My impression has been that when Reader’s Digest starts carrying articles about a topic, it’s no longer of interest to just a few people on the fringe.  When I ran across the February 2011 article on Gary Taube’s book, Why We Get Fat—and What to Do About It, I saw that the cogent and traditional way of eating is really gaining traction against the low-fat and high-carb conventions.

Parts of the messages of Kevin Brown and the Weston A. Price Foundation are starting to penetrate mainstream awareness.  It’s encouraging, even though awareness by the mainstream press is still incomplete and still lags behind the more knowledgeable champions of healthy eating.  Jimmy Moore posted an article on Gary Taube’s book months ago.  (Jimmy  also provided a convenient link to a podcast of his interesting interview of Gary Taube— good stuff.)

Conventional Wisdom Is Not Holding Up
Taube’s book echoes what Kevin Brown has been saying for years, in Kevin’s own book, in his lectures, and on his website: the standard American diet has been making the population overweight, obese and prone to disease.  These observations challenge the simplistic thinking that says calories are calories no matter where they come from.  In fact, the body responds to different types of dietary calories in different ways, and the low-fat, high-carb diet upsets the body’s ability to regulate fat tissue properly.  Eating fat doesn’t lead to more fat storage in the body; eating high amounts of carbs leads to the insulin resistance that increases fat storage.  The high-carb diet also correlates to increased incidence in a multitude of diseases, from heart disease, cancers, diabetes, and even gum disease.

The mounting evidence of researchers and mainstream publications who report on the failure of the standard American diet is like the proverbial handwriting on the wall.  Animal-produced foods are eventually going to lose their demonization.  So now what?  Do we turn to the supermarket aisles for the cheapest and most readily available animal-produced foods?  Not unless we want to trade in one set of health problems (obesity, diabetes) with another set (degenerative diseases such as arthritis and cancers).

Bad food Affects Us.  Bad Food Also Affects Our Animals
We humans do get all kinds of health problems from eating foods that our ancestors never ate and that we weren’t designed for, such as highly-refined grains, sugars and fake oils (care for cottonseed, anyone?).  Similarly, the livestock animals that produce our meat, eggs and milk get all kinds of health problems if forced to eat feeds that they weren’t designed for.  In agribusiness’s factory farms, the food that the animals were designed for, such as natural pasture grass, is replaced by commercial feeds that are both cheaper and cause quicker weight gain, for bigger profits.  The only thing that suffers is the health of the animals, and of the people who eat the unhealthful animals.

A mainstay of feeds for rapid weight gain is GMO corn, which has been shown to cause organ failure in animals, mostly in the kidneys and liver, but also in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and blood.  Another important constituent of feed is cheap protein in the form of animal renderings, which is all the animal byproducts scraped up and thrown out by the factory slaughterhouses, such as bone, feathers, eyeballs, offal, hair, hooves, diseased organs and the occasional bits of metal (from animal-ID-tags), plastic, and some restaurant grease.  Many rendering factories also accept roadkills  and carcasses from animal shelters, and add them to the mix.  To replace the mineral and chlorophyll of natural grass, the feeds for cows usually incorporate ground-up corn stalks and corn plant leaves that are left over after the crop of corn has been harvested; they can make up more than half the feed.

The feeds’ formulas are then topped off with hormones, to force rapid weight gain, and antibiotics, to combat the pathogenic infections that are bound to assail the animals.  The animals on factory farms are kept in pens whose floors (of dirt or concrete) are covered with the animals’ feces and urine, which become an ideal breeding ground for pathogenic bacteria.

It’s Not Smart to Subvert Nature
Grazing animals that are designed to eat grass (e.g., with multiple stomachs) and that were never meat eaters have been forced to eat feed that their systems can’t handle, including bits of animals of their own species.  Mad cow disease is just the most severe outcome so far of these unnatural farming practices.  Other more common diseases and organ failures are inevitable for the animals subjected to modern factory farming.  But agribusiness has figured out how to adjust feeds and hormones so skillfully that they can bring the animals up to harvest weight quickly enough to be killed just weeks before organ failure would debilitate the animals.

The result of all this tinkering with Mother Nature is to produce the most meat (or eggs or milk) for the cheapest cost.  But it’s not really a healthful practice to keep eating food produced by animals pumped up on hormones and antibiotics and on the verge of disease.

The Right Food Raised Right
The truly healthful alternative to an ineffectual diet that’s low-fat and high-carb is to get our food from traditional farming, that raises livestock by having them graze (literally eat living grass).  The animals are healthy because they’ve spent their whole lives feeding on their traditional diet in their natural environment: sunlit pastures where they absorb vitamin-D and the living enzymes and minerals from the grass.  As a bonus, grazing in pastures is much better for the environment than force-feeding artificial diets in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).  The grazing keeps alive the native species of grasses as well as the food chain of animals that dwell there, from insects to small mammals to top predators.   Grazing also does not lead to the concentrations of fecal and urine waste that typically pollute the land around the CAFOs.

Cheap, fake foods that look the same as real are not “just as good” as traditional foods.  People are starting to question whether they’re eating the right things.  Let’s keep going to make sure we’ll all have access to the right food raised in the right way.  Let’s support our natural farmers and buy real food that’s been raised by them.

John Chisholm is co-owner of a small company that makes Good-Gums, a toothpaste-replacement that supports the body’s ability to heal its gums. When WAPF Chapter Leaders started carrying Good-Gums, John started learning and practicing Weston A. Price dietary principles, as lucidly explained by Kevin Brown’s Liberation Wellness. Already a regular exerciser and feeling pretty healthy, John didn’t anticipate how well his body would further respond to unprocessed, full-fat, pasture-raised foods.