“Heart risk of diet soda found equal”

The title is misleading, because at most, the study cited in the article found a correlation, not a causation between diet soda and heart disease. What also is misleading, is that the study only looked at soda consumption and didn’t correct for other lifestyle choices. All you can draw from this conclusion, in my opinion, is that diets soda alone is not enough of a lifestyle change to have an effect.

Hell Food, while preferring that people drink water when thirsty, still considers diet soda to be a viable alternative to regular soda as part of an overall healthy lifestyle.

Health by Veganism

In a side note, Clark Hoyt of the New York Times mentions the problem with an op-ed by Nina Planck called “Death by Veganism”. Ms. Planck claimed that a vegan lifestyle for a baby was irresponsible. She was wrong, of course. There is plenty of evidence to counter her claims. Hoyt’s point, concerning Planck, was that the Times didn’t present the other side of the debate, and has not presented the other side in sixteen years.

Soul Times

Huffington Post

Post Chronicle

Taipei Times

For the record, I am of the opinion that human activity can effect our climate, but I don’t believe we really know what will happen in the future. Irrespective of the science of “global warming”, I see no reason that we human should pollute and use more resources than we need. I think using our resources as efficiently as possible is sound policy. On that basis, I’m promoting the vegan lifestyle as an environmentally friendly and healthy way to live. Once you’re on a low calorie vegan diet, you can’t believe the amount of energy you have!

Check out the article here: http://www.nytimes.com

My apologies if the New York Times link causes problems.

http://www.dailycal.org/sharticle.php?id=24535

“Emily Thurston is a category one cyclist. She is also a vegan.

Thurston, a Berkeley resident, rides with Team Vegan, a Bay Area cycling team working to change a perception that athletes need animal products to perform at their peak. The team, part of the nonprofit organization OrganicAthlete, is the first elite cycling team in the United States whose members exclusively follow a vegan lifestyle…”

One thing I noticed when I became a vegan was an increase in energy and a feeling of “quickness.” This doesn’t surprise me at all.

The cover story of this week’s (January 28) Sunday New York Times Magazine is “The Age of Nutritionism: How Scientists Have Ruined the Way We Eat.” It is by Michael Pollan, the well-known author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and of various other New York Magazine stories on food. Inside, page 39, the article is headed, “Unhappy Meals: Thirty years of nutritional science has made Americans sicker, fatter and less well nourished. A plea for a return to plain old food.”

Pollan opens with:

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

“That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”

Pollan discusses the science of “nutritionism,” writing, “it really wasn’t until late in the 20th century that nutrients managed to push food aside in the popular imagination of what it means to eat.”

He writes:

“No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called ‘Dietary Goals for the United States.’ The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

“Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually ‘reduce consumption of meat’ — was replaced by artful compromise: ‘Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.’

“A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to ‘eat less’ of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called ’saturated fat.’

“The linguistic capitulation did nothing to rescue McGovern from his blunder; the very next election, in 1980, the beef lobby helped rusticate the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the big chunk of animal protein sitting in the middle of its plate. Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.”

The article discusses misleading studies and bad dietary advice. And it gives healthful dietary advice. It is lengthy, interesting, and informative. And it presents a wonderful opportunity for letters from people thriving on plant based diets.

You’ll find the full article on line at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html.

The New York Times Magazine takes letters at magazine [at] nytimes.com.

Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Shorter letters are more likely to be published.

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line.)

To discontinue DawnWatch alerts go to http://www.DawnWatch.com/nothanks.php

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Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare environment environmental environmentalist environmentalism action alerts dawnwatch food the way we eat Michael Pollan food science meat dairy vegan veganism vegetarian vegetarianism

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