Animal Writings

A 14-year study of 71,768 female nurses, aged 38 to 63, showed that, after controlling for lifestyle factors, those eating the most fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat foods had the greatest protection from stroke.
A study of 519,978 subjects in 10 European countries showed that individuals who consumed the most dietary fiber had a 40 percent reduction in colon cancer risk than those who consumed the least. Fiber is found in a range of plant-based foods, including fruits and vegetables.

A 17-year study of 29,564 women, aged 55-96 and initially free of cancer, showed that increasing fruits, vegetable, and plant foods, and limiting the intake of salt, additives, fat, and meat may significantly decrease cancer incidence and mortality.

A Harvard Medical School study of about 85,000 female nurses and about 32,000 male health professionals showed that men and women who consume the most magnesium were least likely to develop diabetes. Magnesium is found in beans, green vegetables, whole grains and nuts. The benefits of magnesium were still apparent after adjusting for age, family history, exercise, alcohol consumption, and other factors that may influence the disease.

A study of 1,230 men aged 40 to 64 showed that men who ate three or more servings of vegetables per day had a 48 percent lower risk of prostate cancer compared with those who ate less. Cruciferous vegetables such as cauliflower, broccoli had the strongest effect.

Canadian researchers analyzed dietary data for 585 people with pancreatic cancer and 4,779 people without the disease. After adjusting for age, smoking, body mass index, physical activity, Canadian province, education, and total calorie intake, researchers found that men consuming the greatest amount of fresh fruits and vegetables were half as likely to develop pancreatic cancer as men who consumed the least amount of these foods. For unknown reasons, the benefit of fruits and vegetables was limited to males. Note that pancreatic cancer has one of the lowest survival rates of all cancers.

A study of 77,000 women and 40,00 men showed that those who ate the most fruits had the lowest risk of macular degeneration.

Finally, this study, which is not directly about fruits and vegetables, but which I think is astounding:

Researchers studying 44,788 pairs of twins in Scandinavia concluded that genetics only plays a 27 percent role in determining whether one gets breast cancer, while the environmental and lifestyle component is 73 percent.

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Now, to get the most disease prevention benefit from your diet, you can't only add healthy foods. You also have to get rid of the culprits—mainly, meat, dairy, and fat. I'll deal with the first two of those foods later in this series, and the third factor (fats) over a longer period.

Next: Extra-Special Bonus Pullout Section!

Labels: cancer, diet, fruits, health, prevention, vegetables

These next few posts are for meat-eaters and (to a lesser extent) cheese-eating vegetarians who don't cook much—because they don't like to or don't have time, or for other reasons.

The main theme is replacing meat in your diet but—to the fullest extent possible—not giving up your comfort foods, not changing your routine, not having to transition to a completely new cuisine. It's a big topic, so it will require multiple posts. In fact, I may write individual posts piecemeal. If I do, the end of the post will say "More to follow..." until the post is complete. Posts will end with "To be continued..." until the series is through.

Now, down the road, I heartily recommend expanding your diet to include a wide range of new tastes, including some of the world's magnificent ethnic flavors. And toward the end of this series, I'll give some tips on how to ease into that. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Why drop meat from your diet?

First, there are the health considerations. The data is in—in spades: A meat- and cheese-heavy diet is unhealthy; a vegetarian diet that focuses on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and a moderate amount of plant-based fats is healthy. When I say "unhealthy" I mean it can debilitate and kill you—slowly, through chronic diseases that start as early as pre-teens and develop and worsen as you age.

Granted, there are exceptions. There are some people who can eat Big Macs every day, and never eat vegetables, and their cholesterol is perfect and they're hearty and vigorous at 70. Just like there are heavy smokers who never get lung cancer or emphysema. But those are the exceptions. The problem is, you don't know in advance if you're going to be an exception. But don't bet on it.

In general, a meat-heavy diet has too much of the bad stuff and not enough of the good stuff. Probably the best-known villain in meat and dairy is saturated fat. Hundreds if not thousands of peer-reviewed clinical and epidemiological studies in mainstream scientific journals show that animal fat intake correlates with heart disease, diabetes, several cancers, and other deadly diseases. But fat isn't the only bad guy in animal products. You also have to worry about cholesterol, chemicals released during cooking, hormones and toxins that accumulate in animal tissue, and bacteria such as salmonella, campylobacter, and e coli.

The good stuff that meat and dairy pushes out include: fiber, vitamin C, folic acid, and about a million micro-nutrients that seem to fight off cancer, heart attacks, and other chronic, debilitating, deadly conditions.

Please note: You may have heard a lot about cutting back on fat in your diet. Be aware that in terms of your health, there is a difference between animal fat and plant fat. Perhaps this is best illustrated by example: In a 2003 study of nearly a hundred thousand women, Harvard researchers found that intake of animal fat, especially from red meat and high-fat dairy products, during premenopausal years had a significantly greater risk of developing breast cancer. There was no relationship between the consumption of vegetable fats and breast cancer found. (Here's the original study: Cho E, Spiegelman D, Hunter DJ, et al. Premenopausal fat intake and risk of breast cancer. J Natl Cancer Inst. 2003;95:1079-85.)

There's more where that came from.

(By the way, relatively healthy plant sources of fat include olive oil, canola oil, peanut oil, flax seeds, sesame seeds, walnuts, almonds, avocados, and coconuts. There are many more; these are just a few of the best known and most widely available ones.)

In sharp contrast to the ton of data affirming the harmful effects of meat and dairy, controlled studies (again, published in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals) show that diets free of animal products may reverse heart disease, prostate cancer, and diabetes. That's powerful. Where on the spectrum do you want to be?

One more thing. There are vegan ultramarathon, triathlon, weightlifting, and Olympic champions. Throw out misconceptions of vegetarians as weak. As a rule, they're healthy and virile.

Yes, you can mess up a vegetarian diet by eating nothing but potato chips, saltines, and frosted flakes. But with a decent balance of whole grains, legumes, fruits, vegetables, and "good fats," you will probably be much healthier than the rest of the population, and stay fit well into old age, unless you are very unlucky. Get some exercise, employ some stress-reduction techniques of your choice, be kind to others, rotate your tires, take in an occasional monster truck rally, and you'll likely have a satisfying and meaningful life.

OK, that's health.

To be continued...

Labels: comfort foods, diet, disease, fruit, grains, health, legumes, meat, vegetables

They want to live. The animals want to live.

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It's the holiday season. A season for giving. A time to reflect and count our blessings. And think about what's important. A time to hope for peace on earth. Maybe this will be the year, the season, that you opt out of violence to animals, at least to a very great degree, by adding more vegetarian meals to your diet, or cutting out meat completely from your diet. If you cook at home, check out Veganomicon, and The Joy of Vegan Baking, and these vegan cookbooks for starters.

That's only the tip of the iceberg. There are a million scrumptious vegan recipes on the Internet. Just google "recipe vegan" and than any ingredients or cuisine or cooking or meal styles you can think of. Expand your culinary horizons a little. There is a world of delicious and healthy food out there that you may not have tried. You can try one new thing a week. It may be a lot of fun.

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There are often psychological barriers to going vegan, or even 80 percent vegan or vegetarian. You may not be thinking of them consciously, but they're there. The first step in overcoming them is to recognize them:

• To be vegan, or even mostly vegan, is to be labeled vegan. You might not be used to this. Currently in our society, to be vegan is to be different. You might not desire this. It may take some adjustment. But not too much. At first you may get some strange and/or negative reactions from people. Those fade quickly, and often some of those same people over time take an interest in what you're doing, and respect it. Also, with each year, "vegan" is less an alien concept and more mainstream.


• Fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, barbecue sandwiches, spaghetti with meatballs, turkey at Thanksgiving, ham at Easter, and so forth--these are comfort foods. Foods you grew up with. I grew up with them, too. The emotional ties we have to foods is amazingly strong and resistant to change. But equally amazing is how quickly we can modify traditions and like them even more. Veggie chicken; thick, hearty pot pies, vegetarian casseroles and stews, LightLife Smart BBQ, spaghetti with marinara and veggie "meatballs"— there is an overflowing abundance of essentially cruelty-free replacements that can make a fantastic base for new traditions, ones that will become cherished in no time.


• A large part of fears about nutrition if you give up meat and dairy is based on cultural norms and advertising. Yes, I know you're fiercely independent and could never fall prey to cheap marketing tricks. But there's a reason companies spend billions on advertising: it works. Calcium? People who live in areas of the world where they never consume dairy have lower rates of bone fractures than we do (in the U.S.). Protein? You're more at risk from too much protein than from too little. In fact, it's difficult to get too little protein unless you starve yourself. When was the last time you knew anyone who died from lack of protein? Now, how many people have you known who have died from heart disease? Rates of heart disease go down when you replace meat with veg alternatives, including whole grains, vegetables, and legumes. Rates of cancer and diabetes are lower in vegetarians, especially vegans. In fact, you may be able to reverse heart disease and diabetes with a vegan diet.
  
  The dairy industry bombards the public, including children, with deceptive messages that make us think we need to consume dairy products to be healthy. But dairy is implicated in breast cancer, prostate cancer, and Type 1 diabetes—and other diseases. We're not dependent on drinking some other animals' milk our whole lives to be healthy. The concept is ludicrous when you think about it. It's all marketing.
  
  The protein thing is a combination of antiquated fears from earlier times in which malnutrition was more common, and—more subtly—a desire to believe that vegetarianism is dangerous. Looked at another way, we all want to defend our lifestyle choices, and convincing ourselves that we must do what we're doing to stay healthy is a good defense. Although in this case it's false.
  
  Here's a good source on vegan nutrition: VeganHealth.org. It's comprehensive and straightforward. As best I can tell, it's unbiased and free of exaggerated claims. Like the authors, the last thing I want to do is make unsupported promises about the health benefits of a vegan diet, and then set you up for disappointment and cause you to be distrustful of vegans.

OK, I've talked your ear off. This was originally going to be—I kid you not—one line long.

One more thought about food...As you transition toward a more peaceful, less violent, more animal- and earth-friendly diet, you may discover a new peace of mind. No longer do you have to suppress faint but disturbing images of slaughterhouses and suffering. You don't have to play any mind games or lie to yourself about how our little pointed incisors mean we have to have meat, or pretend that the "free range" chicken had a happy seven-week life. A vegan diet allows you to be much more honest with yourself, and have a much more honest, non-exploitative relationship with the world— especially the animals in it. You will not only be able to more freely say "peace on earth," you will actually be creating it. What a profound way to honor and enjoy the spirit of the holidays.

Labels: dairy, diet, health, holiday, lacto-ovo, lacto-ovo vegetarians, protein