Did Donald Trump Jr. confess to a crime this afternoon? And if so, does he even know it?

Since Saturday, Trump Jr. has been windmilling wildly, trying to defend himself against a series of New York Times stories about a June 2016 meeting between young Donald, his father's campaign manager Paul Manafort, brother-in-law Jared Kushner (now a senior Trump adviser), and a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya. At every step, he's made things worse for himself, and perhaps his father. But on Monday he may have delivered the knockout punch-against himself.

Just as the Times published a shocking new piece detailing e-mail messages sent to him by Rob Goldstone, a music publicist, promising "very high level and sensitive information" about Hillary Clinton as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump," Donald Jr. released the entire e-mail chain himself, on Twitter. In it, he appears to be committing the crime of accepting campaign help from a foreign government. Gleefully.

"If it's what you say I love it," Trump quickly replied to Goldstone, adding, "especially later in the summer," in what seems to be a reference to when the campaign might deploy such damaging information against its opponent. Goldstone, who represents Russian singer Emin Agalarov, the son of Aras Agalarov, a real-estate tycoon who is a crony of both Trump Sr. and Vladimir Putin, told Trump Jr. that both Agalarovs were urging the meeting with a "Russian government attorney," and he added, tantalizingly, "I can also send this info to your father via Rhona [Trump's longtime assistant Rhona Graff] but it is ultrasensitive so wanted to send to you first."

The subsequent e-mails show Donald Jr. quickly pulling together a meeting with Manafort and Kushner. When the meeting time got changed, Trump e-mailed the thread to both Manafort and Kushner, retaining the subject line: "Russia-Clinton: private and confidential." So much for earlier Trump claims that the men had no idea what they were talking about. After three days of increasingly worse news about Donald Jr., Donald Sr. finally issued a statement: "My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency." Then he coldly referred questions to Donald Jr.'s lawyers.

Both Trump and Goldstone told the Times Tuesday that the meeting with Veselnitskaya was a bust. She had no information about Clinton, they claim, and merely delivered an "inane" statement on the Magnitsky Act and Russia's reactive adoption restrictions. For her part, Veselnitskaya admitted to NBC on Tuesday that the Trump team indeed sought damning information about Clinton, but she claims she didn't have it, and merely wanted to talk Russia policy. She also insists she has no ties to the Kremlin, which seems untrue, as she is one of the most prominent Russian lobbyists in attempts to repeal the Putin-loathed Magnitsky Act, named for a Russian accountant who discovered corrupt financial dealings among Putin-connected Russian oligarchs, and died, allegedly of a beating by guards, in prison.

It should also be noted: There is no reason to believe either Veselnitskaya's or Trump and Goldstone's insistence that the Russian attorney provided no damaging information about Clinton obtained by the Kremlin. All three have been proven to be inveterate dissemblers.

We must also note that none of this confirms the story told by the four major US intelligence agencies-that the Russian government directed the hacking of Democratic Party e-mail accounts to hurt Clinton. The "incriminating" information that Goldstone promised had to do with Russian officials contributing, illegally, to Clinton's campaign-information that never apparently materialized. So far, none of the conversations revealed by Trump Jr. or the Times has involved reports that the Russians hacked into Democratic officials' e-mail accounts and/or were offering to disseminate those e-mails. There will likely be many more details necessary to substantiate any kind of legal or political case against Trump himself.

Some experts say Trump Jr. committed a crime, violating a law prohibiting foreign nationals from providing, and Americans from receiving, "anything of value." Election-law expert Rick Hasen concludes "there's a lot for prosecutors to sink their teeth into. Pretty close to the smoking gun people were looking for." Pretty close-but not quite. It's also not clear who would charge Trump with this potential violation of the law-or what penalty he would pay.

There are many strands to follow here. The very same day as young Donald and top Trump officials took the meeting with Veselnitskaya, the candidate himself tweeted, for the first time, about the 33,000 e-mails that Clinton declared personal and didn't provide to FBI investigators. The Wall Street Journal has reported on the clandestine pro-Trump efforts of Peter W. Smith, a wealthy conservative lawyer who's been a GOP gremlin since the early Clinton administration. Smith tried to confirm reports that the Russians indeed obtained those Clinton e-mails, and to retrieve them. It's possible that Trumps Jr. and Sr. had an early heads-up on that rumor. (Smith, 81, died two weeks after talking to the Wall Street Journal.)

So many things are possible. Donald Jr. has changed his story about the meeting with Veselnitskaya three times, at first saying it was about adoptions, then admitting he was hoping for Clinton dirt, and on Tuesday coming semi-clean (at least via an email thread) about the whole tawdry and possibly illegal search for Russian dirt on the former secretary of state. Meanwhile, Jared Kushner has had to amend his government security forms three times, to disclose new information about meetings with Russians that he had forgotten, including this one. The Times stories have benefited from cooperation from "White House advisers"-of which Kushner is one-which raises the question of whether someone in Trump's inner circle is out to get his older son. There may be more changes to come in the storyline from Trump Jr. and Kushner. If the Times has this kind of information, I would imagine that special counsel Robert Mueller has much more. We still don't know what the outcome will be.

But the Trump family's repeated claims to know nothing about Russian meddling in the election, and Jared Kushner's (thrice-revised) insistence he had no meetings with any Russians, at all, have been exposed as lies. Republicans still don't care. Senator Ted Cruz called in a "nothing-burger" on Tuesday afternoon, a talking point he borrowed from Hungarian Nazi-admirer Sebastian Gorka, who said the same thing today (before Trump Jr. released his e-mails). It seems like every time the GOP goes out on a limb to defend the Trump team, the Trump team returns the favor by leaking or confirming more evidence to the contrary.

This is unlikely to end well for Republicans, though we may not be close to the end. We can only hope it ends soon enough to end well for the rest of us.
(c) 2017 Joan Maureen Walsh is an American author, editor, writer and blogger. She was an editor-at-large of Salon.com before becoming National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation, and does political analysis for MSNBC.

I HAVE a unique confession to make: I like Gaza.

Yes, I like this far-away corner of Palestine, the narrow strip on the way to Egypt, in which two million human beings are crowded, and which is closer to hell than to heaven.

My heart goes out to them.

I HAVE spent quite a lot of time in the Strip. Once or twice I stayed there with Rachel for a couple of days. I became friendly with some people whom I admired, people like Dr. Haidar Abd-al-Shafi, the leftist doctor who set up the Gazan health system, and Rashad al-Shawa, the former Mayor, an aristocrat from birth.

After the Oslo agreement, when Yasser Arafat came back to the country and set up his office in Gaza, I met him there many times. I brought to him groups of Israelis. On his first day there he sat me on the dais next to him. A photo of that occasion now looks like science fiction.

I even came to know the Hamas people. Before Oslo, when Yitzhak Rabin deported 415 Islamic activists from the country, I took part in setting up protest tents opposite his office. We lived there together, Jews, Christians and Muslims, and there Gush Shalom was born. After a year, when the deportees were allowed back, I was invited to a public reception for them in Gaza and found myself speaking to hundreds of bearded faces. Among them were some of today's Hamas leaders.

Therefore I cannot treat the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip as a faceless gray mass of people. I couldn't stop thinking about them during last week's terrible heat wave, about the people languishing in awful conditions, without electricity and air conditioning, without clean water, without medicines for the sick. I thought about those living in the houses severely damaged in the last wars and not repaired since. About the men and women, the old, the children, the toddlers, the babies.

My heart was bleeding, and was asking who was to blame.

Yes, who is to blame for this ongoing atrocity?

ACCORDING TO the Israelis, "the Palestinians themselves are to blame." Fact: the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah has decided to reduce the electricity supply to Gaza from three hours a day to two. (The electricity is supplied by Israel and paid for by the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.)

This seems to be true. The conflict between the Palestinian Authority, ruled by Fatah, and the Palestinian leadership in Gaza, ruled by Hamas, has come to an ugly climax.

The uninvolved bystander wonders: how can that be? After all, the entire Palestinian people are in existential danger. The Israeli government tyrannizes all Palestinians, both in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. It keeps the Strip under a strangling blockade, on land, in the sea and in the air, and is setting up settlements all over the West Bank, to drive the population out.

In this desperate situation, how can the Palestinians fight each other, to the obvious delight of the occupation authorities?

That is terrible, but, sadly, not unique. On the contrary, in almost all liberation struggles, something similar has happened. During the Irish struggle for independence, the freedom fighters fought against each other and even shot each other. During our own struggle for statehood, the Haganah underground turned Irgun fighters over to the British police, who tortured them, and later shot up a ship bringing recruits and arms to the Irgun.

But these and many other examples do not justify what is happening now in Gaza. The struggle between Fatah and Hamas on the backs of two million people condemns these to inhuman living conditions.

As an old friend of the Palestinian people in their fight for liberation, I am deeply saddened.

BUT THERE are more partners to the atrocious blockade on Gaza.

Israel can blockade the Strip only on three sides. The fourth side is the Egyptian border. Egypt, which has in the past fought four major wars against Israel on behalf of the Palestinian brothers (in one of which I was wounded by an Egyptian machine-gunner) is now participating in the cruel blockade on the Strip.

What has happened? How did it happen?

Everyone who knows the Egyptian people knows that it is one of the most attractive peoples on earth. A very proud people. A people full of humor even in the most trying circumstances. Several times I have heard in Egypt phrases like: "We do not like the Palestinians very much, but they are our poor cousins, and we cannot abandon them under any circumstances!"

And here they are, not only abandoning, but cooperating with the cruel occupation.

All this why? Because the local rulers in Gaza are religious fanatics, just like the Muslim Brothers in Egypt who are the deadly enemies of today's Pharaoh, General Abd-al-Fatah al-Sisi. Because of this enmity, millions in Gaza are punished.

Now rumor has it that Egypt would relent, if the Gazans accept an Egyptian stooge as their ruler.

The Israeli blockade of Gaza is completely dependent on the Egyptian blockade. Proud Egypt, which claims to be the leader the entire Arab World, has become the handmaiden of the Israeli occupation.

Who would have believed it?

BUT THE main responsibility for the atrocity in Gaza falls, of course, on us, on Israel.

We are the occupiers - a novel type of occupation by blockade.

The justification is clear: They want to destroy us. That is the official doctrine of Hamas. The mouse hurls terrible threats against the elephant.

True. But...

But like all religious people, they find a hundred different ways to cheat God and get around His prohibitions.

Hamas has declared that if Mahmood Abbas made peace with Israel, and if the Palestinian people confirmed the peace by plebiscite, Hamas would accept it.

Also, Islam allows for a Hudna (armistice) with infidels for any length of time - 10, 50, 100 years. After that, Allah is great.

In many hidden ways, Israel does cooperate with Hamas, especially against the even more extreme Islamists in the Strip. We could easily reach a modus vivendi all along the line.

SO WHY must the people in Gaza suffer so grievously? No one really knows. Because of the mental laziness of the occupation. Because that's what we are used to doing.

Here is a mental exercise: What if we did the very opposite?

What if we announced to the people in the Gaza Strip: the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah is now paying for only two hours of electricity a day. But seeing your suffering, Israel has decided to provide you with electricity for 24 hours for free.

What would be the effect? How would Hamas react? How would it affect the level of violence and security costs?

For the long run, there are many Israeli and international plans. An artificial island in the Mediterranean opposite Gaza. An airport on the island. A deep-sea port. Peace in fact, even without declarations.

I believe that this is the wisest way to proceed. But wisdom has little chance.

IN THE meantime, the atrocity goes on. Two million human beings suffer inhuman treatment.

The United States is at war with the very concept of the rule of law among nations, and constitutes the most imminent threat to the survival of the human species. Washington's outlaw doctrine of "humanitarian" military intervention, championed by Bill Clinton and elevated to a defining national principle under Barack Obama, marks the U.S. as "a rogue state, a state that is completely rejecting international norms," says Ajamu Baraka, of the Black Alliance for Peace. "There is no legal right for the United States to be in Syria, but yet they are in Syria with no domestic opposition."

Instead, much of what should constitute the "domestic opposition" to Washington's flagrant crimes against peace is consumed with an obsession to punish Russia for imaginary offenses against a fictitious American "democracy."

Ajamu Baraka calls for "a restoration of the commitment to the rule of law on the part of the US authorities" -- a minimal demand that should resonate with all civilized peoples, most especially Black Americans, for whom U.S. law has always been riddled with "exceptionalisms." However, the Black political (Misleadership) class now takes its cues from the CIA, NSA, FBI and other spook agencies currently allied with the Democratic Party -- the most abject capitulation to evil imaginable.

On the world stage, the United States has declared itself above the law, as if it had already completed the conquest of the globe. Thousands of U.S. troops are implanted on Syrian soil, the better to arm, train and protect the Islamist jihadists that act as foot soldiers for U.S. imperialism in the region. Washington has no plans to leave, even after ISIS, the purported rationale for the U.S. presence, has been reduced to small guerilla bands. "We call that ISIS 2.0 - an insurgency, rural," said General Stephen Townsend, commander of the U.S.-led "coalition" in Syria. "So I think we'll still be here dealing with that problem set for a while."

Townsend's forces are laying trip-wires for nuclear war with Russia, whose eminently legal presence in Syria is at the request of that country's government. That the U.S. has been enabled to invade and occupy a sovereign state "with no domestic opposition" is a testament to the collapse of progressive politics, in general, and the moral debasement of a Black political class that is utterly at odds with its own people's history. Tethered mouth and foot to the Democratic wing of the rich man's duopoly, the Black political class has disavowed and defiled the legacies of W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Dr. Martin Luther King. They have trashed the sacred essence of the Black Liberation Movement: solidarity with other peoples oppressed by white supremacist capital.

Solidarity has its own value, but it also earns reciprocity. In abandoning solidarity with those oppressed by the United States -- comprising an ever-growing proportion of the world's people -- Black America sacrifices the moral authority to expect support for our own struggles. We are left alone to fend off the beast, here in its belly.

It is widely understood that U.S. rulers felt compelled to appear amenable to Black demands in the Fifties and Sixties because of concerns about how the rapidly decolonizing world viewed race relations in the United States. Dr. Gerald Horne, the Black historian who has studied African American political alliances dating before the War of Independence, maintains that it serves Black people's interests to "ally -- as our ancestors did -- with the prime antagonists of US imperialism," including, in various epochs, the British, French, Spanish, and later, the Soviets and Third Word revolutionary movements.

In Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, his 1920 global sequel to The Souls of Black Folk, the public intellectual and political activist W.E.B. Du Bois laid out his case for solidarity among the oppressed peoples of the planet:

"I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength."

These are voices of the Black Radical Tradition, the tradition that has made African Americans the most anti-war constituency in the United States, but which the Black Misleadership Class consistently betrays. For these infinitely self-centered creatures, even the Mother Continent is unworthy of basic human empathy, much less solidarity. No one has been more intimately involved, over a longer period of time, than Susan Rice in the U.S. sanctioned genocide of at least six million Congolese. From 1996, as a national security staffer and Under Secretary of State for African Affairs under Bill Clinton, to the Obama administration, Rice has dutifully facilitated the bloodbath in the Democratic Republic of Congo at the hands of U.S. allies Rwanda and Uganda. Her service on behalf of this genocide, and other slaughters, earned Rice a shot at becoming Obama's secretary of state, when Hillary Clinton left the job, in 2012.

Republicans mounted a campaign against Rice, claiming she was culpable for the jihadist attacks in Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya. (Actually, the GOP failed to nail her on the real Benghazi crime, which involved transfer of Libyan weapons to jihadists in Syria.) Despite her well-known role in the worst genocide since World War Two, most of the Congressional Black Caucus supported Rice's bid to become the top U.S. diplomat -- including Barbara Lee (D-CA), the most "anti-war" member of the CBC.

Six million dead Africans are not worth one Black face in a high State Department place, as far as the hideous Black political class is concerned.

The year before, in 2011, more than half of the Congressional Black Caucus voted to continue the bombing of Libya, which had once been Africa's most prosperous and generous country.

Only three members of the Black Caucus (and just 5 Democrats) are co-sponsors of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard's Stop Arming Terrorists Bill, designed to halt U.S. proxy jihadist wars in Syria and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

The Black Caucus is at opposite ends of the spectrum from the Black Alliance for Peace. "The first thing that has to happen is for the United States to stop supporting those elements that are committed to perpetuating the conflict [in Syria], to stop supporting those elements that many people define as terrorist elements, and to be serious about a real diplomatic solution to this issue," said Ajamu Baraka. Clearly, the Congressional Black Caucus is in solidarity with U.S. imperialism, not with the victims of Washington's lawlessness in the world.

However, the Black Radical Tradition is not dead. The Black Is Back Coalition, in its 19-point National Black Political Agenda for Self-Determination, calls for "U.S. Out of Africa, Asia and Latin America.... In addition to U.S. military withdrawal to within its own currently recognized borders, we demand an end to U.S. proxy wars, drone attacks and political subversion of governments and people's movements around the globe. Given that the U.S. was the first nuclear power, is the only country to have used nuclear weapons, and has never renounced First Strike, we demand U.S. nuclear disarmament without preconditions--unilaterally, if necessary."

The coalition also demands reparations and immediate forgiveness of debt for the formerly colonized world, the right to independence for the Palestinian people, and cessation of all U.S. aid to Israel.

Other grassroots Black organizations have been true to the Black Radical Tradition and its ethos of solidarity with the oppressed. But, the closer one gets to the Democratic Party, the less peace-oriented Black organizations become. Among the establishment Black civic organizations -- which behave like annexes of the Democratic Party -- peace has no priority whatsoever. However, even the Movement for Black Lives is weak on peace. The M4BL's closest approximation to an anti-war plank pledges to:

"Use upcoming international opportunities and human rights mechanisms to expose the systemic human rights violations inflicted on black communities, the linkages between people of African descent in the US with other Black people around the world, make connections with oppressed people globally, and chip away at American exceptionalism."

In July 1976, the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, chaired by Sen. George McGovern, held hearings titled "Diet Related to Killer Diseases." The committee heard from physicians, scientists and nutritionists on the relationship between the American diet and diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Six months later, the committee released "The Dietary Goals for the United States," which quickly came to be known as the McGovern Report. "Decrease consumption of meat," the report urged Americans. "Decrease consumption of butter fat [dairy fat], eggs, and other high cholesterol sources."

"The simple fact is that our diets have changed radically within the last 50 years ...," McGovern said when the report was released. "These dietary changes represent as great a threat to public health as smoking. Too much fat, too much sugar or salt, can be and are linked directly to heart disease, cancer, obesity, and stroke, among other killer diseases. In all, six of the ten leading causes of death in the United States have been linked to our diet. Those of us within our government have an obligation to acknowledge this."

The response to the report was swift and brutal. The meat, egg and dairy industries lobbied successfully to have the document withdrawn. They orchestrated new hearings, supplying a list of 24 experts approved by the National Livestock and Meat Board, so that, in the words of Wray Finney, then the president of the American National Cattlemen's Association, the public would get "a balanced, correct view of this whole matter." A new report was released in December 1977. This second edition insisted that "meat, poultry and fish are an excellent source of essential amino acids, vitamins and minerals." The Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs was abolished. Its functions were taken over by the Agriculture Committee. "The Agriculture Committee looks after the producers of food, not the consumers, and particularly, not the most needy," wrote The New York Times. And when Sen. McGovern, who had already angered the Democratic and Republican leaderships with his 1972 insurgent campaign for the presidency, was up for re-election in South Dakota in 1980, he was defeated by James Abdnor, a cattle rancher and well-funded spokesman for the meat industry.

Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn-whose documentary "Cowspiracy," about the environmental impact of the animal agriculture industry, led me to become a vegan-recently released a new film, "What the Health," which looks at how highly processed animal products are largely responsible for the increase of chronic and lethal diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer in the United States and many other countries. Both films are available on Netflix.

The companion book, also titled "What the Health," written by my wife, Truthdig Book Editor Eunice Wong, lays out in even greater detail how the animal agriculture industry intimately joins with the pharmaceutical industry, the medical industry, health organizations and government agencies to mask and perpetuate the disastrous effects of animal products on our health. The animal agriculture industry, like the fossil fuel industry or any other branch of the corporate state, profits at the expense of our health and even our lives. Many corporations and our government have a lot invested in keeping us sick.

"We sometimes joke that when you're doing a clinical trial, there are two possible disasters," one biotech stock analyst told The New York Times. "The first disaster is if you kill people. The second disaster is if you cure them. ... The truly good drugs are the ones you can use chronically for a long, long time."

In the book "What the Health," Wong writes, "The public's willingness to endure lifelong pharmaceutical use is called, in industry lingo, 'compliance.' And we are compliant. In 2014, the US spent $374 billion on pharmaceuticals. That's more than the combined gross national products of New Zealand and Bangladesh. It's also well over 200 percent of what the US federal government spent on education in 2015."

For long excerpts from the book "What the Health," click here. For the trailer of the documentary movie of the same title, click here.

Corporations invest heavily to promote the nation's unhealthful diet. "The meat, egg, and dairy industries," economist David Robinson Simon says in an interview in the book, "spent, in one year, at least $138 million lobbying Congress alone."

"It's money well spent for these industries," Wong writes. "A $1 industry contribution usually results in a $2,000 return as federal subsidy payments."

"You have a $5 billion stent industry," Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, a renowned cardiologist, says in the book. (A stent is a permanent wire mesh inserted into an artery to prop it open.) "A $35 billion statin [cholesterol-lowering] drug industry. They don't want that to go away. Look, if I'm in the middle of a heart attack, there's no question that I want a man or a woman with great expertise in stents by my side. They will save my life and a lot of my heart muscle. But the 90 percent of stents being done electively? There is zero evidence that you can prolong life or protect against a future heart attack with stents."

"Of every US federal income tax dollar in 2015, 28.7 cents went to healthcare," Wong writes. "That's the biggest single chunk of the dollar, larger now even than the military (25.4 cents). Compare that to 3.6 cents for education, and 1.6 cents on the environment. Talk about priorities. And yet for all that healthcare spending, the US has the lowest life expectancy among 12 high-income nations, and some of the worst health outcomes."

Early in the film, a news broadcast announces, "The World Health Organization this morning has classified processed meat, such as bacon and sausage, as carcinogenic, directly involved in causing cancer in humans. ..."

Andersen discovers that processed meat has been classified by the cancer agency of the WHO as a Group 1 carcinogen, along with tobacco, asbestos and plutonium.

In fact, Wong writes in the book, "... every 50 grams of processed meat eaten daily [on an ongoing basis] raises your risk for colorectal cancer by 18 percent. Fifty grams is less than two pieces of bacon, or two slices of ham. ... [E]ating meat only 4 times a week [on an ongoing basis] increases your cancer risk by 42 percent, according to an Oxford study."

"No more than 10-20 percent of risk for the primary causes of death come from our genes," Wong writes. "Only about 5-10 percent of cancer cases are attributable to genetic defects, with the other 90-95 percent rooted in lifestyle and environment. Colon cancer, the second most lethal cancer in the country, is the cancer most directly affected by what you eat. According to WHO, 80 percent of all heart disease, stroke, and Type 2 diabetes can be prevented."(The book's extensive footnotes facilitate research by readers on the scientific and medical studies cited.)

"The reason we know cancers like colon cancer are so preventable is because rates differ dramatically around the globe," Dr. Michael Greger says in the film. "There can be a 10-, 50-, 100-fold difference in colon cancer rates, from some of the highest measured in Connecticut, down to the lowest rates in Kampala, Uganda, for example. There are places where colon cancer, our No. 2 cancer killer, is practically nonexistent. It's not some genetic predisposition that makes people in Connecticut die from colon cancer while people from Uganda don't. When you move to a high-risk country, you adopt the risk of the country. It's not our genes; it's our environment."

"We can change the expression of our genes-tumor-suppressing genes, tumor-activating genes-by what we put into our bodies," he goes on. "Even if you've been dealt a bad genetic deck, you can reshuffle it with diet."

In the film, Andersen visits the American Cancer Society website. In a section of the site called "Basic Ingredients for a Healthy Kitchen," recommended foods include extra-lean hamburger, ground turkey breast, chicken breast, fish, eggs and cheese.

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) in its "Diabetes Meal Plans" was no better. The U.S. has the highest diabetes rate among 38 developed nations, according to the International Diabetes Federation. The ADA recommended to the estimated 29 million Americans with diabetes that they eat dishes such as "Moroccan Lamb Stew, oven-barbecued chicken, Asian pork chops and barbecued meatballs." Eating one egg a day can triple the risk of death among diabetes sufferers. And consumption of eggs doubles the risk of prostate cancer progression among men with that disease. This is probably why, as the book points out, "90 percent of scientific studies on dietary cholesterol are currently paid for by the egg industry." "Diabetes, of all the diseases, may be the most affected by meat," Dr. Garth Davis says in the film.

"There is probably more confusion around what causes Type 2 diabetes than around any other disease, among doctors, patients, and the media," says Dr. Michelle McMacken in the book. "People don't understand that high blood sugar is a symptom of diabetes. It is not the cause of diabetes. The foods most clearly linked to the development of Type 2 diabetes are processed meat, like bacon, hot dogs, cold cuts, salami, pepperoni, ham, sausage. There's a number of studies showing that the more processed meat there is in your diet, the more likely you are to get Type 2 diabetes. And of all the foods, whole grains are the most protective against the disease. The root cause of diabetes has to do with our insulin not working properly, which is very directly related to extra body fat. Until that message gets out, we're never going to break the cycle."

The American Heart Association posted recipes for "Grilled Chicken and Vegetables," "Pork Tenderloin Stuffed With Spinach" and "Steak Stroganoff," along with recommendations to eat low-fat dairy and skinless poultry and fish and to buy cuts of beef labeled "choice" or "select" rather than "prime."

Andersen and Kuhn found that these major health organizations received large donations from the animal agriculture industry, fast food chains such as McDonald's, soft drink companies such as Coca-Cola, and pharmaceutical corporations.

The American Heart Association, Wong writes, "has received money from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, National Live Stock and Meat Board, Subway, Walgreens, Texas Beef Council, Cargill, South Dakota Beef Industry Council, Kentucky Beef Council, Nebraska Beef Council, Tyson Foods, AVA Pork, Unilever, Trauth Dairy, Domino's Pizza, Perdue, Idaho Beef Council, and fistfuls of pharmaceutical companies-the usual suspects like AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Pfizer, Sanofi, and Merck, which spent $400,000 to fund an AHA program teaching 40,000 doctors to 'treat cholesterol according to guidelines.' "

One of the main sponsors of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) is the National Dairy Industry. AND, which is the nation's largest trade group for registered dietitians, publishes so-called Nutrition Fact Sheets for the public. The food industry writes these Nutrition Fact Sheets for its own products and gives $20,000 for each of these sheets to AND.

Dr. T. Colin Campbell, one of the lead scientists of the China-Cornell-Oxford Study, a 20-year study "that found 8,000 statistically significant correlations between eating animal protein and risk of disease in 65 counties in China," is emphatic about the danger of dairy products. He told The Guardian that "cows' milk protein may be the single most significant chemical carcinogen to which humans are exposed." Susan Levin, director of nutrition education for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, warned in the book, "Milk, because of what it is [a fluid designed to jump-start the growth of a 60-pound calf into a 1,500-pound cow], makes things grow faster, and that includes cancer cells. This is not a product even in its purest state that you want to consume."

The filmmakers confront spokespeople for the health organizations about funding from the animal agriculture industry, much as they confronted environmental groups in "Cowspiracy." They ask these spokespeople about peer-reviewed, scientific studies showing that plant-based diets dramatically lowered the risks for disease. The administrators in these health organizations, including Dr. Robert Ratner, the chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association, invariably canceled or terminated the interviews once they discover they would be asked about the link between diet and disease.

The idea that chicken is a healthful alternative to red meat is fictitious. A skinless chicken thigh, the book points out, contains more fat-including saturated fat, the most dangerous kind-than over two dozen different cuts of lean beef. Chicken is potentially the most fattening meat. Carcinogens form in chicken and other meats as they are cooked. Chicken is the top source of sodium for American adults because the chicken industry injects poultry carcasses with salt water to increase market weight and therefore prices, while still being able to label its product "100% natural." Chicken contains more cholesterol than a pork chop. And cholesterol is found primarily in lean parts of meat.

"The birds come through on hooks," Dr. Lester Friedlander says in the book in explaining the processing of chicken carcasses, "and then a mechanical arm goes up the cloaca [the opening through which the bird releases urine and feces] and pulls out everything inside the cavity. Unfortunately, when the mechanical arm pulls the intestines out, they often burst. Then all the fecal contamination is inside the bird. At the end of the poultry slaughter line there's a big chill tank to cool the birds down quick so they can get packaged and shipped out. If you have just one of those chickens with broken intestines and fecal contamination, the whole chill tank is contaminated. They call the water in the tank, 'fecal soup.' All the chickens throughout the day, if they don't change the water, are contaminated with feces. Hundreds of thousands of chickens go through that water. And while they're in the tank the chicken flesh soaks up that fecal soup. That's what they call 'retained water' on the chicken label."

"About 90 percent of the nation's retail chicken is contaminated with fecal matter," the book states. "Yes, that includes the kind you buy at your clean, local supermarket. This is according to a 2011 FDA report, which monitored bacteria such as E. faecalis and E. faecium, on meat, concluding that 90 percent of chicken parts, 91 percent of ground turkey, 88 percent of ground beef, and 80 percent of pork chops have fecal contamination."

We need to stop believing the lie that we require animal products in our diet for protein, calcium, iron, omega-3s or any other nutrient. "Every nutrient from meat, dairy, and eggs can be found, in a form that is as healthy or healthier, in plants," as Dr. Neal Barnard points out in the film.

There is one weakness in the film. It focuses at the end on several people suffering from serious diseases who switched to a vegan diet. A few weeks later they appear on screen dramatically improved. The book, unlike the film, makes it clear that the patients did this within a supervised medical program, including liquid fasts before the transition to a whole-foods, plant-based vegan diet, free of salt, oil, sugar and processed foods. Yes, they did improve, but I worry that the scene in the film incorrectly implies that veganism is a miracle cure. Despite this shortcoming, the documentary "What the Health" is tremendously important. We are being preyed upon and poisoned by the animal agriculture industry, working in conjunction with the medical and pharmaceutical industries and our government.

"We are on the cusp of what can truly be a seismic revolution in health," Dr. Esselstyn says in the book. "It's never going to occur because of another pill or operation. That revolution will occur when we in the healing profession have the grit and the determination to share the nutritional literacy that will empower the public to absolutely destroy this common, chronic, killing disease [heart disease]. When somebody orders pizza with cheese or a steak, it will be the same as smoking today. Look how long it took us, but it happened; nobody would even dream about smoking in your house now. It will be the same with food."