Tag Archives: vegetarian

LinkedIn café offers plant-based by default

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The headquarters building of LinkedIn, based in San Francisco, has converted their employee café to be plant-based by default.  The company was looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint, and the food they served in their cafeterias provided them with a big opportunity to make a difference. Working with an organization called “Greener by Default” alongside their catering partner, Sodexo-owned Good Eating Company, they were able to gradually move to a 65% plant-based menu and the replacement of cows’ milk with oat milk as the default.

Although they still serve meat dishes, these are limited in number, and they only serve the most carbon-intensive options such as beef or lamb, in one dish per week.  They have worked to create vegan versions of the most popular meat dishes in the café, so that diners will likely choose the most climate-friendly options.  As they made the transition to offering more plant-based options, they carried out regular surveys of the diners to see how they felt about the new choices that were being offered.  As the feedback received was positive, they were able to make more changes over a three-month trial period, and ended with having switched the ratio of foods from five meat meals to three plant-based meals to five plant-based meals and three meat-based at each meal. Other LinkedIn offices will now start working on the same menu transformation.

“When a corporate trendsetter like LinkedIn shows that people are happy to choose plant-based foods when they’re accessible and appealing, it’s a huge leap forward towards a more sustainable food culture,” said Katie Cantrell, CEO of Greener by Default.  Greener by Default works with a range of clients including healthcare facilities, universities, restaurants and more.  They include Harvard University, Stanford Medicine and a global soap manufacturer Dr Bronner, as happy clients alongside LinkedIn.  They present plant-based food as being more sustainable, cost-effective and inclusive. Clients note that by making plant-based meals the default, they also increase the healthfulness of their meals.  They seem to have hit on a winning formula to help businesses make a significant switch to their cafeteria options.

Jane Goodall’s new vegan cookbook

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Renowned animal lover and chimpanzee scientist Jane Goodall recently published her first plant-based cookbook, EatMeatless – Good for Animals, the Earth and All. Along with the Jane Goodall Institute, she decided to create this collection of 80 plant-based recipes because, she said,

“It’s becoming more and more clear that the obsession with eating meat and dairy products and eggs is totally destroying the environment. It’s creating methane, it’s wasting water, and it’s bad for our health.”

Jane wrote the cookbook’s foreword and many nuggets of wisdom throughout the book.

A lifelong animal lover, Goodall became a vegetarian in the 1970s. “For me, the starting point was ethical,” she says.“It all began when I read Peter Singer’s Book.” Singer is an Australian moral philosopher. His book, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, was first published in 1975. In it, Singer explores non-human animals’ ability to experience suffering, particularly within factory farming.

“I didn’t know about factory farms up until that point, I was out in Gombe and I had no idea that they existed,” continues Goodall. “The next time I saw meat on my plate I thought ‘ah, that symbolizes fear, pain, death.’ And I didn’t eat anymore ever again.”

Though her initial reasons, she says, were “ethical and purely about animals,” they are now also about the environment. She is particularly concerned with the raising of animals on factory farms, which requires the clearing of huge swaths of habitat and the use of pesticides, fertilizer and lots of fossil fuels.

She also recognizes the health benefits, and the growing research that links meat to human antibiotic resistance and the emergence of superbugs. She has published many different books, including Harvest for Hope, a guide to mindful eating.

For those of any age, Goodall stresses it’s never too late to tweak your diet. She offers a simple suggestion for meat eaters: Start by going meatless one day a week. Her cookbook (or ours) is a great place to start.

Covid and plant-based diets

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We’ve been getting a lot of questions about following a plant-based diet and COVID. There are some things a plant-based diet can do it and something it can’t.  It turns out that a plant-based diet can significantly reduce the severity of COVID.

In one study, looking at doctors and nurses, a plant-based diet reduced the chance of getting a severe or moderate case by 73%, which we think is saying a lot.  Compare this to those individuals following “low carbohydrate, high protein diets” such as Atkins and others, which are typically high in food that comes from animals, who had an almost 4 times greater risk of moderate-to-severe COVID. Another study showed that among the elderly, those following a non vegetarian diet had 5 times the risk of having a severe case of COVID.

So what’s up with this? We think there are two things at work. A plant-based diet has been shown to reduce inflammation. Part of the damage COVID does is by inciting extreme inflammation. Studies have shown that those following a plant-based diet have a lower baseline level of inflammation. Second,  people with chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure, have been shown to have worse outcomes when infected with the COVID virus. People who follow a plant-based diet have, on average, much lower rates of these diseases. Lower levels of baseline inflammation and lower rates of chronic disease combine to give vegetarians and vegans the edge.  

Can a good diet prevent you from getting COVID in the first place? Here the effect of the plant-based diet is much less pronounced. One study showed only a 9% reduction in the risk of getting infected in the first place. Based on the evidence, vaccination is very strongly recommended for the general public.

While 9% isn’t much of a reduction, with a disease as widespread as COVID it can still make a difference in preventing illness. A 73% reduction in the risk of getting a severe or moderate case of COVID makes a huge difference in reducing suffering and saving lives.

New York City Hospitals serve plant-based meals

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All 11 hospitals run by New York City will now serve plant-based meals by default.

The move came after diet-change-focused nonprofit, The Better Food Foundation, partnered with New York City Hospitals and the Mayor’s Office. The foundation aims to aid healthcare organizations in improving health outcomes while cutting carbon emissions, and decreasing food costs.

The hospitals serve three million meals for lunch and dinner each year. While meat options will still be available to those who want them, the hospitals are offering plant-based dishes for every meal.

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Diets that fight global warming

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The food we consume has a massive impact on our planet. According to one analysis, based on UN data, the diet that helps fight global warming the most, by having the least greenhouse emissions, is the vegan diet followed by a vegetarian diet. You can see how the different diets stack up when it comes to global warming in the graph below.

Bar chart
How much CO2e (in billions of tonnes, or Gt) would be saved if the whole world switched to each of these diets. Terms as defined by CarbonBrief. Data: IPCC.

When it comes to global warming we need to move fast if we are to avoid the worst consequences of global warming. A switch to a plant-based diet may be just what we need to avoid the worst consequences of global warming.

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Live longer with plant-based diet

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A young adult in the U.S. could add more than a decade to their life expectancy by changing their diet from a typical Western diet to an optimized diet that includes more legumes, vegetables, whole grains and nuts, and less red and processed meat, according to a new study.

Gains are predicted to be larger the earlier the dietary changes are initiated in life. For older people, the anticipated gains to life expectancy from such dietary changes would be smaller but still substantial. The message is clear. You’re never too young to start on a plant-based diet, and you’re never too old to benefit from it.

According to the study, young people starting out at age 20 could, on average, add 10 years to life expectancy for women and 13 years for men. Starting at age 60, it could add 8 years, on average, for women and 9 years, on average, for men. Even 80-year-old women and men could add 3 years, on average, to their life expectancy.

This should come as no surprise. The Journal of the American Medical Association says that diet is the number one risk factor for disease in the United States. Among the 10 leading causes of death (before COVID) are heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease, all of which a plant-based diet can help prevent and treat.

According to the study, an optimal diet had substantially higher intake than a typical western diet of whole grains, legumes, fruits, vegetables, and nuts.  Yet, many doctors treat nutrition as a side issue. Of course, they were offered little to no training in medical school.

Of course, we don’t say that nutrition is the only relevant factor in life expectancy. For instance cigarette smoking has a large impact, along with access to medical care. Nevertheless, the nutritional effect  on health is considerable and offers a wide ranging opportunity for increasing life expectancy.

America is thirsty

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America is thirsty. But there’s something powerful we can all do to help quench that thirst.

First, let’s unpack some stats. 43% of the U.S. and 51% of the lower 48 states are currently in drought. 234 million acres of cropland in U.S. is experiencing drought. 130 million people in the U.S. are currently affected by drought this week. It’s a big problem.

What can we do about it? After all we can’t change the weather. True, but we can change what we eat and it turns out that may be more effective than anything else. Eating vegetarian foods saves a huge amount of water because producing meat is so water-intensive compared to plant foods.

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Avoiding dementia – new research

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Dementia is a scary disease, so we all want to do everything we can to avoid it. One recent study showed that vegetarians have a 38% lower risk of dementia. We already knew that part of the reason was that vegetarians have, on average, a much lower prevalence of risk factors such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, high cholesterol and lower levels of markers for inflammation such a C-reactive protein, but now new research shows there’s an additional reason.

Investigators found that individuals with the highest blood levels of lutein, zeaxanthin and beta-cryptoxanthin were less likely to have dementia, even decades later than their peers with lower levels of these phytonutrients. Phytonutrients are nutrients found in plant foods besides vitamins, minerals and fiber, that nourish our bodies and are the focus of a lot of medical research.

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Illinois requires plant-based school lunches

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The state of Illinois has passed a bill (HB 4089) in both houses, that requires a school district to provide a plant-based school lunch option to those students who submit a prior request to the school district.  It now just awaits the governor’s signature.

“All students deserve the opportunity to have a well-rounded, nutritional meal at school that meets their dietary needs,” said sponsoring senator Dave Koehler, D-Peoria. “For some kids it may be the only substantial meal they get that day, and they need to be able to make the most of it.”

We’ve written before about the New York City school district requiring Meatless Mondays and now Vegan Fridays, championed by mayor Eric Adams. Some schools in the NYC district have gone even further by providing only vegetarian lunches every day of the week.

While we wish that school lunches were plant-based for all students, Illinois has taken a good first step, enabling those students who want to have a healthy and animal-free lunch to get one.  

Asthma – the latest science

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Childhood asthma is a major and growing public health problem worldwide. Adults get asthma too. The western, meat-centered diet may partly explain the “asthma epidemic” in the United States.

Asthma is the most common chronic disease of childhood. The prevalence has been increasing at an alarming rate and has more than doubled in the last decade. Over 9 million children in the United States have been diagnosed with asthma. That’s a lot of children. There are few things more upsetting than a sick child.

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