OPRAH INTERVIEWS the DALAI LAMA: O MAGAZINE 2001
http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Oprah-Interviews-The-Dalai-Lama

WALL STREET JOURNAL: THE SAVVIEST LOBBYIST - The Humane Economy - by Wayne Pacelle

By
Fred Barnes July 10, 2016
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-savviest-lobbyist-1468183798
                              

The head of the Humane Society, with the help of Carl Icahn, got McDonald’s to changes its policy toward pork. Sixty brands followed.

In 2011, Wayne Pacelle got a phone call from a man he didn’t know. Mr. Pacelle is president of the United States Humane Society, the animal-protection group. The caller was Carl Icahn, the activist investor. “I understand you are working against animal cruelty,” he said, “and I’d like to help.” The Humane Society had many supporters in business, politics and the arts, but Mr. Icahn was a step above: He could get the attention of powerful CEOs anywhere in the world.

After several meetings with Mr. Icahn, Mr. Pacelle decided to aim high. He asked Mr. Icahn for his help in changing the policy of McDonald’s, one of the world’s greatest brands. The Humane Society had already urged McDonald’s to adopt a more humane approach to the treatment of animals and had won some public support during a yearslong campaign. Still, as Mr. Pacelle writes in “The Humane Economy,” he suspected that the company “might need an extra kick in the pants that only [Carl Icahn] could deliver.”

Mr. Icahn got in touch with the head of McDonald’s “almost effortlessly,” Mr. Pacelle writes, and laid out the problem of pigs on commercial breeding farms being confined for years in crates that wouldn’t allow them to walk or turn around. They chewed the bars until their teeth cracked and banged their foreheads and snouts bloody.

          
The Humane Economy


By Wayne Pacelle
William Morrow, 352 pages, $33.50

Because of its size and reach, McDonald’s was in a position to influence the entire food industry. McDonald’s buys 15% of all pork bellies, “which means,” Mr. Pacelle writes, “it takes a piece of one in every seven pigs in the nation.” When McDonald’s agreed to get rid of crates, the effect surprised even Mr. Pacelle. In the three years after the announcement, “more than sixty major brands agreed to phase out purchasing pork from operations that confine sows so severely,” he writes. The biggest holdout was Wal-Mart, the world’s largest food seller. But in 2015 it yielded and directed its suppliers to commit themselves to broad goals in animal welfare. Faced with losing Wal-Mart as a customer, suppliers had to comply.

The Humane Society has a reputation for genteel concern for pets and horses. But the breakthrough at McDonald’s—copied by Burger King, Wendy’s, Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.—shows how out-of-date that perception has become since Mr. Pacelle took over in 2004.

Mr. Pacelle, 50, a Yale graduate, has energized the Humane Society by focusing on what is simple and achievable: preventing humans from abusing animals. In comparison with radical groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, his approach is more moderate. He has been a vegan for 30 years but doesn’t try to impose a no-meat regimen. Instead, he urges reduced consumption of meat and advises anyone who does eat animal products to choose those with labels such as “Animal Welfare Approved” or “Certified Humane.”

As one might expect, Mr. Pacelle has critics in the animal-welfare movement. Some activists believe that animals should not be owned as pets. Mr. Pacelle and his wife, Lisa, however, adopted a beagle that had been scheduled to be euthanized at a Virginia shelter. “Live as if all life matters,” he writes.

Over the past decade, the effort to protect and ameliorate the lives of animals has made unprecedented progress. Dogs adopted at PetSmart and Petco now come from shelters, not breeders’ “puppy mills.” Like pigs, hens have been freed from cages. Ringling Bros. is phasing out its traveling elephant acts. The use of hundreds of chimpanzees in medical tests has been halted at the National Institutes of Health. More than 600 cosmetics firms have ceased animal testing. SeaWorld has stopped breeding killer whales, making the current crop of 29 the last generation to live and perform there.
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Mr. Pacelle and the Humane Society have been major players in most of these reforms. He negotiated the agreement with SeaWorld after former California Rep. John Campbell recommended SeaWorld CEO John Manby as a leader he could deal with. “Just as the circus will continue without elephants,” Mr. Pacelle writes, “so amusement parks and aquariums can survive without orcas.” He has intervened to protect wolves—only 5,000 or so survive in the lower 48 states—and insists that they aren’t a threat to humans: “Of America’s big predators, wolves have proved among the least menacing—with no documented fatal attacks by healthy wild wolves on people in the lower forty-eight states in the last century.”

Mr. Pacelle lives and works in Washington, D.C., and operates like a lobbyist whose clients are animals. But persuading corporate America is his main task. He doesn’t rely on the moral argument for the benign treatment of animals. He makes the case that it’s a “brand builder” that pleases consumers without increasing the cost of doing business.

Mr. Pacelle and his team are also savvy about state politics. The Humane Society backed anti-crate ballot initiatives that passed in Florida (2002), Arizona (2006) and California (2008). In 2014, BlackRock and Vanguard Financial started to get behind shareholder resolutions advising companies in the pork business of the risks of packing pigs in crates. It was not a coincidence that the Humane Society had talked to these investors. “We reminded them that pork companies reliant on crate confinement aren’t thinking ahead, and are putting themselves in a vulnerable position with their customer base by continuing to treat sows so inhumanely,” he writes.

“The Humane Economy” is a compelling book with a special message for corporate leaders. By embracing the values of animal welfare, Mr. Pacelle writes, “no CEO ever has to fret about getting a call out of the blue from a guy like Carl Icahn.”

Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard. 

Read this WSJ article at: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-savviest-lobbyist-1468183798



 

 

CANCER REVESAL USING a VEGAN DIET - by Dr. Michael Gregor

 

HOW NOT TO DIE: New York Times Best Seller

 

NutritionFacts.org

 

 

Volume 3 · January 15^th 2010 · Michael Greger, M.D.

  Transcript: Cancer Reversal Through Diet?

Just like with diabetes, the same diet that prevents heart disease can be used not just to treat it, but to reverse it. Next year will be the 20th anniversary of Dean Ornish’s landmark research showing that—without drugs—a near-vegan diet could reverse atherosclerosis, dissolve the plaque, open up the arteries.
 

Well, if that’s the case, can’t we just eat whatever we want, and then just start eating vegan after our first heart attack to dissolve the plaque away? Unfortunately, there’s a little something called sudden cardiac death. Half of those who die of heart disease just drop dead; so our first heart attack may indeed be our last—but not in the way we were hoping.
 

So what’s Ornish up to these days? Well, he’s still reversing heart disease. Nearly three quarters of patients angina-free, without drugs or surgery. But now that he’s conquered the #1 killer, he’s moved on to trying to reverse killer #2: cancer.
PSA levels are typically what’s used to follow the progression of prostate cancer. In the standard diet group, they got worse; in the vegan diet group, they got better. No surgery, no chemotherapy, no radiation—they just started getting better. Here’s an MR spectrograph showing the drop in cancer activity on the plant-based diet.
 

To figure out what was going on, they took blood from each group, and dripped their blood on prostate cancer cells in a Petri dish to see what effect the dietary change had. The blood of the standard diet patients did reduce the cancer cell growth rates by about 10%. Their bodies and their immune systems were doing the best that they could to beat back the cancer. The blood of people on a vegan diet, though, knocked the cancer growth down 70%. Eating a plant-based diet made their bloodstream eight times less hospitable to cancer.
 

Now, this is after a year. Subsequent studies have shown that one can see a significant cancer-fighting effect after just two weeks on a plant-based diet, with exercise. 
 

What’s happening, it seems, is that the vegan diet reprogrammed gene expression within the prostate gland itself. Ornish took biopsies before and after the dietary change, and you can see the subtle shift in gene regulation from more red to more green. The green denotes genes that are being downregulated under the lifestyle changes. Before, and after.
 

Ornish’s two-year follow-up was just published last year. A significant number of the standard diet group were forced to go into surgery for what’s called a radical prostatectomy, which often leads to urinary incontinence and impotence in 60% of men coming out of surgery. But not a single one of the men on the plant-based diet had to go to surgery.
 

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by veganmontreal.

 

Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.
 

Sources Cited

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Ornish D, Scherwitz LW, Billings JH, Brown SE, Gould KL, Merritt TA, Sparler S, Armstrong WT, Ports TA, Kirkeeide RL, Hogeboom C, Brand RJ. Intensive lifestyle changes for reversal of coronary heart disease. JAMA.16;280(23):2001-7, 1998.

Chugh SS, Reinier K, Teodorescu C, Evanado A, Kehr E, Al Samara M, Mariani R, Gunson K, Jui J. Epidemiology of sudden cardiac death: clinical and research implications. Prog Cardiovasc Dis. 51(3):213-28, 2008.

J. Frattaroli, G. Weidner, T. A. Merritt-Worden, S. Frenda, and D. Ornish. Angina pectoris and atherosclerotic risk factors in the multisite cardiac lifestyle intervention program. Am. J. Cardiol., 101(7):911-918, 2008.

Ornish D, Weidner G, Fair WR, Marlin R, Pettengill EB, Raisin CJ, Dunn-Emke S, Crutchfield L, Jacobs FN, Barnard RJ, Aronson WJ, McCormac P, McKnight DJ, Fein JD, Dnistrian AM, Weinstein J, Ngo TH, Mendell NR, Carroll PR. Intensive lifestyle changes may affect the progression of prostate cancer. J Urol., 174(3):1065-9; discussion 1069-70, 2005.

R. J. Barnard, N. Kobayashi, and W. J. Aronson. Effect of diet and exercise intervention on the growth of prostate epithelial cells. Prostate Cancer Prostatic Dis., 11(4):362-366, 2008.

Ornish D, Magbanua MJ, Weidner G, Weinberg V, Kemp C, Green C, Mattie MD, Marlin R, Simko J, Shinohara K, Haqq CM, Carroll PR. Changes in prostate gene expression in men undergoing an intensive nutrition and lifestyle intervention. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 17;105(24):8369-74, 2008.

J. Frattaroli, G. Weidner, A. M. Dnistrian, C. Kemp, J. J. Daubenmier, R. O. Marlin, L. Crutcheld, L. Yglecias, P. R. Carroll, and D. Ornish. Clinical events in prostate cancer lifestyle trial: Results from two years of follow-up. Urology, 72(6):1319-1323, 2008.

Acknowledgments

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Acknowledgments

Topics

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Video Topics

• angina
• cancer
• cardiovascular disease
• chemotherapy
• Dr. Dean Ornish
• epigenetic changes
• heart disease
• heart health
• immune function
• in vitro studies
• medications
• men's health
• omnivores
• plant-based diets
• prostate cancer
• prostate health
• prostatectomy
• radiation
• reversing chronic disease
• sudden cardiac death
• surgery
• vegans
• vegetarians