Doc, I was eating a hamburger the other day, and a co-worker started shaming me about my “dietary choices.” She’s a vegan and told me I was poisoning myself and ruining the planet. I had no idea. What do you think?
Life is a long series of choices, and what we eat is an important one. Choosing a vegan diet is one of those, but there are some problems of which we need to be aware. First, we need to examine the history of our species. From the outset, we have been omnivores, eating a wide and varied diet. This is not to say that all of these choices are necessarily healthy, but to eliminate meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products can result in deficiencies of several important substances, including calcium and protein. In fact, when comparing vegans with those who eat meat, vegans have more than twice the risk of suffering a hip fracture. That’s also true for fractures at other sites. There are other concerns about the vegan diet. An interesting and at times controversial read can be found in Lierre Keith’s book, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. In it, she describes her own twenty-year experiences with being a vegan. If you’re considering this dietary approach, I’d recommend doing some research. But your co-worker is right about the hamburger. There are better and healthier choices.
Everybody in my family has diabetes. I’m thirty-eight years old and don’t have it yet. Is there something I can do to prevent this from happening?
Hear that drum beat again? First, make the right life-style choices. And yes, there is something we can all do to help reduce our risk of developing diabetes. That risk reduction can be as much as 50%! That’s a significant number, especially when we consider that in the United States the chance of developing diabetes is one-in-three—almost one-in-two for those of us of Hispanic lineage. This is an epidemic, and one that shows no signs of abating.
So what’s the magic bullet? It’s what your mother always told you—eat your fruit and vegetables. We need at least five servings a day of these food groups, something that’s easily achievable for each of us. But we need to be intentional. Think back to yesterday, and what you had to eat. Be honest. Can you count five combined servings in these two categories? Some days I don’t make it, but I’m going to try. We’re not sure who said it, but it still rings true: Let food be thy medicine.
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