(Crossposted on easyVegan.info.)

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From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Jul 25, 2006 4:33 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: Washington Post on vegan diets and diabetes 7/25/06

The Tuesday, July 25, Washington Post, has an interesting article on the cover of the Health section (Pg F01) by Sally Squires, headed, “‘Good’ Carbs To the Rescue.”

It opens:

“People with Type 2 diabetes are advised to limit carbohydrates because of worries that too many carbs could overtax the body’s dwindling insulin production and lessen its ability to process glucose.

“Now some scientists are asking if a very-low-fat diet rich in healthy carbohydrates — whole grains, beans, fruit and vegetables — might be another option.

“The idea borrows a lesson from the heart disease field, which has shown that very strict vegetarian diets quite low in fat and very high in carbohydrates can help reverse arterial blockages.”

Then Squires writes: “Such diets have proven very difficult to stick with, absent high motivation and plenty of support.”

On the benefits, she writes:

“In May, physician Dean Ornish, a proponent of the very-low-fat approach for reversing heart disease, reported that this regimen also helped a subset of people with both diabetes and heart disease.

“In the study, published in the American Journal of Cardiology, participants who followed the approach shed pounds. Blood levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), ‘bad’ cholesterol that raises heart disease risk, dropped. Levels of protective high-density lipoprotein (HDL) didn’t drop, and unhealthy fats known as triglycerides didn’t rise, as some researchers had feared. Another key finding: 20 percent of participants who stuck with the diet for a year were able to cut or eliminate their insulin and other glucose-lowering medications.

“Similar results are expected later this week from a study headed by the University of Toronto’s David Jenkins and Neal Barnard of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a pro-vegetarian group.”

We learn that in PCRM’s study, the group on the American Diabetes Association standard diet and PCRM’s vegan diet both improved blood sugar control and LDL cholesterol levels, but that the vegan group lost an average of 15 pounds, compared with six for the ADA group.

Then Squires suggests (again):

“Learning to go vegan takes effort, time and some sacrifice, however.”

You can read the whole article on line at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ OR http://tinyurl.com/otvt4

It cries out for letters from those who don’t find plant based diets difficult to follow or requiring of much sacrifice. The Washington Post takes letters at letters [at] washpost.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. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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…Grist Magazine’s interview with Bryant Terry:

As founder of a group promoting healthy eating among NYC youth and a chef in his own right, Bryant Terry has plenty of food for thought. Organically grown, sustainably harvested, locally sourced food for thought, that is. As InterActivist this week, Terry chews over questions from readers about soul food, Wal-Mart’s organic offerings, South Central Farm, his love of okra, and more.

Check it here. Lots of discussion of organics and sustainable agriculture.

Still catching up on all that email (!)…

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From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Jul 10, 2006 2:44 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: Discover Magazine on lab-grown meat — July 2006 edition

The July edition of Discover Magazine has an article under “Blinded by Science” headed, “The Way of All Flesh. Bringing home the bacon may become a thing of the past when we can grow our own.” (p 28.)

It opens with a discussion of a proposed meat machine, and suggests that “in the future we’ll be sprinkling a few ’starter cells’ into our meat machine before we go to bed and adding a cup or two of ‘growth medium.’ The next morning we’ll awake to an appetizing, fully formed lump of pork or beef or poultry, ready to be fried up with breakfast…”

It tells us that this new meat will be healthier for humans:

“The steaks and chops we use to fill our faces will have the fat content of mere salmon. Nor shall we submit any longer to disease. Salmonella, mad cow, E. coli . . . these will be consigned to the dustbin of meat history and the name pool of heavy-metal bands.”

The article suggests that some vegetarians will be thrilled:

“Ingrid Newkirk, founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, informs me that she has been following Dr. Mironov’s career and the glacial progress of the ‘lab-grown meat’ movement since its inception. Newkirk is salivating in anticipation of the day she finally gets to eat a chunk of meat that nothing had to suffer to produce-not least because the flesh won’t contain the vast quantity of ‘rectums and nose-skin bacteria’ she assures me I’ve been eating a lot of.”

It continues:

“But Newkirk is the right sort of vegetarian: the rational sort. She concedes that not all of her pale fellow travelers share a commonsensical enthusiasm for the coming revolution.”

It then goes on to discuss, in amusing detail, the kinds of vegetarians the author imagines won’t be pleased, those whose “decision not to eat meat was inspired less by the contemplated suffering of animals than by the contemplated prolonged suffering of parents forced to cook two sets of meals….”

You can read the whole article on line at:
http://www.discover.com/issues/jul-06/departments/blinded/

It presents a fabulous opportunity for letters about the current methods of bringing meat to dining tables.

Discover takes letters at editorial [at] discover.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. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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(Crossposted at easyVegan.info.)

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Jun 27, 2006 9:37 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: NY Times write-up on “The Way We Eat” 6/27/06

The Health section of the Tuesday, June 27, New York Times (pg F5) has a positive write-up on two new similarly named books, “What to Eat,” by Marion Nestle and “The Way We Eat,” by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. The article’s headline reads, “On Special At Your Local Supermarket: Moral Choices.”

The review explains that Nestle’s book “focuses on how much food we need, what kind, and how to find it” while in their book “Peter Singer, a bioethicist at Princeton, and his co-author, Jim Mason, an animal rights activist, make the case that food choices are ethical choices.”

We read:

“Dr. Singer and Mr. Mason organize their book around food shopping by three very different households: an Arkansas family eating ‘the Standard American Diet,’ much of it bought at Wal-Mart; a Connecticut family striving to eat only organic food; and a Kansas family of vegans who eat nothing animal-based, not even cheese or eggs.

“Both books end up in the same place on a number of issues.

“Both advise eating organic food. Not because it’s better for you — though it might be — but because it’s better for the environment and far kinder to animals. And both pile up evidence that profit pressures in agribusiness are detrimental to society at large.

“The examples the authors use to bolster their arguments are not for the weak of stomach. Dr. Singer’s and Mr. Mason’s gruesome description of industrial pig farming ought to turn any sentient reader away from anything but organic bacon. As Dr. Nestle puts it, ‘If you think too much about what is involved in the raising and killing of animals, you may find meat hard to eat.’

“In ‘The Way We Eat,’ the description of industrial chicken production actually comes with a warning that it may be ‘disturbing to some readers.’”

The review discusses the impact of the glut of corn syrup on the market, and touches on the environmental impact of factory farming. We read:

“For example, any doubt that industrial pig farming can have disastrous environmental impacts was removed a few years ago, with the failure of a so-called lagoon holding vast amounts of manure from a North Carolina hog factory. The resulting pollution was widespread and long lasting.”

And it returns to animal cruelty issues:

“Dr. Singer and Mr. Mason dismiss the cost argument as insufficient to justify what they regard as chronic cruelty, much of it inflicted on highly intelligent creatures…. And, while it is true that if a pig’s tail is chopped off, another pig cannot gnaw it off, and that chickens whose beaks are seared off cannot peck one another to death, the authors say these steps are unnecessary when pigs are allowed to forage and nest naturally and chickens are not crammed into sheds where each has less than 80 square inches of space — an area smaller than a sheet of typing paper — as is typical in chicken production sheds.”

You can read the whole piece on line at
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/health/27book.html

It presents a nice opportunity for veg-friendly letters to the editor. The New York Times takes letters at letters [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.

You can read other reviews and buy Singer and Mason’s book on Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/qdmds. I highly recommend it.

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. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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(Crossposted at easyVegan.info)

Returning from vacation with an old-ish email from DawnWatch. Vaca pics coming soon!

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch - news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Jun 25, 2006 11:49 AM
Subject: DawnWatch: NY Times on animals raised for food — “It Died For Us” 6/25/06

This Sunday, June 25, The New York Times Business section (page 2) has an article that discusses the Whole Foods decision to stop selling live lobsters and tells us of a new invention called the “CrustaStun,” which electrocutes crabs or lobsters in a matter of seconds. See http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/business/yourmoney/25goods.html for that article.

“The Week in Review” section, also includes an article, on its cover, inspired by the Wholefoods decision. Titled “It Died for Us,” the piece, by Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni, takes a broader look at the raising of consumer consciousness with regard to the treatment of animals sold for human food.

Bruni’s piece opens by questioning whether oysters eaten alive feel pain, then comments:

“These questions seem less ridiculous than they once did. This month Whole Foods announced that it would no longer sell live lobsters, saying that keeping them in crammed tanks for long periods doesn’t demonstrate a proper concern for animal welfare. The Chicago City Council recently outlawed the sale of foie gras to protest the force-feeding of the ducks and geese that yield it. California passed a similar law, which doesn’t take effect until 2012, and other states and cities are considering such measures.

“All of these developments dovetail with a heightened awareness in these food-obsessed times of what we eat: where it came from, what it was fed, how it was penned, how it perished. If the success of best sellers like ‘Fast Food Nation’ and ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ and stores like Whole Foods is any indication, more Americans are spending more time mulling the nutritional, environmental and, yes, ethical implications of their diets.

“They prefer that their beef carry the tag ‘grass fed,’ which evokes a verdant pasture rather than a squalid feed lot, and that their poultry knew the glories of a ‘free range,’ a less sturdy assurance than many people believe.

“But these concerns are riddled with intellectual inconsistencies and prompt infinite questions. Are the calls for fundamental changes in the mass production of food simply elitist, the privilege of people wealthy enough to pay more at the checkout counter? Does fretting about ducks give people a pass on chickens? Does considering the lobster allow seafood lovers to disregard the tuna?”

Great questions! And Michael Pollan, author of ”The Omnivore’s Dilemma” is quoted:

”Foie gras and lobster are not at the heart of the real tough issues of animal welfare, which are feed lots and pigs and cattle and chickens and how billions of animals are treated….On the other hand, the fact that we’re having this conversation at all — that we’re talking about ethics in relation to what we’re eating every day — strikes me as a very healthy thing.”

The article also shares thoughts from Jay Weinstein, author of a new book ”The Ethical Gourmet’.”

We read:

“While the lives of ‘free-range’ chickens are hardly ideal, the lives of other chickens are even worse, Mr. Weinstein said. The birds’ feet are lacerated by the wire they are forced to stand on, while their beaks are clipped so they can’t peck at each other in the tight quarters they occupy. He questioned whether any of that was less offensive than the force feeding of ducks.”

The article also includes quotes by a chef, Eric Ripert of ‘Le Bernardin’, who kills lobsters with a knife before boiling them, to save them suffering.

But we read:

“But where do the restaurant’s lobsters await their appointment with the knife? For as many as 24 hours, as many as 40 lobsters inhabit a container that’s just 3-feet long by 1-foot wide, he said. It doesn’t sound much comfier than a Whole Foods holding tank.”

Ripert is quoted:

“When you think about treating animals in a humane way, it’s unlimited. If you start with the lobster, then next month you should think about the clam, and then you have to think about the fish, which is suffocating outside the water after we catch it.”

The reporter, Bruni, adds:

“Even before it suffocates, a hooked or netted fish flails in a doomed effort to avoid its fate. The process is traumatic enough that David Pasternack, a fisherman and co-owner of the Manhattan seafood restaurant Esca, noted that ‘you can see the struggle in the flesh of a fish.”’

Bruni then asks, “Does that struggle deserve as much heed as the grisly realities of the abattoir?”

He answers:

“Maybe not. Ample scientific evidence suggests that various creatures have varying levels of consciousness.”

He quotes Pollan again, ”There really is a difference between the sentience of an oyster and the sentience of a lobster and the sentience of a cat. These lines really can be drawn.”

And Bruni writes:

“And advocates of animal welfare argue that some lines are better than none, that inconsistencies are better than inaction.”

A nice comment — of course inconsistency is better than inaction. The article, however, might inspire animal advocates to question drawing lines between animals when there are so many nutritious vegetarian choices available. You can read the full article on line at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/weekinreview/25bruni.html and send letters to the editor to letters [at] nytimes.com

Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Remember that shorter letters are more likely to be published, and that it is important not to use any of my phrases or those from other alerts. Sample letters (or alerts that recommend specific talking points — much the same as sample letters) are counterproductive when dealing with the media since many papers will avoid publishing letters that appear to be part of a campaign. Yet still, many letters about the same article show great reader interest in the topic, and will ensure that some letters are published and also that the topic gets more coverage. So it is important to write — but to write short original notes.

Most importantly, please keep an eye out for related articles in your local media — you might use any article on food as a jump-off point for an animal friendly letter. Some of the smaller papers publish close to 100% of the letters they receive, so why not write?

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. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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(Crossposted at easyVegan.info)

One last article, and I’m off to bed:

Beer ingredient may fight prostate cancer

PORTLAND, Ore. - For many men, a finding by Oregon researchers sounds too good to be true: an ingredient in beer seems to help prevent prostate cancer, at least in lab experiments. The trouble is you’d theoretically have to drink about 17 beers a day for any potential benefit. And no one’s advising that.

Researchers at Oregon State University say that the compound xanthohumol, found in hops, inhibits a protein in the cells along the surface of the prostate gland. The protein acts like a switch that turns on a variety cancers, including prostate cancer.

Dr. Richard N. Atkins, CEO of the National Prostate Cancer Coalition, said the experiments are encouraging and “perhaps men could take it in pill form someday.”

Two recent news stories concerning the American Medical Association:

AMA wants warning labels on high-salt food

The American Medical Association voted Tuesday to urge the government to require high-salt foods to be labeled and also vowed to push the food industry to drastically cut the amount of salt in restaurant and processed foods. The goal would be 50 percent less salt within a decade.

Americans eat almost twice the amount of salt they should, and that contributes to high blood pressure and heart problems, the AMA says.

And:

AMA Wants to Tax Soda

A can of soda pop may cost you more if the American Medical Association gets its way. Doctors with the AMA have voted in favor of a resolution for a tax on sugary soft drinks.

They say pop is a large contributor to the nation’s obesity epidemic. The doctors want to use the money from the tax for public health programs that fight America’s unhealthy eating habits.

I’ve got to say, I think both actions are a step in the right direction. The warning labels for high-salt foods is easier to get behind, since it won’t “punish” the consumer for making poor dietary choices. Rather, it simply provides consumers with the information needed to make sound choices. Of course, it doesn’t guarantee that shoppers will pay much attention to the AMA’s cautionary note, but it does help in terms of education.

The soda (I call it “pop”, but whatever!) tax is bound to be more controversial, as it mandates economic disincentives in the form of a “sin tax.” Even so, I think it’s a great idea, as long as the tax remains minimal (because people should still be free to make their own choices - even bad ones). For starters, the funds generated will go to help fight obesity - a war that we’re quickly losing. Additionally, many lower-income individuals buy junk food because it’s cheap and available. A tax, then, will start to bridge the price gap between the junk food and the good stuff. As we’ve already seen, the prices of many foods are artificially low (as opposed to “organics” and health foods being ridiculously expensive). So a sin tax on the junky, inexpensive stuff will help to level the playing field.

Thoughts? (C’mon, Shane, I’m sure you have something to say as a tax-hating libertarian!)

An interesting study, conducted by Cancer Research UK, suggests that children “inherit” (at least in part) a taste for meat and fish from their parents. In contrast, a preference for fruit and veggies wasn’t linked to nature, but to nurture: the more a child’s parents encouraged herbivorous eating, the more kids expressed enthusiasm for nature’s candies.

From the BBC:

Children largely inherit their taste for high-protein food like meat and fish, research suggests.

However, Cancer Research UK found a liking for vegetables and puddings was less likely to be fixed, and more the result of the menu provided by parents. […]

Lead researcher Professor Jane Wardle, of Cancer Research UK’s health behaviour unit, said it was not clear why environmental factors were more influential in determining preferences for fruit, vegetables and puddings.

She said it might be down to the greater variety of choice available in these categories - unlike in meat or fish.

“It might be that children who witness their parents show enthusiasm or distaste for certain types of vegetables or puddings are likely to follow suit.

“Or it might be that if a particular food is always available children learn to like it.

“For instance if a fruit bowl is always full of bananas children might think of them as being a favourite food.”

Professor Wardle said the findings suggested that parents could have a profound impact on their children’s dietary preferences - and steering them towards healthy options could set a blueprint for life.

“Finding out more about why children like and dislike foods is important in helping us understand the problems of obesity.”

Additionally, the researchers examined gender differences in food preferences:

The Journal of Physiology and Behaviour study also found girls were more likely to enjoy vegetables than boys.

Might this have a little sumthin-sumthin to do with the stereotype that “real men” eat meat, while the womenfolk are expected to suffice on tiny sparrow’s portions of lettuce and broccoli?

(Crossposted at easyVegan.info.)

There’s a fun profile of - and interview with - “diet scold” Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating and Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health in Salon.com. Fans of Morgan Spurlock might recognize Nestle from Super Size Me: “She’s the only person in the movie who is able to offer a coherent definition of a calorie.”

Here are a few excerpts:

In “What to Eat,” Nestle demystifies the American foodscape, exposing the ways that nutritional advice is tainted by food marketers and the diet industry. Readers will find there’s much to be learned by taking a 611-page extended shopping trip with her. For starters, many foods with healthy reputations — most yogurt and fruit drinks and many cereals, even those promoted as high-fiber or high-protein — are loaded with sugars, and should be treated as dessert, not breakfast. Junk food is fortified and packaged to make it sound healthier than it is: As Nestle writes, “Vitamin-enriched sodas are still sodas. Organic gummi bears are still candy. Trans fat-free snack foods are still salty and full of rapidly absorbable carbohydrates.” And, sorry, raw cookie-dough eaters; today’s eggs are more likely to be contaminated with salmonella than they were just a few decades ago.

The Q & A on organics is the most interesting exchange, I think:

You’re enthusiastic about organic food. Why should people choose organic?

One reason absolutely overrides all others. There are no pesticides or chemical fertilizers used in the process, which means it’s much less harmful for the environment and for farmworkers. Certainly organic farms can be about as productive, and the food is at least as nutritious, and quite possibly more nutritious than conventional or industrially grown products.

There’s been a lot of controversy about the organic standard. What makes you trust it?

I talked to a lot of people who are in the organic business — farmers, producers, product developers, inspectors — and they all think it’s legit. Everybody involved with it seems to feel that it is a process with a lot of integrity. For one reason: they all watch each other. And really, the only thing that they have going for them is the credibility of the process, and if that process isn’t credible, it’s going to hurt everybody.

That said, there is tremendous pressure on organic farmers to cut corners, and those pressures come not only from the USDA, but also from Congress and the industrial food industry. To the extent that politics can weaken the organic standards, the industry does stand to lose the credibility that they’re now holding onto with their fingernails.

Do conventional food producers want us to think that the organic certification process is corrupt?

Of course they do. They want you to think that organic production is dirtier, because it uses natural fertilizer. They want you to think it’s not as productive. They want you to think that it’s less nutritious.

Go check out the whole thing here.

And a big BOO to McDonald’s:

Wendy’s plans to use healthier cooking oil

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Wendy’s International Inc. said Thursday it will begin frying french fries and breaded chicken items with non-hydrogenated oil, continuing a shift to offer healthier menu choices.

The country’s third-largest burger chain said the blend of corn and soy oil has zero grams of artery-clogging trans fat per serving and will cut trans fat in those menu items by 95 percent. Wendy’s will begin using the oil in its 6,300 restaurants in the U.S. and Canada in August. […]

Wendy’s has been working on the new oil for two years and testing it for a year at 370 restaurants in Florida, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Ontario.

McDonald’s Corp. pledged four years ago to switch to an oil that would cut in half the level of trans fats in the top-selling chain’s fries. However, Chief Executive Jim Skinner said in April that the Oak Brook, Ill.-based company was still testing the oil and did not know when they would make the change.

When will silly Ronald learn that it’s just bad business to kill your customers? Like, duh.