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Here is a speech I gave at Toastmasters this week. Hopefully I got all the details correct:
WHAT WE DON'T KNOW IS KILLING US
We tell ourselves stories. Stories we want to hear. When Aunt Martha dies from complications from diabetes, we say, well, it was her time, or when Cousin Bob dies from a sudden heart attack, we say he had bad genes. 'Cause, ya know, his dad and his grandma died from heart attacks, too. We think things like heart disease are a normal part of the aging process.
But intuitively we know – intuitively we know that unhealthy diets led to our loved one's illnesses. Intuitively we know that cheeseburgers are bad for us and broccoli is good for us.
But when we're confronted with the fact that a low-fat whole foods diet could save us, we say, well, I'm going to die anyway. At least I'll die eating stuff I enjoy. At least I'll die happy. But we don't die happy. We lose our ability to walk, to function, to do our daily tasks. We lose our limbs. We lose our eyesight. We lose our loved ones. We even lose our minds. We die prematurely – even in our 40s and 50s -- of heart attacks and cancer.
Sure, our life expectancy may surpass what it was 100 years ago, but we are spending years, even decades, suffering with things like kidney disease and rheumatoid arthritis or debilitated for years after a stroke or a fall. What does it matter if we live longer if we spend 20 to 30 years in pain and agony? It's outrageous that we are so ill-informed that we don't even know that we could have prevented all of this suffering.
And what we don't know is killing us.
We don't know about Dr. Denis Burkitt, a surgeon who worked in Uganda for 20 years, who was hard-pressed to find anyone at all with diabetes, appendicitis, diverticulitis or coronary heart disease. In fact, the first clinical case of heart disease in Uganda wasn't discovered until 1956. It was also discovered that the native Ugandan man with the heart disease had lived abroad – in Europe – and had eaten a Western diet for a couple of decades.
We don't know about the observations of Dr. John McDougall, who while working in the 1970s as a sugar cane plantation doctor in Hawaii, noted that his healthiest patients were those in their 70s and 80s and even 90s. These patients ate a traditional, plant-centered diet, and were thin, active and robust. Their children, in their 40s and 50s, who had adopted a bit of the Standard American Diet, weren't doing so well, and were showing signs of things like heart disease. Worst yet was the next generation, who had fully adopted a Western diet. They were sick and overweight.
We don't know about the documentary Forks Over Knives which celebrates Dr. McDougall and other heroes in the world of nutrition, and which teaches us about the overwhelming research that a lowfat vegan diet protects us from a whole assortment of diseases that we have been conditioned to believe are inevitable. Forks Over Knives should be required viewing for every high school student in this nation. But we don't even know about it.
And what we don't know is killing us.
The idea that what we put in our mouth affects our health is an alien concept. It seems so basic on the surface and yet it eludes us.
We don't know about animal protein and vegetable oils and their cancer-promoting qualities, that is, we don't know that meats and oils grow tumors. We worry about getting enough protein when all the while we're getting too much protein and destroying our kidneys and liver in the process.
We don't know about cows' milk and its links to autoimmune diseases. We don't know how cows' milk increases our IGF-1 levels and that IGF-1 is one of the most powerful promoters of certain cancers, specifically, breast, prostate, lung and colon cancers.
We blame our high blood pressure and our high cholesterol on our genes. We take statins, among the most prescribed drugs in the U.S., like candy. We barely lower our cholesterol and we destroy our muscles in the process. Our doctors tell us that if our cholesterol is under 200 we're OK. So we continue eating poison. What the doctors don't tell us is that one-fourth of all heart attack victims have a cholesterol between 150 and 200, and that a majority of people eating a lowfat plant-based diet can get their cholesterol under 150 without drug interventions.
And what we don't know is killing us.
We don't know about research. We see a random headline, that eating animal products doesn't increase our risk of heart disease. We believe that story, as it matches the story we want to hear, and we file it away, not reading the fine print. Why do we tell ourselves these convenient stories? Because we know what we like and we like what we want and we want what we want. And we don't want to know what we don't know.
And what we don't know is killing us.
We feed our children all the wrong stuff. We give them acne, constipation, ear infections, tooth decay, asthma, and appendicitis. We teach them the myths and lies that were taught to us, such as the myth of the food pyramid which should be in the trash alongside all the disease-promoting cows' milk that we serve our children every single day in our schools. We give our children diabetes, both type I and type II. Indeed, the incidence of what was once known as adult-onset diabetes is growing at alarming rates among children in the U.S. Sadly, the Centers for Disease Control predicts that one in three children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes at some point in their lives.
What we don't know is killing our children.
We expect medicine and surgery to solve our health problems when over 80 percent of them could be prevented or resolved by changing what's on our plates. As Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn points out, we call a low-fat plant-based diet "radical" but we don't think it's "radical" that half a million people a year will have their chests cut open and a vein cut from their legs and sewn into their coronary artery. That's not radical, but eating spinach is?
We don't know, as Dr. Esselstyn teaches, that heart disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never exist. We don't know that heart disease, our number one killer, which kills over 600,000 of us in the U.S. each year, is completely preventable and reversible. We don't realize that within days, actually within hours, of changing our diet our body starts working to heal those arteries.
And what we don't know is killing us.
We are so wealthy and so well educated in this country but so ignorant about one of the most important things. Our very lives are at stake.
We are so frightened of "terrorists" when what is killing us by the millions is on our plates. Our plates should terrify us. We should be screaming and running from our plates, running as far away as we can get.
Because what we don't know is killing us.
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This time, hopefully can provide benefits to all of you. Okay, see you in another article posting.
You now read the article with the link address https://diseaseknown.blogspot.com/2017/04/here-is-speech-i-gave-at-toastmasters.html
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