Editor's note: This is the sixth in a series of articles about Kickstart Your Health Little Rock.
The recent bad weather scuttled Bobby Ampezzan's plan to report today how 21 days without eating even one animal may have affected his blood chemistry. And so, remarkably, he has nothing to say this week.
But Ampezzan was not the only newspaper employee who took the Kickstart Your Health Little Rock 21-day vegan-eating challenge posed by Drs. Jason and Christie Beck and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
Impressed by the cancer and heart disease research described in the documentary Forks Over Knives, three
of us joined Ampezzan as human guinea pigs. We were supported by four other staff members who are already vegan, committed vegetarians or mostly vegetarian.
Our first hurdle was dealing with labeling ourselves "vegans," however briefly. Christie Beck offered us a host of humorous alternatives, including "pre-contact diet," "pre-paleo diet," "ancestral diet" or "starch-based diet," but the bottom line was we had agreed to become those weirdos.
Did you know that there's now a label for people who don't feel sufficiently pigeonholed by the phrase "mostly vegetarian"? It's "reducitarian." Reducitarians aim to reduce the amount of animal products they eat, but ... ahem. Must we have all these labels?
ArkansasOnline editor Katie Doherty doesn't think so.
"I went strictly and conscientiously vegan (I'm still a little surprised) for the 21-day Kickstart challenge after eating either a vegetarian or pescetarian diet the past 15 years," Doherty says. "I can't say I'll be going vegan full time -- mostly because it's too much pressure to exist under a label -- but I also haven't restocked my fridge with eggs, cheese or butter because I felt more sprightly on the plants-only plan.
"My pants seem to indicate I also lost weight, which wasn't a particular goal but a nice bonus, since I wasn't trying to cut calories, only to eliminate animal products."
Copy editor Dixie Land also wasn't motivated by a desire to lose weight, but she did, while sticking mostly to the plan (except on her birthday). But something else no doubt contributed to her loss.
"I lost 7 pounds, which surprised me because I wasn't able to exercise during that time (except for walking the dog or back and forth to the bus stops)," Land says. "Also, I was sick for two weeks, which I'm sure also dulled my appetite (as well as my senses of taste and smell).
"Weight loss wasn't my goal; I wanted to learn more about the nutrition and health aspects, which I did, in spades."
Ampezzan, Land and I (ActiveStyle editor Celia Storey) were more and less faithful attendees at Christie Beck's six-week, free series of Friday night Food for Life vegan cooking classes. Each week, 40 or so students sampled three dishes cooked by Beck while watching short videos in which the face of the national nonprofit, Dr. Neal Barnard, explained in a humorous way how to tailor a plants-only diet so you lose weight while getting plenty of protein, calcium and cholesterol-lowering fiber.
Beck is an obstetrician/gynecologist and not a doctor of nutrition, and she took pains to remind students every week that she was not offering medical advice but rather conveying her personal understanding of plant-based nutrition as taught by the PCRM Food for Life program in which she is certified.
Mostly the program reassured us that protein and calcium are abundant in plants (consider: Cows are vegans. Where do they get their calcium?). But we also learned that while we might get enough vitamin B-12 through fortified grains and nut-milk products, it would be smart to take a multivitamin or a B-12 supplement.
We learned why dietary fiber reduces cholesterol -- and it's a persuasive endorsement of eating more fiber. Everyone ought to look that up.
But the most entertaining information Beck shared concerned the role of spices as micronutrients and the medicinelike effects of some foods. For instance, soba noodles are such a good source of thiamin that eating them saved certain residents of Tokyo from the devastating condition beriberi, and so soba noodles became the noodles of Tokyo.
We met her active, healthy children, her lean radiologist husband and his lean parents. The adults reported impressive improvements in their blood chemistry over several years of eating their plant-based diets (my LDL cholesterol alone is higher than Christie Beck's total cholesterol, which she told us is 123 mcg/dL). And 11-year-old Luke Beck entertained us with his enthusiasm for Lent: He and his brother are eating a cup of greens every morning for 40 days.
Beck introduced us to resources, including:
• nutritionfacts.org, a website jammed with research-based video explanations of nutrition by Dr. Michael Greger;
• a list of area restaurants with vegan-friendly menus;
• food-delivery business Zeganz, which will deliver vegan meals to one's house in central Arkansas;
• Dr. Maryelle Vonlanthen, who is starting an Arkansas chapter of Dr. Pam Popper's The Wellness Forum.
Land says, "Hopefully, I'll be able to be vegan several days in the week. I live with a vegetarian who doesn't plan to give up cheese, eggs or fish. However, I'm grateful to have more vegan recipes and food options to choose from."
I will miss the cooking classes in part because I am giddy about my husband's good-natured acceptance of my messy attempts in the kitchen. After 34 years of marriage, we had accommodated to our incompatible, physical differences in taste -- I like spices; he truly doesn't -- by becoming (here's another label for your collection) "takeout-itarians."
Well, not anymore, because I intend to continue being a messy vegan cook for another two months, after which I will ask my doctor to retest my blood chemistry. Meanwhile, I've lost about 5 pounds, and I am sleeping very well.
Our experiences are merely anecdotes, not scientific evidence. But we are living proof that eating only plants for three weeks isn't likely to prove fatal.
ActiveStyle on 03/02/2015