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Milton R. Mills, M.D. serves as associate director of preventive medicine
for the Physicians Committee, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit
organization dedicated to promoting preventive medicine, especially better
nutrition, and higher standards in research.
A graduate of Stanford University School of Medicine, Dr. Mills practices
outpatient clinic-based medicine in Northern Virginia and works as a
critical care physician with Fairfax Hospital in Fairfax, Virginia. As an
African-American physician focusing on preventive medicine, Dr. Mills has
delved into some of the environmental and societal influences affecting the
health of African Americans and other racial minorities.
Dr. Mills was interviewed by Steve Prussack (Juice Guru) and Dr. Will Tuttle (author, The World Peace Diet).
STEVE PRUSSACK: Everyone’s on the line, and we’re ready to welcome you
all to Veganpalooza 2012 Vegetarian World Summit. I’m your co-host Steve
Prussack, and we’re ready to introduce our next guest. We’d like to welcome
Dr. Milton Mills. He’s a medical doctor in private practice, Associate
Director of Preventative Medicine with Physicians Committee for Responsible
Medicine, and the co-author of the Physicians Committee report on Racial and
Ethnic Bias in the U.S. Dietary Guidelines. I’m honored to have him with us,
and let’s welcome to the call our friend and co-host Dr. Will Tuttle.
DR. WILL TUTTLE: Thank you, Steve. Yes, we’re really delighted to have with
us here on Veganpalooza 2012 Dr. Milton Mills, M.D. As Steve said, he’s been
an M.D. in private practice for a long time and also long-time vegan. I’ve
heard his presentations a number of times, and they’re very, very
informative and interesting. So I’m really glad that we are able to have
some of this insight and wisdom with us here on Veganpalooza. So Dr. Mills,
I’d like to just begin by asking if you could talk to us a little bit about
the comparative anatomy of human beings as compared to, say, omnivores,
carnivores, herbivores, because a lot of people say, “No, we’ve got these
big teeth, these big canines, so they’re designed to tear flesh, so we must
be flesheaters.” Some of these ideas are still actually quite pervasive in
our society. So I was wondering, from your perspective, if you could talk
about what are we designed to eat from an anatomic point of view?
DR. MILTON MILLS: Sure. Let me just start by saying that animals that are
designed to eat plants, the tissues of plants and animals that are designed
that eat the flesh of other animals are dealing with very, very different
types of food. Animal tissue, animal cells, have a cell membrane. They are
filled with proteins, fats, and maybe a minimal amount of carbohydrate, but
there’s no fiber in animal tissues. There’s no cellulose.
There are no indigestible parts. So animals that are designed to eat meat
tend to have very simple and rather short digestive tracts. The problem that
carnivores, which are the animals that are designed to eat animal tissue,
confront is that I guess you could say the problems associated with their
food are problems that occur upfront, meaning that they typically are trying
to eat animals that don’t want to be eaten, so they have to be anatomically
designed not only to chase down prey but then to actually attack it, kill
it, and then dismember it. As a result, these animals are all designed to
run fairly fast. They can all run on average 30-35 miles an hour, with the
exception being the cheetah, which as we know, for a very short burst of
speed, can reach up to 60-65 miles an hour for maybe around 300 yards or so.
They have very strong jaws that allow them to not only grab their prey but
hold onto it while it’s struggling and to also suffocate it and then
dismember it with their, again, with their jaws, so their jaws are very
strongly constructed. They develop tremendous bite forces that allow them to
break bones, chew through tough hides.
Their teeth are designed to, one, to again, grapple with prey. They have
very long dagger-like canines that can rip and flesh and tear apart. Their
molars are constructed like little serrated steak knives, in essence.
They’re blade-shaped, they’re serrated, and when their jaw closes, the upper
molars slide past the lower molars in a vertical plane so that you get a
nice slicing motion. This allows them to slice flesh off bone, and then they
swallow it because they don’t chew. Carnivores don’t chew their food. They
swallow it either whole or in very large chunks. It goes into their stomach,
which has extremely powerful acids that allow them to dissolve bones,
hooves, connective tissue, hides, and this sort of thing. When carnivores
have food in their stomach, they secrete so much acid that the pH of their
stomach is less than 1. The pH scale typically runs from 1 to 14 with 7
being neutral and anything over 7 being progressively more basic. A pH of
less than 1 means that ou’ve got this acid that’s stronger than the acid in
a car battery. Once the meal has been basically liquefied by their stomach,
it passes into their small intestine, which tends to be very short. The
small intestine of a typical carnivore is only about maybe three to four
times its body length, and that’s because the protein, fat, and carbohydrate
are very quickly and efficiently absorbed, and it doesn’t take a long small
intestine to accomplish this. Then whatever residue is left over passes into
their colon, which again tends to be very short, straight, and smooth.
Essentially once it gets there, the animal defecates to get rid of this
leftover material because all that can happen to it is that it can start to
putrefy if it’s kept within their bodies.
Now you contrast that with herbivores, and herbivores are eating food that
doesn’t cause you problems upfront because plants are anchored into the
ground and they don’t bite you. But the problem, I would say the difficulty,
not the problem, comes with the actual digestion of plant material because
unlike animal tissues, plant tissues have cellulose, which is an
indigestible plant fiber that no mammal makes enzymes that can break
cellulose apart. So because of all this fiber in plant food, it takes a lot
more processing and a much longer time to actually extract and absorb the
nutrients from this food. So one of the first things you notice about
herbivores is that they must chew their food. The purpose of chewing is to
mix the plant material with digestive enzymes so that these enzymes can
start the process of breaking down the carbohydrates and other, essentially
the carbohydrates in the plant food. It then passes, I should say, to
accomplish this, they have a jaw structure which is very different than that
of carnivores. Carnivores have jaws that are basically shaped like a pair of
shears. The jaw joint is on the same plane as the cheek teeth so that when
the jaw closes, it closes just like a pair of shears close, whereas with
herbivores, the lower jaw has become Lshaped.
The jaw joint has moved to a position above the plane of the teeth, and that
means that when the jaw closes, instead of closing with a slicing motion,
the teeth actually come together all at once, and instead of sliding past
each other in the vertical plane, they slide across one another in a
horizontal plane, which is what gives you that grinding motion of chewing.
Plant-eating animals frequently have enzymes in their saliva that will start
the process of digesting plant foods. The ruminants, which are the
herbivores that are designed to eat very rough or very coarse plant
material, like grass and hay, actually will first consume a stomach full of
grass or hay. It goes into their first stomach. These are the animals that
have four stomachs. In that first stomach is a population of bacteria and
protozoa that make enzymes that can actually break cellulose apart because
remember I said no mammal actually makes an enzyme that can break apart
cellulose, but bacteria and other microorganisms do. That’s why these
animals need these four stomachs. In the first stomach is this bacterial
soup that releases all of these cellulose-digesting enzymes. They swallow a
stomach full of food, let it soak up those enzymes, and then they bring it
back up and start to chew it, and that’s what chewing the cud is all about.
It’s to mix that plant material thoroughly with those digestive enzymes so
it can really, efficiently break apart the cellulose. They then swallow it
again, but it goes into the second stomach, where it begins to essentially
ferment, that is, the enzymes start to do their job and break apart the
cellulose. It eventually passes into their small intestine, which the small
intestine of herbivores is much, much longer than that of carnivores.
Typical length of a small intestine in a plant-eating animal is about 10 to
12 times the body length. That’s, again, because of all this fibrous
material, it takes a lot longer to extract the nutrients from this plant
food. So they need a much longer small intestine. Then the leftover residue
passes into their colons, which, again, tend to be very long because they
can also do additional bacterial fermentation of whatever fiber is leftover
to extract additional energy from it. When you look at human beings, we have
those classic features associated with a plant-based diet. We have our
teeth, our incisors are broad and basically shaped like spades. They’re
designed for cropping plant material and peeling fruit and that sort of
thing. They aren’t these sharp, pointed, short, peg-like incisors you find
in carnivores. While we do have canines, lots of herbivores have canines.
The fact that canines are present doesn’t necessarily tell you, in the
absence of looking at all the other teeth and the mechanics of the jaw,
doesn’t tell you what that animal’s designed to eat. Furthermore, the
canines in human beings have become reduced to the size of incisors, and
instead of being rounded and conical shaped, more like a dagger, they’ve
become flattened and function like accessory incisors. They don’t, they’re
useless, utterly useless or ripping and tearing meat. Our jaw structure is,
again, like that of the classic herbivore with a jaw joint above the plane
of the teeth. We have flat, nodular molars like other herbivores, and our
jaws slide across one another in a horizontal plane, not past each other in
a vertical plane like the carnivores. When we, the reason that we must chew
our food is because we have enzymes in our saliva called, an enzyme called
salivary amylase that actually starts the process of breaking down plant
material while you’re chewing it.
Food then passes into our stomach, where it’s turned into a liquid. Then
it moves into the small intestine, which the average length of the small
intestine in human beings is 25-30 feet or more, and when you measure actual
human body size, which is not head to toe but actually head to tail bone,
the average human body length 2.5-3 feet. So again, we have the classic
proportions of your typical herbivore. Once we’ve extracted the readily
available nutrients from a meal, the leftover fiber then passes into our
large intestine, which has the, again, the typical sacculated appearance of
the colons of other herbivores like horses and several other primates, where
we have a population of bacteria that actually act on that fiber and break
it down into compounds called short-chain fatty acids that we can use for
energy and also that help regulate our physiology in a number of important
ways. These short-chain fatty acids decrease blood sugar levels, which is
important for controlling diabetes. They decrease cholesterol levels. They
help protect us against colon cancer, and they do a host of other beneficial
things for us if we’re eating the right foods and delivering the right
materials to our colonic bacteria to do the job that they’re supposed to do.
So clearly human beings have the anatomy and physiology of your
classic herbivore and not at all like that of the carnivore.
Now what about this issue of omnivores? Well, people say, “Human beings are
omnivores.” Yes, we are behavioral omnivores, and what I mean by behavioral
omnivores is that many of us do choose to include both animal food and plant
food in our diet, but that doesn’t necessarily tell us whether or not we’re
actually designed to do that. When you look at those animals that are actual
anatomic omnivores, you find that they have some of the features of
carnivores with a few herbivorous adaptations that allow them to eat a
limited range of plant foods. Those are typically bears and raccoons and so
forth. They have somewhat flattened molars, partially flattened molars that
allow them to grind up very soft pulpy plant foods, like fruits and roots
and tubers, but they also are still constructed primarily like carnivores so
that they can still hunt and kill prey, dismember it, and consume it without
causing themselves harm. We could actually spend several hours talking about
this topic.
DR. TUTTLE: Yeah, you’ve given us a good, I think that’s really interesting.
Also I think you mentioned that our stomach acid is not nearly as strong.
DR. MILLS: No, the pH of our stomach is only about 4. Which, again, it’s
acidic, but it’s not nearly as strong by several orders of magnitude as that
of a typical carnivore.
DR. TUTTLE: Right. Then if could you talk also, I mean, obviously when we
eat animal foods and we’re not designed to, it’s going to cause a whole
range of problems that we see and diseases that we have. But you’ve also
done quite a bit of research and presentations on the psychology of this. I
think sometimes it’s called the disgust mechanism. Could you talk a little
bit about that? Because I think that’s also interesting for our listeners.
DR. MILLS: Well, the emotion of disgust is believed by psychologists to be
one of six basic human emotions. The others are happiness, sadness, fear,
anger, and surprise. Disgust is frequently broken down into three domains.
There’s what’s called pathogen disgust, which concerns itself with things
that we eat and protecting the body from potentially injurious agents that
could harm our health or end our life. Then there’s the domain of sexual
disgust, which concerns itself with inappropriate sexual pairing such as
incest or pedophilia and this sort of thing. Then there’s what’s called
moral disgust, which has to do with our distaste for people who are amoral
and vile and people who lie and cheat and steal and that sort of thing.
Clearly with respect to food we’re dealing with pathogen disgust. What’s
interesting is that when you look at the literature of the kinds of
qualities that elicit pathogen disgust from human beings around the world,
there are obviously, in different societies different things will provoke
disgust, but when you look at human societies around the world, there are
certain qualities that make the list in every society. So from that we can
infer that these are basic to all humans, and those qualities have to do
with things that are moist and wet and slimy, things that are bloody, things
that are rotting or covered with flies and maggots, things that have fur or
hair on them, things that tend to be asymmetric or amorphous in their shape.
When you actually think about those things in sum total, what I came to the
conclusion of was that this was describing raw meat because raw meat in its
unprocessed and unchanged form has all of those qualities. It’s moist. It’s
wet. It’s slimy. It’s bloody. It tends to be very, if you haven’t actually
cut it up and butchered it, it’s very amorphous and asymmetric in its shape.
If it’s left out, it will clearly rot and become infested with flies and
maggots. So what’s clear to me is that this disgust we have for raw animal
flesh is a mechanism meant to protect us from ingesting something that our
bodies weren’t designed to ingest. This is why in order for humans to find
meat and animal tissue palatable, we have to change it in such extreme ways.
We first butcher it, which is really changing the shape and look of meat. We
peel off the skin, we pluck out the feathers, we take off the hair and the
fur, we then drain the blood out of it, we then cut it into these little
small rounded shapes, and then we actually cook it to make it be less mushy
and moist and more firm like the tissues of plants. Then one of the most
telling aspects is that all of the herbs and spices that we use to flavor
meat and fish are all plant products. So in essence what we’re trying to do
is make this animal tissue taste like the plant foods that our brains
really crave and desire.
DR. TUTTLE: Wow. Also when we look at the kinds of foods that are attractive
to us, what are those?
DR. MILLS: Those are things that are brightly colored, things that are round
or smooth in their texture, things that have a firm feel to them. Breakfast
cereal is all built on the fact that studies have shown time and time again
people like a crunchy, firm mouth-feel to the food that they’re eating. So
again, when you look at the smells that we like, the textures that we like,
and the colors that we like, these are all things that are qualities that
are associated with plant tissues.
Again, it’s very telling that when it comes to how we, the things we want to
smell and how we ourselves want to smell, in terms of the perfumes and
colognes that we use, again, we’re using all of these floral scents and
plant products to create these compounds or perfumes or colognes or
deodorants or home deodorizers to essentially mimic a plant-based
environment.
DR. TUTTLE: Right. And very often a burger, of course, is covered with
tomatoes and lettuce and onions and ketchup and mayonnaise and all these
things.
DR. MILLS: Absolutely. Right. Because that makes it taste better.
DR TUTTLE: Right. Then also I was wondering if you could say a few words
about something that is kind of related to this, I think, which is we hear
quite a bit of talk and theorizing that we human beings are meateaters, that
that was sort of gave us the fuel thousands or millions of years ago to
enlarge our brains, and if we gave up eating meat, we’d be giving up
something that is essentially what makes us human and what gives us the
intelligence. Do you put any stock into these kinds of theories that are
sort of bandied about now in some circles?
DR. MILLS: Absolutely not, because as I’ve often said, if meat-eating leads
to big brains and intelligence, then lions should have brains the size of
the Empire State Building. The fact is that brain size has nothing to do
with meat-eating. Those theories that have been proposed that meat-eating
somehow led to human brain development are just ridiculous and ludicrous.
They’re proposed by people who have absolutely no understanding of human
health or physiology, no medical background, no medical training, and the
fact is that the brain is comprised primarily of fatty tissue. So protein is
not helpful in building a huge brain. The two largest brains on terrestrial
animals belong to humans and to elephants, and we are both strict
herbivores. It does not take meat to create a big brain. That is just a
fallacy of reasoning, and these authors that have proposed these theories
have no rational or physiologic support for it. They just kind of threw that
out there to try and come up with a reason for eating meat. But again, it’s
a ridiculous notion because carnivores eat nothing but meat, and none of
them have big brains. The absolute biggest brain on the planet belongs to
the elephant, and they don’t eat any meat.
DR. TUTTLE: Right. Great. I think, like you say, it’s sure to be a popular
theory and sell lots of books because it helps people, it’s like saying to a
bunch of heroin addicts that heroin gives you a big brain.
DR. MILLS: Right, exactly. But then you look at what happens to people when
they eat meat, they develop chronic disease. They are more predisposed to
infection. It creates all sorts of health problems. So that is one of the
main reasons these theories make absolutely no sense because physiologically
we clearly are not adapted for a diet that is based around animal foods
because it will create disease, and it will shorten your life.
DR. TUTTLE: Right. Great, well, thank you so much, Dr. Milton Mills, for
joining us here on Veganpalooza 2012. It’s really been so interesting to go
in depth into the comparative anatomy of carnivores, herbivores, and
omnivores, and also into these other topics. I was wondering before we
terminate here, are there any other things you’d just like to say to people
who are listening in that you think would be, in a few minutes, just kind of
any last thoughts for people to help them understand all this a little bit
better?
DR. MILLS: Just that the things that our bodies need are antioxidants,
phytochemicals, vitamins, nutrients, all of the things that are found in
plant foods that research has shown help suppress disease, help fight
infection, and actually help us live longer. All the studies on longevity
show that those populations around the earth that are longest lived are
those that eat a primarily or entirely plant-based diet. As you
progressively eat more, include more and more animal foods in your diet, you
find that life span starts to shorten and the list of chronic diseases
starts to go up. So the thing that I always tell my patients is look. People
often say, “I can’t live without this” or “I need this”. The fact is none of
us ask for fried chicken, ice cream, or cheeseburger in the delivery room.
Everything that people think that they like, they had to learn to like. Just
like you learn to like unhealthy things, we can learn to like foods that are
healthy for us, and they actually preserve our health and lengthen our life
as opposed to destroy our health and shorten our lives.
DR. TUTTLE: Thank you so much. Well said. I really appreciate again your
joining us. Steve, do you have any last-minute thoughts you’d like to share
or anything else?
STEVE: Just some great food for thought right there, Dr. Tuttle. Dr. Mills,
thank you so much. Thank you all for listening to this session of
Veganpalooza 2012 Vegetarian World Summit. Again, special thanks to our
guest Dr. Milton Mills.
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