inflicted upon them.
While the zoonotic diseases the Europeans carried to the New World devastated the indigenous populations, evidence suggests that explorers brought back to Europe more than potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco. In what is sometimes euphemistically referred to as “The Great Exchange,” recent scientific evidence indicates that Columbus also brought home a much stronger strain of syphilis. A 2019 Washington Post article reported that historians believe that syphilis was already present in Europe. In 2004, the Organization of American Historians wrote, “The strain that resulted from sexual contact between Europeans and Native Americans, however, was much stronger than the non-venereal version that a few isolated European regions had experienced. This new version was carried back to Europe and spread among the population More importantly for our discussion, according to an October 2021 article, humans are the only host for the bacteria Treponema the source of syphilis, and that no nonhuman animal reservoirs of the disease So it turns out that the one disease indigenous people passed on to Europeans does not have an animal origin.
Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)
Another widely known infectious disease that emerged in my lifetime, before the novel coronavirus, is HIV, which, according to the WHO, has claimed the lives of over thirty-six million people worldwide as of March 2022. In 2020, 37.7 million people were living with HIV or AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), and 680,000 of them died of HIV-related Of course, unprotected sex, a tainted blood supply, and IV drug use amplified the spread of AIDS, but what were its origins?
Scientists traced the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) to a specific type of chimpanzee found in the Democratic Republic of Congo (called Zaire at the time). Scientists believe HIV made the leap from chimps to humans sometime in the 1920s due to hunting and butchering infected primates.
Ebola
Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), one of the deadliest known viral diseases, was first discovered in 1976 when two outbreaks occurred in Central Africa, with the first occurring near the Ebola River. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the Ebola virus infects both human and nonhuman
Our first exposure to this hemorrhagic disease resulted from international logging activities that took humans deeper and deeper into the African rainforest, where they sustained themselves by consuming, among other things, bush meat. Through the actions of hunting, killing, and eating monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees, humans unwittingly exposed themselves to the tainted blood and excretions of primates infected with “viruses particularly fine-tuned to our primate
However, scientists have determined that these primates are “dead-end” hosts for Ebola and that African fruit bats are the likely source of this deadly virus. Bats harbor up to sixty-one zoonotic viruses but they do not become ill from them because they can “maintain just enough defenses against illness without triggering the immune system from going into overdrive. In humans and other mammals, an immune-based over-response to one of these and other pathogenic viruses can trigger severe
An example of this can be seen in severe coronavirus cases where the immune system floods the body with pro-inflammatory cytokines. This flooding creates what’s known as a cytokine storm, which leads to a poorer prognosis and higher mortality. While bats have evolved natural protection from their unusually high microbial loads, the results are often deadly when these viruses mutate and infect a new host that doesn’t have these evolutionary
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)
As previously mentioned, according to the NIH, SARS was the first pandemic of unknown etiology of the twenty-first century. Like COVID-19, SARS is also the result of a coronavirus (named for the “corona” or “crown” of proteins found on the virus’s surface).
On November 16, 2002, the SARS outbreak began near Hong Kong in China’s Guangdong province. Between November 2002 and July 31, 2003, SARS infected over eight thousand people, killing 774—an alarming kill rate of 9.6
How did humans come into contact with the SARS-CoV? According to the CDC, the best available evidence points to the wild palm civet—a nocturnal mammal native to tropical Asia and Civets garnered notoriety in the West via the 2007 film Bucket In the movie, billionaire Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson) and Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman) attempt to experience everything on their bucket lists before each dies of a terminal illness. One of Edward Cole’s list items is to drink Kopi Luwak, which some consider the world’s best coffee. Cups of Kopi Luwak can cost anywhere from thirty-five to one hundred dollars each. Currently, you can purchase a sixteen-ounce bag of wild-gathered Kopi Luwak coffee beans for $399.99 (with free shipping) from Amazon.
But what does Kopi Luwak have to do with palm civets? Civets consume fresh, sweet coffee cherries. The coffee beans are harvested and made into coffee once they have passed through the palm civet’s digestive tract. Yes, we’re talking about making coffee from beans found in palm civet poop.
Before gaining popularity in the West, all Kopi Luwak coffee beans were harvested in the wild. Today almost all the harvesting is from civets held in captivity. On palm civet farms, these nocturnal, catlike creatures are contained in small cages and force-fed a diet of coffee cherries.
In 2015, twelve years after the deadly 2002 SARS outbreak in Guangdong, ABC News interviewed a civet farmer in Bali, Indonesia, who boasted she had over 102 civets in captivity. Some had been in cages continuously for more than six So why are operations like hers allowed to continue when a highly contagious virus has been linked to civets? The answer is the Meatrix is ready to capitalize wherever and whenever it can. If there’s money to be made off the flesh or secretions—or in this case the poop—of animals, humans will, time and time again, find a way to exploit animals.
Swine Flu (H1N1)
In 2009, H1N1, the swine flu, was responsible for at least seventeen thousand deaths. For the first time, using state-of-the-art genetic analysis, scientists were able to determine the precise molecular transformations that allowed the virus to jump from pigs to humans. In addition, the researchers traced the source of the virus to pigs in the Veracruz region of
In his book author David Robison Simon describes the 2009 H1N1 outbreak this way:
A deadly strain of swine flu raced across North America in the spring of 2009, infecting one in every five Americans and hospitalizing a quarter of a million people. …[A] determined group of animal food producers and government officials sprang into action to address the crisis. But it wasn’t the type of emergency response coalition you might expect: its focus was on saving profits, not
A member of the Pork Producers Council feared if people kept referring to the pandemic as the swine flu, the entire pork industry would suffer. During a press conference in April 2009, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsak announced that the “hog industry is sound and safe…this really isn’t swine flu. It’s H1N1 virus.”
I vividly remember the about-face. Almost overnight, all media, governmental, and medical institutions began calling the virus H1N1.
So which moniker is correct? They both are. Despite industry claims, a 2009 Nature magazine article stated that evidence conclusively determined that the virus began “in swine and that the initial transmission to humans occurred several months before recognition of the
By June, however, the name H1N1 had stuck. Why is a name important? Because the Meatrix doesn’t want the name of a disease implicating it in a deadly pandemic when it’s clear that it’s our ten-thousand-year-old obsession with domesticating, exploiting, and eating animals that has unleashed untold death and misery upon us.
The Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918
Another, vastly more deadly H1N1 pandemic was the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which killed fifty to one hundred million people—3 to 5 percent of the world’s population. In the late 1990s, the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology isolated RNA fragments from the bodies of American soldiers who had died in the 1918 pandemic. According to the NIH, “further sequencing analyses suggested that the 1918 virus may be of avian origin and transmitted from birds to humans directly or indirectly, although this remains
According to the Current Opinion in Environmental Science & zoonotic pathogens are responsible for 60.3 percent of all emerging infectious diseases. 71.8 percent of those pathogens have a wildlife origin. In wet markets, wild animal pathogens can come in contact with domesticated animals and find new hosts. These “dead-end” hosts sometimes pass the pathogen on to humans with lethal
COVID-19
One such scenario may have given rise to the current coronavirus pandemic. In response, the Chinese government closed wet markets. But a February 2020 article in The Guardian reported only weeks earlier that China’s State Forestry and Grassland Administration was promoting the idea of wildlife farming to its rural citizens, including civets (believed to be the dead-end host of the 2002 SARS Co-V outbreak) and pangolins (which have been found to harbor SARS CoV-2). Before the COVID-19 outbreak, we knew little about the scale of these wildlife operations, but the Chinese government has since closed over nineteen thousand wildlife
We read earlier that palm civets are exploited to make Kopi Luwak coffee, but what about pangolins? Why are they for sale in wet markets in China? According to National the pangolin—a small creature resembling a scaled anteater—is the most trafficked non-human animal in the world. A pangolin’s scales are composed of keratin—the same type of protein that makes up rhino horns, human hair, and fingernails. Like all three, keratin has no known medicinal value according to Western medicine. Regardless, traditional Chinese medicine highly praises pangolin scales, which are commonly believed to improve blood circulation, help alleviate arthritis, and help lactating women secrete milk. Unfortunately, these beliefs are driving the pangolin into extinction and increasing our risks of even more novel emerging infectious
Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the acting executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, hopes that the post-coronavirus world will put a greater emphasis on preserving biodiversity:
Biodiversity loss is becoming a big driver in the emergence of some of these viruses. Large-scale deforestation, habitat degradation and fragmentation, agriculture intensification, our food system, trade in species and plants, anthropogenic climate change—all these are drivers of biodiversity loss and also drivers of new diseases. Two-thirds of emerging infections and diseases now come from
In the last ten thousand years, our hunger for meat and the domestication and exploitation of animals has unleashed untold suffering for all animals—human and nonhuman. Clearly the Meatrix is a driving force in creating the favorable conditions for humans to encounter other novel zoonotic viruses. Unless we change our eating habits, end our love affair with meat, and discontinue trafficking wild and exotic animals, we’re likely to see more pandemics in our future.
And zoonosis is not limited to our encounters with wildlife. In fact, Western farming practices also contribute to infectious disease outbreaks. According to a PNAS article from May 2013, growing populations, the encroachment by both humans and livestock into wildlife areas, and intensification of agricultural practices together create “opportunities for spillover of previously unknown pathogens into livestock or humans and establishment of new transmission
For profitability, livestock farming, especially swine and poultry, requires systems in which there are high density and low diversity. The combination of these two factors dramatically increases the risk of pathogenic spillover. In such high-density and low-diversity environments, the authors write, “antimicrobials are often used for growth promotion, disease prevention, or therapeutically, which in turn promotes the evolution of antimicrobial resistance in zoonotic A 2020 article published by The Hill attributes the following quote to the WHO: “The greatest risk for zoonotic disease transmission occurs at the human-animal interface through direct or indirect human exposure to animals, their products (e.g., meat, milk, eggs…) and/or their
Speaking of high-density and low-diversity factory farming, in October 2021, ProPublica published a scathing exposé of the US poultry industry’s handling—or lack thereof—of an outbreak of a multi-drug-resistant strain of salmonella known as S. infantis. The article describes how the government and the chicken industry have knowingly continued to sell contaminated meat that has been making some people
Here’s the story: in May of 2018, an outbreak of a virulent strain of salmonella traced to chicken sausages, breasts, and wings made people sick on the East Coast and in geographically diverse areas such as Illinois, West Virginia, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.
Victims wound up in hospitals with stomach pains, uncontrollable diarrhea, and bouts of violent vomiting. Compounding the seriousness of these illnesses was that Salmonella infantis is invincible to four of the five medications most commonly prescribed to treat severe food poisoning.
The government and the media have been more than willing to intervene for public food safety and hold industries accountable when non-Meatrix foods are to blame. When a foodborne illness is traced back to plant-based food products, as was the case in the Mexican restaurant Chi Chi’s 2003 hepatitis A outbreak linked to green onions from Mexico, and the December 2019 E. coli outbreak linked to Fresh Express chopped salad kits, the government stepped in, recalled the products, notified the public, and forced reforms. For instance, due to the FDA’s investigation of Fresh Express-brand salad kits, the “Leafy Greens STEC Action Plan” was put into effect to prevent such outbreaks from happening in the
Unlike the salmonella chicken outbreak of 2018 that no one heard about during the four years before article, the 2003 Chi-Chi’s hepatitis A outbreak was widely reported by the US media, resulting in Chi-Chi’s closing all their sixty-five US locations, in part because they were unable to recover from the bad publicity they received. While Chi-Chi’s no longer exists in the US, without the stigma of bad press, they still successfully operate restaurants
Given the severe nature of the Meatrix’s Salmonella infantis outbreak, you might expect a similar swift response from the FDA, including warning the public, recalling the tainted poultry, investigating the root cause of the outbreak, and forcing changes within the chicken industry. But the investigation by ProPublica indicates none of that happened.
eight-month investigation revealed that while salmonella in poultry plants has been drastically reduced in countries as diverse as Mexico and Sweden, the US lags in consumer safety regarding salmonella in food. The former Head of Food Safety for the World Health Organization, Jørgen Schlundt, who played a vital role in reducing salmonella in Denmark, made this point very clear. During a 2017 roundtable discussion of whole-genome sequencing (touted as the “biggest thing” to happen in food safety in one hundred years), Mr. Schlundt became “increasingly frustrated,” observing the cozy relationship between the US government and the US food industry. “I understand that I’m in the US, but surely this must also be about protecting consumers,” he told the audience. “We are basically only talking about protecting industry here. I thought that…the basic purpose was to protect consumers, avoid American consumers and other consumers from dying from eating Apparently, it’s not. So the poultry industry’s priority, just like the swine industry before, is in protecting profits, not people.
Clearly, the technology was available to significantly increase food safety prior to the 2018 Salmonella infantis outbreak. But because of the close ties between the government and the Meatrix, this same outbreak continues to sicken and kill people. The kind of meat-industry coverup ProPublica exposes is simply one more way the Meatrix puts its own bottom line ahead of public safety.
In the previously mentioned PNAS article, the authors wrote, “Intensive livestock farming can promote disease transmission through environmental pathways. Ventilation systems expel material, including pathogens such as Campylobacter and avian influenza virus, into the environment, increasing risk of transmission to wild and domestic animals.” The article also reported that vast quantities of untreated waste from animal agriculture, much of which is spread on land, contaminates watersheds, and comes into contact with wildlife, creating even more pathways for disease
The Meatrix, and our addiction to animal products, creates these artificial ecosystems where the next pandemic-causing pathogen may emerge. Whether it’s wet markets in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East or factory farming in the US and other countries, humans are playing Russian roulette with the next emerging infectious disease—which could easily wind up being more contagious and deadlier than the current coronavirus. The COVID-19 pandemic is our wake-up call, and our response will be vital in determining our future.
What can we do to help prevent infectious diseases from emerging? The short answer is to escape the Meatrix and become plant-based because growing 40 percent of the world’s crops to feed livestock (70 percent in the US) fuels biodiversity loss and encroaches into wildlife We can significantly reduce this by eating plants and living outside the Meatrix.
Hopefully, the world will emerge from the coronavirus pandemic with eyes wide open about the threat that infectious diseases pose to our survival, as well as the ways that we can increase our chances of survival when the next pandemic emerges—and it will.
The saving grace to come out of the coronavirus pandemic might be a greater awareness of the negative consequences of our collective and personal actions. I believe we can and must make wiser choices when rebuilding our world, leading us to a better, more sustainable, equitable, and compassionate world. Humanity will be better off protecting rather than invading wild animal habitats. We will be better off eliminating wet markets that are breeding grounds for zoonotic diseases. We will be better off growing food for humans, not for animals. We will be better off leaving animals alone to enjoy their lives. We will be better off escaping the Meatrix.
Fascinating Facts
•COVID-19 accounted for 74 percent of the increased deaths in the US in 2020.
•A possible origin of the coronavirus pandemic is the pangolin, which is the most trafficked non-human animal in the world.
•71.8 percent of emerging infectious diseases have a wildlife origin.
•Approximately 500 million people have died of smallpox.
•New-world smallpox killed 80–95 percent of the Indigenous population in North America.
•200 million people have died from measles. More than 140,000 people died from measles in 2018 alone, most of them children under the age of five.
•32 million people have died of AIDS.
48 Will Bulsiewicz, Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, and Optimizing Your Microbiome (New York: Avery, 2020), xvii–xviii.
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Chapter 4
