God Does Not Eat Meat By Arthur Poletti
From All Creatures Book and Video Review Guide

Chapter Four: More Benefits from Protecting Animals

gdnem

 

Brad felt invigorated and positive as he stood before his classmates to present his next report.

“Good morning, everyone. Today I will talk about some of the many health benefits for humans and animals directly related to eating non-meat foods. I will also explain why, in my opinion, no single decision by individuals or a race has caused a more dramatic improvement in our planetary ecology than the decision to not eat animal flesh. Finally, I will evaluate and discuss the spiritual consciousness today, and how our children and adults have benefited because of vegetarian foods.

“Food is the source of the body’s chemistry; what we ingest affects our consciousness and emotions. If one wants to live in a higher consciousness—in peace, happiness, and love for all creatures—then one cannot eat meat, fish, or fowl. By ingesting the grosser chemistries of animal foods, one introduces into the body and mind anger, jealousy, fear, anxiety, suspicion, and a terrible fear of death.

“Religious beliefs shared by millions of people also insist that if you involve yourself in the cruel cycle of inflicting injury, pain and death—even indirectly by eating the flesh of creatures—then you will in the future experience an equal measure of the suffering you caused.

“In the United States, eating plant-based foods now protects humans from the day they’re born until their projected life span of 95 to 110 years for men and women. We expect that many of our citizens will live happy, healthy lives until they are at least 115 to 125 years old. These calculations result from monitoring the lives of nearly forty-five million Americans born between 1960 and 1970 who are alive and well today.

“Meat eaters used to clog up their arteries with a diet loaded with animal fat, putting themselves at great risk for the killers of the western world, heart attack and stroke. Animal meat is high in sodium, which causes the blood to retain water; it also causes plaque to build up in the arteries, restricting the flow of blood. Combine these problems and you have the recipe for a disease that afflicted about fifty million Americans yearly between 1990 and 2007, high blood pressure. Now our population enjoys vegetarian foods that naturally clear out artery plaque buildup, which often used to require the expensive and widespread procedure of angioplasty.

“Studies concluded in 2064 proved that most animals lived considerably longer and much healthier lives due to eating non-meat foods. Prior to 2008 the average life span for meat eating dogs, depending on their size and breed, ranged between nine to thirteen years. The average life span for meat eating cats ranged between ten to fifteen years. In 2064 the average life span for non-meat eating dogs was twenty one to twenty eight years and for cats twenty four to thirty years.

“For hundreds of years, meat was the primary choice of food made by most people in the western world, especially in America. Between 2000 and 2007 a major expansion in health food stores happened, largely due to the rapidly growing demand for vegetarian substitutes for all meats, including chicken and fish. It became the in thing to do.

“Slogans such as ‘vegetarians live longer, look better, are healthier’ and ‘kindness to animals is cool’ swept across the United States. Now in 2065 thousands of health food supermarkets are found around the world.

“Today, because of fifty-seven years of our vegetarian diet, most diseases such as cancers, heart disease, strokes, and diabetes has been significantly reduced. In essence we did not cure these diseases, but rather we removed the root causes.

“The remarkable and inconceivable improvement in health during the last six decades is overwhelmingly the result of eliminating chemically preserved, decayed, disease-tainted animal flesh from the food chain. Simultaneously our citizens have benefited immensely by strengthening their bodies’ immune systems.

“In the United States before 2008 about 25 million pounds of antibiotics were fed every year to livestock for growth promotion and disease prevention, almost eight times the amount given to humans to treat disease, not so much to treat infection, but to make the animals grow faster on less feed. Though perfectly legal, the practice had the effect of promoting the selection of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Some of the bacteria caused human diseases that physicians were finding very difficult to treat. The practice added to a general worldwide crisis of drug-resistant disease. Each year in the 1990s about 60,000 Americans died because their medications were ineffective in combating bacterial strains.

“In 1995, approximately 683,000 Americans died prematurely as a result of atherosclerosis-related diseases. In other words, they died largely as a result of their meat-eating ways. Those figures represented 29 percent of all deaths that year.

“Though osteoporosis was a disease of calcium deficiency, it was not usually caused by low calcium intake. The primary cause of the once-dreaded bone disorder was too much protein in the diet. Excess protein was leaching calcium from the bones of American meat eaters. Our health experts knew that African Bantu women on low-protein diets take in a third of the United States recommended daily allowance of calcium. Many of these women often bear as many as nine children during their lifetime and breast-feed them for two years. They never have calcium deficiency and never break a bone. The typical meat-eating American before 2008 was eating about five times as much protein as needed.

“Tests performed between 1990 and 2000 revealed that those who ate dead animal flesh were far more likely to contract cancer than those eating vegetarian foods. The risk of contracting breast cancer was almost four times greater for women who ate meat daily compared to those who ate it less than once a week.

“Adult-onset diabetes was irrefutably linked to fat in the diet. Researchers found that when diabetics ate low-fat, high-fiber vegetarian foods, they were often able to reduce or even eliminate their insulin dosages. Tragically, as people around the world increasingly adopted meat-based diets, their incidences of diabetes, which leads to aggressive atherosclerosis, gangrene, blindness, and kidney failure, rose dramatically.

“In 1995 there were approximately 125 medical schools in the United States; only 30 required their students to take a course in nutrition. The average nutrition training received by the average U.S. physician during four years in school was only a few hours. Therefore, doctors in the United States were ill equipped to advise their patients to minimize certain foods, such as meat, that contained excessive amounts of cholesterol and were known contributors to heart attacks.

“Another way to show a link between diseases and diet is to look at living populations that ate differently in the world prior to 2008. Western doctors who practiced in eastern areas of the world where the people subsisted primarily on plant foods quickly realized that their patients had much lower percentages, and in some cases none of the health problems and deadly diseases that plagued the west, illnesses such as heart disease, gallstones, appendicitis, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, colorectal cancer, diverticulosis, and hiatal hernias.”

“Studies done in 2003 revealed that eating meat dramatically raised the risk of heart attack. Heart attack was once the most common cause of death in the United States, killing one person every forty-five seconds.

“A meat eater’s risk of death from heart attack was 50 percent. Even when modern technology saved heart patience lives millions of people were still left with congestive heart failure as a result of damaged hearts not able to circulate blood to the rest of their body adequately. This resulted in fluid build-up and organ damage.

“In 2001 in the United States nearly 5 million people lived with congestive heart failure, and about 550,000 new cases cropped up every year. The disease was the leading cause of hospitalization among the elderly and hospital bills attributed to congestive heart failure came to $19 billion per year.

“During the period between 1990 and 2008, many more doctors recommended vegetarian foods and regular exercise for heart patients, proving heart disease did not have to be a death sentence or mean a life of cholesterol-lowering drugs and bypass surgery.

“Bypass surgery required that a person’s rib cage be opened, their heart stopped, and that their body be hooked up to an external pumping machine so an artery or vein from some other part of their body could be removed and grafted as a replacement blood vessel to their heart.

Memory, language ability and spatial orientation were still impaired in 10 to 50 percent of bypass patients six months later. For some people the side effects never went away. Many required a second operation.

“Today in 2065 because of fifty-seven years of removing meat from the food chain, the risk of death from heart attack is 6 percent.

“The complex carbohydrates, antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, and fiber in plant-based foods guard against disease. Also, the more plant foods you eat, the less room you have for the animal foods that clog arteries with cholesterol, strain kidneys with excess protein, and burden the heart with saturated fat.

“During the 1990s the American Dietetic Association acknowledged a relationship between a vegetarian diet and reduced risk of coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and certain types of cancer. In 2003 a small but influential Canadian study found that a vegetarian diet, including soy, reduced cholesterol levels by about as much as widely used drugs.

“The second leading cause of death among men in 1998 was prostate cancer. This was not just an inevitable outcome of getting old; it was a result of a lifetime of eating animal fats. Animal fats stimulate the production of male hormones, which in turn help prostate cancer cells to grow.

“Vegetarians are less susceptible to all the major diseases that once afflicted humanity, and thus live longer, healthier, and more productive lives. They have fewer physical complaints, less frequent visits to the doctor, fewer dental problems, and smaller medical bills. Their immune systems are stronger, their bodies are purer and more refined, and their skin is more beautiful. All of this, plus the benefit of having unlimited choices of vegetarian foods that taste delicious.

“That ends my presentation for today. Tomorrow we will take a close look at how well farmers in the United States are doing, especially on land that used to be used for cattle farming.” 

“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel Prize winner 1921

The author obtained Copyright Certificate of Registration March 23, 2004


Go on to:Chapter Five: More Fertile Land, More Prosperous Farmers
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