Editor's note: This is the seventh in a series of articles about Kickstart Your Health Little Rock.
On Feb. 25, after 22 1/2 days, I had my first bite of animal. It was a chunk of salmon, so delicious. I didn't immediately stroke or seize or smoke from my teeth. On the other hand, I feel forlorn. Why?
When I was little, I couldn't have Suzy Q's for dinner; my mother prohibited it. As a young adult, I could, and did. I once ate half of a cake for dinner. Now, approaching middle age, I once again cannot. Oh, I could, of course, but so many concerns stop me, chief among these growing fat, feeling dumpy and impulse control (or what it would say about mine).
I'm feeling so mortal these days. That's why forlorn. And eating meat and cheese at most meals isn't healthy, I'm convinced.
SO, WHAT NOW?
Under the aegis of the Washington policy shop Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Drs. Jason and Christie Beck's 21-day vegan diet dubbed Kickstart Your Health Little Rock was never intended to be a three-week experiment. It was meant, I take from the name, to be a true kickstart into a convicted vegan diet.
But I always treated it as an experiment. Could I do it? How did I feel? What was the pain like? What, like, no pain?
Here's what I found.
One, I did it. I ate no meats, cheeses, milk, butter or eggs for more than three weeks. Was it painful? No, not exactly. "Painful" is dietary restrictions and rationing. Then, perhaps, like nearly all people on a diet, I would have lost weight. When I stepped on the scale that Monday morning last month, I'd lost roughly two pounds.
Two, all but one of the biomarkers I had checked Feb. 25 showed improvement in three weeks.
m LDL (bad) cholesterol, especially, took a nice cudgeling from 123 mg/dL down to 109 (99 is the upper threshold for normal).
m HDL (good) cholesterol jumped from 54 mg/dL to 61 (the suggested minimum is 39).
m Hemoglobin A-1-C, which measures average blood sugar level for the past two to three months, went from an ever so slightly elevated 5.8 percent to 5.7 percent (the range 5.7 to 6.4 marks an increased risk of diabetes).
m C-reactive protein, an indicator of inflammation in the body, went from a super-low 0.6 mg/L to 0.4, which my physician Dr. Kevin Roberts said "is already about as low as we see, which is good."
m Triglycerides was the one sad surprise in the panel. I had clocked a 173 mg/dL (149 is the upper threshold for normal), and more recently, 215. This might be explained by my food-insecure wolfing down of carbohydrates and starches. My doctor, like TV doctors, concurs. "I think one thought about veganism is that it is not always low-carb, which can affect triglycerides."
Three, the tidy inventory of cookbooks and cutting tools my fiancee and I keep above the counter has gone all kudzu. We now have a bunch of books and loose recipes -- a dynamite one for spaghetti squash with black beans and mango -- and a blender for smoothies.
Four, I now realize that meat eaters and, therefore, cookers of meat take for granted how easy it is to build a family meal around flesh.
Meat is the easiest (to prepare), densest, and I would argue tastiest centerpiece of an American meal. A roast is patted with seasonings and tinctures and thrown into the oven where it cooks at a rate of roughly 20 minutes per pound. The resulting dish is high in flavor and will sate us for hours. Nowhere during the Kickstart did we accomplish the same breadth of flavors and textures in the same prep time without meat.
Furthermore, our bodies are omnivorous. We are designed to eat animals and animal products. Just not, optimally, in the proportion we do today.
Five, into the category of Things I Can Do Without, I place half-and-half. As much as I like a rich cream for my coffee, I've come to look forward to that first bitter, earthy sip of black coffee. I guess that just means I'm an adult.
Six, into the category of Things I Can Almost Do Without goes meat, especially from animals that breathe our air. I am not hankering for a sirloin tip roast. But fish and shellfish are just so useful in soups, stews and vegetable medleys.
Seven, and into the other category Things I Do Not Plan to Live Without, I reluctantly place cheese. I say reluctantly because I've grown to appreciate just how rotten cheese is in our diets. Imagine, a cow's milk, already fat-dense because it's intended to girth calves, is separated into protein-rich whey and curds. The latter is complex coagulated animal fat further compressed into the hard and soft cheeses we do so enjoy.
So why don't I plan to live without it? That last part. The "do so enjoy."
ANIMAL RIGHTS AND WRONGS
Throughout my diet, I've heard from a self-styled independent investigator, Peter Heimlich out of Atlanta, whose site MedFraud.org has taken aim at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Dr. Neal Barnard and that outfit are animal welfare activists disguised as doctors concerned with our health, he's said. (May I say that Heimlich is polite and fair in my experience, and the world needs more cage-rattlers of his kind, not fewer.)
In fact, the website kickstartlittlerock.org redirects to the committee's home page. And so does another civic-improvement sounding address, ToledoDeservesBetter.org. The second one is a campaign to end the University of Toledo Medical Center's use of pigs in student surgeon training.
"That has nothing to do with the Kickstart. We have no animal rights agenda," said Dr. Christie Beck, who is certified by the committee to teach its Food for Life nutrition curriculum and presented once-a-week cooking classes to about 40 appreciative Kickstart participants at the Hickingbotham Outpatient Center at Baptist Health Medical Center.
"Dr. Barnard told me once, because I'd asked, 'How do I approach people if they get turned off by the animal rights side of things, or they don't want to politically subscribe to any of that?' He said, 'Well, that's fine, it's just, when you do what's best for people, people's health, it happens to work out really well for the animals too.'
"That's kind of my personal philosophy too."
I asked Barnard if Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is an animal welfare group. He said no, it's a medical group. Its three areas of focus are preventive medicine (nutrition), clinical research and research ethics. Animal research ethics? "Animals, but in some cases unethical human research."
On the University of Toledo Medical Center, he said, "For trauma procedures, the best way for a surgeon to practice trauma procedures is a good simulator. In Toledo, they're using a pig, or many pigs. It's bad for the pigs, but it's also not good for the surgeons.
"Any good medical organization is going to take a stand" on ethics, he said.
Write to me at
bampezzan@arkansasonline.com
ActiveStyle on 03/09/2015