(dramatic orchestral music)
- 70 to 75% of African Americans are lactose intolerant
the prevalence amongst Asian Americans is 95 to 98%
amongst Native Americans it's around 70, 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%
and that is because the use of dairy foods have been
traditionally much more common in people of European
ancestry and 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 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, but it was that they were
continuing to include dairy foods in their diet so I'd have
them go home do two weeks with no dairy come back and see me
and eight to nine out of ten times the problems had cleared
up and so I'd tell them nope 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 she
said the problem had cleared up and I said, "Well, you're
lactose intolerant". She looked at me and said I know that
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 serving of dairy everyday
you know to get my calcium and that pissed me off
and that's when I went to PCRM and I talked to Dr. Barnhardt
and I said look we've go to 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 and that's out of that came our two part paper
called Racial Bias in the US Dietary Guidelines. Part one
of the paper dealt with the issue of lactose intolerance
in communites 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 plants.
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
sky rocketed 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?
Calcium right? And what is the primary reason for
consuming calcium?
Come on you guys know: bones.
Well first of all, there is no commercial you will ever see
on T.V. that will tell you that eating dairy foods will
give you strong bones
because there is no study that has ever shown it.
There's a commercial that came out a couple of years ago...
there is 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 want to 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 going to 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 then that
because every study has always shown that for some reason
black woman are genetically protected against osteoporosis.
Black woman don't get osteoporosis period
and so the primary reason for allegedly drinking milk:
black woman are protected against it anyway so the
government is encouraging African American woman to drink
milk for no good reason knowing that it's going to make
them sick in the process. That's disgusting.
It also knows that woman 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 going
they're more likely to die from it
also knowing that African American men are
more likely to have problems with access to health care and
so when they get the prostate cancer it's going to be amf
yoyo ya'll know what that stands for?
Adios I'm a use the polite term my friend you're on your own
(laughs loudly)
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
and our government has had a history of
taking minority communities, putting them in a position of
food insecurity, making, and there by 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?