| SvennoJ said: I don't have any evidence, except that everywhere I get confronted with whole foods diets, it's all about improving health. That's just my experience with encountering vegetarian and vegan diest. It get most of my info in the waiting room on my chiropractor that always has documentaries running on the bad meat industry and amazing improvements people make getting rid of all their medication by switching diest. Ofcourse they have a nutritionist on staff and sell the supplements etc right there... |
You answered your own question. People who talk about whole food diets are usually going to be focused on health, for sure. There are lots of "ethical vegans" who are focused on animal welfare or the fact that vegan diets are much better for the environment. It makes sense that your experience at the chiropractor may skew more towards the health conscious side of veganism, whereas if it were a store that sold fair trade clothing your experience there may skew towards the ethical vegan side more.
Government funded research is more reliable because that removes publication bias. Industry-funded research generally won't be published if they don't get the results they're hoping for (that's true whether it's funded by the meat industry, the rice industry, whatever). Research funded by government is generally published no matter the result, so it is considered a better level of research than industry funded. Government-funded research is also usually not being done with a set goal in mind, so the research is generally not set up to fail (when the dairy and egg industries fund cholesterol research, the methods they use are set up in advance to fail to find any connection between cholesterol and heart disease, despite the fact that the overwhelming body of independent scientific research continues to find strong proof that cholesterol causes heart disease).
Government agencies did use to recommend people consume dairy, though increasingly they do not anymore (the U.S. is a different situation, but the current political climate there is unfortunately openly antagonistic towards science so it's maybe not surprising). The recent draft guidelines on nutrition in Canada removed dairy as a food group and lumped dairy in with processed sugar as something you should never consume if you can help it. Keep in mind that the people responsible for researching health for the government, and the people responsible for drafting the nutrition guidelines, are often not the same people. And politics comes into play if a country produces a lot of dairy, as the government becomes worried about jobs in the dairy industry, their dairy exports, etc., so non-health considerations often guide nutrition guidelines, rather than science. That's the way it was in Canada until recently. They did a new process in Canada where they took out all the industry-funded research, and looked just at the science, and came up with new regulations that indicated beans were a better source of protein than meat, that eggs should be eaten sparingly, that for optimal health dairy shouldn't be eaten at all, etc. Because that's what the science says, when you look just at the science not funded by the industries who're trying to sell you food. And make no mistake, the research that Pom Wonderful does to try to get you to drink their pomegranate juice is just as bad as the research the dairy and egg industries do trying to convince you that you shouldn't worry about cholesterol.
If your kids won't drink soy or almond milk then I'd recommend trying hemp milk, or hazelnut milk, or cashew milk, or coconut milk, or oat milk, or... you get the idea, there are so many alternatives that there's likely one they'll like (unless they're addicted to casein ;) ).
Soy milk is very healthy, there was never any independent research that suggested otherwise. There were *theories* that it might be bad for you because of estrogen-like substances in soy. However, this is compared to meat and dairy that contain *actual* estrogen, so that concern was always exaggerated at worst. And when they did the research and they put it to the test, they found the exact opposite anyway: the phyto-estrogens in soy actually *reduced* the level of estrogen in the blood. It turns out phyto-estrogens are similar enough to estrogen that they (to simplify it) actually tie-up the estrogen receptors in the body, so that the body is less likely to absorb any actual estrogens in your food. This leads to the hilarious scene of someone drinking milk or eating a steak (both of which contain actual estrogen) while saying they are trying to avoid soy to stay "more manly", but the dairy and meat they consume contain actual female hormones in it.
Back when I was an omnivore, I though I was healthy. And compared to a lot of people I was. But the problem with the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality is that the first sign of heart disease is often death due to a heart attack. There was a well known mountain biker who recently died of a heart attack during an event, despite living an active lifestyle. Your arteries can be 90% clogged without you knowing, as the body will do its utmost to compensate (which hides it from you, often until it's too late... because you're dead). So I've chosen to exclude all products from my diet that include cholesterol because the independently-funded science is clear that eating cholesterol raises cholesterol, and that high levels of bad cholesterol over time clog arteries and lead to heart attack, stroke, neurological diseases, and even erectile dysfunction. No thank you.
There are probably some decent Pita Pit options (maybe a falafel veggie pita for example). Ditto Subway. That doesn't mean the kids are choosing those options, and I completely agree with you that we need to keep the corporations out of the schools for all kinds of reasons, because they're always acting in the best interests of the corporation rather than the kids. Of course, a meal from home could be better. I don't know how representative the experience is, but I have friends who work in the school system who say that the overwhelming number of lunches they see kids bringing in are fruit leather, processed meats on white bread, pop, etc. Almost 100% of it is processed food, and much of what they see is the worst stuff on the market. That's anecdotal and I hope it's not representative, but from the commercials you see on TV I fear it likely is close to the mark. :(
