Amazing & Disappointing!!! (BLOG #28)

AMAZING AND DISAPPOINTING!!!

It never ceases to amaze me how one coincidence follows another in this steep learning curve of my psoriasis research.

Remember last week I said that maybe the “Asian diet” was the best one? So, I’m walking the dog on 4th avenue in Vancouver and I see this second hand book store which I’ve never visited before. I go in.

I literally walked five feet and reached out for this book called the China Study. About nutrition. It looked interesting. And it was kind of where my head was at. Plus the owner of the store recommended it. So, I bought it.

And then I kind of disappeared for ten days because this book is truly eye-opening. I couldn’t put it down. It’s not new. It was written in 2006.

Ok, my intuition that the Asian diet was more healthy is completely validated by this book. And the author is a well-respected Doctor and a serious research person. Like, decades of research.

Now, his interest was piqued by the difference in cancer and heart attack rates between rural China and North America. And the difference is stunning!

He began with studies on rats (the poor critters). Here’s what was interesting:

If you fed rats a diet with casein (a dairy protein) and gave them a small amount of a carcinogenic substance, they developed cancer.

BUT, if you fed the rats a plant based diet and a large amount of the carcinogenic substance, they did NOT develop cancer.

That says something about a plant based diet.

See, we are used to the high rates of cancer and heart disease in our Western world. We think it’s normal. But it’s NOT. Asian countries have significantly less incidence of both these diseases.

WHY?

Because we, based on our Western diet, have “diseases of nutritional extravagance” (meat, dairy, processed food. And tons of junk food)

The Asian diet (now being altered by the invasion of Western food) was traditionally low in meat, almost non-existent in dairy, high in vegetables and rice (gluten free). Low in sugar.

Compare that to our Western diet. High in meat, high in dairy, high in processed food, high in sugar, low in vegetables and fruit. We pay a terrible price for our extravagance. We get sick. And we die.

Now, you’d think that all these research results would have changed our way of thinking and eating. But it hasn’t .

WHY NOT?

Because the power of the dairy industry, the meat industry, the pharmaceutical industry have made absolutely certain that this information is quashed, ridiculed, concealed and held back AND that the doctors and researchers who promote it are sidelined.

Imagine if the West caught on to this–a mostly plant based diet. Heart disease and Cancer incidence would shrink dramatically BUT so too would the bank accounts of the food/pharmaceutical industries.

And that ain’t gonna happen any time soon. So, you might be a little surprised to know that we (in North America and Northern Europe) may have the best hospitals and a plethora (excess) of pills and procedures BUT we’re the sickest in the known world.

….to be continued in the next BLOG!

Much love, Dakota, Lucky and Charlie