Plant Based Diets

How, What and If we eat in the future

There was almost a position statement from The Lancet lately that gained a fair amount of press. The commission deals with the global epidemics of obesity, undernutrition and climate change and basically said that our current global way of eating is not sustainable past maybe another 30 years or so. I feel like we are frequently hearing this from many different angles these days.

The basic premises are

- a plant-based diet is generally better for everyone's health than a mass-produced animal-protein based diet

- the amount of resources spent on raising animals just to contribute to our diet has a large degree of wasted energy that could be better distributed

- the byproducts of the industrial animal-protein farming system are damaging the environment

It's tough to argue much with these points, though those in power will fight strongly to maintain the status quo that has gotten us to this point.

From a medical perspective, I've been on board with this since I did my training in the whole foods plant based diet. There will always be exceptions to the rules (some people will point out Inuit and Pacific Island peoples who have survived on animal-based diets for generations, the counter-point being that the animals eaten today are very different as are the rest of the diets, evidenced by the very high rates of diabetes and heart disease in those populations as their diet has been Westernized).

There's a good summary of things and critique I found over here for those interested.

If anything, I think it serves as another wake up call to start thinking about what and how we eat because these changes take a long time to kick in to our daily routines.

Here is some more information for you about plant-based eating, all the benefits surrounding it and how to get started.

Multivitamins

If you can get the lid off, you probably don't need them When I ask people if they are taking any vitamins, herbs or supplements, many people will say they are taking a multivitamin. When I ask them why they take it, I get a quizzical look most of the time. I think this is something that resonates from childhood and parental advice of the idea that we need vitamins to help our body develop. I'm not pediatrician so I can't speak to the effects on the developing child, but I will say that most non-pregnant adults without major medical conditions do not need extra vitamins. You'll be impressed by these labels promising 120%, 300%, 1200% of your daily dose of vitamin whatever it is, but the truth is that for most of these vitamins, if you take more than your daily dose your body needs, the rest just ends up in your urine. You are literally peeing money away in this case. There's been a new trendy vitamin every decade or so for the last 40-50 years; First it...

Kidney Stones

I've written about this previously , but it's often hard to explain to people what a 10 is on the "1-10" pain scale if they haven't been in that spot before. For women who have had children, they generally know what a 10 is, but for men it's a little harder. When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation, we had a patient calmly sitting there saying his pain level was at a 10 and our resident, who was an ex-military sniper with a large skull tattoo on his forearm and a crosshair through the eye, calmly leaned forward and asked, "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you could not be in more pain than you are now, correct?" The patient changed his answer. Getting to the point, a kidney stone is about the close I can come to describing a 10/10 pain to people who haven't gone through childbirth. The fundamental issue is similar - your body is trying to move a big solid thing through an opening that was not really desig...

NSAIDs

Advil and Motrin are ibuprofen, then you have Aleve (naproxen). Those are the over-the-counter ones. Prescriptions are Mobic (meloxicam), nabumetone, indomethacin, Toradol (ketorolac), diclofenac, Lodine, and the list goes on. All of these medications are in a class called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). I'm giving you this list because there is mounting evidence that these medications a) don't work as well as we'd thought and b) have some very serious long term side effects we're finding out more about. NSAID's act by reducing the amount of prostaglandins you make in order to reduce inflammation. However, prostaglandins have a ton of other effects and are involved in the maintenance of just about AIDs and also stronger if they are taken every day and/or around-the-clock. every other organ system that you have. The effect is stronger with higher doses of NS NSAID's work best and are best indicated for times when something is r...

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