The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

The Intelligence of Human Physiology / 79
to increased risk for cancer. Obesity often causes us low self-esteem and
other psychological problems as well.
The fat we carry around under our skin is mainly the fat of miserable
and terrified animals—it’s not surprising we’re anxious to be rid of
it! If we based our diet on the whole grains, fruits, vegetables and
legumes for which we are designed, we would find the obesity problem
in our culture evaporating, along with many other problems. Albert
Einstein was correct in saying that no problem can be solved at the level
on which it was created. As omnivores, we must go to another level to
solve our problem with excess fat, a level where we no longer kill and
confine animals by proxy and consume their fat-laden remains.
Toxins
When we get our protein from animal sources, we bring into our bodies
much higher levels of toxic contaminants than we do by eating plant
foods directly, because livestock feed grains are heavily sprayed with
pesticides and these poisons tend to concentrate in animal flesh, milk,
and eggs, as Andrew Weil points out:
One problem is that diets rich in animal protein put you high on the
food chain, not a good place to be. . . . One consequence of eating
high on the food chain is that you take in much larger doses of toxins,
because environmental toxins concentrate as you move up from
level to level. The fat of domestic animals often contains high concentrations
of toxins that exist in much lower concentrations in
grains, for example. An independent problem is that the methods we
use for raising animal sources of protein further load them up with
unhealthy substances. 29
The unfortunate animals raised for food are forced to eat large
quantities of fish meal and rendered animal flesh and organs, which is
totally unnatural for them, in order to fatten them quickly. Manure is
also used to “enrich” their feed, and these additives concentrate toxins
to an even higher extent than the plant foods the animals are fed. The
toxins in the animal foods we eat include carcinogenic heavy metals,