Crazy Sexy Diet: Eat Your Veggies, Ignite Your Spark, and Live Like You Mean It! (24 page)

Processed meats are the worst
offenders against our bods. You can and should really do without them. The fare typically served at ballparks, Mafia meetings, and in your cozy breakfast nook I call “L&A meats” because they’re made of lips and assholes—all the leftover stuff too gross for other uses. I’m talking about bologna, pastrami, and salami, as well as hot dogs and sausages, to which carcinogenic nitrates and other chemicals have been added.

This isn’t breaking news to most people. I certainly didn’t think it was a hot topic until I mentioned this information during a speech I gave at a well-respected children’s hospital. After my speech, I was asked to sit on a panel. A lovely young girl raised her hand. She had brain cancer and was concerned about recent findings on the connection between cell phones and tumors. The doctor sitting to my left answered her question very snootily, “Please, there’s no connection. Use your cell phone … and eat your hot dogs, too, for that matter.” I received the doctor’s message loud and clear, as well as her dirty look (which I wanted to smack off her face, but my mother raised a lady!). One week later I received a copy of
Good Medicine
, the quarterly magazine of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM). Check out the title of the lead article in the issue: “Expelled! Processed Meats Cause Cancer. So Why Do Schools Feed Them to Children?” I only wish I was armed with that issue at the podium that day.

That a doctor in a major metropolitan hospital could be so out of touch was astounding. The evidence is overwhelming, and even heavy hitters like the American Cancer Institute and the World Cancer Research Fund agree that no amount of processed meat is healthy; it therefore should be avoided completely. In fact, the risk of colorectal cancer increases by 21 percent for every 50 grams of processed meat consumed daily. Keep in mind that 50 grams is about one hot dog. Other studies have also linked processed meats to cancer of the esophagus, lung, stomach, and prostate. Yet these products are still widely consumed. According to the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council, more than 740 million hot dog packages were sold in 2007. A truckload of which is chowed down each year at the Coney Island hot-dog-eating contest. Boy, is that a gold-star event—the Super Bowl of Gratuitous Gluttony. “Look, world, I ate sixty-eight hot dogs in ten minutes! And as a reward, I get this handsome trophy and a colostomy bag. Gee whiz, dreams really do come true.”

Wow—99-cent burgers
at the drive-through! A bucket of chicken for pocket change! What a deal! Or is it? From the fast-food window to the supermarket deli counter, the true price of meat in America is actually much higher than what we pay at the register. That’s because behind every pound of flesh sold there is a cascade of hidden costs to our health, economy, and environment.

It takes enormous amounts of resources to raise beef cattle in our factory farm system. To fatten them rapidly, the critters are fed huge amounts of growth hormones and cheap corn. But there’s one problem: Nature designed them to eat grass. Understandably, their modified diet causes all sorts of health problems, which require antibiotics and other drugs. Their health suffers further from often filthy and overcrowded living conditions, meaning more and more antibiotics. A cow can be so unhealthy by slaughter time, it probably would have died of disease soon after anyway.

Government policies play a big role in keeping meat cheap. Subsidies—your tax dollars—pay farmers to grown way more feed corn than is needed, which results in mountains of rotting food and unrealistically low prices. Some even say that the sharp rise in meat consumption we’ve seen over the past few decades was actually caused by all that extra corn looking for a customer!

Subsidies are also filtered through land-use policy. Ranchers who lease public land reap the profits, but we taxpayers pick up the tab for environmental damage. And last but not least, governments love to give tax breaks to anyone promising to bring jobs to town. But the jobs aren’t so great. According to MarketWatch, slaughterhouse workers are among the top ten most underpaid in the US. Unfortunately, they also suffer some of the highest injury rates.

Ever wonder why there are so many recalls of meat because of
E. coli
or salmonella contamination? The industrial meat system is ground zero for foodborne illnesses. Yum, bacteria on a bun! According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 76 million Americans are sickened from foodborne illnesses each year. Animal feces are a primary cause, either in meats directly or by contact with the crops grown near the animals. That was the case with the big spinach outbreak a few years ago. The investigation found the likely cause was wild boars that rooted in the cattle lots, then wandered down-valley to poop on the spinach. Of course, the cattle folks did everything they could to blame the spinach.

Massive slaughterhouses, which can kill thousands of Beings per day, are a germ invasion. Bessie is disemboweled and often, in the assembly-line rush, her guts get punctured and fecal matter seeps onto her flesh. This is particularly dangerous with hamburger because when the meat is ground, the pathogens get mixed and spread. Besides that, there’s no such thing as one cow on your plate. Lord only knows how many creatures from how many factories went into that happy meal—it’s kinda like an
E. coli
smoothie. It takes only a tiny number of bacteria to cause serious illness. And guess who gets it the worst? Old people and kids.

It’s no secret that America is in the midst of a health care crisis, as rising costs threaten to bankrupt our entire economy. And as you’ve already learned, we also have an obesity epidemic. These distinct problems are actually two sides of the same coin, and you can’t fix one without addressing the
other. The CDC estimates that the health care price tag of obesity in 2008 was $147 billion—more than doubling in less than a decade. Meat is public enemy number one in heart disease, strokes, and many cancers. And cornfed meat is much higher in saturated fat than meat from cows that graze on grass, their natural food.

The health effects of chemicals and toxins are harder to estimate, but the cost in dollars and lives is certainly enormous. The industrial food system dumps millions of tons of pollutants into our environment every year. Feedlots and farms are responsible for much of it: hormones, medicines, infected fecal waste, fertilizers, and pesticides all end up in our soil and waterways. Ever hear of a dead zone? It’s an area of water that is effectively dead of marine life. Nada, kaput. It’s caused when fertilizers flow downriver from farms and choke out oxygen. There’s a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey and at least 400 others around the world.

In 2006 the United Nations released a report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” It revealed that animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions each year than all the planes, trains, boats, cars, and trucks on earth. Meat production was believed to account for some 18 percent of the world’s total emissions. But scientists have since been revising that estimate upward. In 2009 the World Bank put out a new report that pegged it at 51 percent—more than all other sources combined!

Methane gas from animal poo and farts is a big problem. Methane is twenty-one times more harmful to the atmosphere than CO
₂
. Also contributing to global warming is the bulldozing and burning of rain forest to make way for animal agriculture. In Brazil and elsewhere, lush forests are giving way to barren landscapes for either grazing cattle or growing crops to feed the cattle. Trees act as “carbon sinks” because they inhale and store carbon dioxide. When rain forest is killed, it stops breathing and atmospheric CO
₂
levels rise. This is also true of our oceans, the other great carbon sink. Coral reefs are like underwater rain forests, teeming with biodiversity. They, too, are endangered as more and more of them die in acidic dead zones.

In 2008 Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the prestigious United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made waves when he said that reducing meat consumption was the most immediate way to take action against global warming. He suggested we “Give up meat for one day [per week] initially and decrease it from there.” In 2010 the UN further upped the ante by urging a global move towards a meat- and dairy-free diet: “A vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty, and the worst impacts of climate change.” Let’s face it, ladies—one day a week without meat? You can do it with your eyes closed. How about three days a week, or five, or seven?

It’s understandable why quality food is condemned as elitist, and why many people, especially the poor, buy cheap food. But now you can see how the 99-cent burger doesn’t really cost 99 cents. There’s always more to a story than meets the eye, and it’s especially true with our way of eating.

Michelle Riley/The HSUS