Yes, Let's Give Up Meat Burgers!

Today I posted the following comment (links added for this blog now) on Mother's Jone's Blue Marble blog in response to the post, Should You Buy Beef To Help US Ranchers Survive the Drought? —By Kiera Butler:

Any excuse is a legitimate excuse to stop eating meat! Vegan living is the most environmentally responsible, compassionate and overall healthy option. Your only health caveats are to supplement with Vitamin B-12, and Vitamin D or other supplement if blood testing shows a deficiency, and make a reasonable attempt to eat sufficient protein, easy to do with legumes, nuts, whole grains, veggies and fruit,plus soy foods such as tofu, tempeh, and a growing roster of products called meat analogs. Any would-be vegans out there can read Vegan for Life by vegan registered dietitians Virginia Messina and Jack Norris for the low-down. We must stop: causing serious, possibly irreversible, harm to our planet; contributing to inflicting terror, pain and life-long suffering on animals raised for food, eggs or dairy; and our human slide into obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and all the miseries they entail. So, yes! Drought is a great reason to stop eating meat burgers and all other animal-derived food products. Want a delicious, responsible and humane burger? Have a vegan burger such as Gardein's Beefless Burger. It's awesome! --Sunny

So, friends, readers, Tweeps, and just plain curious stumbling upon-ers, let's remember that every day we can make decisions based on ethical and responsible choices, and as we do so, we will become more the change we wish to see in the world, to paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi. Let go of wondering how much of an impact collectively your changes might have; just make them! You know animals suffer in today's agribusiness factory farms. You also know that the cute family farm with the red barn and silo and happy animals about is a dying entity. You may know someone who humanely raises and slaughters their meat animals. Chances are, however, that even such a responsible farmer takes his livestock to be slaughtered elsewhere, and that may not be as humane as he or we would hope. The so-called free range eggs you buy by law can be called such if the animals have an open window or door within so many feet but may never leave the production floor. If you don't buy them off the farm after touring the small-farm's coop, you cannot be sure cruelty was not involved. And besides, animal reproductive products such as cow's milk and chicken eggs were never intended for human consumption. We are meant to ingest human breast milk during the first year or two of life, and that's it for dairy. We are not meant to swill gallons of animal mammary fluids and make cheeses and other products out of them. You ought to hear Dr. Neal Barnard's comments on the very addictive quality of cheese (and other foods such as chocolate, meat and sugar). The eggs chickens produce are intended to bring more chickens into the world. What actually happens on factory farms is that female chicks are kept for laying more eggs and the male chicks are often ground into feed, and fed to chickens! Euthanasia? Please! No thought is given to their feelings at the time of their cruel and violent death. By the way, the typical beef steer or cow is "euthanized" by blunt trauma to the head, and the industry considers this humane. There is some pressure to change this, from the public mostly, so that mass suffocation in large chambers where oxygen is removed is considered better and a goal the industry hopes to attain. Are we nuts? As long as we pretend we are not a party to the cruelty, and to the slurry ponds filled with animal waste that contaminates nearby water supplies, and to the misappropriation of much of the planet's crops to feed those meat animals on factory farms, and to the growing obesity epidemic as we fall for the seductive temptation of the food porn thrust at us by pizza, fast food and seafood chains, we help cause it!

Want to try the vegan lifestyle on for size? I did at age 57 and haven't looked back since, over three and a half years ago. Check the word cloud somewhere on the right side of this page and click on any of the topics to read my experience, strength and hope. If I can do this, I'll bet you can too!



Cool dog tags available from Trudy Chalmers



Still Think High-Fructose Corn Syrup is "Safe"?

I Like my corn fresh, hot and slathered with buttery Earth Balance and doused with a little salt and pepper. I like it yellow, white, bicolor and bumpy. I like it in a husk, ready for shucking out on the deck. I liked it popped, and I like it ground into cornmeal for awesome corn sticks and corn bread. I don't like it sweetening my breakfast cereal, my catsup, my soda, my candy, my cookies, my ice tea or my bread. I don't like it in my salad dressing. And now that I understand that high-fructose corn syrup is a chemically altered corn derivative that delivers intense, shelf-stable sweetness to nearly every commercial food product available in American grocery stores, I am outraged.

Just this past week a story emerged from the Endocrine Society's San Diego conference:

Fructose Sugar Makes Maturing Human Fat Cells Fatter, Less Insulin-Sensitive

On Friday Reuters posted a story titled "Too much fructose could raise your blood pressure." They say:

The more fructose (subjects') diet included, the more likely they were to have high blood pressure. Of course, that could have been influenced by a variety of factors, such as obesity and disease, or getting too much of other sugars, salt or alcohol.

But even when adjusting for all these factors, the odds of having high blood pressure increased in those whose fructose intake was above average. For the most severe form -- stage 2 hypertension -- the odds were 77 percent higher.

"Given the new findings, people might want to think twice about what they throw into their shopping carts," said Dr. Michel Chonchol of the University of Colorado Denver, who worked on the study.

"In the grocery store, you see food without high-fructose corn syrup," he said, adding that it would make sense to reduce fructose intake by choosing those products and avoiding the ones containing added sugars.

"There is no question that fructose itself appears to have effects that other sugars don't have," said Chonchol. The exact mechanisms are unclear, although several have been proposed, he added."

I am so tired of the corn producers and their ad blitz hard-selling their chemically modified corn product and mocking those of us concerned about the effects of HFCS on our health (not posting a link here but sweetsurprise dot com is one of their propaganda sites).

Read your labels and run the other way when you see "high fructose corn syrup" as an ingredient whenever you can. As a vegan I already have limited commercially mainstream products, and some of those have HFCS, such as Oreos, so sometimes I buckle under and have some. What have I learned? That stuff ALWAYS tastes like more. It wakens that sleeping monster that recovery folks call "a phenomenon of craving" that can trigger overeating, even dangerous high-volume bingeing. I shared this with a vegan friend who asked why I don't eat Newman's O's instead of Oreos. Oh yeah! No HFCS, no animal fats. All good!

The Scientific American provides another source of important corn facts and the pervasiveness of corn in the production cycle of most meats, "That burger you're eating is mostly corn." I love corn, but I'd prefer it hadn't passed through a cow, chicken or fish first.

To show that HFCS concern has gone mainstream, I watched NBC's Today Show for a little while this morning, and Lester Holt did a segment on BBQ options, including along with the regular meaty wieners and burgers, Tofu Pups and Amy's Texas Veggie Burgers. He then pointed out that Hunt's makes a catsup now that "doesn't contain fructose." Yay! You can watch it here. By the way, Heinz Organic is HFCS-free, too.

Happy Independence Day! Today I'm striving for many forms of independence, including freedom from HFCS. All the best to you with yours.

Glad I'm a vegan! Live and Learn. Let me know what you think.