My Thoughts on "Skinny Bitch"

After having a couple of friends read the above book, I decided that I wanted to read it. The book is "A no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls who want to stop eating crap and start looking fabulous". The book is clearly promoting veganism, and I am not going to be vegan as a result of reading the book. However, it does make some good points:

• Aspartame (artificial sweetener) has been blamed for a slew of scary maladies, like arthritis, birth defects, fibromyalgia, Alzheimer's, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes.
• Fruit is possibly the most perfect food in existence. It is unique in that it barely requires any work to be digested. High in enzymes, it effortlessly passes through the body, supporting carbohydrates, fiber, vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, amino acids, and cancer-fighting tannins and flavonoids. Because it is made up mostly of water, fruit hydrates the body and aids in cleansing, detoxifying, and eliminating. Fruit serves our bodies best when eaten alone because it is so easily and quickly digested. When we eat fruit with other foods, it cannot pass through our bodies as quickly. So it rots and ferments in our stomachs.
• Egg-laying hens are crammed into cages so small, they are unable to open their wings, and their mangled feet actually grow around the wire mesh floors.
• Partial list of what's in meat, poultry, seafood and dairy: benzene hexachloride (BHC), chlorade, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), dieldrin, dioxin, haptachlor, hexachlorobenzene (HCB), and lindane.
• Every time you consume factory-farmed chicken, beef, veal, pork, eggs, or dairy, you are eating antibiotics, pesticides, steroids and hormones.
• Dioxin, one of the most toxic substances, is often found in dairy products. When you consume dairy products, you are ingesting the same antibiotics, pesticides, steroids, and hormones you would if you ate meat directly. Cows are injected with bovine growth hormone. Their udders, under normal conditions, would supply about ten pounds of milk a day. Cows are milked by machine; metal clamps are attached to the cows' udders. These udders become sore and infected. Pus forms. But the machines keep on milking, sucking the dead white blood cells into the milk.
• Humane protocol calls for animals to be stunned before they are slaughtered. For cows, this means getting a metal bolt shot into the skull and then retracted. When done properly, using working equipment, this renders the cow unconscious. But time is money, and slaughterhouses operate at lightning speeds, some killing one animal every three seconds. Because thousands of frightened, struggling cows are not easy to stun, it is extremely common for a "stunner" to miss the mark. Panicked hogs, also difficult to "hit," are stunned with an electric device. And if the jolt is too high, it bruises and bloodies the hogs' flest (bad for business). Because business is first on factory farms, the jolt is lowered, despite the fact that it doesn't properly stun the hogs. Stunned or not, cows and hogs are then "strung up" from the ceiling by a chain attached to their legs. In theory, while they dangle there, they are supposed to be unconscious. But often they are fully conscious, struggling, screaming, and fearfully staring at the workers while they have their throats stabbed open. Next, they travel along a "bleed rail," where they should bleed to death. But again, these large, frightened, struggling, conscious animals are difficult targets and the "stickers" (workers who cut their throats) don't always get a "good cut." Before the cows can bleed to death, they are sent on their way to the "head-skinners," where the skin is sliced from their heads while they are still conscious. Of cours, this is excruciatingly painful, and the cows kick and struggle frantically. To avoid getting injured by the struggling animal, workers will sometimes sever the spinal cord with a knife blow to the back of the head. This paralyzes the animal below the neck so that the worker is safe. But these cows can still feel their skin being sliced away from their faces. Next, their legs and head are chopped off, their entrails removed from their bodies, and then, finally, they are split in half. Often before hogs can bleed to death, they are dunked fully conscious into 140-degree scalding water to remove the hair from their bodies. Chickens, because they are so overcrowded and stressed, frequently peck each other and factory farm workers, so the ends of their beaks are literally chopped off their faces.
• Juicing is a great way to detoxify your body and get a lot of enzymes, but you must drink it right away. As soon as a fruit is peeled, or cut, or juiced, it begins to lose its enzymes.

The above is just some of the information in the book - there is obviously a lot more information not included. Since reading this book, I have not eaten any chicken. Thinking about it practically makes me want to barf. I have not eaten red meat or pork for the last 3.5 years so I am ok there. I will still eat fish - only "wild caught." I know that the wild caught still has a lot of mercury and other stuff in it, I figure that with the omega-three's in fish, the benefits outweigh the "cost." Plus, in the New Testament, Jesus ate a lot of fish :) Also, I am still eating eggs and yogurt. I do buy the cage-free brown eggs and I get Brown Cow yogurt. The brown cow does not have any BGH in it as their cows are not given the growth hormone. Although the "cage-free" and "BGH" industries are not regulated, at some point you have to have a little faith in advertising and what the companies are claiming.

I would definitely recommend this book; however, I will warn you before any of you decide to read it, the language is pretty bad so you just have to skim over certain words. Also, read it with a grain of salt - I have read other "health" books/magazines and received nutrition guidance from my naturopath that contradicts some of the points made in the book.

On an entirely different note, here is a picture from last week of Otis and Sam (I couldn't do a post without a picture).