For many people, the benefits of the Paleo diet are clear: great nourishment, deep culinary satisfaction, freedom from the blood sugar roller-coaster, and the ability to shrink down to optimum body weight without ever having to go hungry.

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The freak out over the last E-coli outbreak has simmered down now, so people have stopped thinking about the cause of these outbreaks. But we need to think about it. Because never in the history of human kind have we displayed this level of mass gluttony and disregard for the suffering of the animals that give us sustenance. Nature loves payback though. Keep cows in concentration camps, feed them each other along with chicken-poop-soaked newspaper, and Mother Nature will eventually get pissed off. As you read this, possibly incubating in the brains of countless people is the bovine brain-wasting disease commonly known as “mad cow disease.” No one knows when or how many people will suffer brain melt down in the future.

But as they say on TV, “That’s not all!” Ground water from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations’ fecal lagoons is contaminating happy, sunny veggie farms with E.coli. Beleaguered farm workers—who can’t help but have poor personal hygiene—spread E.coli around.

In the film The Last of the Mohicans, Hawkeye, the orphaned Anglo-Saxon frontiersman runs with his adopted father, Mohican Chingachgook and his blood son, Uncas through a heavily canopied forest. When an elk is felled by the .59 caliber round of Hawkeye’s five- foot rifle, the three men kneel at the beast. In Mohican, Chingachgook speaks to the elk, “We’re sorry to kill you, Brother. Forgive us. I do honor to your courage and speed, your strength.”

Ghandi said, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” Instead of freaking out about E-coli outbreaks, maybe we should freak out a little bit more about our lack of moral progress when it comes to the treatment of animals, and have more reverence for those living beings.

Peace, Fun, Love.

Your girlfriend in health,

Image: Christian Meyn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I don’t have to say that the evening was long, very long. And when I got home and told my mother, she looked uncomfortable, and said, “Oh well.” I’ve often thought about that family and wondered if anyone every intervened on the boys’ behalf.

Image: Carlos Porto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

More recently I was at Moby Dick’s in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Like many New England restaurants, Moby Dicks serves up fried seafood, but they also have fresh lobster, coleslaw, grilled fish, and salads. I sat across from a mother, father and teenage son who appeared to weigh in at 200, 250, and 350 to 400 pounds respectively. They ordered fried seafood, fries, milk shakes and ice cream sundaes. This family also had an adorable ten year old boy who was about 150 pounds, a boy who was condemned by virtue of the family he was born into to become a binge eater, to possibly reach 400 pounds like his brother, and likely to die young from a heart attack or complications of type 2 diabetes.

Although being overweight today is the norm, it’s not yet socially acceptable to be obese. In a study which asked college students who they would be the least inclined to marry, an embezzler, cocaine user, ex-mental patient, shoplifter, sexually promiscuous person, communist, blind person, atheist, marijuana user, or obese person, the students said they would rather marry (in this order) an embezzler, cocaine user, shoplifter, or blind person before they would marry an obese person. Children who were shown pictures of children in a wheelchair, missing a limb, on crutches, facially disfigured or obese, said they were least likely to play with the fat child. Obesity is the last acceptable area of discrimination and obese adults are discriminated against in many areas of life including every stage of employment cycle (selection, placement, compensation, promotion, discipline and discharge). Overweight people are even stereotyped as emotionally impaired, socially handicapped and as possessing negative personality traits. They get paid less money.

The fact is that children of overweight/obese parents are more likely to be overweight/obese. And once a child is overweight, he or she is likely stay that way for the rest of his or her life.

Although obesity often condemns people to less than happy lives, our society accepts that a child born into a family of binge eaters will likely become a binge eater as well, and we shrug. Oh well. Sad, isn’t it? And to make matters worse, our medical community has labeled this pattern “genetics.” Most doctors and most people cling to the belief that genes make people obese. Genes—not behavior. Everyone in my family is overweight. My genes are working against me. Type 2 diabetes runs in my family. Oh I see, genes give people type 2 diabetes, not the fact that by the time the little boy from Cape Cod was ten years old, he had eaten twelve hundred pounds of sugar, give or take several hundred pounds. This is not even counting the hundreds of pounds of other carbohydrates, like cereal, toaster pastries, chips, French fries, candy, cookies, cake, pie, pastry, donuts, bread, pizza, pasta, waffles, pancakes, muffins and cornbread that American families typically eat. If a family feeds their children huge quantities of sugar/carbohydrates/factory food over the prolonged period of their childhoods, that is not genetics, that is behavioral programming that creates a conditioned response that is very difficult to overcome.

It’s becoming more common to hear heartrending stories of children and obesity in the news. Like the three-year old British girl who weighed in at 83.6 pounds when she died of congestive heart failure, and the thirteen-year old California girl whose 680 pound bedsore ridden body was found nude on her mother’s living room floor, instigating a five day trial wherein the mother was acquitted of felony child abuse. In the summer of 2010, a couple was arrested after authorities found their two children obese and living in filthy conditions. The five-year-old daughter who could barely walk, with matted hair, rotten teeth and bug bites, weighed 158 pounds. The four-year-old girl wearing a soiled diaper and drinking from a bottle weighed 89 pounds. The couple is facing felony child cruelty charges.

You may say, “Well these children were abused.” True, they were abused beyond just being fattened up way beyond a normal body weight for their ages. As much as it may be unpopular, shocking, and alienating to some readers, it’s my position that causing children to become obese or sick as the result of feeding them factory food products is child abuse, with or without the bug bites and diapers.

I also can’t understand the bizarre American concept of “kid food.” In The Ultimate Weight Solution, TV psychologist Dr. Phil urges his readers to “Begin today to reprogram your environment and set yourself up for success,” he goes on to say, “Okay, I suspect that right now you’re thinking, ‘Well, that sounds fine and good, but there are foods I need to keep around for my kids. They aren’t fat. Why should they suffer?” Dr. Phil suggests designating a “specific cabinet” in your kitchen for kid food such as “pizza, brownies, potato chips and all the rest.” This is supposed to protect you from temptation but allow your kids to eat factory products. In other words, a major role model, best selling psychologist tells us that not feeding kids poisonous substances would cause them to “suffer.” Have you ever noticed that these so-called kid foods are the most processed, chemicalized and sugar-laden foods on the market? Can you imagine feeding that stuff to your dog? I’ve heard many people say, “People food isn’t good for dogs!” In other words people feed “kid food” to kids, but not to dogs.

I often sit in airports, airplanes, and restaurants and am saddened by what I see parents feeding their children. I wonder when, if ever, we’ll collectively agree that fattening a kid up, making him sick and depressed on factory food really is child abuse? It’s not comfortable to intervene, just like the neighbors ignored the goings on in the weird household with the neglected kids, but at least we can start a collective dialog and then someday maybe parents won’t feel as comfortable in the kid food status quo.

Om Shanti,

Shhh! Babies sleeping. Well, not human babies. But still. I think I can safely say that I’m not the only person in America who coddles my dogs.

Dogs and cats have cleverly evolved to be too cute in the eyes of humans to eat. How did they do that? They were smart enough, or clever enough to have figured out how to play humans to assure a place in a soft bed rather than roasting in a barbecue pit.

They must be really happy with themselves now that other animals lead hellishly tortured lives from birth until they are slaughtered in horrifying, painful ways.  If you’re a cat or dog, it’s a relief. If you’re human who eats animals then it’s a horribly squeamish subject.

A subject that I would like to address. I eat for physiology not for ideology.

If you want to understand human physiology read Death by Supermarket (which I spent four years researching and writing so I’m not going to rehash it here). Suffice it to say that meat is an historically eaten food, and just because we have the luxury of not killing our own food doesn’t change human physiology.

You can have a lot of idealistic goals and moral standards—like Buddhist principles (BTW, the Dalai Lama eats meat)—but the fact is that we are still the same creatures we were 10,000 years ago. We ate meat then. (This is all about insulin resistance and aging, and getting diseased and dying faster, which is too huge of a subject to go into here.)

In the 1992 film “The Last of the Mohicans,” Hawkeye is an Anglo-Saxon frontiersman who had been orphaned as a baby and adopted by the Mohican Chingachgook. The film opens with Chingachgook, his blood son Uncas and Hawkeye running silently through a heavily canopied forest, hunting an elk. When the elk is felled by the .59 caliber round of Hawkeye’s five foot rifle, the three men kneel at the beast. In Mohican, Chingachgook speaks to the elk, “We’re sorry to kill you, Brother. Forgive us. I do honor to your courage and speed, your strength. . . .”

This reverential attitude that some cultures historically held for the animals that provided them sustenance was repeated (copied) in James’ Cameron’s 2010 “Avatar” when the Na’vi Neytiri witnesses the humanoid Na’vi (called an Avatar) Jake Sully proving himself with a “clean kill” of a forest creature that ostensibly the Na’vi would eat.

All of this said, if you want to eat for physiology not for ideology (an historically diet including meat), you need to take a stand against the torture of animals. You need to buy only meat that you are sure has been organically raised and humanely slaughtered. That goes for milk products too. Are you buying supermarket brands? Because if you are that stuff is noxious (another reason to read DBS).

Taking a stand against the torture of animals includes taking into consideration what we feed to our animals.

Before WWII people fed their animals the same food they ate (i.e. table scraps). Then we industrialized dog food so that dogs were eating body parts that humans wouldn’t eat, body parts of tortured animals that is. There are organically raised dog food out there, but if you want to make your own, here is a recipe.

Bon Appetit Little Doggies Food

3 cups organic brown rice
5 cups water, or organic chicken broth
2 pounds pasture raised organic ground chicken, turkey, pork or beef, OR LEFTOVERS OF YOUR DINNERS, MINCED UP
3 ten-ounce bags of frozen organic mixed vegetables
(green beans, peas, carrots and corn)
6 to 8 pasture raised eggs
Grated cheese (whatever is going to go bad in the fridge)

Layer all ingredients, except eggs, into a rice cooker and turn on. It takes about 1 hour to cook. When the cooker turns off, transfer the cooked mixture into a large bowl. Working quickly while it is still very hot, crack eggs into the mixture and stir to “cook.” Stir in cheese.

Cool and store in an airtight container in the refrigerator or freezer.

(Note: Do not stir cod liver oil into hot food as polyunsaturated oils become rancid easily with exposure to heat, air and light. And be careful with the cod liver oil as it is cathartic and you may end up taking your dog out in the middle of the night.)

Like humans, all dogs are different. Our dogs get a lot of exercise so may need more food than a dog that doesn’t exercise much or that is much smaller. This a very nutrient dense recipe so experiment to see what amount is best for your dog.

March Against Coca-Cola in Mehdiganj Credit: Amit Srivastava

An ad in Newsweek proclaims: “The world is changing. And so are we. Coca-Cola Enterprises was named #1 in the Food and Beverage sector in Newsweek’s Green Rankings.”

Coca-Cola has signed the Copenhagen Communiqué!

The ad goes on to say that the Coca-Cola Company is committed to reducing our environmental footprint.

I’m just floored when I read stuff like this because I’m thinking are there really people who believe this utter nonsense?

Yes, because propaganda works. Here’s an expert from my book Death by Supermarket:

In 1968, at age eighteen, I was swept into the mass exodus of the love generation overland from Europe through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, to India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In the jungle in Ceylon I met my lifelong friend Jitka Gunaratna, then a Czechoslovakian expatriate, fishing with a safety pin and a shred of coconut. It was less than a year after the infamous Prague Spring and Jitka, who had been in Czechoslovakia during the Russian invasion, was still reeling from that horrible event. As we ate her fish, she cried when she reiterated the story to me.

Twenty-five years later, Jitka visited me in Santa Barbara, where I caught her in front of the TV watching a chemical company ad about caring for some bird. “You’re not crying, are you?” I asked her.

“Well, I see this advertisement on CNN International and I find it so touching,” she sniffed. “I always cry.”

“Jitka,” I said darkly, “aren’t you the little Czech girl who also cried when Russian tanks rolled over your fellow citizens in the Wenceslas Square in Prague in 1968, and cried again when that Communist regime decimated your country?”

“Uh-huh,” she admitted, smiling sheepishly as she wiped away a tear.

“You, of all people, should understand the meaning of propaganda.”

“But it’s so heartwarming,” she insisted. “Those birds.”

The truth is that sodas, particularly Coke (including Diet) are responsible for the epidemic rise in obesity and degenerative diseases such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and heart disease.

Take obesity as an example. Say you’re a 5’4” tall woman, like me who weighs 128 pounds. What if I weighed 350 pounds? Wouldn’t my sheer size take up more room on the planet? What about when I drive in a car or fly in an airplane? Wouldn’t it take more fuel to transport me? It takes more calories/carbs to keep me weighing 350 pounds. The sugar that Coca-Cola is producing in farms across the globe takes up environment space, doesn’t it? What about my medical costs? Producing all the drugs and medical modalities that I’m going to need in the next twenty years (if I live that long) will spread my carbon footprint all over the place.

The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research published “Bubbling Over: Soda Consumption and It’s Link to Obesity in California.” This research reflects the rest of the country.

• Over 10.7 million Californians over the age of one drink at LEAST one soda a day.
• 41 percent of children 2-11 years old drink at least one soda or other sugary drink per day.
• Only 1 in 4 adults drink soda but those who indulge are 27 percent more likely to be overweight or obese.
• The average American consumes 22 teaspoons of added sugar per day versus the recommended 5 to 9 (I think that’s really a lot). 22 teaspoons of sugar per day is still 200-400 percent more than recommended.
• One 20-ounce soda contains 17 teaspoons of sugar.
• Nearly ½ of the added calorie growth in our food chain since 1970’s come from soda.
• Americans consume an average of 50 gallons of sugary soda per year (except me, who consumes none).
• Soda is the number one source of added sugar in our food chain.
• 2/3 of all HFCS goes into sodas.
• The average size of a soda increased from 6.5 ounces in the 1950’s to 16.2 ounces today (149 percent increase).
• Milk consumption has decreased by 33 percent in the last 30 years (I do not have the statistics on the decrease in raw milk but it’s way more than that unfortunately)
• Each additional daily serving of soda increases a kid’s risk for obesity by 6o percent and that is really shocking and disturbing.
• In the last 25 years, the obesity rate in CA rose from 8.9 percent to 24.3 percent. (1 in 4 Californians.)
• The cost of medical and health expenses to the state is estimated at $41 billion.

We are only looking at obesity here, and not at the epidemic rise of degenerative diseases. If you want to get picky, what about litter all over our streets? Have you ever noticed how much of it is fast food (i.e. Coke cans and cups)? The Coca-Cola Company has contributed to the stampeding of carbon footprint all over the planet, yet they are have received Newsweek’s highest green rating.

It’s all about money.

Prince Charles has always been a supporter of the environment. As I am running off to my meditation retreat I have less time to write this week. But I can leave you with this Newsweek article the Prince’s efforts to spare the rainforest.

Om!