What to feed dinner guests? And what about pets?

Posted on 08/12/2012 by J. Morris Hicks

So what do you do at your next dinner party when most of your guests are still eating the typical western diet? And what about pets? What can you feed them that doesn’t require you to support the meat industry? Joanne, who recently read our book, posed these two questions and inspired this blogpost. She wrote:

Dinner Guests. Although you gave suggestions for dining at restaurants and at someone’s home in your book, you did not cover the situation in which you would have people dine at your own home. For me, that seems to be the trickiest situation.  We try to do Mexican or Oriental type dishes that do not have meat and that might satisfy others. I would like to know your ideas.

My response. Hi Joanne, Here are a few blogs that I have written on this topic. I think the first one deals most directly with your question. Here is a brief excerpt from the first article below:

In my case, at least 90% of my local friends are still eating the typical western diet and all of them know about my own preferences. When I am in their homes, I never expect anything special, I simply choose the plant-based options and try to be as inconspicuous as possible. When they are in my home, they seem to be following the same protocol — they just eat the food that I provide and the absence of meat and dairy has never even been mentioned.

(A great entree that everyone seems to love is the one listed second; it was inspired by a recipe in the Engine 2 Diet.)

Cute picture, but I doubt that your kitty will be very happy with this kind of dinner.

Joanne asks about pets. What about feeding pets? I have a greyhound. Although we have been giving him vegetarian food as part of his diet, he also has been eating canned meat varieties. To my knowledge, dogs are not vegetarian and require meat products.

I do feel uncomfortable buying him meat products both because I question how healthy the product is as well as the inhumane issue of killing the animals that go into the product. Additionally, there is also the issue of the tremendous amount of land it takes to raise meat products as you talk about in your book. Do you have a dog, and if so, what do you do?  

My response. I don’t have a pet myself so have no experience. But I did hear recently that there are some 70 million dogs and 70 million cats in this country. That’s 140 million animals, most of whom are probably natural carnivores. In the wild, they would eat small animals, but what about in your house?

I wrote in the book about the fact that humans are the only species of animals in the history of the world who no longer live in harmony with nature. But now, there are other species. That would be our 140 million pets, the ten billion animals we eat each year and our zoo animals. So what can you feed your pet and not be supporting the harmful, wasteful and cruel meat industry?

Just doing their best to eat a natural diet for their species—in an unnatural world.

My advice. Go to the internet, learn all that you can and then do what you think is right. A quick search yielded this Huffington Post article about pets eating vegan diets.

They say it’s easier for a dog than it is for a cat. But if you have an indoor/outdoor kitty, they’ll do their own hunting of small animals to supplement their vegan food that you may give them.

Handy 4-piece take-charge-of-your-health kit—from Amazon.com

Want to find out how healthy your family is eating? Take our free 4Leaf Diagnostic Survey. It takes less than five minutes and you can score it yourself. After taking the survey, please give me your feedback as it will be helpful in the development of our future 4Leaf app for smartphones. Send feedback to jmorrishicks@me.com

International. We’re now reaching people in over 100 countries. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter or get daily blog notices by “following” us in the top of the right-hand column. For occasional updates, join our periodic mailing list.

To order more of my favorite books—visit our online BookStore now

J. Morris Hicks, working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

For help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4Leaf page or some great recipes at Lisa’s 4Leaf Kitchen.

Got a question? Let me hear from you at jmorrishicks@me.com. Or give me a call on my cell at 917-399-9700.

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Blogging daily at hpjmh.com…from the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Posted in Social Challenges | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Mark Bittman getting much tougher on the dairy industry.

Posted on 08/11/2012 by J. Morris Hicks

And I say Bravo for Mark!

Mark Bittman, New York Times

During the past few weeks, Mark Bittman has written two articles about milk. The first was his reporting of a personal “test withdrawal” from milk. The second article not only reported on his success with giving up milk, but the success of hundreds of other people who commented on his first article.

As you might expect, the 1300 comments posted after his first article resonated with lots of people who’d done some experimenting with the elimination of dairy themselves and therefore Mark reports that their stories were “overwhelmingly in tune with his own experience.” But in the second article, Mark raised the discussion to a whole new level—reporting not only on how well his “test” was going for him—but also on the many similarly positive anecdotes that he got from his readers.

Perfect for baby cows—not for humans.

To say the least, this time, he got a few more people riled up. One guy said that Mark was no longer welcome in Indiana and I’m sure he ruffled a lot of physicians’ feathers when he suggested that they only knew how to treat symptoms. Here is an excerpt from his latest article:

As for heartburn, he writes: It would appear that the medical establishment is among the last places you’d want to turn for advice. Nearly everyone who complained of heartburn, for example, later resolved by eliminating dairy, had a story of a doctor (usually a gastroenterologist) prescribing a proton pump inhibitor, or P.P.I., a drug (among the most prescribed in the United States) that blocks the production of acid in the stomach.

But — like statins — P.P.I.s don’t address underlying problems, nor are they “cures.” They address only the symptom, not its cause, and they are only effective while the user takes them. Thus in the last few days I’ve read scores of stories like mine, some of which told of involuntary or incidental withdrawal of dairy from the diet — a trip to China (where milk remains less common), or a vacation with non-milk-drinking friends or family — when symptoms disappeared, followed by their return upon resumption of a “normal” diet.

By telling people more about taking charge of their health, we can turn a projected serious doctor shortage into a doctor surplus.

Bravo for Mark. Now he has further stirred the pot as he begins to challenge the heart and soul of the “system” medical dogma and the practice of treating everything with drugs—that only address the symptom, not the cause.

He’s also talking about the broader problems of agriculture and medicine working together to produce the most food possible, regardless of the environmental and health consequences. These next two paragraphs sum up our entire problem in just a few sentences. Well done, Mark:

The stories here expose problems both with agriculture and with medicine. Once American agriculture became fixated on producing the most crops possible, regardless of the cost to land, water, air, animals and people, one of the jobs of the Department of Agriculture became figuring out how to sell all that produce.

Thus selling and therefore consuming milk and other dairy — whether it’s good for you as an individual or not — became an all-American task. But the job of an agriculture department should not be to sell whatever crops our farmers can grow most efficiently, it should be to encourage the growth of crops that will benefit the greatest number of Americans. Those crops are not corn and soy, grown largely to create hyper-processed food or animal feed (and in turn animal products), but an increasing variety of plants that can be directly eaten by humans.

The Bottom Line. We need many more of these kinds of articles, written by the highly-respected mainstream journalists like Mark Bittman. We need to tell people about all of their health problems that are driven by our toxic diet. And we need to tell them enough times so that they begin to believe it. 

Some people responding to Mark’s article were down-right angry that they hadn’t been told these health “secrets” before. Well, maybe they’ll be hearing a lot more of these “secrets” in the future.

Handy 4-piece take-charge-of-your-health kit—from Amazon.com

Want to find out how healthy your family is eating? Take our free 4Leaf Diagnostic Survey. It takes less than five minutes and you can score it yourself. After taking the survey, please give me your feedback as it will be helpful in the development of our future 4Leaf app for smartphones. Send feedback to jmorrishicks@me.com

International. We’re now reaching people in over 100 countries. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter or get daily blog notices by “following” us in the top of the right-hand column. For occasional updates, join our periodic mailing list.

To order more of my favorite books—visit our online BookStore now

J. Morris Hicks, working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

For help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4Leaf page or some great recipes at Lisa’s 4Leaf Kitchen.

Got a question? Let me hear from you at jmorrishicks@me.com. Or give me a call on my cell at 917-399-9700.

SHARE and rate this post below.

Blogging daily at hpjmh.com…from the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Posted in Dairy, cow's milk | Tagged | 5 Comments

Trying to take fat and sodium out of cheese…

Posted on 08/10/2012 by J. Morris Hicks

…Is like trying to take hydrogen and oxygen out of water.

How much longer will our brightest people continue to believe this kind of misinformation?

Ain’t gonna happen. Nevertheless, we’ve got thousands of scientists in the food industry working on it. While very smart and highly educated, these scientists are all part of the 95% of Americans who truly believe that we “need” to eat animal protein to be healthy. From an 8-6-12 New York Times article, it begins:

MILWAUKEE — In the centuries that Americans have been making cheese, they have gotten very good at it, producing world-class Cheddars and chèvres, to name just two varieties. But more recently, cheese making has been something of a struggle.

Under pressure to reduce sodium and saturated fats in American diets — especially those of children — the cheese industry has tried to make products with less salt or fat that consumers will like.

But all those smart scientists have not had great success. Then just think how many great things they could accomplish if they focused on making whole, plant-based foods the absolutely best-tasting food on the planet. What if they focused on something that was actually possible AND would work wonders for our health and the corresponding cost of health care.

In a related article last week, I cited another example of how the ubiquitous “protein myth” is robbing us of many of our greatest minds. Robbing us when it comes to devising a healthy human feeding model that will provide nourishment to the nine or ten billion humans that will be inhabiting this world in less than forty years.

Assuming the human race survives another 200 years, what do you think the caption will be under this picture in the history books of 2212? How about “the misguided people of the 20th and 21st centuries literally lost their minds for a few hundred years.”

I told a similar story in one of my blogs last week. It was all about what some of our greatest thinkers have to say about avoiding another “dust bowl” that plagued our nation in the 30’s. (See link below) Not a single one of the seven experts on their panel suggested the most powerful solution possible—that of aggressively shifting to a whole foods, plant-based feeding model for humans. Even though such a model would:

  • Reduce chronic disease and the corresponding cost of health care by 70% or more.
  • Enable us to feed ten billion people on half the amount of land now required to feed seven billion.
  • Solve the global water shortage and pollution problems.
  • Reduce fossil fuel energy consumption by thirty percent.
  • And end the barbaric livestock industry that currently kills two billion sentient beings every single week for our dinner tables.

The sustainability of the human race is at risk here and we’re worried about how to take the fat and sodium out of our cheese. To me it’s like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Did you notice that I have stopped talking about the sustainability of the planet, but rather the sustainability of the human race. The planet will be just fine. After we’re all gone, it will reinvent itself as it celebrates four billion years of existence. We’ve only been here 200,000 years.

Promoting health, hope and harmony on planet Earth

What’s good for our health, is also good for the planet — and all of her creatures.

But wouldn’t it be nice to have our brightest people working on projects that would actually promote the sustainability of the human race? Meanwhile, how are things going on the cheese front? Not so well:

“We’ve made some progress in that arena,” said Gregory D. Miller, president of the Dairy Research Institute. “But we have not been able to crack the code.”

Dr. Miller, whose group is financed by the dairy industry, was referring to efforts to reduce salt, but he had a similar appraisal of the challenges of low-fat cheese. “When you take a lot of the fat out, essentially cheese will turn into an eraser,” he said.

The trouble with cheese is that salt and fat are critical components, responsible for far more of its character than consumers might think.

The Bottom Line. Sometimes; news like this just makes me want to SCREAM.

Handy 4-piece take-charge-of-your-health kit—from Amazon.com

Want to find out how healthy your family is eating? Take our free 4Leaf Diagnostic Survey. It takes less than five minutes and you can score it yourself. After taking the survey, please give me your feedback as it will be helpful in the development of our future 4Leaf app for smartphones. Send feedback to jmorrishicks@me.com

International. We’re now reaching people in over 100 countries. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter or get daily blog notices by “following” us in the top of the right-hand column. For occasional updates, join our periodic mailing list.

To order more of my favorite books—visit our online BookStore now

J. Morris Hicks, working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

For help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4Leaf page or some great recipes at Lisa’s 4Leaf Kitchen.

Got a question? Let me hear from you at jmorrishicks@me.com. Or give me a call on my cell at 917-399-9700.

SHARE and rate this post below.

Blogging daily at hpjmh.com…from the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Posted in Big Picture, Dairy, cow's milk | Tagged , | 1 Comment