- There's no question that these viral pandemics,
everything from SARS to MERS to Swine Flu, H1N1,
and now these COVID viruses,
they are jumping out of animal confinement operations,
and now wreak havoc in our own bodies.
This is a serious disease and it's getting scarier.
- Hey everyone, this is Klaus from Plant Based News.
So in this video, I interview Dr. Michael Klaper,
who's a U.S. physician,
and we speak about the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of the first questions I asked him
was about the statistic that three out of every four
infectious diseases originate from animals.
- Oh Klaus, we could do the whole hour just on this.
And you've hit the most resonate chord
in my being at this point,
because ooh, this strange virus, ooh let's get a vaccine,
let's get out there and just focus on the virus.
Where did it come from?
It came from violating natural law.
For every place humans have encroached into jungles
and all these hellacious mass infections
that we've been seeing,
they are all from the animals,
from how we've been abusing them and confining them.
You confine 100,000 chickens in a shed,
you confine 50,000 pigs in a building.
They're sick, they're coughing on each other,
they're vomiting, they got diarrhea,
the other animals eat the feces,
they pass the viruses around.
They mutate with the other animals,
viruses that they brought in.
And quite honestly, and why am I so distressed?
One, the pain that I feel
just thinking about factory farming
and all those innocent creatures
in those sheds is bad enough.
The animals have been abused in this way for so long,
that, without being overly poetic,
when the animals are being slaughtered, they scream,
and they're screaming, don't kill me, don't do this.
And the scream falls on deaf ears.
The humans just keep doing their thing,
and keep slaughtering them.
Then the animals have been screaming
and screaming, we haven't heard.
Well now, as I watched the news last night,
and watched how many of the slaughter houses
that were there, the meat packing plants around the country,
in Nebraska, in Iowa, in South Dakota.
Slaughter house, after slaughter house,
after slaughter house is closing down
because the workers there are passing the virus all around.
And it's like the animals are saying,
you wouldn't listen to our screams before,
well we're just gonna take you,
we're gonna shut your life down.
Gonna take all these humans,
and make 'em sick, and get 'em outta here,
and shut this building down.
And that's basically what we are observing now.
So not only for this current injustice,
but again, the next one is brewing.
The next viral infection is in some chicken warehouse
already being passed from one coughing chicken to another,
chickens can cough, yes.
And, or and then the next pig virus is gonna jump out
and we're gonna do this all again with another virus.
And all of it is unnecessary.
This is all a message to change what we are eating.
If we adopt a plant-based diet, all of this goes away.
- Hmm, I was speaking to Dr. Gregor a few days ago,
and he said that there's been,
it's interesting what he said, it made me think,
"There's been three ages of chronic disease," he said.
Number one, plagues back in the day
when we first domesticated animals.
Number two, the chronic diseases
that punctuated the 20th century and the 21st century,
and now we're in a third age
where all the pandemics that have happened
in the last few years have, once again,
come from exploitation of animals.
So what do you think about this?
And how much resistance can we expect
from the animal agriculture industry?
- Oh huge, absolutely.
It's a fascinating time,
and it's a frightening time,
I don't want to minimize this at all.
But I'm watching these powerful forces,
the immovable object and irresistible force,
the meat eating in our society is part of the fabric,
and it's the comfort foods we've been raised with,
and what's the government
and everybody says we should be eating,
and we must eat flesh three times a day.
Totally, biologically absurd,
but that's what we're told to do.
And we're so attached to this,
and this huge mega agri-business empire
is built around keeping that supply of meat
coming out of those processing plants,
they're slaughter houses.
The truth is, so many,
you know they're gonna talk about the new normal.
The world that we're gonna immerge into
when we come out of this is gonna be a different world.
And that we must, must have a different take on meat.
It's going to, it's gonna force us
to reexamine our relationship with that.
And it may play out, literally, in bloody ways,
because there's other powerful factors going on,
if I can enlarge a bit.
One of the most heartbreaking scenes I saw on TV
was a drone shot of a tractor
going through a field of green,
and the green was string beans.
And the farmer was plowing them back into the field,
because it would cost him money to pay the harvesters
to come and pick all the beans,
to bring 'em to the warehouse where they would rot.
And so it would cost too many to harvest it,
it's more economic for him
to just plow the beans back into the soil.
Heartbreaking and yet,
and it bodes for food shortages in the months to come.
But, as I see these slaughter houses close,
that's a different game.
Because those green beans in the field,
at least they don't ask anything of the farmer,
they don't cost him anything, they just lay there.
But these pigs must be fed.
These chickens must be fed,
or they're gonna have 100,000 starving hogs in a building.
So what are you gonna feed 'em?
Well you feed 'em the pig feed.
But where's that coming from,
if you can't make money off these animals?
It's coming from the core producer's
savings account for his kids' college education,
it's coming right out of the core producer products.
Well he's not gonna stand for that.
And so what are they gonna do?
Well, they're all gonna get killed anyway,
kill them all, cull 'em, is the euphemism.
And you're gonna see massive, massive slaughters
of hundreds of thousands, millions,
hundreds of millions of chickens, and pigs, and cattle
in these factory farms, that are all gonna be killed.
And the animals in the laboratories,
the researchers can't come in and do their research
so they're gonna kill the monkeys, and kill the mice,
and there's gonna be this wave of death
that sweeps across our country
that's gonna make us have to look
at what we have created here.
And then how this tsunami of death is sloshing back on us
in the form of this virus.
And I hope we get this idea
that maybe those plants should stay closed,
and not open up again.
'Cause if you're gonna kill all the pigs,
well now you gotta wait for the pigs to mature
for the next crop.
Well what are you gonna eat in the meantime?
You're gonna eat rice, and beans, and mushrooms,
and plant-based foods.
And maybe this is what it will take
to get hundreds of millions of Americans
to open up to when we say whole food, plant-based diet
is delicious, it's nourishing.
It heals the planet, it heals your arteries.
These folks were right all along.
Well maybe the folks will now take their fingers
out of their ears and open them.
They'll be forced to look at these other options.
And if we're there with some great tasting bean chili,
then we'll help this transition happen,
and a new age will dawn that'll be healthier for everybody,
including the animals.
- That's really, really powerful.
We've obviously known about the environmental costs of meat
for a number of years.
We've ignored that, we've known the animal suffering,
we've ignored that,
health effects we've known about, also ignored.
But with the economic recession due to the Coronavirus,
and its clear link to animal consumption,
do you think this fourth thing, this new thing,
this economic category,
do you think this is finally gonna tip the balance?
- It certainly might.
It would be one of the few silver linings
to come out of this, and I certainly hope it does.
Yes I think plant-based nutrition will get a huge boost.
Will it be enough, will people miss their meat so much
that they just gotta, they'll pay $100 a pound for steak,
which is what it should cost.
Well stay tuned.
This is gonna be a very fascinating time with change.
We'll see who we are when it come out of this tone.
- I've heard that type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure
are high risk factors for COVID-19,
both of which, studies have shown
it can be tackled effectively in a plant-based diet.
So, are you saying that plant-based diet offers protection
against the COVID-19 virus,
and can you discuss why this is?
- Oh my, a very important and profound question.
A healthy immune system, and by that I mean
we have two types of immunity.
They call it the innate immunity.
That's the integrity of the membranes in our lungs,
in our sinuses, in our skin.
The inflammatory reactions we're able to muster up.
These non-specific defenses that we have
that work against bacteria, virus, et cetera,
those take vitamins and minerals,
so you want those nice and strong.
And then there's adaptive immunity.
When the virus gets in,
the lymphocytes take its fingerprints
and they whip up an antibody protein specifically
designed for that particular virus,
and that's the adaptive immunity.
So that takes vitamins and minerals too.
The nutrition will help with that.
It doesn't guarantee that you won't get the infection,
but it helps you ward it off
to the greatest extent possible.
If you do get the infection,
hopefully you'll muster your defenses real quick,
and it'll just turn into a couple of days
of body aches, and fluey feelings, and cough,
and then it passes through,
which is what most people experience,
you shouldn't lose sight of that.
But then there's those feared, preexisting conditions,
what is that?
We're talking about,
so the folks with congestive heart failure are at high risk.
The folks with preexisting lung disease,
the chronic smokers, and the folks with asthma.
If their lungs start getting inflamed and swollen,
they can right up in trouble very quickly.
The diabetic folks.
If your tissues are full of sugars,
all the sugar inhibits your white blood cells' ability
to eat up germs for your lymphocytes
to make antibodies, et cetera.
So poorly controlled diabetes
is a welcome mat for the virus as well.
The good news is, however,
as I've been telling the medical students
as I've been going 'round to the schools,
part of our Moving Medicine Forward initiative,
that the chronic disease, the cardiovascular disease,
the diabetes, the asthma, et cetera,
these diseases get better,
go away, on a whole food, plant-based diet.
And it happens quickly doctors,
I tell them within days to weeks.
The obesity starts to melt away,
and the arteries open up,
and high blood pressure comes down,
and the joints stop hurting, and the skin clears up.
Well this is a great time
to take advantage of that remarkable healing power
that's in your body,
that gets unleashed with a whole plant-based diet.
If you are overweight, or diabetic,
or you've got high blood pressure,
or you're taking prednisone,
or things that are suppressing your immunity,
this is a great time
to get on that healthy, whole-food, plant-based diet.
Lots of salads, and soups, and steamed veges, et cetera.
And start melting that excess fat away,
start controlling those blood sugars,
and this will help your heart muscles,
your arteries open up,
and make it easier for your heart to pump.
Now all those things will start reversing
those nasty pre-existing conditions,
and you'll be less of a target
when the virus knocks on your door.
So, all the way around, no matter how you look at it,
we're being punished, if you will,
for straying from that whole food, plant-based diet,
that are simian bodies are really designed to eat.
We are not carnivorous apes, we don't have claws
on our hands.
We've got starch digesting enzymes in our saliva,
we're plant eating creatures,
like our gorilla and bonobo cousins are.
And the further we stray from that
the more we unleash
these terrible, biological repercussions.
And that's what we're seeing here.
And these diseases are part of that package.
They are the consequence of the wrong fuel
going into our body.
That's why arteries clog and we get obese.
Well, get back on that whole food, plant-based train,
get yourself a lean, healthy body,
and those preexisting conditions go away,
and then maybe when the virus knocks on your door,
you'll have the flu for a days,
a fluey feeling for a few days, and you'll be through it.
And so, there's all sorts of reasons,
that as individuals, and as a society,
we need to get back to a whole food, plant-based eating.
And this is a steam roller that's knocking the door down,
and maybe lead us to that more helpful path.
- Mm-hmm, last question,
do you think there are silver linings from this virus?
- Oh there's going to be,
I think, a whole lot of silver linings.
We're going to so much appreciate
being able to walk outside,
to go out to a meal in a restaurant,
to meet someone and give 'em a hug.
Real human interactions
are gonna be so much more valued and treasured, for one.
Second, we'll get to know ourselves better.
You stay inside for week, after week, after week,
it's gonna force you to grow.
I think that people are using this time to learn something,
increase their power,
increase their ability to get along with people.
I hope it makes us more tolerant,
so we don't react to every little thing,
we don't play the victim.
No matter who you're living with,
small stuff is small stuff, let it go by.
And if someone leaves their dishes in the sink,
just do the dishes.
They'll do it for you the next day.
Just learn how to navigate gently through this life,
and we're being forced to do that as well.
Education's gonna be different.
I think it's gonna open up distance learning
to lots, lots more people.
And we'll see we need some things
a lot less than we thought.
Everything from air travel to meat on the plate.
And it's gonna make us value some things,
and appropriately devalue others.
And if fates are on our side,
and we don't tear ourselves apart in the meantime,
we could come out from this as a wiser,
as well as a healthier population,
and that's what I'm hoping for everyone.
(air whooshing)