May
2001
Vegetarian
Advocate: Diet and Health: Does it Matter What you Eat?
By Jack Rosenberger
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I celebrated Birthday No. 43 last month (thank
you, thank you) and the fact I’ve grown older (yes, older than
I desire) has shifted the direction of my reading habits. During
a recent
visit to my local public library, I borrowed Aging Well: The Complete
Guide to Physical and Emotional Health (John Wiley and Sons, 2000),
the handiwork of co-authors Jeanne Wei, M.D., Ph.D, and Sue Levkoff,
Sc.D., a pair of associate professors at Harvard Medical School.
When I first encounter a nonfiction book about food or health, the
first thing I almost always do is locate the book’s index and flip through
until I find the section of subjects beginning with the letter “V.”
Such as “vegetarian” and “vegetarian diet” and “vegetarian
diets, beginning transition to.” As for the Harvard professors’
“definitive, prescriptive guide to all aspects of aging,”
Aging Well is packed with 373 pages of nutritional and medical advice
and knowledge, but it doesn’t contain a single mention of vegetarianism.
Mazel tov!
Having been an ethical vegetarian for 22 years, I’m not shocked
that Aging Well totally ignores vegetarianism. Health books routinely
ignore or slight vegetarianism. What distresses me about Aging Well
is that people will turn to the book for help—and be denied important
medical information about vegetarianism.
Important medical information, such as the British study that followed
6,000 vegetarians and 5,000 equally healthy nonvegetarians (mean age
39) for 12 years. The researchers discovered that the vegetarians were
about 40 percent less likely to die from cancer and were also about
20 percent less likely to die for any reason during the study period.
Or important medical information such as the American Dietetic Association’s
position paper on vegetarian diets— “A considerable body
of scientific data suggests positive relationships between vegetarian
diets
and risk reduction for several chronic degenerative diseases and conditions,
including obesity, coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes
mellitus,
and some types of cancer.”
Most of the writing in newspapers, magazines, and books that I see
about diet and health ignores vegetarianism—it simply doesn’t come
up. Nor, frequently, is any mention of the link between a good diet
and good health. A startling example of the missing of the connection
between vegetarianism and human health is the New York Times op-ed “Food
Is Not the Enemy,” written by Jeffrey Steingarten, a food writer
for the pro-fur Vogue magazine and author of “The Man Who Ate Everything.”
“Food Is Not the Enemy” is Steingarten’s large-sized
thesis that “food scare” stories and “countless alarmist
reports about nutrition” are taking the joy out of eating.
Steingarten’s take-home message: “The moral of this story
is that we are omnivores, and that it is best to eat a little of everything.”
Oh, sweet simplicity! The problem with Steingarten’s “it is
best to eat a little of everything” is that most Americans don’t
eat “a little of everything.” It’s obvious to me—and
anyone else who possesses fair eyesight—that most Americans gave
up eating a little of everything a long time ago. We have moved from
survival of the fittest to survival of the fattest.
In America, 59 percent of men and 49 percent of women have body mass
indexes that are at or above the federal government’s recommended
maximum. As one recent USA Today headline put it, “All signs point
to an epidemic of obesity.”
Steingarten’s simplistic thesis fails to perceive the dietary
reality of America: Americans eat too much meat. According to one heart
study,
children eating a typical American diet begin developing fatty deposits
in their coronary arteries by age three. By age 12, some 50 percent
of the children have coronary fatty deposits. Is it any wonder that
heart disease is the number one killer in the U.S.?
For vegetarians, the solution is a union of interests with vegetarian
groups partnering with the health food industry, health professionals,
and others and embarking on a campaign to promote vegetarianism. That’s
the next necessary step.
