Why indeed? Preaching to the choir there brother. However - the reality is ... both parties that control US Government are very much PRO helping out the rest of the world whether it be with our money, our food, or our blood.
Again completely irrelevant. How does the government want to feed the world have any impact what so ever on the food you choose to buy for you and your family? Just because the grain industry has been subsidized by the government doesnt mean you have to eat it. Just because cows are now fed this feed comprised of genetically modified food that the government help push doesnt mean you have to buy it. How do they effect your decision on what you buy?
No - raising animals for food isn't pretty ... but that's the price we pay these days so that we each don't have to go out and hunt down our food. I live in Louisiana and I often go out hunting for feral hogs - there are millions of them here. When I kill one, I have to gut it and dress it in the field. Then I drag it back to my truck by hand and that is usually the hardest part. Then it's on to the house to hang up the carcass on the back porch and skin it and butcher it. Then - just to make this wild hog palatable - I have to soak the mean in an ice cooler with ice and lemon in it for two days.
After all that - I have some relatively eatable pork, that's prolly a bit tough ... but it's "Free" I suppose.
So yeah - I'll take a Winn Dixie Rib Eyes over that in a heartbeat, thick - juicy - and I surely thank the farmer who did all the work for me on that!
Or you can pay a farmer or butcher to do it for you. Why do you paint the picture of our only two options are to go out ourselves and hunt or buy conventional beef? Where is the third option that is buying from a local farmer who allows their cattle to graze and feed from the grass as nature intended?
Some of the good information was from a documentary called 'Forks over Knives'. It heavily takes data from books such as 'The China Study' which was a book about cancer rates in china. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, study on humans ever undertaken. And it found that one of the direct links to cancer was the consumption of dairy and meat. For example in some areas in China, between different counties there was something like a 100 fold difference in the rates of some specific cancers. In the US between different areas, the same distance apart, the difference might only be 2-3 fold. They narrowed it down to differences in diets.
They quoted things, and although I don't have a direct reference, but things like prostate cancer. In Japan in like 1970 something, there were only 18 autopsy proven prostate cancer deaths. In the US at the time there was like 30,000. The statistical relationship between the consumption of dairy and prostate cancer, is as strong as smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. They also quoted a study that had been done and re-checked by numerous research about the consumption of casien protein and how it directly lead to the growth of cancer tumors. If you took that protein out of the diet then the cancer tumors would go down. Just a lot of really interesting data came out of the stuff.
While I am not familiar with that documentary I do know the "study" you are referring to.
There were several flaws in Campbell’s analytical methods. He ignored any study that demonstrated anything counter to his claims and cherry-picked references to support his claims (many of which don't even support the claims he tries to make)
Basically he tried to correlate cancer with cholesterol, associate cholesterol with animal protein, and attempt to lead the reader into inferring animal protein associates with cancer. He never once cites a direct correlation between cancer and animal protein consumption. Instead what he did was add in a third variable (cholesterol) into the mix. Now while plasma cholesterol correlates positively with animal protein consumption and negatively with plant protein consumption, it isn't to the extent Cambell leads you to believe. When you actually track down the direct correlation between animal protein and cancer you discover there is no statistically significant positive trend to be found.
Animal protein intake has the following correlations with cancers:
Lymphoma: -18
Penis cancer: -16
Rectal cancer: -12
Bladder cancer: -9
Colorectal cancer: -8
Leukemia: -5
Nasopharyngeal: -4
Cervix cancer: -4
Colon cancer: -3
Liver cancer: -3
Oesophageal cancer: +2
Brain cancer: +5
Breast cancer: +12
Now look at the cancer correlations with “plant protein intake”:
Brain cancer: -15
Liver cancer: -14
Penis cancer: -4
Lymphoma: -4
Bladder cancer: -3
Breast cancer: +1
Stomach cancer: +10
Rectal cancer: +12
Cervix cancer: +12
Colon cancer: +13
Leukemia: +15
Oesophageal cancer +18
Colorectal cancer: +19
As you can see with animal protein consumption most of the correlations are negative and none of them reach a statistical significance. However what you do see is a positive correlation with plant protein and cancers. In fact, when we look solely at the variable “death from all cancers,” the association with plant protein is +12. With animal protein, it’s only +3. Hardly evidence against animal protein.
In the "China Study" Cambell repeatedly distorts facts and chooses to leave relatively important information out of it. He tries to show a link between animal protein and cardiovascular disease (correlation of +1 for animal protein and -11 for fish protein), yet fails to bring up wheat flour has a correlation of +67 with heart attacks and coronary heart disease, and plant protein correlates at +25 with these conditions. He leaves out the correlations wheat has to cervix cancer (+46), with hypertensive heart disease (+54), with stroke (+47), with diseases of the blood and blood-forming organs (+41), and the +67 with myocardial infarction and coronary heart disease. Why does Campbell point out the relationship between cholesterol and colorectal cancer (+33) but does not mention the much higher relationship between sea vegetables and colorectal cancer (+76)?? It is pretty obvious he is attempt to create misleading correlations to further push a result he has already determined to be there before any of the research was actually done. Or in other words he is obviously pushing his own agenda with the study.
When you actually look at the evidence it takes a HUGE leap in logic to link animal products with disease by way of blood cholesterol when the animal products themselves don’t correlate with those diseases. “The China Study” is nothing more than a collection of carefully chosen data and assembled in a way to sell you the authors preconceived reality.
