Rush Limbaugh Should Be More Conservative

Meatless Monday is the perfect day to take a look at the connection between our health and diet. Read on to learn more about the state of America’s health and Neal Barnard, MD’s prescription for wellness.

Rush Limbaugh was rushed to a Hawaii hospital in late December, reportedly suffering from severe chest pains. The concern was a possible heart attack, but fortunately, tests showed no such problem.

This health scare should still be a wake-up call. As a doctor, I’m offering one bit of advice, not just to Rush, but to all Americans: We need to be more conservative. As conservative as possible, in fact.

With our diets, that is. Many Americans are far too liberal with their servings of meat, dairy products, eggs, and other less-than-healthy foods. And they are getting more so with each passing year. Per capita annual meat intake has risen roughly 70 pounds in the last century, and cheese intake has jumped by nearly 30 pounds in the same time period.

This huge load of cholesterol, fat, and calories has fueled epidemics of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other health problems. And these diseases are taxing our health care system like never before. As a nation, we now spend $147 billion on obesity-related medical costs every year. During these tough economic times, we should be tightening our belts. But let’s face it: Our belts are rapidly moving in the opposite direction.

In our grandparents’ day, people knew the value of humble beans, vegetables, and fruits, often growing them in their own family gardens. These foods have essentially no cholesterol and very little saturated fat. It pays to give them renewed respect. Indeed, people who stick to an entirely plant-based diet, as part of an overall healthy lifestyle, can do more than just prevent heart disease; they can actually reverse it, as was demonstrated in the now-classic studies of Dean Ornish, M.D.

A plant-based diet can also help you slim down, improve diabetes and hypertension, and feel like yourself again. It can also fight some types of cancer. Fruits and vegetables are packed with antioxidants and other nutrients that boost the immune system. And fiber-rich vegan diets help quickly flush carcinogens and other toxins from the body.

The only good thing about a health scare is that it reminds us how important our diets and lifestyles are to our well-beings. It’s time to trade our cheeseburgers for veggie burgers, beef tacos for bean burritos, and remote controls for tennis shoes. Yes, that’s my prescription for Rush—but it’s also my prescription for us all.

Diabetes & Our Plates

2010 is the 20th anniversary of Dr. Dean Ornish’s landmark study that proved, for the first time, that a plant-based diet could not just slow down the progression of heart disease, not just stop it from getting worse, but actually reverse heart disease and open up clogged arteries. The list of chronic killer diseases that vegan diets can literally reverse continues to grow.

Today, the average American is overweight, and 1 in 3 are medically obese. That’s what’s fueling our epidemic of type 2 diabetes in this country. It used to be called “adult-onset” diabetes, but now so many children are getting it, now we just call it “type 2.” Over the last decade diabetes rates have skyrocketed 90% in the United States, a disease that can set people down the road to dialysis, blindness, gangrene, and multiple amputations. For those of us who think it’s hard to get enough exercise now, let us imagine trying doing it with one foot.

In 2009 the first study in human history of thousands of U.S. vegans was published in the journal of the American Diabetes Association. Vegans were found to be the only dietary group averaging an ideal body weight, 40 pounds slimmer than the average meat-eater in the country. This is consistent with what a recent interventional study found.

Overweight meat-eaters averaging 221 pounds were essentially put on a vegan diet and lost about 25 pounds a year ending up an average weight of 168 lbs at the end of the two-year study. Switching to a plant-based diet resulted in an average of 53 pounds of sustained weight loss.

The American Diabetes Association journal study concluded: “vegetarian diets may in part counteract the environmental forces leading to obesity and increased rates of type 2 diabetes, though only the vegan diets were associated with a BMI [body mass index] in the optimal range. Inclusion of meat, meat products and fish in the diet, even on a less than weekly basis, seems to limit some of the protection associated with a vegan…diet. These findings may be explained by adverse effects of meat and fish…” Even those eating just a few servings of meat a month significantly raised their risk of disease.

So we now know how to prevent diabetes, but how do we treat it? There are certainly lots of different drugs for diabetics that lower blood sugar levels, but sometimes at the expense of increasing one’s risk of heart failure and bone fractures. There has to be a better way.

Just like with heart disease, the same diet that prevents diabetes in the first place can reverse the disease once you have it. One study found that half of diabetics placed on even a near-vegetarian diet didn’t need to take insulin anymore after just 16 days, and those still on insulin were able to cut their dose in half—and that’s after only about 2 weeks!

In 2009 the gauntlet was laid down. The official American Diabetes Association diabetic diet was placed in a head-to-head challenge against a vegan diet. The ADA diet did slow the progression of disease, such that the diabetes of those on the officially recommended diet was just a little bit worse at the end of the study period. On the vegan diet, however, their diabetes actually got better. Significantly better! Just think how many lives eating vegan could save. How many lives, eyes, kidneys, feet, and families.

Diabetes, meet my green juice.

Michelle Sorensen & Family

I am a vegan mom to two daughters (aged 1 and 3). In addition I am self-employed as a therapist. I have another identity that is invisible to many people: I am a Type 1 diabetic with a couple of other autoimmune problems thrown into the mix. In the 11 years I have been diabetic, I have learned not to fight this disease but to live more peacefully with it.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which your body turns against itself and destroys the insulin-producing beta cells on your pancreas. It is often confused with the more common Type 2 diabetes, which can be managed with diet, exercise, or oral medications. Type 1 (previously known as juvenile diabetes) usually strikes children or young adults who seem otherwise healthy. Without synthetic insulin injected into the body, Type 1 diabetes would be a terminal disease.

I was diagnosed when I was about to turn 25. I was in the middle of graduate school and when I look back, I had been running on adrenaline for some time. The previous year I had been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, which is an autoimmune problem with the thyroid gland. It never occurred to me that my body was warning me to slow down. I continued to take care of others and to juggle school, work and social commitments. I felt tired all the time, and sometimes would get weak and shaky. I was hungry and thirsty, no matter how much I ate or drank. And still I pushed myself to accomplish more. When I felt exhausted I thought I was being lazy. Finally, I ended up at the emergency room. My sugar was too high to register a reading on a glucometer. I was told they had never seen a sugar so high outside of someone in a coma and I was put on an insulin drip right away. I remember asking a resident the question that I had been pushing out of my mind for months: Am I a diabetic? Of course, the answer was obvious, but for a few weeks I honestly believed it would all turn out to be a mistake.

It surprised me what a juggling act diabetes management was. I spent my first year trying to be the perfect diabetic and I struggled with feelings of guilt and shame. I was convinced that somehow this was my fault and now I could never fix it. My days were filled with insulin injections and sugar checks… suffering from blood sugar lows that left me guzzling juice, shaking, sweating and confused or highs that made me dehydrated and fuzzy-headed. I could never take a day off from diabetes without substantial risk to my safety and well-being.

It became difficult to maintain the people-pleasing life I had lived for so long. I started to realize this was a problem at the first anniversary of my diagnosis, but it took me much longer to actually change my behavior. So my body kept saying NO. No, I will not let you destroy me. No, you deserve better than this. Since the first few diagnoses didn’t slow me down, my body sent out more signals. My digestive system began to crumble. The specialists stuck tubes down my throat and scanned me but had no answers. So I gave up on them and it took me another four years of feeling sick and fatigued before I discovered my path to health.

To heal I had to take responsibility for the fact that my health problems were my responsibility. I had to face up to the fears I buried deep down that something I did caused me, in the prime of my life, to develop all this disease. When I fell in love with my husband (6 years ago) he was able to help me see how little I nurtured myself. He made me feel happy and helped me to slow down. My body recognized its window of opportunity and increased my digestive distress, finally sending me to a naturopath. I discovered the food allergies related to my leaky gut (destroyed by stress and lack of nutrition) and quickly devoted myself to adopting an allergen free diet. During my twenties I did not take time to prepare the vegetables and fruit I had always eaten growing up. I consumed way more wheat and dairy than I had in my parents’ home. Now, with my body failing, I needed to spend more time on me.

When I discovered a wonderful raw food restaurant during my first pregnancy four years ago, I began to realize the importance of adding in even more plant-based foods (versus just cutting out the food I couldn’t tolerate), and had an ah-ha moment: food itself is truly medicine! Two years ago my husband and I started making green smoothies every morning and then craved plant-based foods all day. Last spring, I decided I did not enjoy meat anymore, and thought I may as well cut it out altogether for a trial period. The ACT cleanse was starting here on CSL and I decided to follow along. Everyone’s tips and ideas were so helpful. I started using the juicer that had been sitting in my cupboard, did a little dry brushing, got back to hot yoga, and shook the last few gastrointestinal symptoms I had! I completed my transition to veganism.

There is nothing more empowering than taking control of your health. I may still need my insulin pump and thyroid medication but I believe I have halted the autoimmune cyclone hitting my body and I will continue to eat a plant-based, vegan and gluten-free diet for the rest of my life! I know these changes could help many people… in fact, my husband’s asthma of 25 years vastly improved from eating a less rigid version of my diet at home. I hope someone reading this is helped a little on their own path to good health.

Michelle Sorensen is a clinical psychological associate in Ottawa, Ontario. She practices cognitive behavioral therapy, teaching her patients to change the way they feel physically and emotionally by changing the way they think.

A Solution For Diabetes: A Plant-Based Diet

Neal Barnard, MD

I’ve been researching the most common and devastating diseases Americans are dealing with, with the aim of finding a common thread running throughout both cause and reversal. As it is now, one out of every two of us will get cancer or heart disease, and one out of every three children born after the year 2000 will be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. These are devastating diseases, certainly to those who are burdened by them, but also to a health care system that is struggling to keep up.

The extraordinary doctors and nutritional scientists I’ve talked with seem to be saying – and saying fervently – the same thing: a diet high in animal protein is disastrous to our health, while a plant-based (vegan) diet prevents disease and is restorative to our health. And they say this with peer-reviewed (the gold standard of studies) science to back them up. Even the very conservative ADA (American Dietetic Association) says: “Vegetarian diets are often associated with a number of health advantages, including lower blood cholesterol levels, lower risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure levels, and lower risk of hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Vegetarians tend to have a lower body mass index (BMI) and lower overall cancer rates.”

Diabetes does not just mean you take a pill or injection every day. It means you can lose a decade of life. And you while you inch toward that uncomfortable end, you deal with an increased risk of heart attack, blindness, amputation, and loss of kidney function. It’s a very serious disease. The good news is that diabetes can be halted and reversed in a very short time through some diet modifications.

To understand diabetes better, and to learn how to reverse it, I’ve talked with Dr. Neal Barnard, president of The Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine. He is an adjunct associate professor of medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine, and the author of numerous scientific articles in leading peer-reviewed journals, and a frequent lecturer at the American Diabetes Association’s scientific sessions. His diabetes research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Government’s research branch. He is also the author of Dr. Neal Barnard’s Program for Reversing Diabetes.

KF: Why is type 2 diabetes suddenly so prevalent?

NB: Diets are changing, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Diabetes seems to follow the spread of meaty, high-fat, high-calorie diets. In Japan, for example, the traditional rice-based diet kept the population generally healthy and thin for many centuries. Up until 1980, only 1-5% of Japanese adults over age 40 had diabetes. Starting around that time, however, the rapid westernization of the diet meant that meat, milk, cheese, and sodas became fashionable. Waistlines expanded, and, by 1990, diabetes prevalence in Japan had climbed to 11-12%.

The same sort of trend has occurred in the U.S. Over the last century, per capita meat consumption increased from about 150 pounds per year (which was already very high, compared with other countries) in the early 1900s to over 200 pounds today. In other words, the average American now eats 50 pounds more meat every year, compared with a century ago. In the same interval, cheese intake soared from less than 4 pounds per person per year to about 32 pounds today. Sugar intake has gone up, too, by about 30 pounds per person per year. Where are we putting all that extra meat, cheese, and sugar? It contributes to body fat, of course, and diabetes follows. Today, about 13% of the U.S. adult population has type 2 diabetes, although many of them are not yet aware they have it.

KF: What causes diabetes?

NB: Normally, the cells of the body use the simple sugar glucose as fuel, the way a car uses gasoline. Glucose comes from starchy or sweet foods we eat, and the hormone insulin escorts it into the muscle cells to power our movements. Glucose also passes into our brain cells to power our thoughts. In type 2 diabetes, the cells resist insulin’s action, so glucose has trouble getting into the cells.

KF: What happens to the body when one develops diabetes? What’s the fallout?

NB: If glucose can’t get into the cells, it builds up in the blood. It is as if gasoline coming out of a gas pump somehow can’t get into your gas tank, and it ends up spilling over the side of your car, coming in through your car windows, and dribbling all over the pavement. It is a dangerous situation. The abnormally high levels of glucose circulating in the bloodstream are toxic to the blood vessels, especially the tiny blood vessels of the eyes, the kidneys, the extremities, and the heart.

KF: Is it really that serious, or can we just take a drug for it?

NB: A person with diabetes loses more than a decade of life, on average; about three-quarters will die prematurely of a heart attack. It is also a leading cause of blindness, amputations, and loss of kidney function. Many drugs are available, from insulin to oral medications and an ever-increasing variety of other medications. In order to protect the heart, many patients are also put on medications to lower cholesterol and blood pressure. A person with diabetes who walks into my office is typically using $3,000 to $5,000 worth of medications each year. And yet these medications only slow the progression of the disease; many people have serious complications despite being on medications.

Let me emphasize that this grim scenario does not have to occur. If an unhealthy diet is the cause, a better diet can provide the answer to this problem.

KF: How can we avoid it?

NB: The key is to help our body’s insulin to work normally. So long as your body’s insulin can escort glucose into the cells normally, diabetes will not occur. The resistance to insulin that leads to diabetes appears to be caused by a build-up of fat inside the muscle cells and also inside the liver. Let me draw an analogy: I arrive home from work one day, and put my key in my front door lock. But I notice the key does not turn properly, and the door does not open. Peering inside the lock, I see that someone has jammed chewing gum into the lock. Now, if the insulin “key” cannot open up the cell to glucose, there is something interfering with it. It’s not chewing gum, of course. The problem is fat. In the same way that chewing gum in a lock makes it hard to open your front door, fat particles inside muscle cells interfere with insulin’s efforts to open the cell to glucose. This fat comes from beef, chicken, fish, cooking oils, dairy products, etc. The answer is to avoid these fatty foods. People who avoid all animal products obviously get no animal fat at all, they appear to have much less fat build-up inside their cells, and their risk of diabetes is extremely low. Minimizing vegetable oils helps, too.

And we can go beyond prevention. When people who already have diabetes adopt a low-fat vegan diet, their condition often improves dramatically. In our research, funded by the U.S. Government, we found that a vegan diet is more effective than a traditional current diabetes diet, and is much safer than a low-carb diet.

KF: What about the claim that a vegetarian diet has too many starches, which raises blood sugar?

NB: Starchy foods, such as whole grains, beans, and vegetables, are healthful foods, and the body is designed to use the glucose that they hold. In type 2 diabetes, the body has lost some of this ability. But the answer is not to avoid starches, but to restore the body’s ability to use them. After all, cultures whose diets are traditionally high in carbohydrate–Japan, China, Latin America, etc.–have had very low diabetes rates until meat, cheese, and other fatty foods displace their healthy carbohydrate-rich diets; only then does diabetes becomes more common.

The Atkins fad unfortunately left many people imagining that carbohydrate (that is, starch) is somehow risky. That notion is as unscientific as suggesting that water or oxygen is dangerous. The body needs all these things for good health.

A similarly persistent but misguided idea is the blood-type diet approach. A popular book on this subject said that people with type A blood should follow a vegetarian diet but that people with type O blood should not. Unfortunately many readers with type O blood followed this advice, which turned out to be quite wrong. The fact is, people with type O blood do as well as everyone else on a plant-based diet. A vegan diet is helpful and effective, regardless of blood type.

KF: Can diabetes be reversed?

NB: Yes. When people begin a healthful diet, most see big improvements in weight, cholesterol, and their blood sugar. Their need for medications diminishes, and some may not need medications at all. In some cases, you would never know they had had diabetes. However, I caution people not to simply throw their medications away. They need to speak with their doctors so they can alter their medication regimens only when and if it is appropriate.

Let me describe a case: A man named Vance joined our study. His father was dead by age 30, and Vance was 31 when he was diagnosed with diabetes. As our study began, he started a low-fat, vegan diet and gradually lost about 60 pounds over a year’s time. His blood sugar control returned to normal, and his doctor discontinued his medications. Imagine what it feels like to see family members assaulted by this disease, but then to realize that you have effectively tackled it by making healthful adjustments to your diet.

Vance also encouraged me to mention that it is not only blood sugar that gets better, his erectile dysfunction also improved dramatically, too–in case anyone needs an extra motivator.

For more information, go to http://www.pcrm.org/health/

Originally posted at The Huffington Post.

Michelle’s Lessons from No Impact

No Impact Man, the film, opens today! Check here to find a theater near you. Today, Michelle Conlin shares some of her experiences during the No Impact Year…

My author husband, Colin Beavan, decided in late 2006 that he wanted to stop writing about history and start writing about global warming. He was so excited about his idea—attempting to live for one year in the middle of New York City without making any negative environmental impact—that when he asked me to join him, I immediately went all wifely and lobbed back an effusive yes.

When my best friend from childhood, filmmaker Laura Gabbert, later heard about No Impact, she begged Colin to let her and her partners film us. After they promised Colin to make as low-carbon a movie as possible, he agreed. His sustainably produced book—made from postconsumer recycled paper and chlorine-free cardboard, with energy supplied by biogas—is titled No Impact Man. It hit stores Sept. 1. The documentary of the same name begins opening nationwide on Sept. 11.

Truthfully, when I said yes to this Woody Allen-meets-Walden affair, I didn’t fully think through what it would mean to live with a toddler and a dog in a one-bedroom, ninth-floor Manhattan apartment using no elevators, no electricity, no disposable diapers, no food grown more than 250 miles from home, no TV, no takeout, no beauty products, and no washing machine. Oh yes, and no buying anything; for the next year I would shop my own closet.

Little did I know that a year after the project’s completion the global financial system would implode, or that the era of high-impact living—using one’s house as an ATM, jetting off on a lark—would come to a spectacular and cataclysmic end. And here’s the strange and unpredictable twist: Going No Impact for a year turned out to be sublime preparation for the post-subprime life.

In our 10 years together, Colin has bought himself three things: a second-hand cell phone, a used PC, and a folding bike. He bought me a diamond ring from a flea market. So no spending problems there. I, however, was an inveterate credit dipper. (As a last-chance binge before the project began, I indulged in a $900-plus pair of stiletto, knee-high Chloe boots. Then I had a moment of silence for my Sample Sale self.)

At first, the call of the stores was strong. Life on the hedonic treadmill is a habit—and I had to break it. Soon I started coming up with end-runs that gave me an even bigger high. Not buying anything new didn’t mean I couldn’t partake of Jane’s Exchange, a children’s consignment depot. We took our daughter, Isabella, there for her birthday, and I told her she could pick out anything she wanted. She chose a hardly-worn pair of princess slippers. Cost: $1.

We cut most other expenses, too. The Con Edison bill dropped to zero. Restaurants were out. But we did partake of the freegan lifestyle, eating bakery leftovers. Coffee was also verboten. There is no such thing as locally grown coffee—tragic for a girl who before going off the bean was averaging 20 shots of potent, iced espresso deliciousness every beautiful day. On my last run, I blew through a $25 Starbucks gift card in a single workday. Withdrawal was ugly.

But thanks in part to cutting out all my bad habits, within a month, my debt was gone. We ended up cutting our discretionary expenses by at least 50%—often more. Honestly, when my paycheck started loitering around in my checking account, it actually felt uncomfortable. From my journal: “I CANNOT get my bank balance down for the life of me. I spend Nothing. As in NOTHING.” Without knowing it, we were early adopters of what would become the new frugality. We even started giving away 10% of our money to charity.

The No Impact project also provided an opportunity to do a lifestyle redesign. In a nation of extreme commuters, mine was a micro-jaunt: Greenwich Village to Midtown Manhattan, 20 minutes door to door via subway. But Colin and I foreswore all modes of carbon-based transportation (except for BusinessWeek reporting trips). Not because we are against mass transit. But because the point of the project was to be radical: to go completely off the grid, drop out of the culture, and see what would emerge.

At first I walked the 40 blocks to and from my 750-square-foot nanoplex. But this was taking too much time away from my then 2-year-old. So I started to use a push scooter. The scooter itself became a workplace objet fixe. It was irresistible to my colleagues, who swiped it to vroom up and down the halls à la Romper Room. I had long been too tired—from not working out—to get to the gym to work out. But by exchanging my time on the subway for a self-propelled commute, I dropped 10 pounds; my new locavore diet didn’t hurt either. I had the energy of a supermom in my slacker mom’s body. My insomnia evaporated—the scooter was No Impact Ambien. My palate also began changing. The local food, though heavy on the parsnips, began to taste delicious. Three months in, I started getting through the day without the usual afternoon Dunkin’ Donuts high followed by the crash. The pastry mania and shame hangovers were gone. My pre-diabetic condition vanished.

Work was my fast life. Home was my slow life. No lights, no cell phones, no TV. I know it sounds like deprivation. But the truth is that when I opened the door to the No Impact house at night, I felt like I was walking into a vacation. The days felt like they lasted forever. No Impact was a great ritual destroyer. What I realized was that so many of my rituals were so bad for me (my health), for us (our bank account and all the family time lost to my scurrying off to shop), and for the environment. What I learned from No Impact was that there is a steep cost to supporting all your stuff. To a life devoted to getting and having. In my days of high consumption, I’d been searching for something. It turned out that it was right in my own home.

This article was originally posted at the No Impact Man blog.