Animal Writings

There is a plethora of studies showing a causal link between meat and dairy consumption and a host of diseases, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer. Studies across countries, with only men, with only women, with cancer survivors, with young people, with the elderly, with different ethnic groups, with identical twins—you name it—all predominantly show the same results.

However, there seem to be some meat and dairy products that are the worst of the worst in terms of health risk. One is processed meats, including bacon, sausage, and lunch meats. Here are just two of the studies showing the substantial harm that you may inflict upon yourself if you consume these foods, and damage you could do to your family's health if you feed these products to them:

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A review of studies conducted between January 1966 and March 2006 found that increasing consumption of processed meats by just one ounce daily increased stomach cancer risk by 15 percent to 38 percent. One ounce of processed meat is equivalent to approximately two strips of bacon or one small slice of deli ham. Stomach cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death worldwide.

Researchers with the Multiethnic Cohort Study in Hawaii and Los Angeles followed 190,545 participants for seven years, finding that those who consumed the most processed meat showed a 70 percent increase in pancreatic cancer risk.

Labels: bacon, cancer, lunch meats, meat, processed meat, sausage

Not every suggestion here will please, or be relevant to, everybody. We each have individual tastes and unique time, budget, and accessibility constraints. What I'm going to try do, for most of this series, is present suggestions and recommendations that will be applicable to most people, most of the time.

Every reader is going to already know some of what I say here. My hope, and my goal, is that there is enough new—and usable—information in this series to make it worth your while.

Feel free to comment (or email me) on this series. I try to answer all non-spam correspondence.

For the most part, and within reason, I'm going to ignore cost. In general, you can feed yourself with nutritious food and be perfectly satisfied more cheaply on a vegetarian diet than on a meat-heavy diet. And that's before you get into the long term costs from increased risk of obesity and deteriorating cardiovascular function when you eat too much meat and cheese—heart bypass surgery and lifetime prescriptions are expensive.

But there's something to said for convenience, for which you usually pay a premium, so I'm not going to overlook items such as takeout meals, frozen dinners, and prepared dishes from the deli.

There are a few general rules for saving money on food purchases:

• Eat at home more. Even instant meals are cheaper than most restaurant meals.


• Eat more of these foods: Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and nuts. With few exceptions, these are extraordinary values.


• Use up what you buy. A giant bag of mixed greens may look like a great bargain, but not if you end up throwing half of it out. I'll provide hints later in the series on how to easily prevent waste.


• If you never cook, reconsider. You may enjoy it and have an aptitude for it. Also, the more you do it, the better—and more efficient—you get at it. There are additional potential advantages to cooking, which I'll get into later.

• Watch less TV. At least change the channel or get up and do something when commercials air. TV food advertising during prime-time and sporting events is dominated by fatty, unhealthy products. (There are also lots of advertisements for heartburn medications and erectile dysfunction medications, to partially offset the effects of eating too many bacon cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizzas.)
  
  The advertisers use every technique possible in TV commercials—including camera angles, lighting, backgrounds, facial expressions, use of likeable personalities, music, carefully crafted dialog, and excruciating attention to detail in how the food is presented—to draw you in. McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, and other corporations spend huge sums on TV advertising because it works; it increases demand. You may not be as immune to these schemes as you think.


• Start each dinner with a salad. A healthy salad, that is, with lots of greens and other vegetables. Aim for a pleasing variety of colors, flavors, and textures.
  
  The fiber from the salad fills you up and is a hedge against gorging later in the meal.
  
  The bag-o-prewashed-salad products that have become popular in recent years may be a godsend to salads. Just pull the stuff out of the bag and you're ready to go. You don't have to eat a huge salad, but please eat something bigger than a dinky "side salad." For one thing, you're more likely to use up the salad ingredients before they go bad that way.
  
  You can add all sorts of healthy ingredients to salads that work really well: walnuts, dried cherries, steamed asparagus, orange and grapefruit sections, avocado slices, olives stuffed with pimientos—you name it. I'll go into more detail on salads further down.
  
  If you're pressed for time, use the salad bar at your local grocery store. In fact, shop around; some salad bars have much more healthy variety than others. Resist the temptation to add mayo-saturated options to your salad; that nearly defeats the purpose. On the other hand, the salad bar is a great place to try new food selections, or partake of foods that you like only in small doses or on an occasional basis. You can add one beet to your salad, or one cube of fried tofu.
  
  At restaurants, order a salad and, if need be, ask that it come out before the main course. Pass on the parmesan cheese and ranch or blue cheese dressing. While we're on the subject, try not to fill up on bread, either. However, at a Mexican restaurant, you could do a lot worse than eating a bowlful of chips and salsa that they typically give you as soon as you sit down. The chips tend to be fried and fairly limited in nutritional value, but salsa is actually very healthy.


• Where feasible, hang out with people who eat better than you do, especially at mealtimes or at events where food is involved. The influence rubs off.


• Prefer, or at least try out, restaurants with more than the average proportion of vegetarian selections. Ethnic restaurants, especially Asian or Indian, are often a good bet. Greek and Mideast restaurants will usually have a range of vegetarian offerings, including falafels, hummus, and babaganoush—all of which I'll explain later. You can always get pasta with marinara sauce, and sometimes other meatless tomato-based sauces, at Italian restaurants. A couple of chain Mexican restaurants that come to mind that make mighty good burritos free of animal ingredients are Baja Fresh and Chipotle.
  
  If you live in a large metropolitan area or college town, you probably have access to one or more restaurants that cater to vegetarians. Please consider these. In some cases, they are real eye-openers. You may be able to try vegan versions of quiche, General Tso's chicken, steak and cheese subs, cheesecake, and a thousand other dishes that may or may not have a meat and/or dairy counterpart. Some areas of the country, such as DC , Baltimore, Illinois, and Ohio, have guides to veg-friendly eateries, markets, and bakeries in that area. Often you can order a free or cheap printed version of the guide. These are really handy to have in your car, brief case, or coat pocket. Highly recommended.
  
  If you live or are traveling elsewhere, just search on the web for "vegetarian restaurant" and the name of the city or region in which you're interested, and you're almost certain to get back results that point you in the right direction. Frequently—especially for establishments in larger cities—you'll be able to read reviews as well.
  
  If you're not used to dining at vegetarian restaurants, feel free to tell your server that you're new to this, and you like such-and-such types of foods, and ask what he or she would recommend.

Next: Overall tips to increase the amount of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes, respectively, in your diet.

To be continued...

Labels: cooking, diet, food, fruit, legumes, meat, restaurants, vegetables, whole-grains

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

I was perusing this spreadsheet from the USDA, which shows various food categories in terms of percent of calories in the food supply.

I chose 1980 as a baseline. In 1980, the animal rights movement was tiny, but starting to expand.

In 1980:

• Meat comprised 19% of calories


• Dairy comprised 12%


• Added fats (which include butter, cream, and milkfat as well as margarine and vegetable oil, comprised 21%

In 2004:

• Meat comprised 17% of calories


• Dairy comprised 11%


• Added fats comprised 25%

The main components accounting for the rise in added fats were "salad and cooking oils" and shortening, in that order, so, considering current trends, predominantly plant-based fats.

Hence, taking into account that on a per capita basis we're eating more calories than ever, one conclusion is that compared to 1980, animal products now take up less of the plate, but the plate has gotten bigger and it has more canola oil.

Note that relative to the Consumer Price Index, the price of meat, eggs, and dairy has decreased during this time period, thus becoming more affordable. In addition, a preliminary look at the data indicates that today these products comprise a smaller share of per capita income than they did in 1980.

The number of animals killed for food has increased largely because of a massive switch from beef to poultry that started in the 1970s.

As a comparison, note that US fur sales are at record levels, higher than their previous peak in the mid-1980s, despite anti-fur campaigns and grassroots advocacy over the last 30 years that have focused almost entirely on abolishing the practice.

ADDENDUM

The USDA just released its forecast of per capita meat consumption through 2019. Basically, they forecast that it will fall for several years, then rise, but not to current levels. Meanwhile, in emerging countries such as China, which has few animal welfare laws and very little presence of animal rights groups, demand for meat is surging and that trend is expected to continue.

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Some additional references:

Historical food price spreads (spreadsheet from the USDA)

Cow Power (from Science News Online)

Wholesale Dairy Prices (spreadsheet from the USDA)

A trip to the dairy aisle grows costlier (But, adjusted for inflation, still cheaper than 10, 20, and 30 years ago – from MSNBC)

Labels: data, meat, trends