I’m a 76 year old retired married female. A native of the American South, most of my meals are traditional. I’m enticed by infusion/ethnic dishes. I experiment using spices foreign to my experience. Natural ingredients are very important. I am leery of processed foods, even when labeled “natural “.
My health issues, are hypertension, high cholesterol , and coronary artery disease. Controlling animal fat and natural sugars is a daily task.
Hi Anjoba ,
Welcome to the Healthy eating forum. I hope you'll enjoy participating here - many of us share photos of our meals and share recipe ideas, as well as discuss healthy eating generally - and there are lots of Topics and Pinned posts to look through, so I hope you'll find something that interests you, and it will be great to hear your own experiences too, and it's great that you enjoy experimenting using spices. I love herbs and spices. 
Zest
Hiya, you must have an awful lot of nice fruit and veg available to you, not to mention spices.
Dear Anjoba, you say "My health issues, are hypertension, high cholesterol , and coronary artery disease. Controlling animal fat and natural sugars is a daily task."
From where I stand the closer you get to a whole food plant based diet then those issues should melt away. When I say closer, I think your goal should be to really go for it. The reason I say that is even small amounts of animal fats, say once a week are shown to have significant risk.
Just one warning. I presume you are taking medication for at least hypertension. If so and you remove animal fats including dairy then you need your doctor to monitor your blood pressure because it will drop to normal. Consequently you will need to reduce that medication pro-rata as your blood pressure returns to normal. If you don't monitor the blood pressure as it drops then the mix of a plant-based diet and medication means you are at risk having low blood pressure, and that can have dire consequences.
If this lifestyle appeals and you want further advice just ask.
Thanks for the advice regarding discontinuing eating animal fat. For me this would be a daunting undertaking. It requires rewiring so much deeply inculturated in my experience that I can only limit the frequency of eating meat. I wish that I had the resolve to do so.
Thanks again!
Anjoba,
One step at a time.
Try reducing quantities/frequency, try removing a type of meat. Don't be upset at a temporary failure. Just move towards it as a goal over weeks, months if not years. You are right there is a very deep cultural attachment that is not just in our own minds but also that of our family and friends. None of us wants to be an outcast!
I remember when my wife and myself first turned vegetarian in 1980. My wife said she could never ever give up chicken, but beef would not be a problem for her. For some reason I was largely okay from day 1.
However we also said we would only be vegetarian at home, so we would eat meat when visiting friends or at a restaurant. Mind you in 1980 restaurants served eggs, omelettes, chips and peas as the main offer! Macaroni cheese was just coming in as I remember, and usually in cans!
Things changed for us when we went to a friends home for Sunday lunch. With a large group of friends we were offered a beautiful smelling lamb casserole. However when we came to taste it - nothing. Our guts had changed and what others enjoyed we found uninteresting.
From that point on we decided that was that. My wife has dallied on and off with fish over any years since. Whereas I have been "clean" except by accident. Each of us has our own road and must make our own choices.
Take it one step at a time.
andy, re. red meat, a bit of random googling throws up a correlation but not causation. The worst-case estimate seems to indicate a +18% risk at the usual 0.05 statistical significance threshold (in other words there's a 1 in 20 possibility that the observation could be due to chance). That's a pretty uninteresting number, especially since other studies have found NO correlation at all (or at least none that meets the significance threshold).
Reducing animal fats per se will not affect your blood pressure one way or the other. It seems to be far more complicated than that. Again, random googling:
hyper.ahajournals.org/conte...
nutricion.edu.uy/u01/upload...
Going full vegetarian might help long-term - I won't dispute the empirical observation - but as far as anyone knows, the effect has nothing to do with fats.
FWIW, I measured my blood pressure on Saturday. 116/68 at 56bpm resting pulse rate. I eat about 2800kcal a day, including roughly 120g of animal protein and maybe 150-200g of fat (I only have a daily target for the former, not the latter). Fine, I'm just an anecdote, but there are lots of other people like me presenting as inconvenient disproof of the 'fat causes CVD' hypothesis.
Anjoba : without getting into an endless debate over whether red meat will kill you or not, the best thing you could possibly do for your general health would be to start an exercise programme, which tends to alleviate all sorts of issues associated with diet. In other words, even if red meat IS genuinely responsible for an 18% increase in all-cause mortality, regular exercise reduces that risk by about 300% for people in your agegroup.
cancercouncil.com.au/21639/...
"Cancer Council estimates that in 2010, one in six (or 2600) new bowel cancer cases in Australia were associated with consuming too much red meat and processed meat."
Why would anyone want a risk of 1 in 6 of bowel cancer associated with food? We're not talking longish odds say of 1 in 6,000.
We're talking 1 in 6. Who wants those odds of if you get bowel cancer that is is caused by poor food choices?
And that's just bowel cancer.
Next week I am going to a funeral of a cousin who died of bowel cancer. We're talking life and death here.
Whether the research shows causal or correlation is not up for grabs anymore. Yes it would be lovely to have real hard evidence that red meat causes cancer. But since cancer takes 10 years before it can even be detected by modern science that is very very costly to provide.
All I ask, is it worth the risk?
This forum is about "healthy eating," not about whether a 1 in 6 risk is acceptable for someone to eat from a piece of an animal's corpse.
I'm sorry to hear about your cousin. I do understand why you take this issue so seriously. Cancer isn't a nice way to go. My uncle died of esophageal cancer; my granddad of stomach cancer; my cousin survived testicular cancer. It's a weirdly common disease these days, and my personal view is that the focus on food is a smoke-and-mirrors exercise. If TPTB can blame cancer on people eating the wrong things, then they can divert attention from real, known carcinogens being pumped into the air, the water, the soil, and the food we eat in the name of "progress".
Anyway, your math is a bit suspect. The lifetime risk of being diagnosed with bowel cancer is 1 in 22. Equivalently, annual diagnosis rate is 1 in 1700. Eating red meat is associated with an 18% increase (that's your "1 in 6 cases"; at least we agree on that number). If we assume that the majority of the population are meat-eaters, that implies that a vegan has a 1 in 26 chance of being diagnosed with bowel cancer. Hardly a radical difference, is it?
So the question arises: what is the vegan doing wrong to run such a enormous risk of developing bowel cancer? 1 in 26! Why isn't it zero? Is it excessive fibre? Is it phytoestrogens in his soy burgers? The answer, surely, is that's it's nothing to do with his diet; there is some as-yet-unknown factor. I suggest that the same thing is true of red meat. Bowel cancer has fallen steadily by about 30% since 1970 in Europe, the US, and Australia (I can't find any earlier stats). Red meat consumption has dropped slightly over the last decade, but meat consumption overall has DOUBLED since 1950. So whatever it is that's causing that minor difference in cancer rates for meat-eaters, it clearly isn't the meat itself.
There's no cure for death, and the bottom line is that vegans and meat-eaters die at broadly comparable rates, although possibly they die of different things:
pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9b...
Note that this was published in a journal broadly sympathetic to diet-based interventions for health (yes, journals do have biases - that's why there are so many publishers).
Discovering that meat is bad for us would be about as radical as discovering that bamboo causes impotence in pandas. Even if the study I've just quoted is mistaken, and you can shave a few percentage points off your risk of death by going vegan, don't things like enjoyment of food and quality of life come into the equation? Your personal tastes and allergies notwithstanding, meat isn't poison, and it doesn't help your case to misrepresent the numbers.
the truth is that all your health issues can be vastly improved by been more selective on what you eat.
even at 76 you can improve your quality of life. you porbley already know that hart disease kills more people then any other diseases.
i believe from what i have read over the past 3 years or so that you can help yourself by just making moderate changes to your diet.
i am 67 years old and only now i have finally committed myself to changes in my silly diet that i know will go a long way to improve my health.
every now and then i get reminded that death is final.
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