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How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Greger with Gene Stone

July 25, 2016 by Tofu Temptress Leave a Comment

If you can, eat berries every day


Many of you will be familiar with NutritionFacts.org but for those who aren’t, I’ll fill you in. It’s a fantastic resource for those who want to learn about the connection between food and health. Dr. Michael Greger and his team sift through all the papers published in English about nutrition, then present the salient points in the form of short, digestible (sorry…) videos. These videos are uploaded most days and by now there’s one on just about every subject regarding health and nutrition that you can think of. Dr. Greger has consolidated all he’s learned and put it into a book which, although it won’t help you live forever, will certainly help you avoid unnecessary illness and many of the leading causes of death.

Plant fats are healthier than animal fats
Plant fats are healthier than animal fats

How Not to Die is split into two parts. The first part deals with factual research on the top fifteen ways people die and how you can reduce your likelihood of falling victim to them. Everything from heart disease, diabetes and cancer are covered along with illnesses you may not necessarily equate with diet, such as kidney disease, depression and Parkinson’s. Everything is fully referenced and each section has either a personal story or case study along with fascinating data that’s explained intelligently but accessibly. It’s all incredibly detailed, but never boring, and there’s lots of extra information in the boxed text – everything from the top sources of anti-oxidants to how much sleep you should be getting. It’s thoroughly inspiring stuff and leaves you feeling in control of your own health. It seems the more research is done, the more we realise that developing disease has far more to do with our lifestyle choices (of which diet is of course a huge part) than our genes.

If you can, eat berries every day
If you can, eat berries every day

The second part is headed up ‘Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen’ outlining the foods you should be eating each day for good health. It’s the culmination of years of experience and is a regimen that the good doctor and his family follows. The author does many talks both for lay people and health professionals and is always being asked what he eats. A whole food (that means as unprocessed as possible) plant based (no animal products) diet is by far the best for humans and is the only diet to have halted and reversed diabetes and heart disease. The list of foods include beans and berries, other fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, herbs and spices. It also suggests daily exercise, as this is known to ward off not only osteoporosis, but also breast cancer and a host of other maladies.

Red cabbage is better than green
Red cabbage is better than green

Everyone knows that for good health they should cut back on meat and up their fruit and vegetable intake as well as exercise more. This book takes things a stage further. It clarifies what you should be eating, what foods to avoid and gives the hard science to back it all up. The nonsense we’ve been fed by the food industry and drug companies has gone on long enough. Here is an evidence based instruction manual on how to eat well and stay well.

Nuts and seeds should form part of a healthy diet
Nuts and seeds should form part of a healthy diet

Highly recommended.

 

Buy the book here.

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: antioxidants, exercise, food, health, medecine

Animal Testing

February 6, 2015 by Tofu Temptress 1 Comment

Beagles are still used in experiments

When I was a kid in the eighties, the anti-vivisection lobby was quite trendy. Everyone I knew bought their cosmetics and toiletries from The Body Shop as they were against animal testing (unfortunately these days they’re owned by L’Oreal) and those who broke into laboratories to liberate bunnies were heroes. Off colour jokes were made about smoking Beagles as Jason and Kylie blasted out of the radio. Then after that I think everyone, in Britain anyway, thought that animal testing had been given up to make way for kinder, more modern methods of safety testing. I hate to say it, but it was as recently as 2013 when Europe decided to make the testing of cosmetics on animals illegal, but only for new products. That means there’s still plenty of shampoos, eye shadows and hairsprays on the market that have been tested on the aforementioned bunnies. Cruelty Free International (formally BUAV) have a campaign going on at the moment to ban the testing of household products on animals. Even though the current government pledged to dramatically reduce the number of animal experiments, they seem to have forgotten all about it.

A happy bunny
A happy bunny – Jo-Anne McArthur/We animals

So what’s happening? Well, good question. There are many companies, including the Co-op, Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer, who have had cruelty free cosmetics for a number of years and cruelty free household products are available from many supermarkets as well as online. Fine. So it’ll just be a matter of time in Europe before all the old, cruel products become obsolete and the companies that produce them will have to think of other methods of testing when they want to wow us with new products. Well, yes and no. There are loopholes in the legislation and also cosmetics companies who want to sell to China have to, under Chinese law, test everything on animals. So, it’s complicated.

Ok, you say, so if I’m a conscientious shopper I can obtain all my beauty products guilt free in the UK. True, but what about medicine? This has always been a sore point, as it is the law in the UK that you have to test any new drug on a non-human animal i.e. someone who has a working respiratory and cardiovascular system who won’t sue you if things go awry. Again, during my youth, as I was known to be an ‘animal rights sympathiser’ against the cruelty of animal research, and even teachers used to challenge me ‘What if the only way to find out if a drug was safe was to test it on an animal? What if that drug were to cure a disease you’re Mum or Dad had?’ Yes, my teachers were delightful.( It’s almost on a par with any question a vegan is asked that begins with ‘If you were on a desert island…’) The truth is that if the horrid business of animal testing were reliable, we’d have a real debate on our hands, but the fact is that it’s not.

Beagles are still used in experiments
Beagles are still used in experiments – Jo-Anne McArthur/We animals

Let’s take penicillin for example. Alexander Fleming originally tested the drug on rabbits and found it to be ineffective. (He may have thrown away the idea if he’d tested it on guinea pigs or hamsters, as it’s fatal to them.) However he was forced to try it on a very sick human patient as there were no alternatives. Here’s a direct quote from the co-discoverer and manufacturer of penicillin, who won a Nobel Prize for his efforts, “How fortunate we didn’t have these animal tests in the 1940s, for penicillin would probably never been granted a license, and possibly the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realized.” Now think about that for a while.

There are countless examples of animal experiments either delaying the release of an important drug (eg. muscle relaxants for general anaesthesia, organ rejection inhibitors, beta-blockers, pace-makers and heart valves amongst others) or of a drug testing as hunky-dory in animal toxicity tests and then going on to blind, injure or kill humans (eg. a first polio vaccine, thalidomide, ADHD medication, asbestos, smoking and countless others). So where does that leave us?

Well, happily, there are several charities lobbying against animal experimentation and some that even conduct human relevant research using modern techniques that mean no suffering to any animal, human or non-human. This research includes everything from skin sensitivities to  leukaemia and diabetes, and is widely endorsed by patients, even those with very serious illnesses. New discoveries are being made all the time, without the use of rats, mice, rabbits, monkeys or dogs (yes, it is still legal in Britain to subject Beagles to all sorts of horrors). And as for the question as to whether I’d endorse animal experiments to save a relative or indeed myself, well, there are far more effective methods these days and I’d rather they were used. After all, we cured cancer in mice years ago…

 

Filed Under: Vegan News Tagged With: animal testing, cosmetics, health, medecine, vivisection

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