Preventing Heart Disease

The number one cause of death in the United States every single year for both men and women since 1918 (when a bird flu virus likely triggered the deadliest plague in human history) continues to be heart disease. William Clifford Roberts recently published a landmark review on the cause of our number one killer.

Dr. Roberts is executive director of the Baylor Cardiovascular Institute, has authored more than 1,300 scientific publications, written more than a dozen textbooks on cardiology, and has been the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Cardiology for 25 years.

The review, published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nutrition in Clinical Practice, was entitled “The Cause of Atherosclerosis.” Doesn’t he mean causes? Aren’t there lots of things that increase our risk of heart disease, such as hypertension, diabetes, obesity, inactivity, cigarette smoking, etc.? None of those matter, he says, unless our cholesterol is too high. All those other things can speed the buildup of plaque in our arteries; but since the plaque itself is made out of cholesterol, if our cholesterol level is low enough, there is nothing with which our body can actually build plaque. According to Dr. Roberts, atherosclerosis simply does not occur if cholesterol is low enough.

If cholesterol is the cause of atherosclerosis, how low does our cholesterol have to be for us to become heart-attack proof? Ideally, our bad cholesterol—“LDL”—should be under 70. Quoting the review: “If such a goal was created, the great scourge of the Western world would be essentially eliminated.” There are only two ways, he says, to get it down that low: (1) put a hundred million people on a lifetime of high dose statin drugs starting in their twenties, or (2) be what he calls a “pure vegetarian fruit eater,” which is the term he uses for those eating whole food vegan diets.

If we put everyone on drugs, then thousands of people would suffer side-effects. So, according to Dr. Roberts, “Of course a… [vegan] diet is the least expensive and safest means of achieving the plaque-preventing LDL goal, but few in the Western world are willing to live on the herbivore diet.” In his words in a recent interview: “The best way to prevent heart disease is to be a…non-flesh eater, a non-saturated fat eater.” “Because humans get atherosclerosis,” he reasons, “and that’s a disease only of herbivores, humans also must be herbivores.”

The cause of our number one killer is elevated cholesterol. According to Dr. Roberts, probably the most renowned cardiovascular pathologist in the world, that means the cause of our number one killer is: not eating vegan.

Diabetes & Our Plates

2010 is the 20th anniversary of Dr. Dean Ornish’s landmark study that proved, for the first time, that a plant-based diet could not just slow down the progression of heart disease, not just stop it from getting worse, but actually reverse heart disease and open up clogged arteries. The list of chronic killer diseases that vegan diets can literally reverse continues to grow.

Today, the average American is overweight, and 1 in 3 are medically obese. That’s what’s fueling our epidemic of type 2 diabetes in this country. It used to be called “adult-onset” diabetes, but now so many children are getting it, now we just call it “type 2.” Over the last decade diabetes rates have skyrocketed 90% in the United States, a disease that can set people down the road to dialysis, blindness, gangrene, and multiple amputations. For those of us who think it’s hard to get enough exercise now, let us imagine trying doing it with one foot.

In 2009 the first study in human history of thousands of U.S. vegans was published in the journal of the American Diabetes Association. Vegans were found to be the only dietary group averaging an ideal body weight, 40 pounds slimmer than the average meat-eater in the country. This is consistent with what a recent interventional study found.

Overweight meat-eaters averaging 221 pounds were essentially put on a vegan diet and lost about 25 pounds a year ending up an average weight of 168 lbs at the end of the two-year study. Switching to a plant-based diet resulted in an average of 53 pounds of sustained weight loss.

The American Diabetes Association journal study concluded: “vegetarian diets may in part counteract the environmental forces leading to obesity and increased rates of type 2 diabetes, though only the vegan diets were associated with a BMI [body mass index] in the optimal range. Inclusion of meat, meat products and fish in the diet, even on a less than weekly basis, seems to limit some of the protection associated with a vegan…diet. These findings may be explained by adverse effects of meat and fish…” Even those eating just a few servings of meat a month significantly raised their risk of disease.

So we now know how to prevent diabetes, but how do we treat it? There are certainly lots of different drugs for diabetics that lower blood sugar levels, but sometimes at the expense of increasing one’s risk of heart failure and bone fractures. There has to be a better way.

Just like with heart disease, the same diet that prevents diabetes in the first place can reverse the disease once you have it. One study found that half of diabetics placed on even a near-vegetarian diet didn’t need to take insulin anymore after just 16 days, and those still on insulin were able to cut their dose in half—and that’s after only about 2 weeks!

In 2009 the gauntlet was laid down. The official American Diabetes Association diabetic diet was placed in a head-to-head challenge against a vegan diet. The ADA diet did slow the progression of disease, such that the diabetes of those on the officially recommended diet was just a little bit worse at the end of the study period. On the vegan diet, however, their diabetes actually got better. Significantly better! Just think how many lives eating vegan could save. How many lives, eyes, kidneys, feet, and families.

The Flu Goes Back to School

You may be joining friends and family today for one of the last cookouts of the season. On this Meatless Monday, why not wow them with a meat-free feast? Efforts like these bring us one step closer to ending the inhumane treatment of farm animals. Dr. Michael Greger is here to share his expertise on the Swine Flu and explain its connection to factory farms. Dr. Greger recently worked with HSUS to create the DVD, Flu Factories: Tracing the Origins of the Swine Flu Pandemic. Be the fifth or tenth reader to tweet @CrazySexyLife with a link to this blog and win a free copy!

The World Health Organization (WHO) maintains that billions of people may become infected with swine flu. “This virus travels at an unbelievable, almost unheard of speed,” the WHO Director-General was quoted as saying last week. The “most worrying fact,” according to the Director-General, is “that 40 percent of the fatalities concern young adults — in good health — who die of a viral fever in five to seven days.”

Though swine flu has likely infected more than a million Americans, the virus got a late start. For reasons still not well understood, flu viruses thrive best in the wintertime. Swine flu’s emergence in the spring likely limited transmission in the Northern hemisphere in the ensuing summer months, leaving most people susceptible for the upcoming flu season. This leaves officials concerned that there may be a resurgence of the virus this fall, before a vaccine is widely available.

In a world in which millions continue to die of scourges such as AIDS and tuberculosis, though, why is there so much concern about this so-called swine flu? Because the last time a whole flu virus apparently jumped species and triggered a pandemic, it went on to become the deadliest plague in human history, the influenza pandemic of 1918.

Still, only about 1000 people have died so far from swine flu. Although any virus that kills scores of children can hardly be described as “mild,” the current pandemic has not been much worse than the regular seasonal flu so far, but this may just be the first wave. The 1918 pandemic was apparently relatively mild, too—at first. Compared to what was to come later, the first “wave” in summer 1918 hardly registered a blip, but then it came back with a vengeance in the fall to kill tens of millions of people.

Once a pandemic virus emerges, it is nearly impossible to stop. Swine flu has evolved into the first pandemic of the 21st century and almost certainly will not be the last. Attention must therefore be turned to preventing the emergence of viruses with pandemic potential in the first place.

The industrialization of poultry production has been blamed for the unprecedented changes taking place among bird flu viruses in recent decades. Similar changes in the pig industry have likely contributed to the emergence of the current pandemic, as documented in our new video feature Flu Factories: Tracing the Origins of the Swine Flu Pandemic at HumaneSociety.org/swineflu.

We need to end the long-distance live transport of farm animals, which can spread these diseases around the world; we need to follow the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal’s recommendations to abolish extreme confinement practices such as crates for pregnant pigs, as they’re already doing in Europe, and six states so far here in the U.S.; and ultimately, we need to follow the recommendation of the American Public Health Association, the largest association of public health professionals in the world, and declare: no more factory farms.

Studies have shown that measures as simple as providing straw for pigs can significantly cut down on swine flu transmission rates, presumably because then they don’t have the immune crippling stress of lying on bare concrete slats their whole lives. Such a simple measure, yet we deny them even this modicum of mercy—to their detriment, and, potentially, to ours as well.