EarthSaveEarthSaveNEWS Vol. 14 No. 1 EarthSave promotes a shift toward a healthy plant-based diet. Summer 2003 Reversing Heart Disease COW DAMAGED LIVESTOCK FREE through Lifestyle By Neal Pinckney, PhD. A borderline positive result indicated a need for a thallium Denial is not just a river in stress test, a pair of 25-minute Egypt. heart scans, the first after an injec- I frequently saw my father, who tion of a radioactive isotope and died of a heart attack at 59, dou- the second after going on the bled over with pain. He called it treadmill with more thallium indigestion. injected when at the maximum Years later, heart rate. This stress test com- when I was pares how the heart's blood supply shoveling dirt appears at rest and at peak in my yard demand. When not enough blood and a tight- reaches the heart muscles at high- ness across er exertion levels, ischemia my chest kept results. And I had it. me from con- When the thallium scan proved tinuing, it was, I told myself, mus - positive, the next step was an cle strain. angiogram. I wasn't too keen Muscle strain was a far more about this procedure: A catheter is accurate diagnosis than I ever inserted into the femoral artery at imagined. The muscle was my the groin and threaded into the heart. heart. Different catheters are used ©GEORGE WUERTHNER Luck enters into many events to test heart muscles and valves that change lives. In my case, it and to inject a contrast medium was going to a different physician. that lets the cardiologist see exact- Dispelling the Cowboy Myth He looked over my medical ly where any blockages are. records and said my cholesterol The results were worse than "One friend reports having a flash of understanding when he stood by a fence that sep- was too high. He noted that my expected. My heart's right main arated grazed and ungrazed portions of the same creekbed. One side was lush and ver- father had died of heart disease artery was 100% blocked, and the dant. The other side looked like the face of the moon. Moo." and my blood pressure was higher two left arteries were 90% and --- Donald M. Peters, Arizona Republic, 1990 than normal, making me a prime 85% obstructed. Polaroid pictures candidate for a heart attack. When By Tim Lengerich showed me where these blockages he asked about any pain I had in were. my chest during exercise, I passed I was told there are usually There is a tremendous irony in public-lands ranching. On one hand, ranchers and cowboys are it off as indigestion, but he wasn't three alternatives. The first is canonized in the cowboy myth as icons of stalwartness, hard work and an aw-shucks, salt-of-the- fooled. He encouraged me to have angioplasty, in which a balloon is earth mentality. In reality, ranchers are the most pervasively destructive force on our public land, a treadmill test, in which heart with logging as a distant second. Via outlandish subsidies, you, I and Uncle Sam support the cattle monitors record information dur- industry with drought and fire relief, fencing, water tanks, windmills and bargain-basement graz- ing exercise. PINCKNEY/PAGE 10 ing fees. Our government kills hundreds of thousands of wild creatures each year to protect ranch- ers' herds against predators such as wolves, mountain lions and coyotes. In return we get erosion, endangered species, habitat destruction, flash floods, exotic weeds, SARS: Another Deadly Virus desertification and some of the most degraded landscape on Earth. Much of it will never recover. George Wuerthner of Eugene, Ore., is one of the most outspoken leaders against public-lands from the Meat Industry ranching. He dispels the cowboy myth and forecasts the demise of public-lands ranching, one of the biggest farces in American history. By Michael Greger, M.D. tions. In 1999, a new virus, now Wuerthner evolved gradually into a grazing activist. He worked at a fast-food hamburger joint in known as the Nipah virus, jumped Animal agriculture is not just a from pigs to humans in Malaysia, high school, where he considered the free hamburgers a major perk, and on a couple of ranches in public health hazard for those that college. infecting pig breeders and killing consume meat. In fact, the single about a hundred people before it "I have some firsthand experience with ranching and its lifestyle," he says. "It has its attractions- worst epidemic in recorded world especially if you ignore the environmental costs." was stamped out.[8] In the history, the 1918 influenza pan- Southern Chinese province of Wuerthner began to reassess his views on ranching as a result of his college experiences. As an demic, has been blamed on the Guangdong, battery chickens are undergraduate he studied wildlife biology and botany. He went to graduate school in range science, livestock industry.[1] In that case, sometimes kept directly above pig hoping for a job as a range conservationist with the government. the unnatural density and proximi- "In other words, I was not inherently hostile to livestock production or ranching," he says. "But ty of ducks and pigs raised for as I looked more and more at the ultimate causes of many Western environmental issues, I kept slaughter probably led to the coming back to one industry-the livestock industry. I came to conclude that the cumulative envi- deaths of 20 to 40 million people ronmental effects of this industry easily outstrip all others, hence my conversion to a grazing across the world.[2] Since then, activist." the raising of pigs and poultry has Wuerthner says a key problem with public-lands ranching is that it affects more public land than resulted in millions more human any other activity. Some 90% of all Bureau of Land Management lands, 70% of Forest Service deaths from the 1957-58 Asian flu, lands, dozens of national parks, wildlife refuges, state land and even county land are affected by the 1968-69 Hongkong flu and the livestock production. 1977 swine flu.[3] All of these Photo: Farm Sanctuary "Because of its huge geographical scope, even if it were a benign use of the landscape, it would influenza strains seem to have be a concern," Wuerthner says. arisen in the same region of south- pens, depositing their waste right "But it's anything but benign. It is the No. 1 source of water pollution in the West. It's the No. 1 ern China where intensive systems into the pigs' food troughs.[9] It of animal agriculture have become may come no surprise, then, that source of soil erosion in the West. It's the No. 1 cause of species endangerment in the West. It's the a breeding ground for new killer Guangdong is thought to have reason we don't have wolves throughout the West. It's one of the major reasons that more than four- viruses.[4] been ground zero for the deadly fifths of all native fish west of the Continental Divide are endangered or threatened." For centuries, the Guangdong SARS virus as well.[10] The Public lands play a crucial role in this country's biodiversity crisis too, Wuerthner says. Although province of China has had the Severe Acute Respiratory protection of private lands is desirable, it probably will never achieve more than spotty results, he world's largest concentration of Syndrome (SARS) virus is just the says. But because of their sheer size, public lands are where "landscape-scale ecological processes humans, pigs and fowl living in latest in a string of human like wildfire and predation can operate." close proximity.[5] In this environ- tragedies traced back to our MYTH/PAGE 9 ment, pigs can become co-infected appetite for animal flesh. with both human and avian (bird) According to the World Health strains of influenza. When this Organization, SARS, which has INSIDE happens, a deadly gene swapping already infected thousands world- can take place, in which the lethal- wide, could become the "first ity of viral strains rampant in the severe new disease of the 21st cen- L Perspectives 2 Chinese poultry industry[6] can tury with global epidemic poten- tial."[11] And experts are again Raising L combine which the human trans- Veg History 3 missibility of the human strains to blaming intensive animal agricul- Veg L create new mutated flu viruses ture.[12,13,14,15] According to Book Reviews 5 China's equivalent of the Centers L capable of infecting and killing Atkins Anyone? 8 people on a global scale.[7] for Disease Control, the first peo- Children! ple to succumb to the SARS virus L Other viral threats besides EarthSave Summit 12 influenza have also escaped from P. 6 Southeast Asian livestock opera- SARS/PAGE 11 EarthSave News Perspectives Summer 2003 2 Letter from the Chair Junk Pushers use Junk Science By Jeff Nelson Of course, no educational infor- the Integrity of Science -- run by mation was provided to the children tobacco and chemical industry- Out of the Darkness, Just like the tobacco industry, the as part of the study, such as that eat- funded Steven Milloy of food and chemical industries rou- ing the food in question might com- Junkscience.com; Competitive Into the Light tinely use "science" to try to con- promise their health or was other - Enterprise Institute; and Center for vince an unsuspecting public into wise undesirable. Global Food Issues, to name a few JOHN BORDERS JD buying their junky products. Obviously, the food industry of the worst.) CHAIR, EARTHSAVE BOARD OF DIRECTORS One favorite of the junk-food researchers who set up the study The most appropriate way to help industry that illustrates how this knew enough adults get their kids to eat a healthy In many ways, we are living in dark times.