Report this underhanded scumbag to AlterNet's moderator.

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I wouldn't be surprised if the Mediterranean lifestyle is better for your mental health.

I can't speak on it personally, but I know people who have traveled to see relatives in Italy, and it seems like the warm, festive, huggy thing is a shot in the arm for them. There's a cheesy 2-part Raymond episode about it that seems to capture what they're talking about.

Americans seem to be about working hard, playing hard, worrying, and planning or scheduling every minute of their lives with a vengeance. Just sitting around after dinner or lunch and chatting over wine and rich foods, without cell phones, TV, calorie-counting, and all the other nonsense would probably do us more good than particular changes in our diet.

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The following quotes, facts, figures, and statistics are excerpted from Please Don't Eat the Animals (2007) by Jennifer Horsman and Jaime Flowers:

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

---Albert Einstein

"Each year, the meat industrial complex abuses and butchers nearly 9 billion cows, pigs, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and other innocent, feeling animals just for the enjoyment of consumers. Each year, nearly 1.5 million of these consumers are crippled and killed prematurely by heart failure, cancer, stroke, and other chronic diseases that have been linked conclusively with the consumption of these animals. Each year, millions of other animals are abused and sacrificed in a vain search for a 'magic pill' that would vanquish these largely self-inflicted diseases."

---Alex Hershaft, PhD, president, Farm Animal Reform Movement

When analyzing 8,300 deaths in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany among 76,000 men and women in five different, large studies, researchers concluded that vegetarians have a 24 percent reduction in death from heart disease.

Similarly, in the famous Oxford Vegetarian Study, where 6,000 vegetarians were compared with 5,000 meat-eaters over nearly two decades, scientists found that the rate of death from heart disease was 28 percent lower in vegetarians than in meat-eaters.

One study analyzed eighty scientific studies in leading medical journals. The analysis found that vegetarians had lower blood pressure, and were less likely to suffer from stroke, heart attack, and kidney failure.

A large German study of nearly 2,000 vegetarians found that deaths from heart disease were reduced by over one-third, and that heart disease itself was far less than that of the general population.

Another large study examined the coronary artery disease risk of young adults ages 18 to 30 and vegetarians were found to have much higher levels of cardiovascular fitness and a greatly reduced risk of heart disease.

"The process of gradual blocking of the coronary arteries begins not in adulthood but in childhood...and the main cause of this arteriosclerosis is the steadily increasing amount of fat in the American diet, particularly saturated animal fats such as those found in meat, chicken, milk and cheeses. If there was another disease that caused half a million deaths a year, you can be sure that the public would be acutely aware of the danger, and that the cure or prevention would be universally practiced."

---Dr. Benjamin Spock, author, child expert

"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."

---Dr. Dean Ornish, author, Reversing Heart Disease

Stroke is the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer. Vegetarians have a 20 to 30 percent reduced risk of having a stroke. Stroke, like heart disease, is associated with diets high in saturated fats, and the vegetarian diet is naturally low in these fats.

The Oxford Vegetarian Study found cancer mortality to be 39 percent lower among vegetarians when compared with meat-eaters. The European Prospective Investigation of Cancer found vegetarians suffer 40 percent fewer cancers than the general population.

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Studies have shown that decreasing a woman's animal fat intake can reduce the chances that she will die from breast cancer. A large-scale, long-term study in the Netherlands found a powerful connection between the amount of animal fat consumed and the rate of prostate cancer. A review of a dozen studies found dietary fat strongly correlated with prostate cancer.

Ovarian, uterine, and endometrial cancers have all been shown to be strongly correlated to the amount of animal fat in one's diet, and vegetarian women have significantly lower rates of these cancers.

"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all the natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined."

---Dr. Neal Barnard, Executive Director, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rate of coronary disease of any group in the country. They have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate."

---William Castelli, MD, Director, Framingham Heart Study

"Human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores."

---Dr. William Roberts, editor-in-chief, American Journal of Cardiology

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I can eat anything I want and still fly happy. The only diet Vanessa needs to go on is the GARFIELD DIET. An EGG PIE shall be slapped on her face ! AHAHAHAHAHAHA !

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Real food is pleasure and medicine in one. I just finished supper which was comprised of a carrot salad and 6 pieces of veggie sushi. Everything came to a 110 baht. Now, I am going to roll my dessert.

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Aside from the obvious sh** storm between vegetarians and meat-eaters what needs to be paid more attention to is the society that we live in in the United States. For the most part, we live as drones: We have to get the most work in in 24 hours,the most "play" in in 24 hours-CONSUME!

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Don't get me wrong, the recipe looks great! I'll try it in the next few days. But when something is called a "Mediterranean Grain Bowl" but then you read it and it has one cup of brown rice, no other grain... just seems like kind of an odd title. The beets/kale are more prominent, and the most depression-fighting part is the sardines.

Roasted beets are very underrated! Sardines too - don't think I've ever used them in a recipe, just took the cans hiking.

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I think this article is right on the money, mostly. But as soon as I got to the recipe and saw "beets" I was done.

Yuk, I hate beets. I guess I'll have to try to find my own recipes.

Good article though.

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Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action pointed out in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, that 220 million Americans were consuming enough grain (largely because of the high consumption of grain fed to livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.

Some discussion of the cruelty of modern factory farming is is necessary here. Most Americans are still under the mistaken impression that animals are raised on idyllic farms with sunshine, fresh air, and open spaces, and are killed humanely, after a pleasant life. The reality, however, is quite different.

John Robbins writes in his Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America (1987)

"Meat-eating contributes to the fear in the world by putting us in a position in which there is not enough to go around. But that's not all. Meat-eaters ingest residues of the animal's biochemical response to the horrors of the slaughterhouse. Programmed to fight or flee when in danger for their lives, the animals react to the slaughterhouse in sheer terror. Powerful biochemical agents are secreted that pump through their bloodstreams and onto their flesh, energizing them to fight or flee for their lives.

"Like screaming air rain sirens, these chemical agents produce instinctual panic. Today's slaughterhouses virtually guarantee that the animals will die in terror."

The Maoris would eat the flesh of a slaughtered enemy in order to possess the enemy's courage and strength. The people of the lower Nubia, likewise, would eat the fox, believing that by so doing, they would be possessed of his cunning. In upper Egypt, the heart of the hoopoe bird was eaten in order to acquire the ability to become a clever scribe. The bird would be caught and its heart would be torn out and eaten while it was still alive. On the other hand, according to John Robbins, certain Native American tribes would not eat the flesh of an animal who died in fear, because they did not want to take into themselves the terror of such an animal.

In a sermon preached in York Minster, September 28, 1986, John Austin Baker, the Bishop of Salisbury, England, attacked factory farming; choosing as his example, the treatment of chickens.

"Is there any credit balance for the battery hen, denied almost all natural functioning, all normal environment, lapsing steadily into deformity and disease, for the whole of her existence? he asked. "It is in the battery shed and the broiler house, not in the wild, that we find the true parallel to Auschwitz. Auschwitz is a purely human invention."

On another occasion, Bishop Baker taught: "By far the most important duty of all Christians in the cause of animal welfare is to cultivate this capacity to see; to see things with the heart of God, and so to suffer with other creatures."

On World Prayer Day for Animals, October 4, 1986, Bishop Baker preached against indifference to animal pain and lauded the animal welfare movement:

"To shut your mind, heart, imagination to the sufferings of others is to begin to slowly but inexorably to die. It is to cease by inches from being human, to become in the end capable of nothing generous or unselfish--or sometimes capable of anything, however terrible. You in the animal welfare movement are among those who may yet save our society from becoming spiritually deaf, blind and dead, and so from the doom that will justly follow."

According to Bishop Baker: "...Rights, whether animal or human, have only one sure foundation: that God loves us all and rejoices in us all. We humans are called to share with God in fulfilling the work of love towards all creatures...the true glory of the strong is to give themselves for the cherishing of the weak."

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I don't think that would make me happy if I were living on dog food. Want to fight depression? GO WORK OUT.

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I've had severe depression since I was ten. Now I am 51.
There is no doubt in my mind that eating well helps. At times in my life when I had the time, I cooked everything from scratch, used all whole ingredients and I always feel great when eating like this, physically and mentally.
Other times, when I was too busy to cook, I ate crap and my health suffered terribly, both physically and mentally. Exercise helps a lot too, but I swear eating well makes a huge difference. The body just can not function well on crap food. My body seems to be particularly sensitive.
Luv,
Granny

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My understanding is that if you believe that what you're eating is going to make you happy, you're probably right.

Nothing at all wrong with that at all--there's a similar movement that extols the virtues of praying over someone.

Whatever makes you happy on this short trip along the mortal coil, says me.

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Eating a balance diet is considered as the best form of diet. It can help you avoid possible illnesses in the future. There are certain conditions that people engaged in diet schemes tend to deprive themselves of eating food based on what they want. Depriving in the long run can cause you unhappy that might ruin your diet.

Antoinette Taus

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In his 1979 book, Vegetarianism: A Way of Life, Dudley Giehl writes that some ancient Egyptian priests were vegetarian to help them with their vows of celibacy and that they avoided eggs and milk, which they called "liquid flesh." Giehl writes that Leonardo da Vinci was a vegan, out of ethical concern for animals:

In a letter from India dated 1515 from Andrea Corsali wrote: "...they do not feed on anything which has blood, nor will they allow anyone to hurt any living thing, like our Leonardo Da Vinci."

Da Vinci's notebooks contain numerous references to the injustice of killing animals for food:

"Endless numbers of these animals shall have their little children taken from them, ripped open, and barbarously slaughtered."

(Of sheep, cows, goats, and the like)

"The time of Herod will come again when little innocent children will be taken from their mothers, to be put to death with terrible wounds, most cruelly inflicted."

(Of young lambs, slaughtered for meat)

"How cruel for one whose natural habitat is water to be made to die in boiling water."

(Of boiled fish)

"Oh, how many chicks will never come to birth!"

(Of eating eggs)

"Living as they do in communities, whole populations are destroyed so that we can have their honey. Thus will many great nations be destroyed...and multitudes deprived of their food and stores; and they will be most cruelly submerged, swept under, drowned by invading armies, out of their minds. Oh, Justice of God! Why dost Thou not awake and protect Thy misused creatures?"

(Of bees)

"The milk will be taken from the tiny children."

(Of beasts from whom cheese is made)


"Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places! I have since an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men will look upon the murder of animals as they look upon the murder of man."

---Leonardo Da Vinci

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I don't see where one should conclude that the diet eaten was cooked, it could just as easily be raw.

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In the western world we have to much poison in our food source.
With MSG,Aspartame,High Fructose Corn Syrup, Hydrogenated Veggie oil and other chemicals that have no nutrient and is the cause of most of the obesity and cancer that plagues America.
The Hormones and antibiotics that are injected in the food is consumed when the flesh is eaten.
Now we have 90% of all soy being GE along with corn and sugar beets and soon many other Roundup ready crops to feed humans and cattle.

So what you need is to start on organic or grow your own veggies and buy fruit from local farmers and not eat anything that is chemical fertilized or spayed with pesticides and herbicides. Don't leave much for the conscience consumer does it?

So, many of the diseases in America are caused by the food and drug industries, and then the drug industries try to heal you with more chemical drugs. When all you need is some nutritional organic food to make you healthy and to stay healthy.
After I had colon cancer in 1996 I changed to only foods that contain no chemicals or additives, and any meat is usually chicken and wild seafood, with the chicken being organic and not caged.
I am now 76 and doing just fine, and I do take vitamin D3 and Co-Q10 and a few more enzymes as anti oxidents like V-C E and cod liver oil.

I also take L-Carnitine to put more nitric oxide in my arteries to soften them and remove the plaque that had been built up over the many years of eating the normal western diet.

Just changing to an all organic food source will change your life mentally and physically and give you the energy to live again in harmony with the earth.
I also take Garlic tincture and a natural substance that kills all pathogens that may make me sick called MMS (Chlorine Dioxide) It Keeps me healthy.
Read about it here

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First, Barrington takes a perfectly good scientific finding --Spaniards who eat a Mediterranean diet are less depressed than Spaniards who don't -- an twists it. Even though the finding deals only with dietary components, she decides that must be irrelevant, and what makes Spaniards happier must be cooking food and eating it in company.

Then she goes on to provide the least Mediterranean recipe imaginable, made up almost entirely of ingredients that will turn most Americans off on principle, and finishes up by requiring that they be cooked in the most baroque fashion imaginable, with every ingredient requiring separate cooking before assembly. I've been eating vegetarian for decades, and this recipe made me want to faint.

There are thousands of wonderful vegetarian recipes, but here's an actual mediterranean one -- simple to cook, joyous to eat, and even kids like it: pasta puttanesca with greens. No beets or walnuts, but it does include kale and scary little fish -- only invisibly.

1 lb whole-wheat pasta (the ones made in Italy are great)
1/4 c olive oil
1 small tin anchovies, or 1 T anchovy paste
1 can diced tomatoes, or fresh in season, or 1 can tomato sauce
1/2 to 1 c good black olives, coarsely chopped
4 - 6 cloves garlic, crushed and sliced fine
1 medium onion, chopped
1 to 2 c mushrooms, sliced
basil and parsley, fresh & chopped or dried, to taste
greens: either 1 lb spinach, washed and coarsely chopped, or 12 - 20 good-sized leaves of kale, washed, stacked up, rolled into a cigar, and cut crosswise into 1/4-in strips

fresh-grated parmesan cheese to taste
= = =
Put a kettle of salted water on to boil. When it boils, add pasta (and the kale, if you're using it) and set timer per package directions.

While pasta is cooking, put olive oil in good-sized skillet and bring to medium heat. Add anchovies and let them cook a few minutes til they melt away into nothing. Add mushrooms and onions and cook til mushrooms start looking juicy, then add garlic. (If using spinach, add along with garlic.) Once spinach is wilted and/or onions are soft, add tomatoes, olives, and herbs. Let simmer for a few minutes, then turn off heat and cover.

Drain pasta, toss with contents of skillet, and add grated cheese. Accompany with a salad w/ vinaigrette -- sliced cucumbers are nice. This dish tastes like a summer day at the beach -- it is impossible not to be in a good mood when you eat it. And the kale basically disappears into the background -- great for people who find greens scary.

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Fats are the things that make up your cell membranes - the thingy that keeps your cells from becoming rigid or collapsing in a puddle of goo. Growing children NEED cholesterol.

Dietary Supplements and Nutrition For Depression

"Essential fatty acids, such as omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids play a crucial role in the function of brain chemicals, particularly serotonin and dopamine. Studies have shown that low levels of omega-3 fatty acids ..., or a high ratio of omega-6 fatty acids (found in certain vegetable oils, such as corn and soybean oils) to omega-3 fatty acids, may be associated with depression."

That article tells us to eat salmon or tuna - not a pratical fix in these times of overfishing and bioaccumulative mercury. What if there was a plant source that was hardy, high yield and naturally drought-resistant?

The name 'cannabis sativa' means 'most perfect food' in Latin. Amazing that with antidepressants being a $9 billion per year industry and diabetes considered an epidemic, that hemp is still illegal in the US - just because it LOOKS like another plant - that only became illegal because of racist fearmongering dating back to a time when the KKK was still considered a respectable organization (!).

In addition to possibilities as a drought-resistant alternative to corn for animal feed and ETHANOL PRODUCTION, hemp "hearts" have a optimum blend of essential fatty acids for health. If hemphearts can cure tuberculosis, they can make you feel better too ;.)

Importance of hemp seeds in the tuberculosis therapy

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In his 1987 Pulitzer Prize nominated book, Diet for a New America, author John Robbins writes:

"We do not usually see ourselves as members of a flesh-eating cult. But all the signs of a cult are there. Many of us are afraid to even consider other diet-style choices, afraid to leave the safety of the group, afraid when there isn't any evidence that might reveal that the god of animal protein isn't quite all it's cracked up to be. Members of the Great American Steak Religion frequently become worried if their family or friends show any signs of disenchantment. A mother may be more worried if her son or daughter becomes a vegetarian than if they take up smoking."

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I do neuroendocrinology research, and one of the things that I find fascinating is the relationship between stress hormones and the Western fast-food type diet (high sodium, low potassium, high fat). The main human stress hormone- cortisol- actually makes people crave sodium, urinate out potassium, and also crave fat. The Western fast-food diet is pretty much exactly what people who were given an injection of stress hormones would crave. And, interestingly, if you were to give a bunch of people a Western-diet type meal (say, a Big Mac or something else high in sodium an low in potassium- in this case the fat part is not as important) that would help to increase the endogenous production of cortisol. What we call a "positive feedback loop" meaning one thing increases the other thing, and the other thing increases the one thing. Depression is not so simple as "too much cortisol" but that system is quite involved.

Furthermore, this dynamic can become genetic- not "hereditary" genetic but epigenetic. Hormones are transcription factors, they turn on and off genes all the time. They are also very soluble and so they easily pass through most membranes. And so if a pregnant woman had, for example, high levels of cortisol- the main stress hormone- those hormones could reach the developing fetus (the placenta is a very specialized membrane with high levels of an enzyme called 11-beta-hsd2 which breaks down most normal levels of cort, but not always) and cause EPIgenetic changes. Literally, a fetus is an environment of high stress hormones and a high fat, high sodium, low potassium diet will grow up to be much, much more prone to obesity and cortisol problems. Even if the person who developed in that in-utero environment were to eat the exact same diet as someone who developed in a healthier in-utero environment, one would become fat and depressed and the other would be much less likely to become fat and depressed.

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"From the dopamine in chocolate to the serotonin producing carbohydrates"
The big problem with that is, once the high wears off, your body craves more, and it's just a roller coaster. Eat, crash, eat more, crash, eat much more, crash.

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I live alone. I buy the best food I can (mostly vegetarian, not necessarily organic, as I am not wealthy!) I eat a lot of the foods mentioned (except fish), though my diet is more Indian than Mediterranean. I use stir fry, which does not require separate cooking of each ingredient. But I do wash and cut up each vegetable before adding it to the stir fry (I actually use a semi-steaming method which I think is healthier).

The point is, I cook my meals, and use good healthy food. But I do this alone. Not socially. I am not depressed. I don't want to generalize my experience because I think that leads to false beliefs and myths. (Also I do relate to people a lot on-line -- I am not really isolated in terms of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual interaction). But in my experience, a healthy diet, and taking the time to cook, respect, and eat good food is what makes me happy and healthy. (I am 62 and have not been to a doctor in several decades.)

People are not all the same. My guru once said something I found quite enlightening. He said it is better to eat McDonald's food if it makes you happy than to eat the best vegetarian food if it makes you miserable! I am turned off by essayists asserting that their beliefs apply to everyone, and especially when they have no Scientific evidence but just their opinions. It would have been better to stick to the facts about good diet, and leave out the social mythology.

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and if you are constantly hating food, hate eating, you are just eating negativity. what, then, will you experience in your life? negativity.

recovering from an eating disorder; i could really tell the difference once my thinking changed.

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It's not what you put into your mouth that makes you sick (depressed); it's what comes out of it. Think about it.

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When analyzing 8,300 deaths in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany among 76,000 men and women in five different, large studies, researchers concluded that vegetarians have a 24 percent reduction in death from heart disease.

Similarly, in the famous Oxford Vegetarian Study, where 6,000 vegetarians were compared with 5,000 meat-eaters over nearly two decades, scientists found that the rate of death from heart disease was 28 percent lower in vegetarians than in meat-eaters.

One study analyzed eighty scientific studies in leading medical journals. The analysis found that vegetarians had lower blood pressure, and were less likely to suffer from stroke, heart attack, and kidney failure.

A large German study of nearly 2,000 vegetarians found that deaths from heart disease were reduced by over one-third, and that heart disease itself was far less than that of the general population.

Another large study examined the coronary artery disease risk of young adults ages 18 to 30 and vegetarians were сверхъестественное (supernatural) обои к сериалу остаться в живых (lost) обои к сериалу merlin tv show wallpapers seropol5 found to have much higher levels of cardiovascular fitness and a greatly reduced risk of heart disease.

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