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January 2012
GREETINGSHappy New Year, and welcome to the eighteenth year of publication of this
rag. We also should be keeping an eye out for opportunities to table at health fairs and Earth Day events and other such venues. This is not the first time I’ve noted in these pages that the need to nudge the world towards more plant-based diets is increasingly urgent – and MARV is in place to help do that. OCCASIONAL HUMOROUS BITA Bizarro cartoon shows a perky-looking, trussed-up explorer asking the
cannibal chief who just popped him into a cauldron, “Have you ever considered
the health, environmental & ethical benefits of veganism?” M.A.R.V. ACTIVITIESSun., Jan, 8, 5 PM, regular potluck at the Friends’ Meeting House, 3224 N.
Gordon Pl. in Riverwest (from Humboldt Blvd., go east on Other veg-friendly potlucksThere will not be a macrobiotic potluck in January. QUOTE OF THE MONTHAmong the assertions about corporations in the Official Statement of the
Occupy Wall Street Movement, we note: NEWSAnimal foods are still bad. Wisconsin State Farmer ran an article on antibiotics showing up in milk and in meat from dairy farm animals (veal calves and cows sent to slaughter after they stopped giving enough milk to keep), and how consumers might balk at buying these products if they realized what the FDA’s tests were revealing. Contrary to what the newspapers reported last month, the Canadian Supreme Court is now holding hearings on whether a dangerous virus, infectious salmon anemia, has in fact been detected in farmed salmon, and whether the government was responding adequately. And a bit in the Sierra Club magazine weighed in on the danger of overfishing men-haden, the bony little fish that is being decimal-ted for fish oil despite being a vital food source for many important sea creatures; the item did point out that we can get the desired omega-3 fatty acids from sardines, flaxseeds, and walnuts, as well as dark leafy greens and seaweed). We reported last month on findings that producing lamb, of all things, has a very high carbon footprint. Another Sierra item fleshed that out and put it in context: raising sheep, it seems, produces greenhouse gasses similar to raising beef but produces less meat per pound of animal, making lamb’s carbon footprint even higher than beef’s. Kilos of CO-2 equivalent for lamb per kilo of food consumed were 39.2, beef is 27, cheese 13.5, pork 12.1, fish 11.9, turkey 10.9, chicken 6.9, and eggs 4.8 – while peanut butter, for comparison, was at 2.5 and a tomato at 1.1. This makes it particularly worrying that the Netherlands are starting to harbor hog factory farms which are driving traditional more humane hog-farming out of business. Equally depressing was an item in Wisconsin State Farmer announcing that “new research” from Pennsylvania State University has found that eating beef can be good for heart health – but not mentioning who paid for the study… In other bad-animal-raising news, avian flu was found in a chicken carcass at a market in Hong Kong – just at a time when researchers in Rotterdam and UW-Madison had figured out a way to make bird flu more easily transmissible between humans, and the U.S. government made efforts to suppress their research from being published. Then there were a couple of items in the good news/ bad news department. In one, the bad news was the horrible conditions at Sparboe egg factory farms in Minnesota, Iowa, and Colorado that were videotaped and made public by Mercy for Animals, while the good news was that consumers were so upset that several major customers stopped buying eggs from that company. The other was a report from Loma Linda, CA, a town occupied by many vegetarian and vegan Seventh Day Adventists: it is good news that Loma Lindans’ healthy life-styles are definitely correlated with their long and healthy lives, and not so good that their City Council has approved a McDonalds for the town – but at least there is controversy about it. Another item I read pointed out again that the issue of what food is healthy is more complex than just whether it is plant or animal: industrial tomatoes, it was pointed out, have 62% less calcium, 30% less vitamin C, and 19% less niacin by weight than the same tomato would have had in the 1960s when tomatoes were raised without chemicals and were eaten or processed local and fresh. (Solution: eat fresh local organic tomatoes in season, raise them yourself, buy them fresh and local and make your own tomato sauce to freeze for winter.) Nonetheless, plant foods do tend in general to be good for you. Prevention reported that pumpkin seeds are full of the amino acid trypotophan, which the brain uses to make the feel-good chemical serotonin. Vegetarian Times, meanwhile, reported that pistachios are full of good fats, fiber, protein, and vision-enhancing antioxidents lutein and zeaxanthin as well as helping to lower bad LDL cholesterol. And the AARP magazine ran an item about nuts and seeds in general, reminding readers that their fats are the healthy kind and do not, in studies, correlate with weight gain in people who eat them. Generally speaking, people who eat several servings per week decrease their cardiovascular risk by up to 75%, while specific health advantages vary from one nut to another: walnuts lower breast cancer risk in animal studies; sunflower seeds, pecans, and macadamia nuts lower LDL cholesterol; almonds reduce insulin resistance and LDL cholesterol; peanuts also help control diabetes and lower LDLs; and pistachios may help lower lung cancer risk while improving the good HDL cholesterol. On a different note, studies are still finding health advantages in moderate use of alcoholic beverages (which are of course made by fermenting various plants). A Loyola University study found that one serving per day reduces dementia risk by 23%, while University of Texas researchers found that beer and martinis correlated with living longer just as wine does; the drinkers in their study had one to two drinks per day and were followed over 20 years. Another new study confirmed that zinc can improve the immune system’s
function, reducing the severity and duration of colds. Once you have a cold, a
supplement of at least 75 milligrams per day works best – but it is also useful
to eat zinc-containing seeds and nuts on a regular basis to help prevent colds
in the first place. Another item addressed the current gluten-free fad and pointed out that there is no good to be gained in avoiding gluten (present in wheat products) unless you have celiac disease or are truly sensitive to it – and that avoiding wheat if you don’t have to could cause you to miss out on whole wheat’s fiber and folate and many other important nutrients. Then there was a whole article on using diet to improve mood and mental
function. The article’s four rules for mental well-being were to reduce the
amount of processed food you eat, eat more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains,
seek the greatest possible variety of foods, and (alas) choose grass-fed meat
over feedlot grain-fed stuff. However, the reason given for that was that the
grass-fed animal products have more omega-3 fatty acids; this was also the idea
behind the recommendations to boost brain power by eating grass-fed butter and
beef and anchovies and eggs: it was all about the omega-3s. How many times do I
have to repeat it? – You can get your omega-3s by eating dark green leaves
yourself – no need to run them through an animal first – as well as from
flax-seeds, flaxseed oil, hemp seed oil, and walnuts! Other advice was to get
extra energy by eating dark green leafies, as they contain folate and fiber
which protect from depression as well as calcium. Nuts in general and walnuts in
partiular were also recommended, as well as coffee (caffeine increases dopamine)
and red- and blue-skinned potatoes. Foods for a good mood, besides the
omega-3-containing wild salmon, were tomatoes, beets, chili peppers, and garlic. DIALOG: BOOK REVIEWSI read two interesting books last month that focus on diet. One is What I Eat: around the world in 80 diets, by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Alusio. The other is Healthy at 100 by John Robbins. The two books have quite different aims, but an interesting picture develops from looking at them together. In Healthy at 100, Robbins describes the traditional diets and lifeways of four peoples renowned for healthy aging: the Abkhasians of the Caucuses, the people of Vilcabamba in the Ecuadorian Andes, the Hunzas of northern Pakistan, and the elders of Okinawa. In all these places, people have been documentted as often living with health and vigor into their nineties and beyond; all their lives were physically strenuous from childhood until death, and all their diets were far different from ours. Robbins, a long-time vegan himself, honestly reports that these peoples’ traditional diets, while varying from each other according to what foods were available in their very different climates, were all whole foods, unprocessed except for whatever could be done by the people themselves, eaten necessarily when locally in season – and the diets of all four groups, while mostly plant foods in every case, were not vegan in any of these cases. The Okinawans do eat fish, the Caucasians include fermented milk, the Hunzans and Vilcabambans eat small amounts of meat on rare occasions. Robbins uses these facts to suggest that we could protect our own health by choosing similar diets and activity levels – at the same time as he laments that all four of those peoples have in recent years achieved much greater access to the modern world, and that as soon as they did, processed foods were eagerly added, and health began concurrently to decline. The authors of What I Eat had a different intention: to document what people around the world in different circumstances use for food. The diets are arranged from lowest to highest caloric intake, from the Maasai herdswoman who, during a drought, gets only 800 calories per day to the British “snacker mom” who on one day tallied 12,300. In the 80 diets, there are just 3 intentional vegetarians: a Canadian “green teen,” an Indian Saddhu priest, and a urine-drinking homeopathy devotee. There are also very few people who deliberately restrict calories: two fat Americans trying to lose weight, a model, and one adherent to the idea that a very calorie-restricted diet can enable one to live longer. Everyone else eats whatever is available and/or affordable, whatever animal foods they can get, and everyone who can get processed industrialized foods chooses them. What are we to make of these patterns? They do bring home humans’ basic omnivorosity, and show that the lure of convenience foods, and foods designed to satisfy our penchant for fat, salt, and sweetness, is strong indeed. It makes clear that without a specific reason to avoid some foods or calories, no instinct will cause such avoidance. It means that before intentional plant-based diets can really take hold, people must be able to easily and securely get all needed nutrients from plants, and also they must know and understand that they can. Working towards such a condition, worldwide, is the challenge we must meet. |