The Four Food Groups are as much a part of American consciousness as the Ten Commandments and the Seven Warning Signs of cancer. But wait a minute, says Marilyn Diamond.
Are meat and dairy products really essential to good health, as all those food posters in all the elementary school classrooms in America imply? Diamond doesn't think so.Diamond is the author of the new "American Vegetarian Cookbook," and co-author with her husband Harvey of "Fit For Life," the controversial nutrition/cookbook that was the fourth biggest-selling hardcover book in the United States during the past decade, outselling every novel written in the 1980s.
Hamburgers and ice cream, and even chicken and cheese, and all the other foods we have thought we couldn't do without for the past generation have brought us "some pretty serious trouble," says Diamond.
She points to the report issued two years ago by then Surgeon General C. Everett Koop that linked excessive fat consumption with diseases such as stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes and several types of cancer.
She also points to a report released last winter by the National Cholesterol Education Program that urged all Americans, not just those with high cholesterol levels, to cut back the fat content of their diets.
She's not trying to convince us all to become vegetarians, she says. But she thinks we'd be healthier, and feel healthier, if we ate a lot more vegetables and fruit and grains, and a lot fewer animals.
"When you switch to more plants you notice it immediately," says Diamond, who became a vegetarian 12 years ago. "You experience an increase in energy and a drop in weight."
Diamond is a "vegan," the most committed of those people who put themselves in the vegetarian category. Vegans eat no meat or dairy foods. Lacto-ovo vegetarians don't eat animal flesh but consume dairy products and eggs. There are also what you might call semi-vegetarians, who have increased their fruit, vegetable and whole-grain consumption but occasionally eat meat and fish. Even semi-vegetarians will reap big health benefits, says Diamond.
Getting our nutrients from plants also keeps the environment healthy, she says.
"It takes 500 times the land, 100 times the water and 25 times the fertilizer to produce meat (compared to vegetables)," Diamond argues. "Does that make sense? What it means is that we've gone overboard and need to cut back."
Apparently a growing number of Americans agree with her. As the dean of the Tufts University School of Nutrition points out in his just-published "Guide to Nutrition," vegetarianism "has gone mainstream. . . . The vegetarian trend, which is up 30 percent since 1970, has opened the way for a proliferation of vegetarian restaurants, convenience food products and cookbooks that offer enticing meatless meals."
Diamond's cookbook, coming on the heels of "Fit For Life," will probably receive more publicity than most. It is a painless, tasty guide to putting more vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts and seeds into anybody's diet. "I didn't write it for the dyed-in-the-wool vegetarian," says Diamond. "I tried to make it doable for the American public at large."
Her more strident first book, "Fit For Life," brewed up dissent among traditional nutritionists, who found some of the book's claims misleading.
The American Dietetic Association especially found fault with the Diamonds' assertion that certain foods, when eaten at the same meal, cause putrefaction in the intestines and that putrefaction results in ill health. The ADA also criticized the book's assertion that it's easy to get the daily requirement of calcium and protein from plant sources.
In a phone interview recently from New York, where she was promoting her new book, Diamond reviewed her dietary beliefs, hoping, she says, to lay to rest the confusion that still persists about vegetarianism:
- Protein: Americans have overconsumed protein for years, she says. At the very most, according to research Diamond quotes in her book, only 8 percent of our calories need to come from protein. And that protein does not need to come from animal sources, she says.
The calories consumed in a serving of spinach are 49 percent protein, she says; in broccoli, 45 percent; in lemons, 16 percent; in potatoes, 11 percent. Protein is in everything you can eat from the plant kingdom, Diamond points out.
Utah State University Extension Service home economist JoAnn Mortensen, while supportive of the trend toward the consumption of less animal fat, thinks that Diamond's figures "add to the confusion" and might give people a false security that it's a snap to be a successful vegetarian.
Forty-nine percent of the calories from a cup of spinach may be protein, she says, but a cup of spinach is only 10 calories. To meet the 1,500 calories necessary for the average woman, vegetarians need to eat more than they might realize, she says. Most nutritionists, she adds, believe that protein should make up from 10 to 15 percent of a healthy diet.
- Complete protein: The old wisdom was that, in order to get the body's requirements of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, vegetarians had to be careful to combine certain incomplete proteins in the same meal.
But Diamond says that's old-fashioned thinking. Humans store amino acids, she says, and don't need to start from scratch at each meal.
- Calcium: You don't need to eat or drink dairy products to get enough calcium, says Diamond. She points to the mammoth study on the diets of 6,500 people in China, recently conducted by scientists from Cornell University.
The study reveals that most Chinese consume no dairy products, get all their calcium from vegetables, consume only half the calcium Americans do - and rarely suffer osteoporosis, despite an average life expectancy of about 70 years.
- Vitamin B12: The body needs only infinitesimal amounts of this vitamin, notes Diamond, and it can be found in things like sprouts, soy products, spirulina and other fresh-water algae (these can be mixed with juice, she explains).
The American Dietetic Association, in a position paper published in 1988, lent its qualified support to a vegetarian diet, noting that "scientific data suggests a positive relationship between vegetarian diets and risk reduction for several chronic diseases."
But the ADA was careful to add this reservation: If you're going to be a vegetarian, you can't be haphazard in your food choices. "It is important," the ADA noted, "that vegetarian diets be carefully planned to ensure an adequate nutrient intake."
- Marilyn Diamond will be at Kathy's Ranch Market, 4695 Holladay Blvd., June 20, 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
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Recipes listed:
Spinach Pasta with Ricotta and Walnuts
Vegetable Lasagna
Nappa Cabbage Salad
Guacamole Calabasas
Summer Vegetable Stew
Oven-Roasted Fries
Fit for Life House Dressing