We're barely over our holiday hangovers and yet are already bombarded by ads shaming and shouting at us to lose all our holiday weight, join a gym, take a cleanse, get sixpack abs -- no more excuses.
Ain't nothin' wrong with a sixpack, but don't get suckered by all that "new you" business. Be especially wary of so-called cleansing diets, especially those sold in kits comprising little more than a bottle and a powdered, unpalatable mix of mystery ingredients. Going from a month of pounding party foods to a diet solely comprised of lemon and water may help you pee off a few pounds but it's nothing you can stick to, especially in the heart of winter, and it exacts a toll on your body and soul. It makes you cranky and weak.
And yet a certain detox or dietary rethink is appropriate after the bingeing of the Bermuda Triangle of Holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve). So make 2011 the year you dial down -- or stop -- eating meat.
Why go meatless? A little mad cow and E.coli in tainted beef here, a little heart disease and cancer there. Americans may love their beef, but it does not love us back. The more meatcentric your diet, the more at risk you are to serious illness. As Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) president Neal Barnard says, "The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined."
Speaking of natural disasters, beef production is a carbon nightmare, causing roughly three times more carbon output than a meatless diet.
The good news is, it has never been easier to go meatless. Start today. It's Day #1 of the PCRM's 21-day vegan kickstart program. This program provides daily pep talks from celebs, meatless menus and recipes, even its own iPhone app. And meatless support keeps going long after the three weeks are up. There's sources galore, from meatless cooking videos on YouTube to, ahem, this weekly post. I've been writing Meatless Monday posts and providing original meatless recipes every week for a year and a half, and baby, I plan to keep going -- happily busting the absurd myth that meatless cooking means a handful of lettuce and a block of tofu. The food is infinitely varied, easy on the wallet and utterly delicious. Meatless cookbooks, which used to be rare if not freakish, are now hot, with great new ones coming out every day. There's one tailored to whatever your needs and wants are. Here's a handful of recent terrific possibilities:
For the hip and skinny -- skinny bitch Kim Barnouin's Skinny Bitch Ultimate Everyday Cookbook
For meatless basics -- Vicki Chelf's Vicki's Vegan Kitchen
For die-hard carnivores -- Kim O'Donnel's The Meat Lover's Meatless Cookbook
For the minimalist and less-meatarian -- Mark Bittman's The Food Matters Cookbook
And for a new start in the new year -- Terry Walters' Clean Start
Go meatless for your health, for the planet's health, to improve how you feel, how you live, how you eat -- it's a single act with a gazillion profound consequences. Maybe you've been thinking about it, Now's the time to do it. Do the planet and yourself some good. You have nothing to lose except poor health, a heavy carbon load and a heavier karma. You really do have the power to change. No more meat. No more excuses.
Sweet Pepper Hash2 tablespoons sherry
2 tablespoons raisins
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided use
1 pinch red pepper flakes
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 onion, chopped
2 red peppers, chopped
15-ounce can chopped tomatoes
3 to 4 slices day-old whole grain bread, cut into cubes (roughly 3 cups)
1 teaspoon balsamic or sherry vinegar
1 handful chopped parsley
sea salt and freshly ground pepperPreheat oven to 375.
Lightly oil a large oven-proof baking dish.
In a small bowl, soak raisins in sherry.
Place bread cubes in a large bowl. Drizzle in 1 tablespoon olive oil and pinch of sea salt and freshly ground pepper. Toss to coat.
Place seasoned bread cubes on a rimmed baking sheet. Bake for 15 minutes or until dried out.
Meanwhile, heat remaining olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add red pepper flakes, garlic and onion. Cook, stirring occasionally, until vegetables soften and turn fragrant, about 5 minutes.
Add chopped red peppers. Continue cooking for another 5 to 7 minutes.
Add chopped tomatoes, raisins and sherry.
Gently fold bread cubes into pepper and tomato mixture. Add chopped parsley, season with sea salt and pepper to taste.
Spoon into baking dish and bake for 30 minutes, or until top is slightly crusty.
Serves 4. Doubles easily.
Follow Ellen Kanner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/edgyveggie1
Yep. And FULL of super foods that are affordable, like dried red kidney beans, chickpeas, lemon juice, tomatoes, garlic, turmeric, and onions. Anup Singla's book could be your next doctor, as her food is truly medicine and you can't make healthier food for pennies.
A colleague of mine asked them about the lack of recycling in the building. I answered the door when one of their managers responded. She told me that her organization had an excellent relationship with the building management which they did not wish to jeopardize and so the issue of recycling was unspoken. She did say that if my company pursued management and succeeded that they would be very supportive.
I told her "Oh no, business and profit before the environment," to which she responded "The world is full of hypocrisy." I did like the people that I occasionally spoke with, but I thought that incident was hilarious.
Ahh, Neal Barnard, the psychiatrist and vegan activist behind the deceptively named Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which actually has very few physicians in it. What a laughably Mad Hatter-esque contention. Absolute nonsense.
This is what the American Medical Association had to say about the fallaciously named PCRM:
"The AMA continues to marvel at how effectively a fringe organization of questionable repute continues to hoodwink the media with a series of questionable research that fails to enhance public health. Instead, it serves only to advance the agenda of activist groups interested in perverting medical science."
There is no justifiable reason not to post this comment.
Now that we know the evil intentions of this bad, bad doctor we should ignore humanitarian doctors like this and instead donate to the doctors experimenting on our closest living relatives.
Bottom line, I trust a doctor who is humane to all living creatures much more than I trust a doctor who performs torturous experiments on primates in a vain attempt to find a cure for self induced illnesses.
George Bernard Shaw said:
"You do not settle whether an experiment is justified or not by merely showing that it is of some use.
The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments, but between barbarous and civilized behaviour.
Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character” Shaw
Self-induced illness? Yeah, be sure to tell that to all the kids dying in the cancer ward. How completely sick.
George Bernard Shaw also infamously defended Hitler and eugenics, so I don't exactly see him as some sort of moral compass.
If supporting a crackpot vegan activist org pretending to be a medical org by operating under an intentionally misleading name floats your boat, so be it, but it certainly doesn't work for me.
I almost never eat meat unless I have good information about the sourcing, which means I usually eat vegetarian in restaurants (at least in the USA. I may be deluding myself, but I trust the EU's agriculture regulations more than ours.)
Thanks for the post.
Mastitis exists separate from rgbh use. Mastitis is a problem with all lactating mammals. The two biggest factors affecting mastitis are genetics, and hygenic living conditions. It is possible to be a dirty small scale dairy and have a mastitis problem. It's also possible to be a giant dairy and have NO mastitis problems - it's about proper management. Rgbh increases the chances of mastitis, yes, but there are government lab set limits to somatic cell & coliform counts that a dairy can even ship to the creamery with. If a dairy was infested with mastitis, they couldn't ship any milk to the public until the lab test showed the infection level had cleared. There are new ways around this that large dairies have found, but explaining them would expose all the weaknesses in our vegetable foods supply as well. I wouldn't want to scare a vegans here, ya know?
When you do eat meat though, make it local, sustainably raised meat fro a farmer you know and trust. It solves the environmental and ethical dilemmas, tastes LOTS better, and is not as difficult or expensive as you may think. For a source near you, visit http://www.LocalHarvest.org
Fish sticks. What a concept.
I know.
I'll go sit in the corner.
Even Dr. Andrew Weil, a former PCRM board member, has now publicly conceded that the evidence is overwhelming that the PCRM's claims about meat have no basis in reality. As he has now stated:
"Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease or any other chronic disease of civilization."
I think Americans eat way too much meat and sugar. going meatless one day is great. Actually what would be better is to find food of any kind grown in a responsible manner. That would exclude most things in the supermarket. There should also be a processed food free day. Eating less processed food is good for everyone. Cook food yourself if you can. Then you know what goes in it.
It's not the Christmas turkey, goose or ham that causes people to gain weight during the holidays. It's the stuffing, mashed potatoes, buttered noodles, candied yams, dinner rolls, cookies and pumpkins pie. And yet we focus on the serving or two of meat that is consumed along with all the carbs.
Another recent meta-analysis (involving 21 different studies) by a team at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute in Oakland, California, reached a similar conclusion, that intake of saturated fat wasn’t linked to a statistically-significant increased risk of heart disease, stroke or cardiovascular disease. Moreover, in 2004, the Pooling Project of Prospective Studies of Diet and Cancer, which is an international consortium of cohort studies, looked at the alleged links between red meat and colorectal cancer and found no association between higher red meat consumption and a higher colorectal cancer risk. This was the largest study ever done on the issue and involved 725,000 subjects.
People really need to stop blithely asserting that eating meat, particularly red meat, causes cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer when the evidence is not really there.
The link isn't a scientific article supporting the assertion that beef production causes "three times" more carbon output, it's a "Low Carbon Diet Calculator" from Bon Appetit.
There's no evidence that a diet that includes animal protein is associated with either of these conditions, and there's no evidence that a vegetarian diet has any health benefits, period.
(In order to save time, though: 1) Esselstyn's studies are small and uncontrolled, 2) The Ornish program includes lifestyle changes with a vegetarian diet, 3) Seventh Day Adventists are different in many ways from the general population, and 4) The China Study is the most biased, least scientific piece of nutritional "research" in history and has been thoroughly discredited.)