The Casual Vegan

I found an interesting site you should check out called  100 push ups. While I don’t often link to exercise websites, this one of fun and entertaining. I promise. The site contains information about push ups and a program to get anyone to 100 push ups. The main purpose of the site is to advertise their book; however, the program is still a fun one. While most people won’t actually get to 100 push ups in seven weeks, I’ bet you’ll be shocked how far you get.

Exercise not only makes you feel great, but it makes you healthier too. So, what are you waiting for? Take the push up test, and give the program a try. Of course, careful reading will reveal that the program’s goal is pretty much impossible for most people. However, don’t let that dissuade you. I’m giving the program (and the sit up, squat, and a pull up program) a try myself, because my gym closes for 2 weeks over Christmas. I’ll let you know how it goes. I’m starting at 60 push ups, so hopefully I can make it to 100. Hopefully I can get several of my friends to try it with me!

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Shrimp pond after harvest

Shrimp is the second most commonly consumed seafood in the United States behind only tuna. Many people believe shrimp is healthy for you. Researchers often point to the “low fat” value of shrimp. The low fat diet myth created in the 1980’s has been debunked by many scientific studies such as the Harvard Nurse’s Health Study. Shrimp may be low in fat, but T. Colin Campbell’s research teaches us that it’s not the animal fat that we need to watch out for, but the animal-based protien. However, food producers are still keen to convince people of the health value of these little guys.

replacing beef with shrimp isn’t healthy eating

The United States has the worst rates of heart attacks in the world, and we are eating hundreds of 1.3 billion pounds of shrimp per year. It’s hard to imagine how much more we could possibly eat. Studies that look to answer the question: is shrimp good for you, subtract beef or eggs from a test subject’s diet and replace it with shrimp. When you remove two of the most hurtful foods from a person’s diet, you will see measurable increases in health markers. It’s almost impossible to eat something worse than ground beef with ammonia. These studies seem very persuasive, However, if they added shrimp to a whole foods plant-based diet, they would create a much different picture.

chemicals used to produce shrimp

Is shrimp healthy for you? Locavore gives us many solid reasons why you really don’t want to eat shrimp:

…a dry [shrimp] pond should be prepared by spreading urea and superphosphate to encourage plankton growth. Once the pond has been filled with brackish water, generally pumped from a nearby creek, it is typically covered with diesel oil to kill off any insect larvae. The water is then treated with piscicide – a substance that poisons any competing aquatic life- such as chlorine or rotenone; the latter has been strongly linked to Parkinson’s disease in humans…

The adulteration of shrimp does not end at the pond… shrimp are routinely soaked in a solution of sodium tripolyphosphate, or STPP, a suspected neurotoxicant, still legal in the United States, that prevents seafood from drying out in transit and boosts product weight. Borax, best known as a hand cleaner and insecticide, is used to preseve the color of shrimp in some countries. The most unscrupulous countries use caustic soda to chemically burn tiger shrimp a customer-pleasing pink.

The list of toxic chemicals used in shrimp production:

• Urea
• Superphosphate
• Diesel oil
• Piscicides (Chlorine, Rotenone)
• Pesticides
• Antibiotics (including Chloramphenicol and Nitrofurans)
• Antibiotic resistant bacteria
• Sodium tripolyphosphate (STPP)
• Borax
• Caustic soda

Excerpts from the book Bottom Feeder by Taras Grescoe. Lets not forget that most of the shrimp in the World is produced in China where some of the World’s worst pollution happens:

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Green Options (GO) recently had an article posted on their food site Eat Drink Better about BPA in canned food. While it’s a real shame that food producers put this poison in our canned food products, it’s important to realize that you are still better off eating canned vegetables than eating meat or dairy. Cows, chickens, and pigs spend their entire life ingesting poisons, toxic chemicals, and pesticides before they are slaughtered and packaged for sale.

This bio-amplification of pesticides, antibiotics, and growth hormones means meat eaters can ingest up to 22x the amount of pesticide that a vegan will consume. That’s why I never make a fuss about “Organic” products. The amount of poison I eat now is so much less than it was before I changed my life.

yes fresh is best but…

Fresh vegetables are better than frozen and canned vegetables because processing food leaches valuable vitamins and minerals out of your food. While I always try to eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, I keep a supply of frozen veggies in my freezer. When I’m lazy, hungry, and tired, instead of reaching for a bag of potato chips, I can dip into my freezer and stirfry some greens in less than 10 minutes.

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Okay, from what I can tell, Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated, is actually just a vegetarian, but people that crave some literary literature on the topic of not eating meat should look into his new book, Eating Animals. For those celebrity-philes out there, Natalie Portman cites this book as being the reason that she went from being a vegetarian of 20 years to a vegan. Here’s a summary of Eating Animals:

…on the brink of fatherhood –facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child’s behalf– his casual questioning took on an urgency. His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits –from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth– and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.

The book comes out today in bookstores. Read an article adapted from Eating Animals published in the New York Times on October 9th, 2009, or a more recent article on CNN from Foer called Eating Animals is Making Us Sick.

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Crystalline Fructose is a processed sugar derived from corn, just like high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). However, Crystalline Fructose can be labeled on food packages as simply “Fructose” which tricks consumers into thinking they are buying a product that contains fruit or fruit based sugar.

Deceptive and dishonest labeling practices allow vegan junk food makers to hide HFCS from the labels calling it instead “fructose” because they know HFCS turns consumers off. This unhealthy and hurtful additive is used in hundreds of “natural” processed food products.

is fruit healthy?

Yes! Fruit is one of the most healthy things you can eat. Everyone knows fruit is good for you, this is no secret. Yet, when you remind people to eat fruit they usually respond with comments like, “I’m dieting” or “I’m trying to avoid sugar”. Just because fruit is sweet doesn’t mean it’s somehow less healthy. Fruit is full of vitamins, minerals and fiber and its marvelously delicious.

is fructose healthy?

Fruit is healthy. Fruit contains fructose, therefore crystalline fructose is healthy right? Wrong!

According to the LA times, added Fructose is unhealthy and hurtful. Some people like to say “experts don’t yet agree” or “more studies are needed.” The dietitians who don’t think processed sugars are hurtful are the ones being paid by the food and beverage industry. If the initial studies show a food additive to be unhealthy, why would any sane person risk their health waiting for more studies?

Play it safe; avoid processed foods. Eat whole plant-based foods instead.

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