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August 2008 
Vegetables and Vegetarians
Posted on Jan 19th, 2008
by 
Inukshuk
Inukshuk
From the January/February 2008 issue of Vegetarian Issues, pages 70-73, an article about eating more vegetables as a vegetarian:
PUT THE VEG BACK IN VEGETARIAN
The simplest way to lose weight and keep if off this year might also be the healhiest diet change you'll ever make: eat more veggies
By Hillari Dowdle
Like many American vegetarian home cooks, I cut my teeth (so to speak) on the Moosewood Cookboook. I learned everything I know about baking homemade bread from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. I revere Still Live with Menu as a work of art as much as a bible of artful meatless cooking. And I think of Berkeley, Calif.-dwelling Mollie Katzen, creator of these three classics as well as a new one, The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without, as a poster girl for vegetarian living.
So I'm shocked to hear Katzen doesn't call herself a vegetarian. "Vegetarianism isn't even about vegetables - it's about meat, or the absence of meat," she says. "I want to make a more positive statement - a big embrace of garden, orchard, and eating low on statement - a big embrace of garden, orchard, and eating low on the food chain. I like to call this pro-vegetable-ism.
"People approach me all the time and tell me they haven't eaten meat for 18 years. But I'm not interested in what you aren't eating," Katzen says. "Tell me what you are eating. Tell me you're into cooking kale chips, and we have something to talk about."
She's got a point. Every vegetarian has his or her reasons for choosing a meatless path. But, decision made, it's easy to fall into a meat-bad, everything-else-good way of thinking - a mind-set that paves the way for white bread, potato chips, and Oreos to take over a diet that should be among the world's most healthful.
It makes me wonder, here at the dawning of a brand-new year, what would happen if we all flipped our inner switch from anti to pro and make a new commitment to those foods we know we should be eating to keep our health up and weight down, environmental impact low and energy levels high? What if we all took a page from the Katzen book and put the veg back in vegetarian?
Veg Out
It's no secret we're experiencing a health crisis here in our land of plenty. Rates of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity have reached epidemic proportions. Diabetes diagnoses among American adults climbed 61 percent from 1991 to 2001. And according to the American Heart Association, about 72 million Americans over age 20 have high blood pressure. What's even more troubling is that nearly 30 percent of them don't even know they have elevated blood pressure. What's even more troubling is that nearly 30 percent of them don't even know they have elevated blood pressure and 65 percent don't have it under control.
Meanwhile, we're getting fatter and fatter. The 2003-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey estimates 66 percent of all U.S. adults are overweight. The World Health Organization's 2002 World Health Report stated that obesity kills about 220,000 people in the United States and Canada every year.
But there's a simple cure for what ails us, and it's right in line with a vegetarian lifestyle. In a report entitled "The High Cost of Not Consuming Fruits and Vegetables," The Journal of the American Dietetic Association noted, "There is substantial evidence showing that a single dietary change, increasing fruits and vegetables, can help to reverse some if not all of these trends."
Eat your veggies - this is not new advice. We've all heard it a thousand times - but do we listen? Statistically speaking, no. A full 60 percent of American shortchange themselves on the recommended daily five servings of fruits and vegetables.
Are vegarians exempt from these trends? There's no definite statistical evidence that vegetarians are faring any better (or worse) than anyone else. Saying no to meat doesn't necessarily mean fruits and vegebles are on the menu. Meat-less doesn't equte to health-full.
"It is somewhat ironic when people find out about factory farming, choose a meatless diet, and then become junk-food vegetarians, " says Dina Aronson, RD, a vegetarian nutrition consultant, writer, and dietitian for vegfamily.com. "People have so much respect for animals, but then they don't take good care of his own bodies. If you're a new vegetarian and you don't make a conscious effort, you can easily gain a lot of weight."
Tara Gidus, RD, a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, has been vegetarian for 15 years. More and more, she says, she sees "potato-chip vegetarians" who don't put veggies on the plate at all - they never learned to, don't think to, or simply don't want to. "I hear lots of vegetarians say, 'I'm vegetarian and I don't like vegetables ...' And then they just chuckle," she says. So what's for dinner instead? "People eat a lot of starches: pasta, rice, breads, and cereals. And I see a lot of vegetarians leaning on proteins from cheese, and vegans gobbling up prepared soy products."
That last one in particular - the soy products and the convenience-food meat analogues that have sprung up in the past few years to make our lives easier and better - is a trap that vegetarians can fall into, says Reed Mangels, PhD, RD, nutrition adviers to the nonprofit Vegetarian Resource Group. "It used to be, 20 years ago or so, you'd go on a vegan diet and you'd almost always lost weight," she says. "You used to have to focus on fruits and vegetables and beans and whole grains, especially if you were traveling. Now, it is easy to find vegan convenience foods and snack foods and portable foods that fit into your diet. In a way, it's a blessing because it makes life easier. But if you're trying to lose weight, it can also be a curse."
Turn Up the Volume
For anyone who's ever fallen in love with a meatless corn god, "curse" seems like a harsh judgment - and to some degree, it is. Meat analogues, even the junk food ones, can have a proper place in a vegetarian diet. It's just that they're not the free-for-all food many of us view them as. Mangels explains. They tend to be high in calories and low in fiber, which means they fatten you up without necessarily filling you up. And that's not good.
Fresh vegetables, on the other hand, offer just the opposite equation. "Vegetables offer a lot of volume for very few calories because they are so rich in fiber and water," explains Aronson. "Study after study shows that people who consume more fiber and water lose weight because they get full quicker."
Barbara Rolls, PhD, a professor nutrional sciences at Penn State University and author of The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan and The Volumetrics Eating Plan, authored many of those studies. Rolls's research has focused on the "energy density" of foods - the calories delivered per gram of weight. Since water and fiber are the two lowest-calorie dietary constituents, it's easy to see that a diet focused heavily on them would be slimming. Hence, the idea that you can fill up on salad and not necessarily need to compensate with cheesecake later in the day.
"Because people tend to eat a consistent weight of food each day, losing weight is about reducing calorie density and filling the plate with lower-calorie options," Rolls explains. "If you add fruits and vegetables that are high in water, you dilute calories and feel just as full."
Eileen Behan, RD, is a nutritionist on the seacoast of New Hampshire and the author of Eat Well, Lose Weight While Breastfeeding. She regularly beats the same drum in her practice for vegetarians and meat eaters alike: fresh vegetables and fruits. "People come in and tell me they feel terrible and they're gaining all this weight and they don't understand why," she says. "Then we'll sit down and review what they ate over the last four or five days, and there won't have been a single fresh vegetable on their plate! No wonder."
In her practice, Behan often recommends Volumetrics as a resource to show how veggies can tip the balance toward weight loss. She offers this case study. "People love pasta, so I always start there," she says. "Two cups of pasta are 420 calories. Now, if you do one cup of pasta at 210 calories and add one cup of zucchini at 40 calories, you still have two cups of food but now it's only going to cost you 250 calories."
PUT THE VEG BACK IN VEGETARIAN
The simplest way to lose weight and keep if off this year might also be the healhiest diet change you'll ever make: eat more veggies
By Hillari Dowdle
Like many American vegetarian home cooks, I cut my teeth (so to speak) on the Moosewood Cookboook. I learned everything I know about baking homemade bread from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. I revere Still Live with Menu as a work of art as much as a bible of artful meatless cooking. And I think of Berkeley, Calif.-dwelling Mollie Katzen, creator of these three classics as well as a new one, The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without, as a poster girl for vegetarian living.
So I'm shocked to hear Katzen doesn't call herself a vegetarian. "Vegetarianism isn't even about vegetables - it's about meat, or the absence of meat," she says. "I want to make a more positive statement - a big embrace of garden, orchard, and eating low on statement - a big embrace of garden, orchard, and eating low on the food chain. I like to call this pro-vegetable-ism.
"People approach me all the time and tell me they haven't eaten meat for 18 years. But I'm not interested in what you aren't eating," Katzen says. "Tell me what you are eating. Tell me you're into cooking kale chips, and we have something to talk about."
She's got a point. Every vegetarian has his or her reasons for choosing a meatless path. But, decision made, it's easy to fall into a meat-bad, everything-else-good way of thinking - a mind-set that paves the way for white bread, potato chips, and Oreos to take over a diet that should be among the world's most healthful.
It makes me wonder, here at the dawning of a brand-new year, what would happen if we all flipped our inner switch from anti to pro and make a new commitment to those foods we know we should be eating to keep our health up and weight down, environmental impact low and energy levels high? What if we all took a page from the Katzen book and put the veg back in vegetarian?
Veg Out
It's no secret we're experiencing a health crisis here in our land of plenty. Rates of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity have reached epidemic proportions. Diabetes diagnoses among American adults climbed 61 percent from 1991 to 2001. And according to the American Heart Association, about 72 million Americans over age 20 have high blood pressure. What's even more troubling is that nearly 30 percent of them don't even know they have elevated blood pressure. What's even more troubling is that nearly 30 percent of them don't even know they have elevated blood pressure and 65 percent don't have it under control.
Meanwhile, we're getting fatter and fatter. The 2003-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey estimates 66 percent of all U.S. adults are overweight. The World Health Organization's 2002 World Health Report stated that obesity kills about 220,000 people in the United States and Canada every year.
But there's a simple cure for what ails us, and it's right in line with a vegetarian lifestyle. In a report entitled "The High Cost of Not Consuming Fruits and Vegetables," The Journal of the American Dietetic Association noted, "There is substantial evidence showing that a single dietary change, increasing fruits and vegetables, can help to reverse some if not all of these trends."
Eat your veggies - this is not new advice. We've all heard it a thousand times - but do we listen? Statistically speaking, no. A full 60 percent of American shortchange themselves on the recommended daily five servings of fruits and vegetables.
Are vegarians exempt from these trends? There's no definite statistical evidence that vegetarians are faring any better (or worse) than anyone else. Saying no to meat doesn't necessarily mean fruits and vegebles are on the menu. Meat-less doesn't equte to health-full.
"It is somewhat ironic when people find out about factory farming, choose a meatless diet, and then become junk-food vegetarians, " says Dina Aronson, RD, a vegetarian nutrition consultant, writer, and dietitian for vegfamily.com. "People have so much respect for animals, but then they don't take good care of his own bodies. If you're a new vegetarian and you don't make a conscious effort, you can easily gain a lot of weight."
Tara Gidus, RD, a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, has been vegetarian for 15 years. More and more, she says, she sees "potato-chip vegetarians" who don't put veggies on the plate at all - they never learned to, don't think to, or simply don't want to. "I hear lots of vegetarians say, 'I'm vegetarian and I don't like vegetables ...' And then they just chuckle," she says. So what's for dinner instead? "People eat a lot of starches: pasta, rice, breads, and cereals. And I see a lot of vegetarians leaning on proteins from cheese, and vegans gobbling up prepared soy products."
That last one in particular - the soy products and the convenience-food meat analogues that have sprung up in the past few years to make our lives easier and better - is a trap that vegetarians can fall into, says Reed Mangels, PhD, RD, nutrition adviers to the nonprofit Vegetarian Resource Group. "It used to be, 20 years ago or so, you'd go on a vegan diet and you'd almost always lost weight," she says. "You used to have to focus on fruits and vegetables and beans and whole grains, especially if you were traveling. Now, it is easy to find vegan convenience foods and snack foods and portable foods that fit into your diet. In a way, it's a blessing because it makes life easier. But if you're trying to lose weight, it can also be a curse."
Turn Up the Volume
For anyone who's ever fallen in love with a meatless corn god, "curse" seems like a harsh judgment - and to some degree, it is. Meat analogues, even the junk food ones, can have a proper place in a vegetarian diet. It's just that they're not the free-for-all food many of us view them as. Mangels explains. They tend to be high in calories and low in fiber, which means they fatten you up without necessarily filling you up. And that's not good.
Fresh vegetables, on the other hand, offer just the opposite equation. "Vegetables offer a lot of volume for very few calories because they are so rich in fiber and water," explains Aronson. "Study after study shows that people who consume more fiber and water lose weight because they get full quicker."
Barbara Rolls, PhD, a professor nutrional sciences at Penn State University and author of The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan and The Volumetrics Eating Plan, authored many of those studies. Rolls's research has focused on the "energy density" of foods - the calories delivered per gram of weight. Since water and fiber are the two lowest-calorie dietary constituents, it's easy to see that a diet focused heavily on them would be slimming. Hence, the idea that you can fill up on salad and not necessarily need to compensate with cheesecake later in the day.
"Because people tend to eat a consistent weight of food each day, losing weight is about reducing calorie density and filling the plate with lower-calorie options," Rolls explains. "If you add fruits and vegetables that are high in water, you dilute calories and feel just as full."
Eileen Behan, RD, is a nutritionist on the seacoast of New Hampshire and the author of Eat Well, Lose Weight While Breastfeeding. She regularly beats the same drum in her practice for vegetarians and meat eaters alike: fresh vegetables and fruits. "People come in and tell me they feel terrible and they're gaining all this weight and they don't understand why," she says. "Then we'll sit down and review what they ate over the last four or five days, and there won't have been a single fresh vegetable on their plate! No wonder."
In her practice, Behan often recommends Volumetrics as a resource to show how veggies can tip the balance toward weight loss. She offers this case study. "People love pasta, so I always start there," she says. "Two cups of pasta are 420 calories. Now, if you do one cup of pasta at 210 calories and add one cup of zucchini at 40 calories, you still have two cups of food but now it's only going to cost you 250 calories."
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