Why arent Animal Rights ever an issue in presidential politics?

[ColemanMaskell]

64. Book about Vegan diet you might find helpful

This is a sort of a book report about it that I have circulated to friends and acquaintances.

The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, PhD, and Thomas M. Campbell II.
ISBN 1-932100-66-0, and/or 9781932100662, and/or 9781932100389
(c) 2006, published in paperback by BenBella Books, www.ipgbook.com

Synopsis:
The author was raised on a farm and believed consumption of animal protein to be the key to good health, until years of scientific research convinced him otherwise.
He was convinced by demographic data (on humans) and subsequent supporting laboratory data on rodents, including many experiments he conducted himself (and ultimately on himself).
His first major job as a young-ish scientist was to find ways to bring protein to underprivileged children in the Philippines. He discovered that aflatoxin in peanut butter made from moldy peanuts was causing liver cancer in children, but much to his suprise, the liver cancer was most common among the rich kids who ate a lot of animal products (rather than the poor kids who ate a lot of peanut butter).
He got some rats, divided them into groups, and fed them different diets. His rats died of cancer on diets high in milk protein. This was repeated with other animal proteins. Rats who ate zero animal protein could gobble up loads of aflatoxin without getting sick.
When premier Chou En Lai of China developed cancer not long after that, a massive demographic study was undertaken in China. Being in the area and having made contacts, Campbell got in on it, and I think he said he directed it. He reiterates his credentials a lot.
They looked at the geographical distribution of cancer in China (a big place) and then found out what the people in the different areas ate. It turned out that regions where mostly plant foods were consumed showed little or no cancer. As animal protein intake increased, so did cancer.
At extremely low levels the effect leveled off; that is, the difference between tiny and teensy weensy didn't seem to matter.
Similarly he later saw a study someone else had done on American nurses, all of whom consumed high levels of animal protein (which no group in China did), and there was no observable variation in effect at the high end either; that is, the difference between a huge amount and an an even bigger amount made no difference.
So consuming anything from zero up to a tiny bit of animal protein doesn't correlate to cancer, and after that you can draw a graph showing that cancer goes up in proportion as animal protein intake goes up, until you reach a pretty big amount of animal protein, and after that the risk levels off at a high level.
He makes a big hoop-la pointing out that the data from various studies quoted to indict fat consumption, or animal fat consumption, have not measured fat consumption specifically by itself, but rather consumption of animal products. He thinks animal proteins cause a lot of the problems that have been attributed to animal fats. The groups that were studied consumed animal fat and animal protein together, as meat, whole milk, eggs etc. When he looked at some other data where people had reduced fat consumption while increasing animal protein consumption (switching to skim milk, white turkey meat, etc), the change didn't improve their situation at all. So, two points here; (1) animal food is the problem, not animal fat, and (2) scientists are being sloppy.
He particularly indicts milk protein, but finds fault with animal-based foods in general.
He proposes possible mechanisms.
Incompletely digested short chains of amino acids get into the bloodstream, where the body makes antibodies against them. As an example, one small chain from a milk protein has been shown to resemble the cells in the pancreas, and the antibodies then attack the pancreas also. (This particular reaction only happens if the person also has the genetic predisposition to diabetes.) Studies of diabetes in children show that infants weaned from mother's milk onto cow's milk formula at a very early age are vastly more likely to develop childhood diabetes.
He generalizes that a similar mechanism can account for a lot of autoimmune diseases, and gives interesting demographic statistics to support that viewpoint. (Example, Dairy-eating areas of Norway have more arthritis than seafood-eating areas. Further studies show that this correlation holds even when the second group doesn't eat seafood, so it isn't about the fish oil.)
Another possible mechanism has to do with the sulfur-based amino acids, found mainly in animal protein, which supposedly produce a more acidic, in fact sulfuric-acid, condition in the body, dissolving things that shouldn't be dissolved, and imbalancing calcium in the process.
He goes on to say that cutting out animal foods is not, in and of itself, sufficient. We need whole plant foods, especially the colorful ones (dark green, bright red and orange) which contain a pantheon of carotenoids (and fiber). Apparently beta carotene and lycopene tablets alone won't do the job. He complains repeatedly about bad methodology in reported studies. (Scientists being sloppy again.) Scientists have measured carotene levels in the blood of groups of people who eat a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables, and who don't get cancer, and these sloppy scientists have leapt to the conclusion that the beta carotene protected the people from the cancer. However carotene tablets alone don't do that. You have to eat the whole food and get the whole range of related compounds to get the effect.
On protein, we don't need as much protein as we seem to think, and plant foods have more protein than we might think. Ten per cent of the calories in spinach come from protein. All whole grains, for example corn, have protein. Beans, lentils, chick peas are high in protein.
He complains about "junk food vegetarians" and also about vitamin supplements. Eat whole plant foods, he advises, not Fruit Loops and potato chips, not vitamin pills washed down with Coca Cola. However, he does acknowledge that supplements of B-12 and D are necessary for some people; (B-12 comes from animal products and also from soil bacteria if it's the appropriately fertilized kind of soil) (The D of course requires sunshine to form naturally but can also be had from some animal sources such as cod liver oil).
The observations are much the same for heart disease as for cancer, and for all autoimmune diseases mentioned including MS. In areas where people eat plant-based whole food diets the diseases are almost nonexistent, and in areas where people eat highly processed diets high in animal products the incidence shoots up. When individuals move from one group to another, their risk profile morphs into that of their adopted life style.
In this context he tells an interesting anecdote about his pet rats. When they had been exposed to carcinogens and developed budding cancers, he switched them to a plant based diet, and the cancers remained dormant indefinitely. If, however, the rats reverted to an animal protein diet, the cancers resumed activity and grew. Several variations in the timing demonstrated that the cancers could more or less be awakened or rendered dormant at any point by changes in diet alone. However, they couldn't be eliminated. Once extant, they remained lurking forever, waiting for a chance to reactivate.
He mentions that there are senators and scientists in the pay of big money interests. (Wow, really? You may say.) You might think Cattlemen's Association types, or Nestle and Kraft, but they aren't his main villains.
In especially low esteem he holds The National Dairy Council (or whatever they're called now), which he seems to view as being on a par with the tobacco industry. Their marketing campaigns aimed at children and misrepresented as nutritional education seem to get to him the worst.
Beyond that, and more generally, having been on high-up government scientific committees he can tell first hand stories, and he does, naming people and everything.
Being seventy years old when he writes the book, he apparently isn't too afraid they'll ruin his future. Or maybe he's just gotten overconfident because their efforts so far have mostly failed (according to his telling of it). He says he's in excellent health, but his claim to be motivated (to write the book) by something like altruism, combined with his talk about his age, gives the text a little of the air of a deathbed oratory.
Does milk protein cause cancer, as the data demonstrate, and does the dairy industry know it, in the tradition of the tobacco industry? Interesting in this context is research he describes towards the end of the book, funded by the dairy industry to try to show an anticarcinogenic effect from a component of milk, a fatty acid derived from linoleic acid in corn oil in the corn the cows eat. Dubious experiments are done feeding mice the fatty acid (CLA) by itself. Other experiments are done to prove that feeding cows more corn increases the CLA in the milk. So far nothing to show that any milk product has any good effect. Eventually the researchers feed some mice a milk product containing CLA, but the milk product they choose is butter. (So, how much do they know, and when did they know it?)
It's actually one of the best diet/ health/ nutrition books I've ever read.
He doesn't recommend that you need to cut out all animal protein, but he thinks that less is better and zero is probably just fine as long as you get your B-12 (and D). He does seem to recommend staying away from milk products pretty completely.