THE VEGETARIAN BLOG

TV man Larry King hosted a discussion about the safety of eating meat last night, following the national interest in how dancer Stephanie Smith’s life was destroyed by eating E Coli contaminated meat. Stephanie went into weeks-long coma and emerged from it brain-damaged and unable to walk.

Three people from families wrecked by contaminated meat told their stories. Then T. Colin Campbell came head to head with Nancy Rodriguez of the University of Connecticut about whether meat is good for you. Colin’s China Study indicated a strong link between animal products, such as meat and dairy, and disease such as cancer and heart disease. Studies since have backed up the findings that a plant-based diet can not only help prevent disease but also cure it. Because of this, Colin strongly promotes a plant-based diet. Nancy, a so-called nutritionist, objects to Colin’s point of view but how can you take her seriously when her university website bio says that “Dr. Rodriguez has an active research program that has been extramurally funded by agencies including USDA, NIH, the American Heart Association, the National Dairy Council, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and the Egg Nutrition Center”?. She’s not impartial and I wonder why she was invited on the show.

However, the real point is not whether meat is safe, but whether it is necessary to our diets and the answer is a resounding NO. That’s the official position of the American Dietetic Association. Forget all the gobbledegook about protein. You get can get plenty of that from plant-derived foods. And, most importantly, the ethical reasons to give up animal products is the most compelling of them all. Animals suffer terribly to provide humans with their own flesh and excrements, as so many videos around the internet document and we can all help mitigate so much suffering simply by switching to a vegan diet. Yes, there are health and environmental benefits to a vegan diet and I take them as an added bonus. Good karma, as some may call it.

Via Food For Change

Virgina Messina, a well-known vegan dietician , has given her approval to the USDA’s new fact sheet for vegetarians. Says Ms. Messina:

While the fact sheet lists some nutrients that vegetarians need to focus on, it doesn’t have any of that annoying verbiage about the need to carefully plan meals. (Vegetarians and vegans should, of course, carefully plan their meals; so should everyone else.) More importantly, there isn’t a word about animal products in the whole fact sheet, other than how to replace them.

That is, despite the vegetarian terminology in the title, the fact sheet is vegan in essence. To download the sheet, go here .

An article in the London Times yesterday was a perfect example of how insidious turning veganism into a ‘fad diet’ can be. Continue Reading »

Three New Jersey residents are suing Nathan’s Famous, Kraft Foods/Oscar Mayer, Sara Lee, Con Agra Foods, and Marathon Enterprises for failing to warn consumers that hot dogs increase the danger of colorectal cancer. The action comes in the wake of landmark scientific studies linking hot dogs and similar meats to colon cancer.

The class-action consumer fraud lawsuit, which is being filed July 22 in Superior Court in Essex County, seeks to compel all five companies to place cancer-risk warning labels on hot dog packages sold in New Jersey. The labels would read “Warning: Consuming hot dogs and other processed meats increases the risk of cancer.”

The nonprofit Cancer Project is filing the suit on behalf of John O’Donnell, Ruthann Hilland, and Michele DeScisciolo, who purchased hot dogs made by the companies without being made aware that processed meat products are a cause of colorectal cancer.”Just as tobacco causes lung cancer, processed meats are linked to colon cancer,” says Neal Barnard, M.D., president of the Cancer Project. “Companies that sell hot dogs are well aware of the danger, and their customers deserve the same information.”

The lawsuit is based on the findings of a landmark report from the American Institute for Cancer Research, based on 58 separate scientific studies, showing that just one 50-gram serving of processed meat (about the amount in one hot dog) consumed daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer, on average, by 21 percent.

Every year, about 150,000 Americans are diagnosed with colorectal cancer; approximately 50,000 die of it. In March, the National Cancer Institute published a study of more than half a million people showing that red and processed meat intake is associated with a higher risk of dying from cancer and cardiovascular disease.

The Cancer Project is a collaborative effort of physicians, researchers, and nutritionists who have joined together to educate the public about the benefits of a healthy diet for cancer prevention and survival. Based in Washington, D.C., The Cancer Project is an affiliate of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

A piece of news I saw on the Latin American news agency Ansa lept to my attention. The headline announced that vegetarianism can have a negative effect on sexual performance, which seems to be the exact opposite of what Peta often says. After reading the article, though, I realized it was just a slack attention-grabbing exercise. The editor must have been short of news on the day in order to indulge in such sloppy journalism.

The article was based on statements made by one Nicola Mondaini, a Florence doctor who was making a presentation about an endocrinology event in Milan, Italy, that will take place later this month. Mondaini said that vegetarianism is not necessarily healthy; it’s what you eat that matters. So far, so good. Variety and balance are very important factors. Zinc is also mentioned and it’s true that it’s a very important mineral. It helps wounding and scarring. Seeds are good sources. Avoiding frying food is also important, said Mondaini, and I couldn’t agree more. Steam those vegetables, I say.

So what about the sex issue? Well, it was limited to a brief statement in the last paragraph where Mondaini suggests a Mediterranean diet in order to have a great sex life. And that’s it. Why vegetarianism is linked to a bad sex life is left unexplained, or, at best, vaguely implied. And even so, that would be a false statement. Vegetarianism does not improve or compromise sex life. It’s irrelevant. This is the kind of biased journalism that really gets on my nerves. All the editor wanted was a headline with the word sex in it and if to achieve that it took some creative editing, so be it. Such a shame.

For more information on zinc, go here.

Ecorazzi has a great interview with Dr. Neal Barnard, the founder of the Physicians for Responsible Medicine, an organization that works compassionate and effective medical practice, research, and health promotion. They believe in nutrition as an essential component to good health and oppose to animal testing, so yes, I love this hard-working organization. Said Dr Barnard:

We have been working very hard to bring nutrition back into medical training where it’s been neglected - and this is a very, very important area. Medical schools still neglect nutrition, and yet research has shown that when people switch their diet — particularly with vegetarian and especially vegan food – their risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, blood pressure diminishes dramatically. Doctors need to be able to use those tools.

To read the full interview, go here.

The Globe and Mail carries a report about a study published in the February issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, which has concluded that a vegan diet “is easier to stick to than you might think”. The study was carried out by researchers from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the George Washington University and the University of Toronto, and assigned 99 people with Type 2 diabetes to follow either a low-fat vegan diet or a conventional diabetes diet for 18 months.

The vegan diet dramatically cut consumption of cholesterol, fat and saturated fat and increased fibre intake compared to the conventional diabetes diet. People on the vegan diet lost weight, lowered their blood sugar and LDL cholesterol, and reduced the need for diabetes medication. Among people whose diabetes medications remained unchanged, those following a vegan diet achieved better blood-sugar control as indicated by bigger improvement in a blood test that measures hemoglobin A1c.

I welcome studies like this becomes it further cements the idea that veganism, besides being more ethical than a diet based on animal parts, rewards its adepts with better health. It may take some getting used to as we are, in most cases, programed to eat animal products, but the transition process goes rather fast and I can say from experience that the very thought of eating meat, dairy or eggs makes you nauseated in a matter of months after turning to veganism. It’s a wonderful feeling to feel free of even the slightest craving for anything derived from the exploitation of animals.

This is what I call a responsible public administrator. According to a report in the Chicago Tribune, the city’s health commissioner Dr. Terry Mason has told his constituents to put an end to their meat-eating habits. Apparently, Chicago is big on animal fat (pun intended) and now that they’ve mentioned it, it makes historical sense as the city was the place where the concept of the modern, mechanized slaughterhouse was created, and which is chronicled in the famous book, The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair.Of course, animal food is a health hazard and Mr. Mason knows that.

“For the entire month, I’m not eating any meat,” he has told listeners to his Sunday morning radio show, “Doctor in the House,” on WVON-AM. “If it walks, runs, hops, flies, swims, crawls or slithers, I won’t eat it. If it has eyes, I won’t eat it. If it had a momma and a daddy, I won’t eat it. . . . I’m going to focus on eating a healthy and delicious variety of fresh vegetables and fresh fruit. . . . And I want you to do the same.”

The Afro-American community particularly shows a high-than-average rate of health problems related to animal fat, such as diabetes and heart conditions so it will be a good thing to educate these people about the benefits of a plant diet. Go on Chicago, go vegan!

This is what I call a conscientious doctor. The American medical researcher Neal Barnard said he makes no apologies for promoting a vegan-style diet in New Zealand whose farmers rely on the world eating meat and dairy foods for their livelihood, according to this report.

Dr Barnard was in Wellington to address Victoria University students, and told NZPA that obesity and “terrible” eating habits increasingly meant that people in affluent countries were facing a rising tide of adult-onset diabetes and premature deaths. His research showed that type-2 diabetics could “repair” their insulin function by cutting meat and dairy from their diet, and slashing their intake of food oils. “The low-fat vegan diet is more effective at treating diabetes than the typical diet or oral medications,” he said. “I want people to stop focusing on how much pasta, how much glucose, and how much rice they eat. Instead, I want to take the grease out of the diet. This approach could put a huge dent in the diabetes epidemic.”

Over 175,500 New Zealanders have congenital diabetes (type-1) or the adult-onset form (type-2). Dr Barnard described the illness as “the disease of our time”. It really is great to see a doctor being brave enough to tell people to avoid getting ill instead of telling them how to get treated while keeping the bad habits that caused the problem in the first place.

Elsewhere a CNN expert said a vegan diet is great, although her concern with protein is disproportionate. She’s right about B12, the only nutrient vegans need to supplement.

The Healthy and Green Living section of the fabulous Care2 website has compiled a list of foods that help in the prevention of cancer, one of the biggest disease killers in the world. And guess what? There’s only plants in the list. From broccoli to beans, there is a huge variety of vegetables and greens that can give your system extra ammunition. The full article is here and in my view offers yet another confirmation that a balanced vegetarian diet is one great way to achieve optimal health. It’s no panacea, as there are other factors that impact on our health, such as genetics and fitness, but it surely helps avoiding the flesh of animals.