Forks Over Knives (8 page)

Many other conditions are affected by diet. A final one to consider here is excess weight, which ranks among America’s most visible—and most dangerous—epidemics. An expanding waistline is a significant factor in four leading causes of death: heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer. The same unhealthy diets that cause obesity promote plaque formation in blood passageways, the key factor for a heart attack or stroke. Moreover, the National Cancer Institute concluded that many forms of cancer, particularly colon, breast, endometrial, kidney, and esophageal, are directly linked to obesity.

Modern medicine has made little progress in treating common degenerative conditions. Every year, millions of people die from diseases that are completely avoidable; over one million Americans die every year just from heart
disease and cancer. But the reality is that most of these ailments are preventable and even treatable through simple lifestyle choices.

The fact that so many diseases are dependent on diet is the reason why, for health and healing, it is far better to rely on food (i.e., your fork) than surgery (i.e., the surgeon’s knife). Simply put: Forks over knives.

ALONA PULDE, a California native, always wanted to be a doctor: “Maybe that had something to do with the doctor’s kit my parents gave me for my fourth birthday.” She completed her premedical training at UCLA in 1996; later, her interest in alternative treatments led her to pursue a master’s degree in traditional Chinese medicine. She then completed a doctor of medicine in family practice at Albany Medical College in 2004.

When Alona was thirty years old, her father passed away. “With all my training and all my knowledge, I could not understand for the life of me how a healthy man like my dad could suddenly die of a heart attack at age fifty-five,” she says. Reading the works of Colin Campbell and Drs. John McDougall and Caldwell Esselstyn on the relationship between diet and health, she came to realize and promote the importance of a low-fat, whole-foods, plant-based diet as an integral part of the medical practice that she had created with her husband, Matt. Today, the couple is working with Whole Foods Market to help develop and oversee the implementation of the company’s health and wellness programs.

Matt, who is a physician certified in internal medicine specializing in nutrition and lifestyle medicine, grew up outside Philadelphia and holds a bachelor of science from the University of Michigan and and doctor of medicine from Temple University School of Medicine. Like his wife, Matt “never really considered any other profession” than medicine. “I had always thought I was going to be a cardiologist, just like my father. But I grew disillusioned. The medicine I was practicing had very little to do with actually healing people, which was my original motivation to become a doctor.”

Say Alona and Matt, “If you don’t switch to a plant-based diet, you will significantly increase your risk of disease. Simply put, you will be more ill and you will die younger.

“People who don’t switch run the risk of becoming very overweight and severely de-conditioned. It’s only a matter of time before they succumb to one or more chronic diseases. Is the standard American diet really worth a slow, painful death from diabetes? Decreased motor function from debilitating arthritis? Exacerbating cancers of the colon, breast, prostate, and more? A heart attack? Or ending up on countless medications, all with their endless lists of side effects? Why risk ministrokes, small strokes big enough to cause changes in your cognitive functions, or worse, larger strokes able to rob you of your ability to function and interact with your loved ones forever?

“Following the American diet is your one-way ticket to a slow, painful death that often begins in what should very well be the prime of your life. Or, you can switch to a plant-based diet and stop this runaway train in its tracks.”

Lee Fulkerson is the writer and director of
Forks Over Knives
. A self-admitted “non-healthy eater,” he consulted with Drs. Matt Lederman and Alona Pulde, who immediately put him on a plant-based diet. Below are the results: After thirteen weeks, Lee lost 20 pounds, his blood pressure dropped significantly, his total cholesterol went from 241 to 154, and his LDL (or bad cholesterol) dropped from 157 to 80.

Lee Fulkerson’s test results before and after 13 weeks on a whole-foods, plant-based diet

Clearly, the impact of a plant-based diet on human health is powerful. But our diet has other effects beyond personal health, raising issues about humankind’s relationship with animals, particularly how we treat those animals we have domesticated for our own purposes and those we capture in the wild for food.

Life on the farm once conjured up images of sunburned, cheerful farmers tending to vast tracts of rolling pasture, with chickens roaming freely around the barn, pecking at fresh grain and laying eggs at their whim, while the family cow wanders near the henhouse, the silver bell tied around her neck clanging lazily.

Farming has changed. For the sake of maximizing profits and streamlining production, most of today’s meat originates in factory-style farms, enormous industrial warehouses crammed with thousands of turkeys, chickens, cows, pigs, or other animals. These suppliers strive to maximize efficiency by raising large numbers of these animals in a short amount of time.

It once took about two years for a calf to grow to the size required for slaughter. In the eyes of a corporation, this growth period represents a
substantial overhead cost, because the animals must be fed constantly and treated for disease. In order to reduce this growth period, most factory farms employ artificial growth promotants, such as rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone), which allow animals to develop muscle far faster than normal. Although the European Union has banned the use of growth-promoting hormones, approximately two thirds of all beef cattle in the United States are treated with them. In fact, the United States is the only developed nation that permits the use of rBGH for increasing milk production in dairy cows.

Sadly, animals in factory farms are pushed to their biological limits and subjected to tremendous amounts of stress. Like other factory-farmed animals, milk cows endure grueling demands and are susceptible to disease and fatigue. By giving the cows high-energy food and injecting them with growth hormones, farmers can get more milk from their cows. The average cow today produces nearly one hundred pounds of milk per day, ten times what she would produce naturally. Although cows can live twenty or more years, many factory-bred cows can barely walk by their fourth birthday.

Hens exploited for egg production are commonly packed in cages so tightly that they cannot move or even flap their wings. The harsh wire cages are lined up in rows and stacked in tiers in huge factory warehouses. When just chicks, they are subjected to a process known as debeaking, a procedure that involves severing bone, cartilage, and tissue to remove part of the beak—a necessary precaution in many factory farms where severely overcrowded cages provoke pecking and fighting.

Calves raised for veal are typically separated from their mothers immediately after birth and confined thereafter in crates measuring just two feet wide, their movements restrained with neck chains. Males are castrated without painkillers.

Because the cost of every square inch of space is carefully calculated for optimal profits, pigs, too, are packed together tightly, constantly breathing the noxious gases from their own excrement.

At the slaughterhouse, fully conscious chickens are hung by their feet from shackles—because poultry is excluded from the rules of the Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act, stunning them prior to slaughter is not required. If the automated cutter fails to cut their throats, they are killed by other means, or submerged alive in the scalding tank that is used to loosen their feathers so they can be removed later.

All in all, in 2008 the number of animals killed to satisfy American palates was 8.56 billion, or 29 animals per average American meat eater. The total number of animals killed on land and sea was approximately 80 billion, or 270 per American meat and fish eater—making the average number of animals consumed in one American lifetime 21,000. While the total number of animals killed to feed Americans has decreased slightly over recent years, the number
slaughtered
in the United States has actually increased because of a rise in U.S. meat exports. (The United States, which has 5 percent of the world’s population, accounts for about 20 percent of the animals killed worldwide for food.)