Babich Suzanne M. - Living Vegetarian for Dummies

Living Vegetarian For Dummies

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Copyright 2023 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022946107

ISBN 978-1-119-90311-6 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-90312-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-90313-0 (ebk)

1. Chapter 3
2. Chapter 5
3. Chapter 6
4. Chapter 7
5. Chapter 20
6. Chapter 21

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 8
4. Chapter 9
5. Chapter 10
6. Chapter 11
7. Chapter 12
8. Chapter 13
9. Chapter 14
10. Chapter 15
11. Chapter 19
12. Chapter 21

Vegetarianism has come a long, long way.

As a child, I wore a button that said, Real People Wear Fake Furs. Id picked it up at the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair when my older sister was in college at the University of Michigan. It was the late 60s, and it wasnt much longer before my mother announced to our family that from then on, she would be a vegetarian. She never said why and we never asked! but for the next several years, the former Wisconsinite ate cheese omelets or cheddar-cheese-and-pickle sandwiches on whole-wheat toast for dinner while the rest of us ate the meat she prepared for us. That is, of course, until my siblings and I followed her lead and, one by one, without fanfare, we followed Moms model and became vegetarians ourselves.

My dad worried wed miss vital nutrients. He chided my mother for planting the idea. Mom, a registered nurse, was considered a bit odd by her hospital colleagues. By now, it was the early 70s, and vegetarians lived on communes or wore Birkenstocks and long hair on college campuses. They werent kids and working, middle-aged moms.

A competitive swimmer in high school, I hoped that a vegetarian diet would boost my endurance and athletic performance, as Olympic gold medalist Murray Rose claimed it had for him. It didnt help enough, but it did pique my interest in nutrition and set me on the path to a career in dietetics. It would be many years, however, before the scientific community came around to the idea that a diet of grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, seeds, and nuts can be adequate never mind superior to a diet centered on animal products.

In college, I learned about vegetarianism in a lesson on fad diets. At that time, in the early 1980s, a blood cholesterol level of 300 mg/dl was considered normal, and patients in the coronary care unit in the hospital got bacon and eggs and white toast for breakfast.

My grandmother worried that I wouldnt get enough iron if I didnt eat red meat. She thought that my slender body wasnt healthy enough in size as compared to her old-world, European standards. For baby boomers like me, this was the environment for vegetarians in North America 40 to 50 years ago.

Everything is different now.

Slowly, over the last 30 years, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) long the conservative holdout on such matters went from cautious at first, to later tentative at best, to now clearly stating in its position papers that vegetarian diets confer health advantages. U.S. government dietary recommendations now explicitly acknowledge the vegetarian alternative and advise all Americans to make fruits, vegetables, grains, and legumes the foundation of a healthy diet. Its as close as the government can come to a stamp of approval for a plant-based diet as it balances science with the economic interests of the powerful meat and dairy industries.

As a practicing nutritionist and vegetarian, Ive observed these changes taking place over decades. The progress has been steady, and at this point, I think we can say that vegetarianism has become mainstream in much of the world.

The scientific rationale for eating a plant-based diet is thoroughly documented. The advantages for everyone and everything on our planet are compelling. The next task is helping people everywhere make the transition to an eating style that, while culturally mainstream today, is still outside the personal experience of the majority of people. Accomplishing this requires education as well as the political will to initiate and enforce public policies that make it easier for you and me to sustain lifestyles that support health.