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

96 / the world peace diet
the three toxic elements described earlier: saturated animal fat, cholesterol,
and animal protein. The percentage of saturated fat relative to
unsaturated fat may be “better” in fish than in other animals, but fish
is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “low-fat” food. Besides being
generally high in fat, cholesterol, and animal protein, and thus encouraging
heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and the other negative effects
of eating these substances, fish, because they live in water, are generally
even more toxic than factory farmed birds and mammals. That is saying
a lot! How could that be?
The basic reason is that the millions of tons of toxins that are produced
by our culture all end up, eventually, in the water. The largest
share of this pollution comes from animal agriculture in the form of herbicide,
pesticide, fungicide, and chemical fertilizer runoff from fields,
and sewage from factory farms, rich in drug residues and other toxins.
Livestock produce 10,000 pounds of manure for every person in the
U.S., 2 and the excess phosphorous and nitrogen from this waste causes
algal blooms, red tides, and the proliferation of deadly one-celled creatures
like Pfisteria piscicida that kill billions of fish and cause grotesque
sores on human swimmers. 3 Waters are further polluted by the whole
range of carcinogenic dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), toxic
heavy metals from industrial wastes, and other residues from mining,
tanning, paper, energy, petroleum, and industrial production, as well as
noxious pharmaceutical residues and radioactive contamination from
nuclear leakage. In addition to all this, the toxins that pollute the air are
eventually washed into lakes and oceans, and solid waste sites and landfills
are also leached by water, which carries their toxins into rivers and
aquifers.
Water is our planet’s universal solvent, and the whole range of environmental
contaminants we produce ends up eventually in our rivers,
lakes, streams, and aquifers, leading to the increasingly severe pollution
of our oceans. There are large oceanic areas called dead zones where no
fish can survive the water’s extreme toxicity and its lack of oxygen, a
condition known as hypoxia. This is the result of the massive amounts
of nitrogen fertilizer and livestock manure running into rivers and
oceans. This unnatural, “high-nutrient” water encourages the profusion