Michael Greger Lecture: McDougall DVD Review
The third McDougall Advanced Study Series DVD I’m going to review is from Michael Greger, MD. I had previously downloaded the audio of some of his presentations from his website, but think it’s worth watching them on this DVD series, as well. The first lecture is on “Stopping Cancer Before It Starts”, with the second lecture on “Coming Home To Roost: Bird Flu and Other Emerging Infectious Diseases.”
“Stopping Cancer Before It Starts” is an entertaining lecture mainly due to Greger’s presentation style, which in addition to his interesting cadence includes a lot of fun with the expectations of presentation delivery. For example, in one slide he shows the level of DDT-like toxin that is allowable in food by the government, and says he’s going to put McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, ice cream and other fast foods up on the slide. Now, the expectation is that they would fit on the slide, which went from 0 to 200 units, with 120 being the daily limit. The presumption is that everything will come in at less than 200, though, since that is the top number on his graph. But when he puts Haagen-Dazs ice cream on the slide, though, it logs in at 49,000 units with the line crashing through the top of his slide. The other junk food also ranks with similarly high levels.
Greger’s lecture gives a primer on cancer itself and how it spreads, and he shows how a low-fat vegan diet can prevent the spread at different levels of its growth. He then starts talking about the antioxidant and other cancer-fighting properties of different foods in an entertaining way, showing how much anti-cancer bang for the buck you’d get with different fruits and vegetables. It’s good to see this recommendation about including these various whole foods in your diet rather than the reductive way the processed food industry will use this information to add health claims to their products.
A word of warning, though, the presentation does end early as this is a one-hour version, and he mentions you can download the complete presentation from his website to find out the full top ten list of cancer superfoods. But it’s certainly a worthwhile watch and reinforces how important it is to incorporate some of these foods into your regular diet.
“Coming Home To Roost: Bird Flu and Other Emerging Infectious Diseases” shows how human interaction with animals has led to many of our common ailments, such as the common cold. It started 10,000 years ago, when we started using animals as part of our workforce on farms. Once people got into close proximity with animals, they began to get colds and diseases that were previously unknown to them. It is why when Europeans came to America, the Native Americans were getting illnesses they had never known before encountering Europeans. There was no contamination from the Native Americans to the Europeans, however. The major difference is the Europeans had a closer relationship with animals, and Native Americans did not.
But our current wave of animal agriculture poses one of the biggest health threats, because factory farm conditions could not be any more conducive to growing more savage strains of viruses if it tried. With millions of birds in a huge room with no sunlight, feces everywhere, the virus can just infect and mutate at a rate that was previously unheard of. Greger shows articles from poultry industry magazines where they clearly understand the problem, but then don’t do anything about it. The government’s plan if such a strain of influenza were ever to be released is to quarantine people at home for up to 90 days, according to the Department of Homeland Security, a measure for which few if any people are ready.
So, similar to Dr. Barnard’s lecture, the first one is more pratical advice you can put into use and the second lecture is more of a bigger issue piece that is good information to have. It seems unlikely that government regulation will ever respond in a dramatic enough way to address this situation, in which case it is only a matter of time before this crisis happens. But, if you’re lucky, you could be one of the two to five percent of the population who might get the vaccine for this bird flu, as that is the amount our government has stockpiled, as opposed to Western European countries who have up to 30 percent of their population covered.
This lecture is part of the McDougall Advanced Study Series DVD set. The DVDs cost $20 each, but you can get all five new DVDs for $60 total, including additional lectures from Howard Lyman, T. Colin Campbell, John Abramson MD, and Neal Barnard MD. You can order them from McDougall’s website.
