When you bite into a hamburger or chicken sandwich, what do you think that this grass eating animal was eating before it died? Most likely it was a mixture of ground up eyeballs, anuses, bones, feathers, and euthanised dogs . Most animals that we eat spend the entirety of their short lives in factories eating recycled meat and animal fat. These herbivores have been turned into carnivores thanks to our process of ‘waste removal’ better known as rendering.

Every day thousands of pounds of slaughterhouse waste such as brains, eyeballs, spinal cords, intestines, bones, feathers or hooves as well as restaurant grease, road kill, cats and dogs are produced. From this need for large waste disposal came the development of rendering plants. Rendering plants recycle the dead animals and their wastes into products known as bone meal, and animal fat.  These products are sold to the companies that grow animals for meat or milk cattle, poultry, swine, sheep and put into their feed.  Each slaughterhouse has a privately owned rendering plant nearby .

These facilities operate 24 hours a day all over the world. Till the BJP came to government in 1998 rendering was banned in India by the department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Ministry of Agriculture, which prohibited the use of animal byproducts in ruminant feeds (Order No.2-4/99-AHT/FF) However, the BJP, influenced by a coterie of slaughterhouse owners and interested bureaucrats, repealed this ban and India’s first rendering plants came up in 2001. No one in India knows about them – and few people in America where there are thousands of plants. They are not advertised - and for good reason. The process itself is very disturbing and those who have witnessed it have often sworn off meat for good. The rendering plant floor is piled high with 'raw product' - tonnes of feet, tails, feathers, bones, spinal cords, hooves, milk sacs, grease, intestines, stomachs and eyeballs of slaughtered animals..  In the heat, the piles of dead animals seem to have a life of their own as millions of maggots swarm over the carcasses. First the raw material is cut into small pieces and then transported to another machine for fine shredding.  It is then cooked at 280 degrees for one hour ,melting the meat away from bones in the hot 'soup.'  This continuous batch-cooking process goes on for 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

During this cooking process, the soup produces yellow grease or tallow that rises to the top and is skimmed off.  The cooked meat and bone are then sent to a hammer mill press, which squeezes out the remaining moisture and pulverises the product into a gritty powder.  Shaker screens remove excess hair and large bone chips that are unsuitable for consumption.  Now recycled meat, yellow grease, and bone meal are produced and used exclusively to feed vegetarian animals.  

In India, no testing is done of these plants.  In America and Europe, state agencies spot- check. Yet, testing for pesticides and other toxins in animal feeds is not done or is done incompletely with toxic wastes accompanying the dead animals – none of which is removed by the rendering plants.  Poisoned cattle stomachs, animals that have been lying dead for weeks before being picked up, animals that have been run over by trucks, all their noxious parts, are part of this. The package includes euthanasia drugs given to pets, animals with flea collars containing organophosphate insecticides, fish oil laced with DDT, heavy metals from pet ID tags, and plastics from thrown away meats. Labour costs are rising; and therefore, many rendering plants refuse to hire extra hands to cut off flea collars or unwrap spoiled shopmeat.  Every week, millions of packages of plastic-wrapped meat go through the rendering process and become one of the many unwanted ingredients in animal feed. 

Even if some people do realise how animal feed is made and feel that it is still too far removed to be a concern to them, most of them do not know of the risks consumption of this meat entails. Perhaps the best-known health concern associated with rendering plants is Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease. In America, regulations mandate that brain and other nerve tissue be removed from cattle after they are slaughtered for human food. Yet these most infectious parts, the brain and spinal cord, are allowed to go to a rendering facility where they can be processed into pet and animal feed.  This means it is possible that a cow with Mad Cow Disease can be ground up and fed to a pig or chicken that is, in turn, fed back to other cows that are eventually eaten by people. India has no regulations of any kind.  Behind the scenes and out of public view, these practices are unfolding around the world, putting millions of people at risk for Mad Cow Disease.

Other diseases that can be contracted from rendering plant product feed include tuberculosis,  variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), and Alzheimer’s. All of these diseases, except Alzheimer’s, are transmissible spongiform encephalopathy diseases (TSEs), which means that they is are infectious diseases that leave the brain resembling a sponge. The process by rendering plants makes chickens, goats, sheep, pigs, cows and buffaloes into cannibals:  a factor that has been cited as a cause of Alzheimer’s disease, which did not exist in the world until this practice started. Millions of people are affected by Alzheimer’s making it one of the leading causes of death among the elderly across the globe. Scientific evidence shows that people eating meat more than four times a week for a prolonged period have a three times higher chance of suffering from dementia than vegetarians. A preliminary 1989 study at the University of Pennsylvania showed that over 5% of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s were actually dying from human spongiform encephalopathy. That means that as many as 200,000 people in the United States may already be dying from mad cow disease each year. God knows how many in India but certainly thousands more after 2001.

In 2001 in India, the BJP-led government  prepared a secret position paper on the “Utilisation of Slaughter House Waste for the Preparation of Animal Feed”. This is what the report said: “India ranks topmost in the world in livestock holding and has the potential to utilize slaughterhouse by products to partly meet the growing requirement of animal feeds. The total availability of offal/bones in the country generated from large slaughterhouses is estimated to be more than 21 lakh tonnes/annum. It can also be used for the preparation of animal feeds”. The report goes on to explain that “Presently in India, livestock feed production is cereal-based. This results in livestock, especially poultry, pig and fish, competing with humans for grains and cereals which can easily be replaced with slaughterhouse waste.”

The Office International des Epizooties (OIE World Organisation for Animal Health)  had surveyed the risk of CJD/BSE in Asia . The report revealed that no attention had been paid to any risk analysis on bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in China, India, Pakistan and seven other countries. According to OIE, significant quantities of animal feed of meat origin have been imported into Asia, which may mean that the BSE agent could have reached domestic cattle in these countries. The Report noted that  ‘the spread of BSE through rendering plants cannot be excluded in some countries such as China, India, Japan, Pakistan and Taiwan. Therefore, much more stringent management at slaughterhouses and rendering plants, as well as extensive surveillance programmes, are required in those countries. “ 

The Indian companies on the Internet advertise their rendered meal as having been made from "spray-dry" machines that turn blood into a fine, brown powder (gardeners know it as blood meal); gigantic kettles that boil fat to make tallow; grinders that crush bones into minuscule fragments.. Millions of tonnes are supplied to the dairy industry, poultry farms, cattle feed-lots, pig farms, fish-feed plants, and pet-food manufacturers. Leading manufacturers of “Meal”, as they call it, are Standard Agro Vet (P) Ltd., Allanasons Ltd., Hind Agro Ltd., Al Kabeer, and Hyderabad – also the four largest private slaughterhouses in the country.

      All animal feed manufacturers use meat and bone meal in their feeds. Recent reports state most domestic animals are fed such rendered animal tissues. A 1991 United States Department of agriculture report states that approximately 7.9 billion pounds of meat, bone meal, blood meal, and feather meal was produced by rendering plants in 1983. Of that amount: 12 %percent was used in dairy and beef cattle feed ,34 % in pet food ,34% in poultry feed and 20 %in pig food . This has doubled by 2006.  So has the use of animal protein in commercial dairy feed since 1987 all over the globe. Grass or cereal fed cattle and other animals are nonexistent abroad and lessening in India. BSE expert Richard Lacey states “The time bomb of the twentieth century equivalent of the bubonic plague ticks away.”  Do you think Nature will forgive you for a baby chick is eating on what's left of her mother after she's been stripped down, a calf being fed on her mother’s slaughtered remains, a pig being reared on a diet of dead pigs, a goat being fed on a goat’s leftovers?

Maneka Gandhi

When I was Minister for Social Justice there were demands for giving grants to build Alzheimer’s Disease Homes- a disease unknown in India till the 1970s. In the West the first 150 cases happened in 1948, rose to 600 by 1978 . Now there are 500,000 cases in the U.K. , 250,000 in Canada and 4.5 million in the U.S. 10% of people over 65  in the US have it and 50% of 85 year olds . It is now very much in India – which means homes have to be set up as it is almost impossible for anyone to look after an Alzheimer’s patient for a long time .

Alzheimer’s disease is an irreversible brain disorder in which a person loses his capacity to reason, think, recognize and function. The disease progresses from mild forgetfulness to death in just 8 years and is most prevalent in people over the age of 65. 55% of all senility cases are now Alzheimer’s.

Is it to do with old age? If so, everyone would get it. But, the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that very poor people in Nigeria/India are far less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than their relatives in New York, Obviously it is a lifestyle related disease .

Alzheimer’s is not a normal part of ageing. It is caused by sticky plaque-like deposits and neurofibrillary tangles that kill off brain cells until all memory disintegrates. Ultimately the patient dies.
What is the cause of this deadly epidemic? There is no mention of anything that could be considered Alzheimer’s disease in any medical or other literature before 1900. In the last 100 years, Alzheimer’s disease has gone from non-existence to a disease that affects 12 million people yearly and kills 200,000 people .

 Dr Murray Waldman is the coroner of Toronto. He is a professor of Toronto University and medical director of a large rehabilitation hospital . His book Dying for a Hamburger has taken the medical world by storm.  

He contends that Alzheimer’s is caused by a protein called a prion. The same prion that causes Mad cow Disease, (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE), variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), and other neurodegenerative diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs ).

Prions are misshapen proteins  normally found in the nervous systems of animals. When prions come into contact with normal proteins, they cause these proteins to become misshapen, too. As the chain reaction continues, more and more proteins become misshapen and begin to impair normal neurological functions. In all prion diseases the brain is clogged by dense deposits and dementia is the major symptom. The disease shows up only in later age. It is irreversible. All these factors are true of Alzheimer’s.

 Waldman correlates the growth of the industrial meat industry( where cows are fed meat and chickens fed other chicken) and meat eating directly to the increase in Alzheimer’s. WHO’s figures correlate with Waldman’s theory. After researching the spread of Alzheimer’s disease , Waldman concludes that Alzheimer’s disease behaves like an infectious disease, not something congenital. He has linked the spread of the disease to industrialized nations that eat factory-farmed animal meats, saying that ,just like mad cow disease, Alzheimer’s disease is the result of the modern factory farm and  increased meat consumption in the last century. Till a few years ago scientists denied that mad cow disease could be transmitted to humans through beef. Now hundreds of people who ate infected beef have died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), with perhaps lakhs more at risk. Could the same scenario hold true for Alzheimer's disease?

Waldman shows that Alzheimer’s disease first showed up in medical records at about the same time that world meat consumption began to rise and makes a direct correlation between the levels of meat consumption and the number of Alzheimer’s disease afflicted across the world. In countries where meat consumption is lower, incidents of Alzheimer’s disease are much lower than in developed countries, where meat consumption is high.

 The Alzheimer’s Society is the world’s premier body on this disease. Their head of Research, Dr Sorensen, refuses the prion theory( which is weird because the Nobel Prize winner Prof Stanley Prusiner who discovered prions agrees with Waldon )Instead, he says that the factors that cause heart disease are the same that apply to Alzheimer’s.

 This still makes meat the culprit.  Saturated fat and cholesterol have been conclusively linked to heart disease and strokes. So have high levels of a substance called homocysteine and high blood pressure – all created by animal products.

Cholesterol is a waxy solid substance. High levels are found in meat,dairy,eggs,fish. Too much cholesterol damages the blood vessels as it deposits in the arteries . The only time vegetable fats carry cholesterol is when they have been altered by industry to be hydrogenated (hardened for shelf life) High cholesterol doubles the risk of Alzheimers unless you already have the Alzheimer’s gener ApoE in which case it goes up sixteen times. ( Only 50% of people with the  ApoE gene actually develop the disease – those who eat a high-fat diet during their 40s ).  70% of people in the West , according to WHO have high cholesterol

In a 21-year study, investigators examined the association of cholesterol with brain plaques and tangles in people who had died of Alzheimer’s. They found a strong correlation between increased cholesterol levels and increases in the number of plaques and tangles in the brain , the two characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease..

Not only does meat and dairy consumption raise cholesterol, it raises the levels of an amino acid called homocysteine, which is now widely seen as a  risk marker for heart disease.The American Heart Association has shown a clear association between homocysteine levels ,heart attack and stroke – and Alzheimer’s.

Boston University investigators have found that elevated levels of Homocysteine increases the risk of Alzheimer’s three fold. Homocysteine is formed in the human liver after ingesting another amino acid, methionine, found in animal food . High homocysteine levels make nerve cells weak and prone to premature death.  Like cholesterol it causes deposits in the arteries and 100gms of chicken have more than 12 times of what your body needs. In Alzheimer's patients much higher levels of   homocysteine were found than in elderly individuals with no cognitive impairment. In fact , now tests on levels of homocysteine are useful in *predicting* who might get Alzheimer's.

The only things that brings down cholesterol and homocysteine levels are vegetables, green leaves and citrus. People who adopt a diet free of meat, eggs, and dairy products can drop their homocysteine levels by 20% in one week. This is because folic acid, a B vitamin found in whole grains, green vegetables, beans, and other plant-based foods, helps convert homocysteine to another, more useful amino acid.

 In a study, reported at the World Alzheimer's Congress in 2000, researchers looked at 5,395 elder individuals who were free from dementia in 1993 and again in 1999 ."People who remained free from dementia had consumed higher amounts of beta-carotene, vitamin C, vitamin E and vegetables than the people in the study who developed Alzheimer’s disease."

The same findings have been reported at Case Western University School of Medicine and University Hospitals of Cleveland, Ohio, and St. George's Medical School in London. Scientists at The Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Ageing have brought out an ideal menu: it is entirely vegetarian with no milk products . WHO recommends stopping animal based food as exchanging red meat for white, full cream for skimmed, butter with margarine – reduces less than 5% cholesterol 

Why do our doctors not look at prevention – simple, there is no money in that. Medicine, pharmaceuticals and hospitals are huge business. Why do medical colleges not teach nutrition anywhere in the world ? If prevention became the norm who would need doctors ?

Maneka Gandhi

----------------

2)

Wish for the Holidays...........

    I wish, for every dog searching trash cans for breakfast, a filled bowl with his name printed in bright letters.

    For every dog who did not slept fitfully last night, chained unmercifully in a frozen yard, a soft, warm bed with a person snoring gently nearby.
    For every shelter dog, spending Christmas morning in a shamefully soiled run, a forever home filled with sounds and smells of a loving family.
    For every "Christmas" pup given thoughtlessly as a "present" today, a tolerant, caring owner who won't abandon you as you grow into a real dog.

    For every ailing pet, enough money for your owner to pay the bills to make you well.
    For every lost dog, a clear, safe road and well marked path to lead you home.

    For every old and tired friend, a warm fire and soft bed to ease your aches and pains.

    For every Heart Dog at the Bridge, a moment when you know that you are remembered today, missed again and loved forever, that a loving God has a special place for you with Him, until I arrive to meet you in His heavenly home some day.

Author UNKNOWN.

---------------------