Fighting Fat and Climate Change

By Seth Borenstein, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted December 7, 2007.

We can attack both problems by cutting calories and carbon dioxide at the same time.

America's obesity epidemic and global warming might not seem to have much in common. But public health experts suggest people can attack them both by cutting calories and carbon dioxide at the same time.

How? Get out of your car and walk or bike half an hour a day instead of driving. And while you're at it, eat less red meat. That's how Americans can simultaneously save the planet and their health, say doctors and climate scientists.

The payoffs are huge, although unlikely to happen. One numbers-crunching scientist calculates that if all Americans between 10 and 74 walked just half an hour a day instead of driving, they would cut the annual U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, by 64 million tons.

About 6.5 billion gallons of gasoline would be saved. And Americans would also shed more than 3 billion pounds overall, according to these calculations.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering public promotion of the "co-benefits" of fighting global warming and obesity-related illnesses through everyday exercise, like walking to school or work, said Dr. Howard Frumkin, director of the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health.

"A simple intervention like walking to school is a climate change intervention, an obesity intervention, a diabetes intervention, a safety intervention," Frumkin told The Associated Press. "That's the sweet spot."

Climate change is a deadly and worsening public health issue, said Frumkin and other experts. The World Health Organization estimated that 160,000 people died in 2000 from malaria, diarrhea, malnutrition and drownings from floods -- problems that public health and climate scientists contend were worsened by global warming. Officials predict that in the future those numbers will be higher.

The American Public Health Association, which will highlight the health problems of global warming in April, is seeking to connect obesity and climate change solutions, said executive director Dr. Georges Benjamin.

"This may present the greatest public health opportunity that we've had in a century," said University of Wisconsin health sciences professor Dr. Jonathan Patz, president of the International Association for Ecology and Health.

The key is getting people out of the car, Patz and Frumkin told the public health association at its annual convention. Reducing car travel in favor of biking or walking would not only cut obesity and greenhouse gases, they said, it would also mean less smog, fewer deaths from car crashes, less osteoporosis, and even less depression since exercise helps beat the blues.

In a little-noticed scientific paper in 2005, Paul Higgins, a scientist and policy fellow with the American Meteorological Society, calculated specific savings from adopting federal government recommendations for half an hour a day of exercise instead of driving.

The average person walking half an hour a day would lose about 13 pounds a year. And if everyone did that instead of driving the same distance, the nation would burn a total of 10.5 trillion calories, according to the scientist, formerly with the University of California at Berkeley. At the same time, that would cut carbon dioxide emissions by about the same amount New Mexico produces, he said.

"The real bang for the buck in reducing greenhouse gas emissions was from the avoided health expenses of a sedentary lifestyle," said Higgins.

But it's not just getting out of the car that's needed, said Dr. Robert Lawrence of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. A diet shift away from heavy meat consumption would also go far, he said, because it takes much more energy and land to produce meat than fruits, vegetables and grains.

Recent studies support that argument. Last year the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported that the meat sector of the global economy is responsible for 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Much of that is indirect, including the fertilizer needed to grow massive amounts of feed for livestock, energy use in the whole growing process, methane released from fertilizer and animal manure, and transportation of the cattle and meat products.

Similar calculations were made in a study in September in the medical journal Lancet.

The average American man eats 1.6 times as much meat as the government recommends, Lawrence said. Some studies have shown eating a lot of red meat is linked to a higher risk for colon cancer.

As for fighting obesity and global warming by walking and cycling, don't expect people to do it easily, said Kristie Ebi. She's a Virginia public health consultant and one of the lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

Citing the decades-long effort to curb smoking, she said, "It turns out changing people's habits is very hard."

Eating Vegetarian Is Taking Global Warming Personally

By Kathy Freston, HuffingtonPost.com.

If you want to decrease your carbon footprint, you can start with your dinner plate

After the tradition of Thanksgiving overindulgence, wouldn't it be nice if we had a good reason other than vanity to start eating healthfully, some other incentive to help us get on a better track in the wellness arena? Luckily, the United Nations just gave us one.

The U.N.'s latest report on global warming has bad news and good news. On the downside, a lot of scary stuff is heading for us at breakneck speed. On the upside, we still have time to do something about it -- and one thing we can all do is actually fun and delicious.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a panel of thousands of the world's top climate scientists, has described the existence of human-caused global warming in its final assessment report as both "unequivocal," and as having "abrupt and irreversible" effects on global climate. Worse still, these effects are coming stronger and faster than expected in the panel's last report just six years ago. Alarmingly, some effects that had been predicted to arrive decades from now are already here.

The report warns that hundreds of millions of people are threatened with starvation, flooding, and weather disasters. Rain-fed crop production will fall by half, a quarter of the world's species will go extinct, and arctic ice will completely disappear during the summer. We will see more deadly heat waves, stronger hurricanes, and island nations completely obliterated from the map by rising sea levels.

And the good news is...?

Fortunately, there's still time to save ourselves -- but not very much time. The U.N. says point blank: "immediate action is vital." According to the report, we have just a few more years left to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

A problem of such scale will require governments, industries, and private citizens to work together to address what many believe to be the greatest challenge of our time. As with most solutions, the approach must be varied and come from all angles to really make the kind of quantum difference that is necessary. Here's but one -- albeit one of the most powerful -- way to add to the momentum of a turnaround: eat a plant based diet. Give up eating animals and go vegetarian. Seriously.

A U.N. report from just this past November found that a full 18 percent of global warming emissions come from raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food. That's about 40 percent more than all the cars, trucks, airplanes, and all other forms of transport combined (13 percent). It's also more than all the homes and offices in the world put together (8 percent).

So, one of the simplest and most elemental (and most delicious) things you can do to decrease your carbon footprint is to choose a veggie burger over a hamburger, "un-chicken" patties (try Garden Protein, the new and much talked about faux chicken/turkey) over actual chicken, or some grilled Portobello mushrooms with marinated tofu (I swear it's really good!). Order the vegetarian option whenever you go out to a restaurant -- and ask everywhere you go that they expand the vegetarian section on their menu, since it's good for owners of restaurants, hotels, airlines, etc. to know that there is consumer interest for tasty plant-based entrees.

I'm all for participating in the myriad things we can do to assist turning back the tide on human-made global warming: writing to a corporation about being environmentally responsible, turning off unnecessary lights and keeping the heat or a.c. on "low", voting for the politicians who will lead us into cleaner living, and driving a smaller more fuel efficient car. But on an ongoing more fundamental level, we can make a huge shift by simply eating differently. Being vegetarian is being green.

Eating a plant-based diet isn't just kind to animals and good for your health (and waistline!), it is also the single most effective thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint.

We can each think creatively about how to use our roles in our families, jobs, and social circles, and join as part of the solution to this serious global threat.

With so much at stake, it's the least we can do. After all, the U.N. says there's still time if we act now. Surely that's something to be thankful for.

Pesquisa da Universidade de Cornell sobre uma dieta Eco-eficiente

Diet for small planet may be most efficient if it includes dairy and a little meat, Cornell researchers report
By Susan Lang for Cornell Chronicle

A low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficient in terms of how much land is needed to support it. But adding some dairy products and a limited amount of meat may actually increase this efficiency, Cornell researchers suggest.

Illustration by Steve Rokitka/University Communications
Even though a moderate-fat plant-based diet with a little meat and dairy (red footprint) uses more land than the all-vegetarian diet (far left footprint), it feeds more people (is more efficient) because it uses more pasture land, which is widely available.

This deduction stems from the findings of their new study, which concludes that if everyone in New York state followed a low-fat vegetarian diet, the state could directly support almost 50 percent more people, or about 32 percent of its population, agriculturally. With today's high-meat, high-dairy diet, the state is able to support directly only 22 percent of its population, say the researchers.

The study, published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, is the first to examine the land requirements of complete diets. The researchers compared 42 diets with the same number of calories and a core of grains, fruits, vegetables and dairy products (using only foods that can be produced in New York state), but with varying amounts of meat (from none to 13.4 ounces daily) and fat (from 20 to 45 percent of calories) to determine each diet's "agricultural land footprint."

They found a fivefold difference between the two extremes.

"A person following a low-fat vegetarian diet, for example, will need less than half (0.44) an acre per person per year to produce their food," said Christian Peters, M.S. '02, Ph.D. '07, a Cornell postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. "A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on the other hand, needs 2.11 acres."

"Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use," said Peters.

The reason is that fruits, vegetables and grains must be grown on high-quality cropland, he explained. Meat and dairy products from ruminant animals are supported by lower quality, but more widely available, land that can support pasture and hay. A large pool of such land is available in New York state because for sustainable use, most farmland requires a crop rotation with such perennial crops as pasture and hay.

Thus, although vegetarian diets in New York state may require less land per person, they use more high-valued land. "It appears that while meat increases land-use requirements, diets including modest amounts of meat can feed more people than some higher fat vegetarian diets," said Peters.

"The key to conserving land and other resources with our diets is to limit the amount of meat we eat and for farmers to rely more on grazing and forages to feed their livestock," said Jennifer Wilkins, senior extension associate in nutritional sciences who specializes in the connection between local food systems and health and co-authored the study with Gary Fick, Cornell professor of crop and soil sciences. "Consumers need to be aware that foods differ not only in their nutrient content but in the amount of resources required to produce, process, package and transport them."

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American ate approximately 5.8 ounces of meat and eggs a day in 2005.

"In order to reach the efficiency in land use of moderate-fat, vegetarian diets, our study suggests that New Yorkers would need to limit their annual meat and egg intake to about 2 cooked ounces a day," Peters said.

The research was supported in part by the National Research Initiative of the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service.

Uma questão de embalagem

The Great Plastic Plague

Raw for 30 days

Um filme independente Norte-Americano sobre 6 pessoas diabéticas acostumadas a se alimentar de fast-food entram no desafio de se curar através da alimientação vegan, orgânica, crua e sem aditivos e preservativos por 30 dias. O filme foi inspirado na Dieta do Palhaço, onde o oposto foi feito por um indivíduo saudável.

Está em inglês, mas confira o trailer abaixo.

Raw for 30 Days is an independent documentary film that chronicles six McDonald's-munching Americans with diabetes who switch to a diet consisting entirely of vegan, organic, live, raw foods in order to reverse diabetes naturally. The six participants are challenged to give up meat, dairy, sugar, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, soda, junk food, fast food, processed food, packaged food, and even cooked food – as well as go without their loved ones and many of their creature comforts – for 30 days.

Can foods heal? Can diabetes be reversed or cured through diet? Can a diabetic thrive without insulin and other drugs? Can people subsisting on a Standard American Diet (SAD) give up their favorite foods and favorite vices for 30 days? Can six strangers of diverse ages, races, and backgrounds support and nurture each other through this life-altering challenge?