“God’s Country” – Land of the Obese
People. This is just staggering.
During the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in the United States. In 2009, only Colorado and the District of Columbia had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Thirty-three states had a prevalence equal to or greater than 25%; nine of these states (Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia) had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 30%.
Check out this animated obesity trend map at the CDC.
Get 10 self-described vegetarians and or vegans at a table and you’ll see that they’re not all there for the same reasons. Some are there because of animal welfare concerns. Some are there because their particular religious tradition has regulations about whether or when to eat meat. Some will be there because of environmental reasons. Some will be there because eating low on the food chain is frugal. Some will be there strictly for health reasons. Some of these motivations are more philosophical, some are more practical. In some ways you can’t separate the two. This is where the word “diet” gets tricky.
I’m primarily motivated by the empathy, conscience, animal welfare-y reasons. Given the choice between hurt-kill and help-heal I choose the latter. For me and others like me it’s about more than just food. You can of course describe my eating patterns as a vegetarian diet. I don’t however, consider myself to be “on a vegetarian diet”. Being “on a diet” has connotations of being motivated primarily for personal health reasons. I start from a set of moral/ethical constraints and then try to work from there. Some days I’m more about Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, some days I’m more about Carb Conscience Vegetarian or Fat Free Vegan. Sometimes I am a vegetarian who is also “on a diet”. I have my moments. You get the idea.
Luckily, no matter the primary motivation, it turns out that meat/dairy free eating patterns can be just as, if not more healthy than the SAD (Standard American Diet). This is where everybody at the vegetarian-vegan table wins. Here’s a collection of different perspectives from the health front. There should be 4 videos with this post, if not, refresh. Thanks and Enjoy!
-> Eating to Starve Cancer - fascinating cutting edge research
Plants, plants, and more plants. Maybe some fish. It’ll be interesting to see if the benefit is somehow from fish qua fish or if it’s from Omega’s which you can get directly from, wait for it, more plants.
- > Gieco goes vegan. No, not all of Gieco. Just read the thing and watch the video.
For those of you who dig statistical graphs and sentences with lots of numbers ;-> here’s the actual paper, ”A Worksite Vegan Nutrition Program Is Well-Accepted and Improves Health-Related Quality of Life and Work Productivity.” I wish I could just post the pdf, but there are rules about that kind of thing.
-> The Engine2 diet
(this is me not blogging about the fact that my husband has been checking this out. Yay! he’s in the kitchen right now chopping up some mango for breakfast ala Rip’s Big Bowl. life is good.)
-> Want to try it but don’t know how? Need a little structure?
Check out the 21-day vegan kickstart plan. Easy Breezy. Yes … now. ;->
Or, check out Weight Watchers - they have a vegetarian-vegan plan and you can do it all online.
-> Where do you get your protein? Ask vegetarian and vegan tri-atheletes and body builders!
Veg-Athletes group on Ning
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And finally, see what you make of this. Public health is public health is public health. They were talking about it then too. From the back cover
“In this compelling exploration of the “belly” motif, Karl Olav Sandnes asks whether St Paul might be addressing a culture in which the stomach is similarly high on the agenda. The result is a surprising new insight into his writings. Paul twice mentions the enigmatic phrase ‘belly-worship’ (Phil 3; Rom 16). The proper context for these texts is the moral philosophy debate about mastering the desires, and the reputation of Epicurus’ philosophy as promoting indulgence. The belly became a catchword for a life controlled by pleasures. Belly-worship was not only perjorative rhetoric, but developed from Paul’s conviction that the body was destined to a future with Christ.”
I blogged about this book in a couple of posts, Belly and Body in the Pauline Epistles. You can check them out in the index but you probably should just read the whole book for yourself.
All public health is a complex issue, obesity is no different. It’s a complicated matrix of governmental policy, personal responsibility, social mores, education, and individual psychology and biology. Like most everything else, we’re all in this together.
