Meat

Meat eaters, especially red-meat eaters, are three times as likely as vegetarians to suffer from heart disease and breast cancer. Meat eating stresses the liver and kidneys, two important detoxifying organs. It can also deplete calcium, which adds to the risk of osteoporosis, and the uric acid in meat can deposit in our joints, inflaming arthritis.

People who eat red meat five or more times a week increase their risk for colon cancer by 400 percent compared to people who eat no meat or eat it less than once a month. Women who eat beef, lamb, or pork as a daily staple are two and a half times more likely to develop colon cancer than women who eat meat less than once a month. The substitution of other protein sources such as beans and lentils is known to reduce the risk of colon cancer. Prostate cancer is another risk. Meats are higher in animal fat, which is harder for us to digest and therefore stays in our bodies longer.

Humans were meant to be primarily vegetarian. Our closest living relatives from the animal world, apes, are vegetarians. Even cows are, by nature, vegetarians. The structure of your skin, teeth, stomach, and bowels, and the length of our digestive system, are all typically vegetarian. Somewhere along the way, we overcame our physical limitations and decided to kill other animals for food. Unfortunately, we've become too smart for our own good. Please leave meat for the carnivores. Contrary to what many people believe, we are not carnivores. Our incisors (canine teeth) are not long enough or sharp enough, and our digestive tract is not designed to efficiently process meat.

We can survive quite easily on a diet that consists of no animal products, a vegan diet. Most of the world's human population is, for the most part, vegetarian. All of the negative information claiming that vegetarian diets lack some necessary nutrients and protein comes from organizations, such as the Meat and Livestock Commission, that compete with vegetable food sources for their profits.

Also, I often hear people say, "I don't feel strong when I don't eat meat. Meat gives me strength." Well . . . the largest and strongest dinosaurs were vegetarians. Elephants, who are big, strong, and smart, are vegetarians. Eating meat has nothing to do with strength. In fact, it zaps your strength because it overtaxes your digestive system and wears you out. A chimpanzee is 97 percent vegetarian. Orangutans are more than 99 percent vegetarian. Both are extremely close in DNA to humans. Chimpanzees are much closer to us than they are to any other animal, and they eat a much healthier diet than we do. (Are we sure we're smarter?)

Even if humans were built like carnivores (and we're definitely not), we would still have to contend with the added hormones, antibiotics, tranquilizers, additives, preservatives, and pesticides found in most meat sources today.

People often ask me whether or not I eat chicken. When I first started this program, I didn't plan to give up chicken. But about two and a half years after I gave up red meat, chicken began to taste funny to me. I became more aware that its texture and density made it too hard for me to digest, and its smell and taste no longer appealed to me. So I gave it up. At that time "free-range" chicken products were not widely available. Today, I still don't eat chicken, and I don't really recommend it in the long run for women because I believe it is too concentrated a protein for females. My husband and sons eat a little chicken as long as it is free range. It's important that chicken is free range because then the chicken is raised on natural grains and allowed to run free as opposed to being shot up with steroids and growth hormones and cooped up in tiny cages. (You don't want to inherit all the chemicals and "stress" that come with a conventional chicken.)

Sugar

In recent years, sugar has been blamed for conditions such as hyperactivity, diabetes, hypoglycemia, bad moods, yeast infections, obesity, and tooth decay. Sugar depletes your body of all of the B vitamins. It leaches calcium from your hair, blood, bones, and teeth. It interferes with the absorption of calcium, protein, and other minerals in your body and retards the growth of valuable intestinal bacteria. This is what we often give to our valentines. How sweet!

Sugar has a fermenting effect in your stomach. It stops the secretion of gastric juices and inhibits the stomach's ability to digest. People eat desserts and the end of their meals because it makes them feel emotionally satisfied. But because sugar inhibits the stomach's ability to digest, it makes the food that accompanies the sugar to stagnate, making it more fattening. It's not the fat or calories in sugar that's a problem. It's what sugar does to your digestive enzymes. That's the problem. Sugar is not digested in the mouth like other foods. When eaten alone, it passes directly into the small intestine, but when eaten with other foods, it gets stuck in the stomach for a while. Sugar in the stomach is a sure way to guarantee rapid acid fermentation in the warm and moist conditions that exist there. So, drinking a regular soda with your meal or sugar in your coffee while eating breakfast definitely ignites that fire. It's like you've got a winery working inside your stomach.

Kicking the sugar habit isn't an easy thing to do. I know when I decided to give up sugar, it was very difficult for me. My theory on this one is that once you start eating sugar, you want more and more of it, even if your stomach tells you it's full. That is what I call the sugar treadmill. It goes beyond satisfying a simple urge. People generally eat to fill their stomachs, not caring what they put into it. But you should care, because so much of how we feel and think and act is all tied to what we eat, right?

Getting caught up on a sugar treadmill is dangerous, especially for children. I have often referred to sugar as "kiddy cocaine," because, in my opinion, that is exactly what it is. Watching your children's behavior change right before your very eyes after they've eaten sugar can be a very dramatic experience. It is like giving the child a drug. It stimulates, causes mood swings, and can be addicting. (Sounds like a drug to me!) Giving your child sugar is such an unhealthy food choice (if you want to call it a food). It only stimulates and trains him or her to behave in an unruly and unhealthy way.

Americans consume somewhere in the neighborhood of 136 pounds of suger per person, per year. Sugar adds "empty" (meaning of no nutritional value) calories to your daily intake. Over half of the sugar consumed today is added directly from the sugar bowl while eating or preparing a meal. The food manufacturers add the other half, either as suger or as high-fructose corn syrup. Your body breaks down sugar that you eat into the sugar found in the blood, called glucose.

If you want to get off that sugar treadmill, pick one of two ways: either cut down on your total sugar intake by eliminating added sugars and slowly decreasing your intake of foods that are high in sugar, or go cold turkey. Give up all added sugar and any food that has refined white sugar in it. It's that simple.

I found when I gave up white sugar, I also ended up giving up red meat. They are total opposites in terms of being yin (sugar) and yang (meat). The reason you crave one with the other is that they balance each other out because they're both so extreme in the food spectrum. It's hard to eat one without the other, just as it's hard to entirely give up one and still crave the other. Dropping both from your diet makes it easier to stick with not eating either food, because your craving for both goes way down. The more vegetable protein you eat in place of animal protein, the lower your desire for sugar will be. You'll see! That craving for something sweet at the end of a meal slowly fades because now you're eating a much more balanced meal.

Once you decide to kick the sugar habit, you'll notice that your taste buds will start picking up flavors and sensations you may have never experienced before. Everything you eat will start to taste better and be more alive with flavor. Oddly enough, it's not the food that tastes better; it's your body that's now able to taste the food better. (You'll find that this is a common and wonderful little dividend that comes from improving your diet.)

Dairy

I have been virtually dairy free since 1979. Believe me when I tell you quite frankly that eliminating dairy from your diet will change your life forever. It'll change the way you look and feel and add years to your life. When I first talk to people about this program, they invariably say to me, "There is no way I could ever give up milk or cheese." The overwhelming response is that they might be able to deal with all of the other aspects of this health makeover, but the dairy thing, well, that just seems downright impossible! I should know. When a nutritionist first suggested that I give up dairy, I was one of those people! But after reading about the connection between dairy and heart disease, and arthritis, and diabetes, and kidney stones, and allergies, and nasal congestion, and depression, and respiratory problems, I thought, "Wowww! I owe it to myself to try this."

Once I finally got off dairy for good, my face changed so much. My perpetual puffiness was finally gone. The baby fat layer, brought on and maintained because of my dairy consumption, went away. I actually had bone structure! My resemblance to Miss Piggy was a thing of the past. My lungs and kidneys were functioning better because they were no longer clogged by the dairy sludge that had been impairing their function.

Everyone who goes off dairy raves about having more energy, better digestion, and feeling less stuffy in their nose. I can't think of anyone who didn't feel a difference once they gave up dairy. Some, unfortunately, go back to eating some dairy, but they never go back to the amount they consumed before. They now know consciously that they shouldn't be eating dairy.

I'm always saying that the only thing milk is designed to do is to turn a fifty-pound calf into a three-hundred-pound cow in six months. If cows don't drink milk, why should we? Think of how strange it would be to drink something like orangutan's milk? Yet it would make more sense for us to drink orangutan milk because we are closer to them as a species than we are to cows.

Humans were never meant to consume anything other than human breast milk, and that only while we're infants. We are the only animals that drink the milk of another animal. Milk is a food of convenience, and in our quest for convenience, we have made ourselves one of the sickest animals on the face of the earth. This is another example of man being too smart for his own good. In many countries, the thought of drinking milk from a cow is as absurd as drinking milk from an orangutan. Milk is nature's food for a baby calf, which has four stomachs and will double its weight in forty-seven days. Not only does a baby calf have four stomachs, it also has nine feet of intestines, as opposed to humans, who have twenty-seven feet of intestines. Our digestive enzymes are not capable of breaking down a food that is designed to nurse the young of another species. Our stomachs don't even recognize dairy as a "food," and everything we eat with it becomes difficult to digest.

Maybe you're thinking to yourself, "What about all of the good things we hear about milk, like it helps build calcium and keeps our bones strong?" Although millions of dollars are spent every year photographing celebrities with white mustaches proclaiming the virtues of milk, the truth is that the calcium in cow's milk is much coarser than in human milk, and the human body does not adequately absorb it. Also, all of the processing of dairy products reduces the calcium supply in those products, so it becomes very difficult to use pasteurized, homogenized, or other processed dairy products as a good source of calcium. In fact, most of us get enough calcium through other foods we eat, so we don't need to get it from milk. Spinach, broccoli, and all other green leafy vegetables contain calcium. Soybeans, tofu, nuts, and sesame seeds are also excellent sources of calcium. So are salmon and sardines. Even concentrated fruits like dates, figs, and prunes offer up enough calcium for your body's needs. Cows get their calcium from eating grass in the fields where they graze. (You don't really think they're getting their calcium from eating a pizza, do you?) Next time you go to drink a glass of milk, think of it as cow breast milk. Or better yet (my favorite phrase for it) . . . bovine slime. In fact, my slogan on my last book tour was "Get rid of bovine slime, get rid of bovine butt." Wake up, America. "Got Milk?" Well, I say, "Not Milk!"

Butter

Making butter requires 21.2 pounds of milk for each "finished" pound of butter. One quart of milk weighs 2.15 pounds. The fat found in dairy products is animal fat, which is high in cholesterol. Whole milk and anything made from whole milk is very high in saturated fat, which can increase your cholesterol level. Saturated is a chemical term that means the fat molecule is completely covered with hydrogen atoms. Without those atoms, the fat is unsaturated. Saturated fats stimulate your liver to make more cholesterol. Most animal products contain substantial amounts of saturated fat. Lose dairy, and you'll lose fat.

MEAT

• People who eat red meat five or more times a week are three times as likely to suffer from heart disease and breast cancer, and four times as likely to develop colon cancer than people who eat no meat or eat it less than once a month.

• Meat overtaxes the digestive system, stresses the liver and kidneys, depletes calcium, and deposits uric acid in our joints.

• The structure of our skin, teeth, stomach, bowels, and length of our digestive system are all typical of vegetarian animals.

• Our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, chimps, are 97 percent vegetarian.

• 90 percent of the pesticides Americans consume comes not from vegetables and fruit, as most people assume, but from meat and dairy products.

• Animal products are the number one cause of our number one killer, heart disease. It kills more people in the United States each year than the combined total of U.S. combat deaths in WWI, WWII, Vietnam, and Korea.

SUGAR

• Depletes the body of B vitamins.

• Leaches calcium from hair, blood, bones, and teeth.

• Interferes with the absorption of calcium, protein, and other minerals.

• Retards growth of valuable intestinal bacteria.

• Overstimulates and causes dramatic mood swings in children, making them unruly. (I call it "kiddy cocaine.")

• Research has connected it with diabetes, obesity, rheumatism, gout, hypoglycemia, acne, indigestion, arteriolosclerosis, and even mental illness.

• Ferments in the stomach, stops the secretion of gastric juices, and inhibits the stomach's ability to digest.

• Forget what Mary Poppins says. A spoonful is not a harmless aid for getting the medicine down. In fact, you'll need medicine if you get too much of it down.

DAIRY

• In studies, has been linked to heart disease, arthritis, childhood diabetes, kidney stones, allergies, nasal congestion, depression and mood swings, respiratory problems, canker sores, and mad cow disease.

• A high percentage of cow's milk contains bovine growth hormones that are unnatural and unhealthy for humans.

• It's a myth that milk and dairy products are a necessary source of calcium.

• Cow's milk is designed to turn a 50-pound baby calf into a 300-pound young cow, and that's it! If you don't have aspirations like that, don't drink it!