Part III Mike: People drink cow juice. They've been very effective at marketing it with all kinds of ridiculous claims like, "Milk will help you lose weight." Well, that's interesting. One-third of the calories from 2 percent milk come from saturated animal fat, a type of fat we know is strongly correlated with heart disease, arteriosclerosis and obesity. There are all kinds of problems with this type of fat, and yet the dairy industry has managed to convince people that it's healthy. Ben: Is it the same story with skim milk? Are the benefits of something like that skewed at all? Mike: The benefits are definitely skewed, even with skim milk. Even though it doesn't have the fat in it, it comes from cows that are milked under very unscrupulous conditions. There is a level of pus in all dairy products and cow's milk sold in the United States. There's a certain amount of pus that's legally acceptable according to the government regulations. Ben: I'm guessing that number isn't zero. Mike: No, I think it's a couple hundred thousand pus cells per ounce, which, from a microbiology standpoint, is not that high of a level, but most of the milk in this country exceeds that level. You know, cows get infections in their udders; they are given various hormones. They're artificially modified in terms of their endocrine system to make sure they keep giving milk and so they can produce more milk per cow. Then this milk is modified through a process of homogenization. Homogenization modifies the milk fasts to be an unnatural form of fat that the human body doesn't recognize. It is this homogenization that, I think, is partly responsible for the detrimental health effects of long-term consumption of cow's milk. Again, this is one item on the list. There are many items on the list and we could talk about each of them, but the big picture is that this is what's true and associated with disease. If you want heart disease, if you want colon cancer, if you want diabetes then just eat from this list here. It's very easy to accomplish. Ben: Now, The Honest Food Guide doesn't just list items like the traditional food pyramids, but it actually lists things as they are associated with both health and disease. The old pyramids say you should eat more of this or less of this because we say so. The Honest Food Guide actually lists specific drawbacks and benefits. Mike: That's a good point. That's the other thing that's unique about this food guide. It tells you not only what you should consume, but it gives you the benefits. For example, we talk about avocados, and avocados are really healthy foods even just eaten raw. In fact, raw is preferable. Ben: Despite some newsmedia attention that says avocados promote cholesterol. Mike: Oh yeah, there is so much ridiculous information out there. They said for years that butter was going to kill you so you should eat margarine made with hydrogenated oils, right? It's ridiculous. There's been a lot of bad publicity about avocados. Avocados not only have vital nutrients in them, they are also loaded with healthy oils. It's almost like a fat food from nature, but it's a plant fat. It has these omega-3 oils that everybody is talking about today. Avocados are really one of the best healing foods out there. They're not going to make people fat either. But anyway, getting back to the point, we list the benefits of these foods. Ben: I also notice that we have something down here in the right hand corner that says, "Eat all the colors of the rainbow." What is this designed to promote? Mike: Well, this is just an awareness section here where it lists various colors of the rainbow: Red, orange, yellow, green, purple and white. Now I know that's not a technical readout of the spectrum wavelength sequence or anything. They are just different colors. It's designed to teach people that they should eat foods that are different colors, not just because it makes food visually interesting, but because each of these colors is created by a vital nutrient or vital chemical created by the plant that produced these foods. These vital nutrients have specific biological advantages that are very important for human health. Many of the colors are potent antioxidants and can help fight free radicals in the human body. Some of them protect the nervous system, for example, or can actually protect your eyes from macular degeneration. They protect your brain cells and all the cells in your nervous system. Some of them inhibit the growth of cancer tumors. Others enhance circulation, help enhance longevity and help turn back the visual signs of aging, as they say. These colors are medicines in the foods. If I say go out and eat some red foods, it would include tomatoes, peppers, cranberries, raspberries, apples and strawberries. Again, this is information the USDA isn't telling anybody. They're afraid to even tell people the good news about some of these foods. In fact, they're so afraid to say anything that they took the foods off the chart. They don't even have foods on the chart anymore, just a bunch of colors. You have to log in on the website to find anything, and then it's pretty much drink more milk. I just can't stop laughing. Let's talk about tomatoes. Most people who follow anything about nutrition know that tomatoes have a variety of vital nutrients in them -- most notably, lycopene, which is well known for prostate cancer treatment and prevention. But lycopene is just one of the many nutrients in a tomato, and, in fact, in isolation lycopene is not nearly as effective as the whole tomato. Then, it's not nearly as effective as a cooked tomato. In this case, a cooked tomato is far more potent than a raw tomato because of the way the lycopene is tied up with certain proteins. They are broken down by heat. By eating tomatoes, you are, in fact, preventing prostate cancer and many other forms of cancer. If you go down the whole chart and eat the various colors, you will be preventing chronic disease in a powerful way. Blueberries, for example, are one of my favorite superfoods, I call them a superfood because they offer such high density nutrition. I eat blueberries by the pound. I spend a couple hundred dollars a month on blueberries. They are potent medicine; they lower LDL cholesterol even better than statin drugs, with no negative side effects. They have other benefits, such as the protection of the nervous system, protection of eye health, fighting of free radicals and so on. People need to know this information. They need to know that the colors in the food mean something and not the artificial colors that you find in all these packaged processed foods. They have FD&C Red No. 5, for example, in them. You know where artificial colors come from? Ben: Where do they come from? Mike: Coal tar. They are petrochemical products basically. Ben: Like they use for the road? Mike: Like they use for the road. If you modify those petrochemicals enough, you can create food colors. That's where they come from. The FDA allows certain food colors because not enough people have died from them yet to yank them off the market. There are some food colors that have been yanked and are illegal now, but there are many others still on the market, that are considered safe, according to FDA standards that can still be used. Ben: I notice that the colors of this rainbow are all colors of fruits and vegetables that we've always know about -- like carrots are orange and tomatoes are red or green -- instead of things like meat, which I know a lot of times is red simply because that is more attractive to someone walking through a grocery store. Mike: Very true. The color in meat is added with an ingredient called sodium nitrate, which is a cancer-causing chemical. That's how they make these meats look red on the shelf. If they didn't add these chemicals, they would look kind of a putrid gray color. Ben: Orange gray. I've seen uncolored meat before straight from the cow, and it is not visually exciting at all. Mike: No, and people wouldn't buy it if it wasn't red.