By John Robbins on September 21, 2011
We can, as a society, be astoundingly cruel to people who are obese. They might be creative, caring and hopeful people, but we don’t see that. Far too often, we see only their weight.
What does it say about us that we act as though you can take the measure of a person by the size bathing suit they wear?
Maybe this partially explains why obese people are flocking to a restaurant outside Phoenix, Arizona, whose name, and I am not making this up, is the Heart Attack Grill. The restaurant, which seats 100, is often packed. It offers what owner Jon Basso calls, “an environment of acceptance to overweight customers who are typically demonized by society.”
But at this restaurant, it’s a little more than acceptance. The Heart Attack Grill literally celebrates obesity. Customers who are over 350 pounds eat for free. A scale is strategically placed at the center of the restaurant, so other diners can watch the weigh-ins. When customers exceed 350 pounds, says the restaurant’s owner, “Everybody applauds and cheers for them. A big smile comes over their face, and for once they are finally accepted. They are not picked on here.”
It’s all made to seem sexy, too. Waitresses, all of them young and slender, are dressed as scantily clad nurses, wearing high heels, thigh-high stockings, and skimpy outfits revealing lots of cleavage.
It sounds like fun.
Except when it isn’t.
Several months ago, the 575-pound spokesman for the Heart Attack Grill, a 29-year-old man named Blair River, died. It wasn’t a heart attack, it was pneumonia. He had been the public face of the restaurant and the star of its advertising. He was also the single father for a five-year-old girl.
At nearly 600 pounds. Blair River ate all his meals free at the restaurant.
Heart Attack Grill owner Jon Basso did not deny the link between the young man’s excessive weight and his tragically premature death. “I hired him to promote my food,” said Basso, “[but his] life was cut short because he carried extra weight.” Ironically, the restaurant’s motto is “Food Worth Dying For.”
Of course, no one is forcing anyone to eat at the Heart Attack Grill or to stuff themselves full of unhealthy food. It’s a free country, in theory anyway, and we’re free to eat ourselves to death if we want to do so.
Some would say that the Heart Attack Grill steps over a line, to the point of enabling dangerous food addictions. There is certainly nothing remotely resembling healthy on the menu. Customers can purchase cigarettes, but only the non-filtered type. On the wall are prominent displays advertising menu items such as “Quadruple Bypass Burgers” that carry 8,000 calories, and “Flatliner Fries” that are deep-fried in pure lard. Perhaps joking, owner Basso says, “We’re in the front lines of the battle against anorexia.”
But Blair River’s death is no joke. And it would be a mistake to make light of the medical consequences of obesity. The Centers for Disease Control tells us that obese people have a substantially higher risk not only for heart attacks, but also for diabetes, most cancers, and many other types of cardiovascular disease.
Heart Attack Grill owner Basso doesn’t plan any changes on account of the young man’s death. Scantily-clad waitresses will still regularly exhort customers to eat all they can. He’s making money, and thinks the restaurant is great fun.
But is it funny that we have become the most obese society in the history of the world? Two-thirds of the residents of the United States are now either overweight or obese. So many children are developing the most common type of diabetes that medical authorities have had to change the name of the disease. What was formerly called “adult-onset diabetes” is now called “type 2 diabetes.” It accounts for 90 percent of the diabetes in the country, and the incidence in children is skyrocketing.
It’s easy to point our fingers and pass judgment. We can blame fast food companies that aggressively market unhealthy foods to children, we can blame people who overeat for their lack of will power, and we can blame parents for feeding their kids poorly. We can blame harmful ingredients such as trans-fats and high-fructose corn syrup, and we can blame the pressures of modern life that turn people into addicts of one kind or another.
We can play the blame game ad infinitum, but who does that help? Does it help those with weight problems that leave them vulnerable to disease and prone to feelings of shame?
What if we were instead to learn from those people who have taken the arduous, difficult, and ultimately joyful journey from obesity to health?
I have had the wonderfully good fortune recently to become friends with a young woman named Natala Constantine and her husband Matt. They’ve been married for seven-and-a-half years. At their wedding, Natala was morbidly obese.
She knew something about the abuse endured by obese people in our society. By then, she had lost track of the number of times she had been humiliated in public, called ugly names by strangers, and been physically hurt by people who felt entitled to treat her as less than human because of her weight.
People constantly told Natala she was lucky Matt had fallen in love with her, and that he must be amazing to be able to look past her weight.
A week after the wedding, she was diagnosed with severe diabetes. Her blood had become so acidic that her organs were shutting down, and doctors seriously doubted whether she would survive. She was 25-years-old.
Five years later, Natala was taking up to 13 different medications and as much as 200 units of insulin a day. She ate what many people would call a healthy diet — lots of animal protein, and almost no carbohydrates. She had been told that a diet high in animal protein was the only way she could control her diabetes, but it wasn’t working. She was working out at a gym for two to three hours a day, but at 5’2? tall, she weighed close to 400 pounds.
When Natala developed an infection in her right calf, doctors told her that part of her lower right leg might need to be amputated. But then a friend, who Natala described to me as “a vegan and into yoga,” suggested that she consider a natural approach to her diabetes, and that she start to think of food as medicine. “I wanted to smash her,” Natala admits. “How dare she suggest something so simple! Didn’t she know that I had been to the best doctors, that I was on the best diet, that I was working out?”
But Natala did take her friend’s advice to heart, and decided to go on what she calls a “100-percent healthy plant-strong diet.”
“For the first three weeks,” she says, “I felt as though I was ridding myself of much more than animal products. Food had a hold on me that I could not even conceptualize prior to those three weeks. I would sit in my car and cry outside of sub shops, just wanting a tuna melt.”
It was very rough, but Natala stayed with it and the results were nothing short of miraculous. In 30 days, she was off all insulin.
The physicians she was seeing for her diabetes took a look at her numbers, were amazed, and wanted to know how she did it. “I told them I had adopted a completely plant-based diet. They didn’t seem surprised at all, and told me that plant-based diets were helping to reverse diabetes. When I asked why they had not suggested it, they told me because it isn’t practical.”
Aghast, she asked her doctor, “Do you think it’s practical to be 30 years old and lose a leg?”
She walked out of that doctor’s office and never went back. “Everything changed from that moment,” she recalls. “I slowly decreased all the other diabetes medicines I was on. I lowered my blood cholesterol without drugs. I lowered my blood pressure without drugs. I corrected my hormonal problems without drugs. Many diabetics go blind, but I reversed the nerve damage in my eyes. And that infection in my leg? It completely healed. The arthritis in my feet? It went away.”
Today, Natala Constantine has lost almost 200 pounds, is medicine-free, and continues to make great strides toward her ideal weight. Her diabetes is in complete remission. I’ve met her and I can attest that she is one of the happiest and most radiant people you could hope to meet. A concert violinist, she exudes joy.
And her husband, Matt? While Natala was dealing with diabetes, he was not only obese but also suffered from severe food allergies. Eating a few tomatoes would send him to the emergency room. His food allergies dominated his life. And now? His improvement, on a 100-percent healthy plant-strong diet, is almost as miraculous as his wife’s. A concert pianist, he has lost 90 pounds, is now a healthy weight, and his food allergies are entirely behind him.
It’s quite a world we live in it, isn’t it? On the one hand, we have the Heart Attack Grill, whose 570-pound spokesman died at the age of 29. On the other, we have people like Natala and Matt Constantine, who have taken a different path.
We live in a society that tends to cruelly stigmatize the obese. The Heart Attack Grill represents one form of response. It can feel empowering to turn shame into defiance. When society points its finger at you, blaming you and denying its own illness, there is a natural urge to send a message back to society with your middle finger.
But is there a healthier alternative? What about turning shame into a commitment to greater wellbeing and happiness? What about refusing to internalize society’s negative messages, and instead building a healthy life of joy, confidence, and beauty?
Cutting back on heavily sweetened beverages like sodas and juice-like drinks is a good place to start. Eating less processed foods and more whole foods is another good step. Getting exercise helps a lot. And the more of your nutrients you can get from plant sources, the better.
Eat a healthy plant-strong diet, and your body will thank you for the rest of your life.
For more tools, resources and inspiration, visit http://www.johnrobbins.info/.
This article was originally published at HuffingtonPost.com.
Photo credit: Trina Alexander
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By Neal Barnard, MD on June 22, 2010
What is making Americans gain weight? Which foods are responsible for the obesity epidemic? Is it soda? Fast food?
In the May 2010 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, I published a detailed analysis of how diets have changed over the past century, based on government records going back to 1909. The results were surprising—even sobering—and I thought I would share them with you. Here’s what we found:
Compared to a century ago, an average American now eats 75 pounds more meat every year. Although red meat made a big charge early in the last century, the recent increase has all been related to chicken. Convinced that chicken is somehow health food, Americans now eat more than one million chickens per hour. Perhaps surprisingly, its fat content is not much different from beef (about 29% for lean beef, 23% for skinless chicken breast, compared to less than 10% for typical vegetables, fruits and beans.)
Cheese intake back in 1909 amounted to less than four pounds per person per year. Americans had not yet discovered cheese pizza or cheeseburgers, or the fact that schoolchildren will happily munch on cheese day after day. Today, cheese intake is over 30 pounds per person per year. Unfortunately, typical cheeses are about 70% fat, as a percentage of calories, and most of that is saturated fat—the kind that raises cholesterol.
And along with our meat and cheese, we’re munching on French fries, which accounts for a 50-pound rise in oil consumption per person per year compared to a century ago. And we’re polishing our fries off with frozen desserts, particularly ice cream. The average American eats 20 pounds more ice cream per year than a century ago.
So, what’s behind these huge increases? Much of this change reflects the advent of fast-food and pizza restaurants, for which meat, cheese and fryer grease are staples. Also, government subsidies make meat, dairy products and sugar cheaper and more available than they would be otherwise, and government meal programs ensure that children consume these less-than-healthful foods in schools on a daily basis.
But what about sodas? They are commonly blamed for childhood obesity. It’s certainly true that soda intake is way up. But, among children, this rise has been partly compensated for by a drop in milk intake. Nonfat milk has about the same calorie intake as soda, and whole milk is denser in calories than soda. So, calorie-wise, it appears to be nearly a wash.
Bottom line: Americans were moderate meat-eaters a century ago, and are vigorous carnivores today. Cheese intake has exploded, and greasy, sugary foods are more prevalent than ever.
If we turn the clock back a bit, we might see the difference on the scale.
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By Daphne Oz on April 26, 2010
Last fall, Lincoln University made headlines when its administrators instituted a class called “Fitness for Life,”which covered everything from nutrition and exercise to sleep and stress management. The course was to provide basic health education and equip Lincoln’s students with the tools they needed to implement a healthy lifestyle in college and beyond. Making such a class available is certainly commendable. Making such a class mandatory for students with a body mass index over 30 raised questions and a few eyebrows.
The fact that such a story made national headlines is a good sign because it shows that the question of how to deal with our growing obesity epidemic and generally deteriorating health features prominently in the consciousness of many Americans. But what role, if any, should colleges play in educating students about health and longevity?
Last year, colleges and universities spent some $4 billion providing food to students. Imagine what that kind of purchasing power could be used for if colleges began to see their duty to educate students as extending past textbooks and classrooms and into basic skill sets, like how to eat and exercise for longevity. It’s no secret that optimal mental functioning is grounded in receiving all the essential nutrients, and adequate exercise is needed to ensure proper blood flow and muscle function. So why, then, have colleges not added nutrition and exercise classes to the core curriculum?
College students are uniquely suited to adapt and adopt new healthy lifestyle habits. They are open to both change and challenge as they adjust to life on campus. Moreover, their learning takes place both inside and outside the classroom, from teachers, fellow students, the Internet and personal experience. This is a prime environment in which to engage students to consider the habits they form today as investment in their future health. More importantly, if colleges and students begin to demand access to healthful foods by placing emphasis on quality and variety, rather than solely on quantity and convenience, they might be able to send a shockwave through our food system that would result in a much healthier balance for everyone.
If you are in college, or know someone who is, you can start by getting your college or university administration to spend their cafeteria money wisely. Combining purchasing power with their educational mission and community impact, campuses could serve as a hotbed of innovation and a leader in the move towards a healthier America. So many important social changes—women’s suffrage, civil rights, peace movements—were catalyzed by a few, passionate young people. If we use our voices correctly, we can help create a food supply of healthy, high-quality, nutrient-dense food that is affordable for everyone.
As proof that major food suppliers will respond to consumer demand, look to the cases of PepsiCo and Kraft Foods. Both companies announced they would be replacing high fructose corn syrup in their respective products of Gatorade and Wheat Thins with sugar. Though it costs more money to use sugar, the switch was made in response to consumer preference. And the removal of trans fats from many restaurant menus and processed food items was due solely to public outcry about the possible health hazards of this ingredient.
As a consumer group, our role must be to continue to show large-scale producers that investing in affordable, widely accessible health food options will be profitable. As we provide the demand, producers will follow through with a supply that meets our needs. Colleges, in particular, have an important role because they provide a succinct, focused support sector that can provide a model which the rest of our society can emulate.
Here are four ways every college and university could improve the experience, education, and health of its students:
Farm-to-School: College campuses should focus on seasonality, prioritizing those foods that can be sourced locally or from organic/fair-trade institutions. Limiting purchases of industrially produced and non-local food items decreases cost (because it cuts out shipping and preserving aids), decreases students’ exposure to harmful pesticides and fertilizers, and, especially in the case of locally-produced food, offers fresher, nutrient-dense options. An excellent way to cut costs and improve both student health and local economy is to implement Farm-to-School partnerships, where local producers provide produce and fresh goods, giving students a chance to eat a healthy variety of foods indigenous to their locale.
Sustainability: Part of creating a more healthful society entails making sure we are meeting our needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. Colleges should implement campus-wide recycling and composting systems to generate awareness of the waste created and to contribute as little as possible to the waste stream.
Academic Engagement: As they work to encourage students to prioritize healthy living, colleges must offer more academic opportunities for students to observe the relationship between food, health, environment and the global economy. Then students can come to understand intellectually the role they play in creating a sustainable society as conscious consumers and perhaps as the next generation of sustainable suppliers.
Physical Engagement: Crucial to the learning process is for students to feel a sense of ownership over the material and their health. The best way I know for this to take place is to make hands-on learning opportunities available to engage students in the growing process from seed to plate. This could include anything from creating on-campus gardens (such as the ambitious Cornell Sustainable Campus initiative) to work-study opportunities on local farms.
Ultimately, the hope is that students will graduate with a sense of stewardship over the land so that they continue to be conscious consumers after graduation. If colleges seize the ripe opportunity presented to them, they can have a significant impact not only in growing the ranks of a healthier generation, but also in selecting and grooming the leaders of tomorrow’s food marketplace.
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By Michael Greger, MD on January 15, 2010
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.
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By Guest Blogger on September 24, 2009
By Earthmother in the Raw
In the spring of 2008, a book on the “New Arrivals” shelf of my small-town library jumped out at me: Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips by Kris Carr. I didn’t have cancer, didn’t know anyone with cancer, and yet, I was compelled to sign the book out. I think it was the cover photo of the cowgirl in the desert southwest that spoke to me.
“Wow,” I thought, “That used to be me. What in the world happened to that free spirit with her bohemian lust for life?”
Here’s what happened to her in a nutshell: Years and years of dieting had taught her not to trust her body’s hunger cues. With every diet, her eating became more disordered and her body’s physiology became even more imbalanced. She had forgotten that eating had anything to do with being hungry and dieted her way to 300 pounds. Yup, morbidly obese.
I suffered from fire-breathing-dragon heartburn, chronic fatigue, migraine headaches, lymphedema, adult acne, joint pain and a host of other debilitating symptoms. Walking to the end of the driveway was excruciating. My legs were swollen like tree trunks. I hadn’t seen my ankles in several years. I knew what was coming down the pike — diabetes, heart disease, pushing up daisies. I was way too young, but I felt hopeless. What was the answer? Gastric bypass?
Instead, I devoured that book. Kris’ story of being diagnosed with an extremely rare, incurable cancer and her journey toward health and healing was so inspirational. A big part of her healing journey involved adopting a raw foods lifestyle. The back of the book is loaded with resources and I started checking out websites and other books from the library.
The more I learned about eating raw foods, the more sold on the idea I became. It was when I read The Raw Food Detox Diet by Natalia Rose that I thought, “I can do this!” I loved her simple start-where-you-are approach.
On the summer solstice, June 21, 2008, I set an intention to change my relationship to food and regain my health and vitality. I soon traded in my scale for a juicer and entered the world of raw, living foods. I began to replace prepared and processed foods with fresh fruits, vegetables, sprouts, nuts and seeds.
It was a big change for me. BIG. I grew up in a Hungarian household, where I was weaned on chicken paprikash and stuffed cabbage. Vegetables were potatoes and corn. Not too many salads, because Dad thought “they taste green.” We celebrated with food. We mourned with food. I learned to use food for pleasure, for comfort, for reward.
As I grew into an adult and began living on my own, I couldn’t be bothered with cooking. Convenience was key — get more, faster. So I ate food in packages and racked up frequent flyer miles at the drive-thru windows. I joke that I thought Starbucks was a food group, but trust me, that wasn’t far from the truth. And, pick a diet, any diet, and betcha I’ve been on it.
There was the whole emotional component around food too. I’ve had to change my relationship with food. When we stop dieting, we have to trust that our body will tell us what it needs—and only what it needs.
Hello? Terrifying! I used to live to eat. Now, I’ve learned to eat to live.
A funny thing happened along this path of weight loss: by infusing my body with live enzymes, I began to feel more alive. All those symptoms I mentioned disappeared. My energy level shot through the roof. I sleep like a baby at night. My skin is smooth, clear and radiant. Over 120 pounds have melted away without counting a point, calorie, carb or fat gram.
I walk 5K every morning and every evening – my walking partner/Siberian husky, Maya, sees to that. I have a daily yoga practice. I love hiking in the woods (Maya too!), so I’m out there at least three-four times a week. I got a pair of inline skates for my birthday and began rollerblading this summer. No fatalities yet.
And, most recently, this cowgirl’s gotten back in the saddle. Yee Haw! My four-legged, 1,500-pound pals couldn’t be happier. Me too. I lost the equivalent of a whole person, but found that ol’ bohemian lust for life in the process.
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