Both of these experts spoke at the Women's Club of Catonsville on April 8th, 2007. |
What on earth could a white Montana born former cattle rancher possibly have in common with an African American Stanford educated doctor? At least two things. One, they will both be speaking at the EarthSave Baltimore event on Easter Sunday, April 8th. Second, they are both advocates of a vegetarian diet.
Whether Internist Milton Mills is practicing at Fairfax Hospital in Virginia or in free clinics in Washington D.C. his prescription for patients is likely to include some dietary advice: go vegetarian. “Medical research shows conclusively that a plant-based diet reduces chronic disease risk, so that’s something I absolutely encourage my patients to move toward,” says Dr. Mills, a graduate of Stanford University School of Medicine, who became interested in the connection between diet and health when he went vegetarian as a teenager. “I find that when people are ill, they are very open to adopting practices that will improve their health.”
One of his patients, Katheryn Vess, suffered from heart disease and poorly controlled diabetes before changing her diet. “I was taking insulin twice a day and couldn’t walk half a block because my arteries were so clogged. Then I met Dr. Mills and he taught me how to eat,” Vess says. Now she is off insulin, no longer takes blood pressure medicine, and can walk a mile. “Her diabetes is, for all intents and purposes, cured,” says Dr. Mills.
In the future, he hopes to delve into a new area of interest where little research has been done but the anecdotal evidence looks promising: diet and immunity. When Dr. Mills works with HIV and AIDS patients at clinics, he’s noticed that those who go vegetarian seem to improve, with increased energy and higher T-cell counts. “Medical literature supports a plant-based diet as being better for overall immune system function,” Dr. Mills says. “So its effect on patients with HIV is something I’d very much like to examine in the future.”
As a fourth-generation family farmer in Montana for almost 40 years, Howard Lyman is the author of Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won’t Eat Meat. He was involved in agriculture at a time when the call dictated getting bigger and better or getting out. By following modern advice he turned a small organic family farm into a large corporate chemical farm with a thousand range cows, five thousand head of cattle in a factory feedlot, thousands of acres of crops, and as many as thirty employees. He saw the organic soil go from a living, productive base to a sterile, chemical-saturated, mono-cultural ground produced by so-called modern methods.
In 1979, a tumor on his spinal cord caused him to be paralyzed from the waist down. That changed his life forever. He promised himself that, whatever the outcome of the surgery, he would dedicate the rest of his life to doing what he believed to be right—no matter what changes that necessitated. He became a voice for the family farmer and the land. In 1983, he sold most of his farm and started working for farmers in financial trouble and as a lobbyist on Capitol Hill.
In 1996 he appeared on Oprah to discuss Mad Cow disease, food production, and the rendering process. He was part of a discussion of experts, including an expert from the beef industry, about food safety in the U.S. This included a discussion of potential health risks from e-coli and mad cow disease. When he explained that cows are being fed to cows, Oprah seemed repulsed by this thought and exclaimed that it had just stopped her cold from eating another hamburger. That is how they ended up being sued by Texas cattlemen for violating a Texas law that forbids someone from “knowingly making false statements” about agricultural business. The cattlemen alleged that Oprah was responsible for the decline in beef futures. On February 29, 1998, a Texas jury found they were not liable. Howard says “today I breathe more easily knowing that a vigorous debate about potential dangers to our food supply is permissible. Lawsuits like this stifle speech about matters that have implications for the health and welfare of every American consumer. At a time when threats to food safety are arguably greater than ever we need a free and open discussion about these matters.”
Today Howard is 130 pounds lighter, infinitely healthier, full of life and energy and much happier. He feels part of a movement that is not so much political as it is a march of the human heart. He shares “now that I understand how much is at stake I’ve come to relish shaking people up. I would love to see the meat and the pesticide industries shaken up, too. I would love to see feedlots close and factory farming end. I would love to see more families return to the land, grow crops for our own species, and raise them organically. I would love to see farm communities revived. I would love to know that I’ve wandered into my nation’s heartland by the sweet smell of grain and not the forbidding smell of excrement. When you can’t take it with you, all that really matters is what you leave behind.”