Tag Archives: vegetarian diet

Sperm counts decline drastically

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Men are producing a lot less sperm. There has been a drastic drop in the number of sperm produced by men in recent years, and it’s getting worse.

Overall, there is a significant worldwide decline of more than 50% in sperm counts in the past 46 years, a decline that has accelerated in recent years. Sperm count declines among men in America and Canada have accelerated in the last five years, and this reflects a crisis related to our modern environment and lifestyle, including diet, with broad implications for the survival of the human species.

Eating a big fat steak may not be so manly after all! A 2017 study found that red and processed meat like steak, bacon, and cold cuts lowers sperm count and mobility. Another study found that high-fat dairy products like whole milk, ice cream, and cheese were associated with lower sperm mobility and abnormal shape.

Researchers, who studied men ages 18 to 20, found that those who followed a vegetarian diet had higher sperm counts — 25.6 million more per ejaculate, to be exact.

Switching to a healthy vegan diet rich in fruit, vegetables, and whole grains while young could help prevent fertility issues later in life. Men on a Western diet had lower levels of the chemical inhibin-B, which may signal damage to sperm-producing Sertoli cells.

The message is clear: a plant-based diet helps men produce more and healthier sperm.  It also helps with other aspects of men’s health such as testosterone levels and erectile dysfunction.

Veg Diet treats Fibromyalgia

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Woman With Severe Neck Pain 6This disease needs a better treatment and needs it badly. It’s one of those particularly hard-to-treat diseases, but new research shows that a plant-based diet may help quite a bit.

Fibromyalgia is a tough disease to experience. It hurts, it’s exhausting, and it can be depressing. Fibromyalgia, which affects millions of Americans, is a disease of persistent widespread pain, stiffness, fatigue, plus disrupted and unrefreshing sleep. Not surprisingly, those with fibromyalgia have functional impairment of the activities of daily living. Current treatments aren’t especially effective for most patients, so something better is needed.

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Thirsty in California

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Since we last reported on the drought in California and how a vegetarian diet could help, the drought has only gotten worse. As Californians cut residential water use by 25 percent under Governor Jerry Brown’s unprecedented mandatory restrictions, pressure on the drought-stricken state’s water resources continues to come from its robust agriculture industry, which accounts for about 80 percent of the state’s total water consumption, with livestock claiming the lion’s share.

Some of the vegetarian naysayers complain that since so much of California’s meat is eaten around the country, it would take a national effort to save California’s water. To this we reply, good idea! Let’s all do our part and go vegetarian to save California from an all-too-thirsty fate. Others point to global warming as the main culprit. Maybe so, but we have a diet for that as well.

While we are happy to get the word out about the environmental benefits of going vegetarian, we really wish the environmental organizations would join us. So far only a very few do. However, since even the government is starting to talk about the environmental impact of animal foods, we have high hopes that this omission will change in the not too distant future.

Global Hunger – the Veg Solution

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African children eatingIt’s official. The world’s population now stands at 7 Billion. Over a billion people are living with chronic hunger and malnutrition, and rising food prices are challenging the household budgets of the other 6 billion. What many people don’t know is that it is meat consumption in the developed world, and rapidly rising meat consumption in the developing world, that are the prime driving forces behind rising food prices and global hunger. For years this went unrecognized by even economists and policymakers. However, this has now started to change.

Starvation kills, and it hurts to have to go to bed malnourished and hungry. Hunger and malnutrition are some of the most serious problems facing humanity and it’s getting worse. Global hunger is at an all time high, with about 1 billion people in the world going to bed each night still hungry. In the next year, over 10 million people will actually starve to death. Even worse, it is the children who are the most vulnerable. Read more

Interview with a Cardiologist

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Dr. Arun Kalyanasundaram (Dr. K) is an interventional cardiologist with practices at Highline Medical Center and Swedish Medical Center.  He moved to Seattle in 2011. He strongly believes in a holistic approach to cardiology – with a particular emphasis on preventive cardiology primarily through diet and lifestyle. He will be speaking and answering questions at our next Monthly Dining Event on October 17th.  We asked him to tell us more about himself and his approach to cardiology.

Tell us something about yourself. Where are you from originally, how long have you been a doctor, and cardiologist, and what brings you to the Northwest?

I have been a doctor now for about 13 years. I am originally from India. I obtained my MPH at the University of Maryland, and then did my residency and fellowship at Geisinger and Cleveland clinics respectively. I chose to move to the Pacific Northwest because it is unique in terms of scenic beauty, cultural diversity and just an overall great place to raise a family.

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Making Health Insurance Reform Work

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First Congress voted, and now the Supreme Court has spoken, so, as of this writing, a massive overhaul of the health system seems likely. The questions on many people’s minds at this point are: How are we going to pay for it all? and will there be enough medical staff and facilities to go around? The entire debate about health care is driven by the fact that Americans need so much care. Collectively we are sicker than we have ever been. When you think about it, what we really need the most to make things work is a healthier country. This is where helping the country to move towards a vegetarian diet can make a big difference, perhaps the crucial difference between success and failure.

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What’s Yoga Got To Do With It?

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The answer is plenty when it comes to vegetarian food choices.

The most important part of the yoga practice is eating a vegetarian diet. -Sri K. Pattabhi Jois

Yoga has hit the mainstream. With yoga studios popping up all over, offering everything from traditional forms of yoga to new forms aimed at special groups ranging from prenatal moms to airline pilots (there are even new and innovative forms of yoga such as laughter yoga and Christian yoga), more and more people are giving it a try. However, in their drive to become more popular, or perhaps because of a shortage of fully trained instructors, many, if not most, yoga studios have dropped the vegetarian portion of yoga theory and practice. Read more

Consumer Reports Fails to Give Life-saving Information

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Maybe we were just naïve, but when we saw that Consumer Reports magazine was focusing this month’s cover story on “Protecting Your Heart”,  we thought that there would a major emphasis on healthy vegetarian diets, or at the very least prominent mention of this life-saving solution. Alas, there wasn’t a word. Consumer Reports positions itself as a rater of all things that people across the county need or want to know more about.  Given its glaring omission, we thought it just might be high time we gave our rating of this rater.

To be fair, there are a few good points in the article.  They do stress that lifestyle changes are the best prevention, and they do emphasize that some procedures such as angioplasties are not effective in preventing heart attacks, under most circumstances, as a front line treatment. They also point out that “people tend to view a heart doctor as some sort of action hero, and think that the more aggressive, the better.”

However, large-scale studies such as the Framingham Heart Study or The China Study, and the interventional studies such those conducted on heart patients by doctors including Dean Ornish, John McDougall and Caldwell Esselstyn, have clearly shown the significant benefits of a healthy vegetarian diet. The new movie, Forks Over Knives, which emphasizes these benefits, has created quite a stir, and there’s been much talk in the media about the great results former president Bill Clinton has achieved in treating his heart disease on a veg diet. So there really is no excuse for their failure to mention the importance of a vegetarian diet, and we can only give Consumer Reports a failing grade for choosing not to give their readers this lifesaving message. How did Consumer Reports miss the study showing that a veg diet was as powerful at lowering cholesterol as the American Heart Association diet and a statin drug combined? How did Consumer Reports miss the insurance industry study showing that for every dollar spent on switching patients over to a veg-diet centered heart disease program, $5.55 were saved in treatment costs? A healthy vegetarian diet, and especially a healthy vegan diet, is the most powerful tool to protect your heart, and in most cases, may even be the most powerful tool to heal your heart once disease has already set in. 

The article quotes Dr. Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic, lamenting the failure of most doctors to act on so much of the medical research when it comes to heart disease. He says “It may take years for evidence to trickle down to private practice.” It seems that the same is true of many mass market magazines, such as Consumer Reports.