FOOD, DISEASE, ANIMALS AND TREES
Learn How Healthy People Create a Healthy Planet
By Claudette Vaughan

John Toomey is one of Australia’s leading health educators. He is a Sport’s Nutritionist and Conditioning Coach and has worked in Professional Sport for over 20 years. John formed LifeWise Consulting Pty Ltd. With Lynda Stoner from Animal Liberation NSW he produced the tape Food, Disease, Animals and Trees that is exceedingly popular with environmentalists and animal rights activists alike. He’s just about to up-date the data on that original tape so we thought we’d catch up with him to talk about food, disease, animals and trees.

www.lifebalance.com.au

Abolitionist: You were born on a cattle station. How did you come from a cattle station to teaching people about diet, healthy living and how to create a healthy planet?

It’s funny isn’t it? I was born in 1960 on a cattle station. Cattle stations have been in my mother’s family for many years. I remember that we used to kill our own meat when I was a kid.

Then I lived on a dairy farm for 4 years. After that my parents moved off the land and ran hotels.

I always tell people it was beef, milk and beer that paid for my education. (laughter)

It was during my studies in physical education that I realised that perhaps I didn’t have to eat all of that animal based food so that started an exploration and I started to read and study and meet some amazing people. I realised that a big part of the problem with the environment is food production, in particular animal foods. That really switched me onto a bigger picture.

While everybody’s running around complaining about the amount of energy that motor vehicles use I realised there was something much more sinister lying right beneath the surface and contributing indirectly as well. It’s that that got my interest and I’ve been campaigning about it for many years now.

My own experience has shown with these issues that if one takes a highly radical stance people tune out and stop listening to you and so I think being highly radical is not the smartest approach if we really want to get people to change and get the message across to them.

The environmental argument is one with so many facets to it and I think first things first. If you are going to be a stanch environmentalist then it’s important to live as an example – Mahatma Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

From the animal based food perspective there are so many conflicting nutritional viewpoints so I have chosen to take this stance. I no longer tell people not to eat meat because whether human beings are natural vegetarians or omnivores, it’s an argument that has very strong points from both sides but there is no need for human beings to be totally cruel to human beings either.

What has happened in the name of economics has created such systems which are surposingly efficient and surposingly cost effective that are tremendously destructive to the environment. If we want to save the environment, we have to shut down the animal factories because the cost to the environment. If we put aside the animal cruelty aspect, which I don’t wish to do, and just look at the cost to the environment from factory farming it is astounding and it gives people so much power because if a person walks into their butcher shop and say’s “No I don’t want any products that have come through factory farms” all of a sudden people could bring these industries to their knees.

Once we get people listening to us they will be willing to make that change. The thing I have found with people is when they stop consuming factory produced products then they start consuming less meat-based products and they start moving towards a diet with far less meat in it to what they were originally accustomed. That, to me, is a significant win.

What has gone wrong with the modern-day diet?

Degeneration creeps up slowly. It takes a virus to make us very sick and it’s quick. People are lazy around their food and it’s too easy to grap something quick that’s heavily processed. People buy on price. It’s convenient, it’s laziness and there is enough information out there that muddies the waters to make people think that various highly processed foods are okay for them. I have never classified myself as a vegan, but I do call myself a pure vegetarian. I have never actually completely stopped wearing some leather, have never stopped eating honey and I have worn some wool products. I do not consume any animal products at all though.

A lot of people who abstain from animal products completely are extremely unhealthy because they eat too much grain-based food and they struggle with their health and their bodies are really acidic and they are not good examples for a plant-based diet. I think there is a profound lack of real information out there and there is laziness to conquer as well.

Here we are speaking about nutrition but not everybody concerned with the environment and animal rights is doing that now and that must impact the nature of effective campaigning.

Absolutely. The food industries are driving nutrition education out of the country.

Who makes up those nutritional rules?

Well, there are no rules. For a schoolteacher if they can get a glossy colourful set of posters for their classroom walls to compliment things, they will put those posters in their classroom. It’s up to people who are passionate about health and the environment and the welfare of animals to educate people, one at a time.

The other side of that is in terms of the consciousness of most people they are walking around asleep and so it’s important to wake them up gently. I think sitting at the dinner table lecturing somebody on why they shouldn’t be eating meat doesn’t get you anywhere but asking them a lot of questions, where did the meat come from? How did the animal die? How did he/she live? Do you know those sorts of things? This is what allows a person to start to explore their own consciousness and they start to wake up gently.

We can put people onto John Robbin’s new book “Healthy at 100”. It’s all great stuff.

You’ve made 10 points on your tape “Food, Disease, Animals, and Trees” that identifies how to keep ourselves, our families and the planet healthy. Without giving all your secrets away, briefly, will you give us your view on each John?

No 1. Good Health Begins in the Bowel (and so does Death).

Absolutely. The human body was not designed for the 21st Century. We take a lot of toxic waste into our bodies and ultimately it gets rejected through the bowel. If a person’s bowel isn’t functioning absolutely 100% then that waste will accumulate in the bowel. When that happens it creates an absolute cesspool in there. As soon as that happens the rest of the body’s health starts to degrade.

It was only 4 years ago when a person went into a western hospital whether it was for cancer or a broken leg, the first thing they had was their bowels washed out. The drug companies somehow squeezed that one out.

No 2. How much protein?

The original research done on protein from a couple of European researchers in 1914 comparing rats fed with grain with egg white and because the rats grew faster on the egg white so animal protein was superior was their conclusion. A huge quantum leap was make from there with the American Meat and Livestock picked up on that research and threw the protein theory into the hearts and minds of Americans but if all species of animals were looked at, you need to look at two things. One, the amount of protein in their breast milk. Two, how fast they double their birth rate. A rat doubles her birthrate for four days and her breast milk is 49% protein. A human being doubles her breast milk in 130 days and her breast milk is 5% protein. Human beings actually have a low protein requirement.

Some people tell me, “I was a vegetarian but after eating meat again I felt heaps better”. It’s the fat in the meat that did it for them. Human beings have a high requirement of fat and since we’ve been going for low fat then a lot of health problems have kicked in. People do need to eat a lot more fat than what they eat. Eating fat doesn’t necessarily make you fat. There’s been a lot of discoveries made in the last 10 years and a lot of theories so vegetarians who say they are lacking energy need to increase their fat content and then they’ll be fine.

No 3. How much fat?

When you talk about coconut oil, it’s the perfect oil for the body. It’s possible to have large volumes of it. Avocados, Olive oil, Nuts and Seeds are all good foods and a lot of the oil in those foods simulates the thyroid and increases a person’s metabolic rate but when you’re taking in extra calories, you are burning extra calories. A lot of those fatty acids, especially in the cholesterol is the foundational building blocks of the body. We now realise from long-term research that cholesterol need ever, ever causes heart disease. Saying that cholesterol causes heart disease is like saying that fire engines causes fires. The reason the person’s body is high in cholesterol is because cholesterol is doing repair work. It’s trying to repair the body as a result of the prolonged damage that free radicals have done caused by a really bad diet.

No 4. Cravings: Empty Foods vs Whole Foods?

If a person eats white flour and white sugar those foods are such empty nutrition the body doesn’t get satisfied so the body is still looking for more and more food.

The more whole the food and the less processed more satisfaction comes from eating that food. So many people when they eat all this heavily refined food get high insulin activity which in turn packs our cells full of glucose and then the body stops burning fat and almost exclusively burns glucose then the body starts losing another nasty little hormone called lepton which switches on your cravings for more carbohydrates so it’s keeping the refined foods out and that itself does an enormous amount for the environment.

No 5. Beating lethargy forever.

Yes, hydrate yourself. Most people are grossly de-hydrated and when they are their blood volume drops and they don’t get enough blood to their brain, they don’t get enough oxygen to their brain which means they just want to tune out and go to sleep. Every person needs a litre of water for every 25 kilograms of body weight.

No 6. Finding Balance.

Find Balance is about taking responsibility. People claim that their boss puts too much pressure on them or their partner puts too much pressure on them or society or the government makes it too hard for them. They need to build a bridge and get over themselves and start taking responsibility for their lives. Start learning how to say “No” and start putting their attention onto things which are more productive. The number of people who tell me they have no time for themselves but they watch 2 hours of television every night really need to step back and take a look at themselves. I often say to people do you really want to reach the end of your life and be laying back there on your death bed staring into the eyes of your grandchildren to say something profound like, “Well, at least I never missed an episode of CSI.” Pure indulgence, and it’s crazy, you know?

No 7. Chemical poison. This has fallen out of favour with the media of late and you would think it would be hardline No 1 up there since the food chain is inundated with chemical poisons.

Yes, female cancers and estrogen levels. High estrogen comes from phenol estrogens or environmental estrogens which come from pesticides which are just totally chocked up in the flesh of factory animals. It’s just nuts.

I say to people in seminars all the time if God was a women there’s not a chance in the world I would eat any form of factory farmed poultry because you are consuming a toxic cocktail then it rubs into their skin. Even the amount of chorine that people breathe in when they are just standing under the shower is just madness. It takes the human body multiple generations to adapt to changes in the environment. Look at how much the environment has changed in the last 200 years. The human body hasn’t had time to adapt.

No 8. Who’s cutting down the trees?

There was a television show 3-4 years ago on Sixty Minutes and they were talking about the land clearing in North Queensland because the most intensive land clearing in the world at the moment is North Queensland. They had the Environmental lobby on presenting their case and the Beef Industry presenting their case. The final sentence was “The environmentalists need to wake up. People need to understand that there is a 1.5 billion industry depending upon this land-clearing” as if that made it justifiable in some way.

No 9. Fast Food Capital of the World.

10 years ago MacDonald’s had more stores here in Australia than any other country on the planet. We were so successful with the CEO of MacDonald’s in Australia, Charlie Bell, he moved to the US and took over “MacDonald’s World”. He was super successful that he died a few years ago of bowel cancer. I’m sure Charlie was a super passionate marketing man but like a lot of passionate marketing people when they turn a blind eye to the product they are selling, it catches up with them in the end.

No 10. Give the Cow A Break.

I think the first step is this. If I was to go and find 20 people and say to them “Do you want to do something better for your health than what you are doing right now?” Go outside Melbourne and find a farmer who raises cattle. I would encourage people to find out where their meat comes from, how it is killed and it shows children that you are taking responsibility.

This might not turn people into vegetarians but it does show their children that meat does actually come from cute and furry animals and stop turning a blind eye. If we get enough people doing that all of a sudden the feedlot industry is going to be in big trouble because it won’t be able to sustain their dollars. They see themselves now as sustainable because they are making a financial profit so they think they can turn a blind eye to every thing but you know forget government to do anything about it because agri businesses know that deals were done in their favour when Australia signed the Trade Agreement. There’s a study conducted by the University of Adelaide in 1998. It was published in New Scientist magazine. They actually looked at the amount of grain that gets consumed by feedlot beef and they worked out that it takes about 16 kilograms of grain to produce a kilogram of beef. They then looked at the grain that needs to be grown to feed that beef and some of it needs to be irrigated and some doesn’t so they looked at how much water on average needs to be used to grow that grain. They looked at how much water needs to be used to hydrate the animals, and they looked at how much water it takes to manage the waste in the feedlot. They worked out that a quarter pound hamburger made from feedlot beef consumes 12,500 litres of water and that is where our water problem is.

I used to live at Red Hill on the Mornington Peninsula and we were on tank water there. If we ran out of water it cost us $80.00 for a delivery of 5000 litres of water so based on those figures $200.00 worth of water in every quarter pound hamburger.

Lastly, please talk about your work because Australia is the place for a consciousness change re: food and animals, if this is going to take place at all.

There are a couple of things that I’m doing. I present seminars in the corporate arena and one of my most popular seminars is called “Achieving Exceptional Health”. In those seminars I make it very, very clear about what following an animal based diet does to people and especially what following an animal based diet using products that come through factory farms. I follow that up with a website that provides information for people, they come to my website then they share that information with their friends and they often pass it on to their kids who take it to school.

I’m also about to launch into running audio and video programs on the web and I’m also an Avatar Master. The Avatar Course came out of New York and it is a 9-day exploration of human consciousness. It’s the most extraordinary process and it is a Movement that’s building momentum like a raging fire across the planet. I’m working through that Movement because the aim of the Movement is to contribute to creating an enlightened planetary civilization so through that I’ll be creating a new website that will be making contributions to feeding an enlightened planetary civilisation.