Raw Living Foods Lifestyle - chiDiet.net

Macho Men Need Protein and Meat, Right?

A common myth has it that bodybuilders, musclemen, warriors and other macho men need lots of meat and protein, right?

That's a common misconception.

Archeological evidence shows that ancient Roman Gladiators were vegans. In fact, the entire Roman army went on a vegan diet when they went to war.

Here's a fun video by Dr. John McDougall, MD, describing recent archeological finds:

http://is.gd/dI3X5

A Guide to Organic Gardener's Composting

In reviewing my composting procedures here on the farm in Georgia, I came across this really handy, informative book. Through special arrangements with the publisher, I'm able to share it with you. It's 272 pages, in PDF format.

From the foreword, by Ann Lovejoy:

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Back in the '70's, I made the momentous move from the East Coast to the West and quickly discovered that much of my garden knowledge needed an update. Seattle's climate was unlike anything I had experienced in Massachusetts or Ohio or Colorado, and many of my favorite vegetables simply didn't grow well.

A friend steered me to a new seed company, a tiny business called Territorial Seed, unique in that, rather than trying to tout its wares all over the country, it would only sell to people living west of the Cascade Mountains. Every vegetable and cover crop listed had been carefully tested and selected by Steve Solomon for its performance in the maritime Northwest.

The 1980's saw the revival of regional gardening, a concept once widely accepted, but since lost to the sweeping homogeneity of the '50s and '60s. Steve Solomon and his Territorial Seed Company directly influenced the return of regional garden making by creating an awareness of climatic differences and by providing quantities of helpful information specific to this area. Not only could customers order regionally appropriate, flavorful and long-lasting vegetables from the Territorial catalog's pages, we could also find recipes for cooking unfamiliar ones, as well as recipes for building organic fertilizers of all sorts. Territorial's catalog offered information about organic or environmentally benign pest and disease controls, seasonal cover crops, composts and mulches, and charts guiding us to optimal planting patterns.

Every bit of it was the fruit of Steve Solomon's work and observation. I cannot begin to calculate the disappointments and losses Steve helped me to avoid, nor the hours of effort he saved for me and countless other regional gardeners. We came to rely on his word, for we found we could; If Steve said this or that would grow in certain conditions, by gum, it would. Better yet, if he didn't know something, or was uncertain about it, he said so, and asked for our input. Before long, a network of environmentally concerned gardeners had formed around Territorial's customer base, including several Tilth communities, groups of gardeners concerned with promoting earth stewardship and organic husbandry in both rural and urban settings.

In these days of generalized eco-awareness, it is easy to forget that a few short years ago, home gardeners were among the worst environmental offenders, cheerfully poisoning anything that annoyed them with whatever dreadful chemical that came to hand, unconscious of the long-term effects on fauna and flora, water and soil. Now, thank goodness, many gardeners know that their mandate is to heal the bit of earth in their charge. Composting our home and garden wastes is one of the simplest and most beneficial things we can do, both to cut down the quantity of wastes we produce, and to restore health to the soil we garden upon I can think of no better guide to the principles and techniques of composting than Steve Solomon. Whether you live in an urban condo or farm many acres, you will find in these pages practical, complete and accessible information that serves your needs, served up with the warmth and gentle humor that characterizes everything Steve does.

Ann Lovejoy, Bainbridge Island, Washington

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Click here to download your free copy, in PDF format (about 1 MB).

If you want the fancy color cover to the book too, click here (another 1 MB).

Feel free to share this with your friends, but the files are so large I suggest you email them the link to this page, instead of trying to email them the actual files.

Enjoy! I learned a lot from it.
Jim Carey

Health Myths in America, by T. Colin Campbell, MD, PhD - Part 2

by Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Part 2

Principals in Practice: Development and Promotion of Diet and Health Policy

Case #2 is an experience I had in respect to the aflatoxin question: concerning whether or not it caused liver cancer. You may recall when I was discussing the experimental animal data showing that rats administered aflatoxin - a potent chemical carcinogen (causes cancer) for rats - and then subsequently fed either 5% or 20% casein (the casomorphine protein from milk/cheese/yogurt).

I'm sure you'll recall that the animals that were given the 20% casein protein in this particular case, they were the ones that developed the tumors. The animals that were given the 5% did not.

There was this observation, and it was the multiple ways that we looked at that observation, that became so convincing that casein had this particular property of being able to increase cancer growth rate that got me going down the track that I eventually did.

It also suggested that maybe antitoxin really is not that important as had been expected back in the 60's. When aflatoxin was first discovered, it being a mold toxin being present in peanuts and corn, when it was first discovered as being so potent in causing liver cancer in rats, there was a lot of concern and rightfully so, about the possibility that it might cause human liver cancer and I know there are a lot of countries where there is a lot of human liver cancer.

In any case, experimental animal studies suggested that maybe low levels of aflatoxin consumed by humans was not the main player in causing liver cancer. Rather, it seemed that nutrition, particularly protein intake and dairy even more particularly, was involved in this. So it remained an open question for some 15 or 20 years.

I think from the time I started this work as to whether aflatoxin was a significant human carcinogen, or whether it was something else like nutrition. I should also add something else that has been subsequently discovered like hepatitis B virus, which incidentally is a very significant factor in causing liver cancer but I won't have an opportunity to get into the details of that.

So, the question remained open: was aflatoxin really important or not? I mean there were huge amounts of money being spent in various countries around the world, especially through international agencies being spent to try and bring under control the amount of moldy peanuts that may be present that were designed for human consumption. Or, the amount of moldy corn that was destined for either human or animal consumption especially animals that may in turn be consumed by humans.

And so this notion had arisen in many communities around the world both regulatory communities and the public was that here we have this aflatoxin compound, the most carcinogenic chemical ever discovered and it could be the answer to why people get liver cancer in areas of the world where aflatoxin consumption was thought to be higher.

We had an opportunity in our China Study to explore this question in more depth and breadth than all the rest of the studies put together... There was already supporting evidence that aflatoxin might be important. In contrast, there was also evidence from chemical studies that aflatoxin was not carcinogenic for humans at all. In fact, there was very strong evidence to indicate that it did not play a role in human liver cancer.

So the question became of great interest, not just to the aflatoxin liver cancer, hepatitis scientific communities, but also it became of interest in terms of just basic cancer itself. What was important? Was it the chemical carcinogen? Was it the virus? Was it nutrition? What was it? So in our study in China we had an opportunity of looking at this question from a rather broad point of view, measuring all kinds of nutritional characteristics as you may recall.

We also measured aflatoxin exposure in 3 different ways and using one of the ways was very precise and a very good method. In fact, it was the best method that was available at the time. We did this study and we had a total of 65 communities to compare as opposed to 17, which was a total of all the other earlier studies. We also looked at hepatitis B virus exposure and a whole host of different factors that may be related to liver cancer.
So, we really had an opportunity to look from a very broad perspective to see whether aflatoxin was involved or not.

I should also point out that in that study, we had a big range of cancer mortality rates for the different communities that we were examining, so we had a big broad range of liver cancer rates, of aflatoxin exposure and of nutritional characteristics. It was ideal to have a fairly careful evaluation of this question.

The aflatoxin analysis was done by a chemist who is now at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine - a chemist who had begun to distinguish himself and his chemical work,and who believed very strongly in the idea that this carcinogen was terribly important for us to bring under control. I basically made arrangements for him to do the analysis of the urine samples that we got from the subjects in our studies. Urine samples incidentally being collected because that's the way we measured aflatoxin exposure simply by measuring how much of the aflatoxin metabolite came out of the urine. So our study was done, we sent our samples to him and he very carefully analyzed all thee urine samples and much to his displeasure, there was no relationship to aflatoxin intake.

In fact, if anything, it almost suggested that the higher aflatoxin intake, the lower the risk of liver cancer. So, I say that, because there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever that aflatoxin had anything to do with human liver cancer.

This came at a time when the international and national agencies who determine what's carcinogenic and what's not had already concluded that aflatoxin was a very serious carcinogen and they had regulations being placed around the world about how much aflatoxin should be allowed in food. And there were methodologies being developed and enormous amounts of money being expended just on this question concerning aflatoxin exposure.

What did we find? We found no relationship with aflatoxin; interestingly, we found a highly significant relationship with nutritional exposure and the way we determined that was looking at plasma cholesterol which tends to reflect nutritional characteristics and it turned out the higher the cholesterol levels the higher was the risk of liver cancer. Also, we learned that before in our time, that people who had been predisposed to Hepatitis B virus or had been chronically infected by that virus, that they too also had a much higher risk. So what came out of our study, which like I said was the most comprehensive study ever done, was that cancer was largely a nutritional viral disease, at least in the case of this liver cancer. It was not a chemical carcinogen disease, even with the most potent chemical carcinogen that we've ever had.

So why am I telling you all this? The person who actually did the analysis for the aflatoxin became really quite upset about it. He would not co-op with the paper. He would have nothing to do with this, he said  because it basically countered the popular opinions of the day, it ran right up against the face of a lot of regulations that were being established in international trade as to how foods could be traded across borders; which were largely triggered by how much aflatoxin they had.

In any case, he wanted nothing to do with it. (Dr. Flora: "Don't confuse me with the truth!" he shrieked!" :[ )

Instead, he and his colleagues it turned out later also had an association with a small industry to produce an analytical methodology to analyze for aflatoxin.

So, suddenly we came in with this report that suggested that aflatoxin wasn't nearly as important as it otherwise would be, it certainly brought in his interest in that. But more to the point, that group also had an interest in aflatoxin still being regarded as an important carcinogen because if, in fact, we made the assumption that aflatoxin was important, they had come up with a chemical that they thought could be administered as a drug in order to reduce the risk for people who would otherwise be getting liver cancer when they were consuming aflatoxin. Thus, if aflatoxin's not important, than this drug was not important. And, it turns out that the drug that was being proposed for use was a very potent and a very toxic chemical, at least toxic to the liver.

I raised some objections but unfortunately ran into some difficulties with that group because it involved a group of scientists at NIH as well. I pointed out that if they did that study (they wanted to do it in China) first off, they were running a very high risk of causing more deaths and more health problems than solutions based on the information that we had.

They went ahead and did the study, conducted it for a total of eight years, and finally quit, because according to their report, they ended up with unforeseen health problems in these people and I still, to this day, don't know how serious those "unforeseen health problems" were, but the whole project was abandoned after many millions of dollars were spent to do it.

Now I will tell you once again, that particular episode illustrated something to me quite apart from the personal thing. I don't want to get into that, but it indicated something tome about the way we think about science. Those folks wanted to think that cancer was caused by a very specific chemical and therefore treated or prevented by a very specific chemical.

They did not, under any circumstances, want to consider the possibility that nutrition working its ways might be playing a role.

(Dr. Flora: Later, it was shown by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn that the aflatoxin "seeds" itself in us when we eat something that contains it, like moldy peanuts, peanut butter, flour, grain or corn and their products, and then later, when the dairy casomorphine enters our bodies, the tumors begin to grow. When the dairy is withdraw, the tumors shrink. When it is offered again, the tumors grow once more. It's like the glue that takes two types of chemicals to cause the reaction of bonding. The casein is the major ingredient in Elmer's Glue, seriously!  Mold and Pus...)

[Emphasis added.]

To be continued...

Peace and Love Be With You,

Dr. Flora van Orden III
PhD, Nutrition

[Please post your questions as Comments]

What is Truly a Healthy Diet? - Dr. T. Colin Campbell Speaks Out

Dr. Campbell (The China Study), and Dr. Flora's thoughts on his statements.

Dr. Campbell: I’m rather enthusiastic about how impressive the evidence is for this vegan diet and how it relates to health. Of course, I came to this particular point-of-view over many years of being involved in research and policy development as well as lecturing: both in the classroom and in public. Here are questions we need to answer and to understand why they are this way and what to do to change the situation:

Why does the U.S. rank #1 in the world in per capita health care costs, but 37th in the quality of health care, according to a United Nations document?

Why is hospital food so unhealthy?

Why must public schools, who offer federally supported school lunch programs, absolutely require dairy to be served to innocent children, if the schools want to participate in getting free food?

Why are they urging at local level, with the teachers who run the programs, that the children should in fact drink milk when the evidence against dairy is becoming so troublesome and contrary to that mistaken idea?

Why is the school lunch program food so unhealthy, just like the hospital food?

Why do we produce the most expensive food, especially when it is the most unhealthy food? It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

Why is it not known that the #1 cause of death is not really heart disease, as is said by everyone, but instead it’s our ignorance of nutrition? One can actually do the math on that and calculate the percentage of deaths that can be attributed to dietary and nutrition practices and easily come up with that number.

Why does the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health estimate that 35% of cancers can be prevented by diet? But, if you ask how does this occur, although it’s generally understood that fruits, vegetables and grain can help you prevent cancer, they often will say “we don’t really know why it happens and we don’t know how it works,” although they acknowledge again that 35% can be prevented by diet. With this absence of information, and relatively certain agreement that many cancers can be prevented, why then do they only spend 2-3% of their research budget, rather than 35%, to find out why diet works in this way? There is a mismatch here and it’s a mismatch on something that obviously is considered to be so important.

Why do we spend so much money discovering new genes, and of course then protein products, when it will be virtually impossible in the future to ever identify which gene or set of genes causes which disease?

Here’s a really profound idea: who really controls the development of, and the dissemination of, diet and disease information?

Why do research studies make conclusions about plant-based diets when they fail to include human subjects using plant-based diets? A lot of their prospective cohort studies and case-controlled studies, these are human experimental study designs. Those kinds of studies in fact include subjects, who few of whom or usually known of whom, are really consuming a full, plant based diet.

How can they make sound conclusions from these kinds of studies about plant-based diets when they are not really including people who are consuming such diets?

Why does it take a court order to require scientists, who sit on a major nutritional policy board, to reveal their industry ties? I’ve had a lot of experience sitting on these boards. For 20 years I was almost continuously on one of them and it was really a sacred process to have us reveal any associations we may have with the private industry or sector. We didn’t want to have conflicts of interest. But, in more recent times, it turns out that the members of that particular panel did not appropriately reveal through their agency their association with their industry, and one had to go to court to find out that a majority of the members who choose the food we eat had financial ties with (owned stock in the companies that produced) the foods they were recommending. I don’t think that should be necessary.

(Dr. Flora: This should be a time of disclosure, of pure intent, not of special interest groups pushing unhealthy foods on our innocent children and mandating that schools buy them. The people on the boards should not have any stock or own companies that sell foods that are recommended by the nutritional policy board members.)

Why are affected food and drug industries now allowed to fund as much as half (49%) of reports on diet and health by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences? Again, in my day when I was on those panels, I was not aware of private sector money being used to fund any of those studies. But now it seems that there is a new policy and it can fund half of these studies, and this raises a serious question.

In any case, all of these questions are pointing to a serious mismatch of what is known in the scientific laboratory and what is actually being told to the public.

...

Dr. Campbell gave 2 examples and then finished his thoughts off with:

...

The final recommendation that The World Health Organization made, which was more startling than anything I can possibly imagine, is that we could go as high as 35% of calories in the form of protein in order to minimize chronic disease risk. Now in the lectures that I’ve been giving here, at Cornell, most of this information regarding the effects of protein on these diseases of affluence (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, M.S., etc.) tend to occur in the 10-20% range. In other words, as we increase protein intake from 10-11% or so up to 22-23%, that’s when we see evidence suggesting increases in cancer risks, increase in cholesterol concentration, increase in loss of calcium from the bones, etc. We’re already consuming enough protein. The range of protein that we now have become accustomed to in this country is already in excess of what is needed.

In prior years, we always said that 10% protein was enough. That was the RDA. Because of this worship of protein that has existed in this society, most people are consuming diets somewhere between 11-22%. Where all we need is 10%. The average protein intake in the U.S. is about 17% and 70% of that 17% is animal-based. So, we’re consuming protein-rich diets now that one could argue have a lot to do with determining our risk of cancer and heart disease, etc. All of a sudden, the Food and Nutrition Board comes along and says, “Hey, we now have evidence that we can go all the way up to 35% protein, where almost nobody goes, and that’s associated with minimized chronic disease risk.”

Somebody might ask: “Were there any companies involved in funding this report that had an interest in the protein question?”

Well, one of the most powerful dairy conglomerates in the world in fact was helping to do this and much of our protein intake in the U.S. comes from dairy foods. In fact, one can argue that dairy food consumption has been justified to a considerable extent not only because of the presence of calcium, but of protein.

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Dr. Flora: And the tragic truth of the matter is that, thanks to our French researcher, Dr. Kirvran, and his book Biological Transmutation and the Secret Life of Plants, by Christopher Bird, we know that calcium in foods has never been known to approach the human bones. It’s only foods rich in potassium, magnesium, and silica, which turns into bone calcium. Calcium in dairy actually provides nothing helpful. There is so much sodium in dairy that it’s dangerous, but who would want to eat cheese without salt? It’s a marketing ploy, a necessity. Salt-free cheese tastes like what it is, a block of Elmer’s glue, which is made of the dairy protein casein or casomorphine. Cheese decalcifies women; it’s so acid that our bones' calcium is withdrawn to act like a buffer. The more acid protein we eat, the more osteoporotic we get!

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Dr. Campbell: Here we have a Food and Nutrition Board report coming right out in our face telling us that they are going to drastically change the recommendations that we’ve previously had all for the purpose of reducing cancer and heart disease risk. And we find that the people involved in this are associated with the industry. It’s not terribly well known who is associated with whom and how much association they really have. We find that the industry supports this report and I find the entire process appalling.

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Dr. Flora: Working in Washington for the Department of Justice, setting up a program called Juris, I spoke with some of the attorneys there, and they showed me a chart that indicated how just a few people own everything! Shell companies conveniently hide the principals from view of criticism. Change a name to something ‘healthy’ and no one knows you are pushing foods that are bad for our kiddies.

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Dr. Campbell: Now the vast amount of our research has been conducted with an enormous focus and undue focus on the activities of various chemicals. Whether these chemicals be nutrients or whether they be chemicals to stop reactions from chemical carcinogens or whatever. We put so much focus on the effects of individual nutrients out of context.

So, as a result, we’ve lost sight of what whole foods can really do; whole foods that do work in large measure because of their presence of nutrients. It’s the nutrients that are part of these foods that make it work. But to take a nutrient out of context, whether it’s being used as a drug or whether is being used as a chemo preventive agent (one of the popular terms) or whether it’s being used at elevated levels of intake. All that stuff is going on and that’s been the nature of science lately, and I find that my criticism of this approach to our thinking unfortunately almost goes to the heart of what science is really all about and I don’t have time to get into that question. We put so much emphasis on single nutrient effects: what they do that are supposedly good, or whether they’re doing things to block bad things that otherwise would occur.

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Dr. Flora: It’s like scientists are now trying to take apart a butterfly, tear it down to its individual pieces, put it back together again and wonder if it will fly, or why it won’t fly or how they can sell the parts so that we can fly. Fractionated things don’t work. They’ll never work. Homogenized, shot from guns, extruded from little strainers to break down the normal size of the fat, boiled, etc.

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Dr. Campbell: In our economic system, in our free market system, discoveries of new chemicals, new products, new devices, or whatever will go someplace if they have value. What kind of value am I talking about? Economic value that’s inherent in these studies. So, if we make a discovery about a certain nutrient doing this or a chemical doing that, it will reach the marketplace. It can make money, it does have value, but only if insofar as we’re able to protect that intellectual property, and we can do that, with our patent laws, our trademark laws, our copyright laws, are such that that’s what it’s all about. If we can use those laws to protect an intellectual property at least for a sufficient period of time to go to the marketplace, we can make money.

That’s how information from nutrition literature and the biological information that comes from N.I.H. are really valued - maybe not obviously at the dense top with the individual researchers doing this work, they’re not concerned really with this most of the time. The vast majority of researchers are honorable, hard working, dedicated people doing the work and doing very good work, I should add. But, the problem is now that I’m talking about the larger context of what becomes of this information that they research. This info that becomes of value in an economic sense is information that reaches the public.

Once we come to terms with understanding what that’s all about and with the kind of claims that can be made, and I’ve been involved in that game and I’ve seen a lot of the evolution of regulations concerning the health claims, it becomes very easy to see why there’s so much confusion. Most of the information that reaches the public is either coming directly from health claims, most of the public aren’t aware of that, or it’s coming from institutions and agencies that are doing the bidding in many ways for the industry simply because they are populated by people who are setting the guidelines. So, that’s the professional side.

The unprofessional side of this problem is illustrated by the Food and Nutrition Board, the Dietary Guidelines, by my colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, where they had other agendas and other interests because of their personal compensation. Obviously, I consider that to be unprofessional. But, nonetheless, rest assured that that happens.

Fortunately, I think it only happens in a minority of people in the scientific community because I still hold in very high regard the vast number of people working in science. Very fine people, as I said before, just doing their work. It’s just the very small handful of people who get into powerful positions, who have associations with the food and drug industries that then in turn are compensated through honorary and other means or perhaps get money for dong their research. These people end up in very powerful positions often times in the government, in agencies particularly the policy arena, and really mess things up. So, these are my thoughts in terms of the confusion we have to be concerned about and the questions that were raised in the beginning. If you go back and look at those questions, they will be available to you, do a little analysis of the history and go interview some people, look at reports, and I think you will find what I in fact have over these years.

Healing Diabetes - a Straightforward Program

Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days is an independent documentary film that chronicles six Americans with 'incurable' diabetes switching their diet and getting off insulin.

The film follows each participant's remarkable journey and captures the medical, physical, and emotional transformations brought on by this radical diet and lifestyle change.

We witness moments of struggle, support, and hope as what is revealed, with startling clarity, is that diet can reverse disease and change lives.

Additional wisdom is provided by Morgan Spurlock, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Robbins, Rev. Michael Beckwith, and Doctors Fred Bisci, Joel Furman, and Gabriel Cousens.

We've been awaiting this film for months; it's finally been released. Learn more, and get your copy here:

http://tinyurl.com/revDiabetes.

Yours in health and vitality,

Dr. Jim Carey

P.S. "Leave your drugs in the chemist's pot if you can heal the patient with food." - Hippocrates.

P.P.S. Here's another good video about reversing Diabetes and other health challenges with raw, living foods: http://tinyurl.com/chiFood.

5 minute preview video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSUw9SaPLmA

- If you buy through this link, any commission goes to supporting this website. Thank you!

Protecting yourself from cell phone radiation

Do Bluetooth headsets or little pieces of energized cardboard really protect you from cell phone radiation? Find the surprising answer in this Q & A report by Dr. Mercola (a 5-minute video): http://www.mercola.com/forms/rf3_headsets.htm.