(ethereal music)
- 70 to 75% of African-Americans
are lactose intolerant.
Prevalence amongst Asian-Americans is 95 to 98%.
Amongst Native Americans, it's around
I think 74 to 78%.
And amongst Hispanic Americans,
it is 53 to 58%.
Whereas amongst Caucasian-Americans,
it's only around 33 to 35%.
That is because the use of dairy foods
have been traditionally much more common
in people of European ancestry.
So again, dairy foods have not been a traditional part
of the cultures and cuisines of people of color.
And therefore, the recommendations in the dietary guidelines
for people to include these foods in their diets
can't be justified.
And so, what is the reason that these foods are recommended?
It's marketing, plain and simple.
After I finished residency,
I was working, doing urgent care part-time for Kaiser
but also working in free clinic in Alexandria.
And I was having African-American patients coming in
telling me, Doc, my irritable bowel is acting up,
or I've got a spastic colon,
and I'd talk to them about their symptoms
and it was fairly clear to me that probably,
what was going on with them
wasn't that they actually
had spastic colon or irritable bowels,
it was that they were continuing
to include dairy foods in their diet.
So I'd have them go home, do two weeks no dairy,
come back and see me,
and eight to nine out of 10 times,
the problems had cleared up.
And so I'd tell 'em, no, you are lactose intolerant,
which is the case with most African-Americans
so you need to avoid dairy.
Well, the clincher came
when this one older black woman came back and I said to her,
as she said, the problem had cleared up,
and I said, "Well, you're lactose intolerant."
She looked at me and said, "I know that."
- [Audience Member] Ha, she got it right.
- And I said, "Then why are you continuing
"to eat these dairy foods?"
She said, "Because the government says I have to."
And that just blew me away.
She said the dietary guidelines
say I have to eat X number of servings of dairy everyday
to get my calcium.
And that pissed me off!
And that's when I went to PCRM
and I talked to Dr. Barnard and I said,
"Look, we gotta do something about this."
Because African-American people are eating foods
that are gonna make them sick
because they think they have to do it.
Out of that came our two-part paper called
"Racial Bias in the U.S. Dietary Guidelines".
Part one of the paper dealt
with the issue of lactose intolerance
in communities of color,
and then part two dealt with the larger issue
of the fact that an animal food-centered diet
is going to create disproportionate levels
of disease in communities of color
because of the presence of what are called thrifty genes.
So when you look at the traditional diets
of communities of colors,
so Asian-Americans, Hispanic Americans, West Africans,
these are diets that traditionally
are built around whole plant foods, contain no dairy,
are low in fat, and have limited amounts of animal foods.
And when people stick to these kinds of diets,
they have very low rates of chronic disease.
But when they start to adapt a Western-style,
high-fat, high-animal-food-centered diet,
particularly when they start to consume
a lot of meat and dairy foods,
their rates of chronic disease not only skyrocket
but they typically begin to exceed
those in the general population.
And so by encouraging people
to consume a Western-style diet,
the government knows
that they are going to ultimately promote
excess rates of disease in communities of color.
And to do this deliberately
is a form of institutional racism.
But it's particularly egregious in communities of color
because with respect to the issue of dairy foods,
what is the primary reason
the government encourages people to consume dairy foods?
- [Audience Member] For bias?
- What, calcium, right?
And what is the primary reason for consuming calcium?
(audience members chattering)
Come on.
You guys know! - For bones!
- Bones!
Well, first of all,
there is no commercial you will ever see on TV
that will tell you that eating dairy foods
will give you strong bones,
because there is no study that has ever shown it.
There is a commercial that came out a couple years ago,
there's some black guys playing basketball,
and then there's this idiot that comes out
in a milk carton costume,
and he starts talking smack
with the guys playing basketball.
He says, "If you wanna be good at basketball,
"you need strong bones."
And he says, "Milk has calcium.
"And for strong bones, you need calcium."
And he leaves you to make the inference
that drinking milk with the calcium
is gonna give you strong bones, but he never says it.
He never says it because no study has ever shown it.
In fact, every study has shown exactly the opposite,
that the more milk you drink,
the more likely you are to have osteoporosis.
But it actually gets worse than that,
because every study has always shown that for some reason,
black women are genetically protected against osteoporosis.
Black women don't get osteoporosis, period.
And so the primary reason for allegedly drinking milk,
black women are protected against it anyway.
So the government is encouraging African-American women
to drink milk for no good reason,
knowing that it's gonna make 'em sick in the process.
That's disgusting!
It also knows that women who drink milk
are more likely to get ovarian cancer.
It knows that when African-American men drink milk,
they are more likely to get prostate cancer
and they're more likely to die from it.
Also knowing that African-American men
are more likely to have problems with access to healthcare,
and so when they get a prostate cancer,
it's gonna be AMFYOYO.
Y'all know what that stands for?
Adios, I'ma use the polite term, my friend,
you're on your own! (audience laughing)
So yeah, it's institutionalized racism.
It's a deliberate effort on the part of the government
to encourage the consumption of foods
that it knows promotes disease
with no demonstrable benefit.
Our government has had a history
of taking minority communities,
putting them in a position of food insecurity,
and thereby making them dependent upon the government
for food subsidies
that it then uses essentially
as dumping grounds for agricultural excess,
and basically dumps these commodity foods
into these communities.
And these, again,
are the foods that promote chronic disease.
That's pretty much it in a nutshell.
Any questions?
(ethereal music)