Vegan Cyclist... what?

It seems far to often as blogs start to die at the foot of twitter, face book, and smart phones there is a plethora of posts about "I need to start writing more... I know I am not writing enough... I am looking for motivation to blog... I need to make time". It would appear that I am beginning to fall into that void as my blog posts grow fewer and farer (is that a word) between.

So far, what exactly has this blog been about? Well I started it right about the time I started riding a bike. I had just visited Marco off the Mark and being inspired, thought It would be nice if friends and family could follow me along this new passion. From time to time my life philosophies also seeped there way onto the pages and then there was the Monday Morning Haiku and the smack talk, not to be confused with trash talk. I have frequently gotten requests to write more posts about being vegan and I have been reluctant for the most part.
A good portion of my life I have been "that guy", you know the one who quits smoking cigarettes for a week and then is one of the leading reformers against smoking, chastising all those who still smoke as being fools, stupid, and horribly ignorant people only to be sucking down a pack and a half of Camel Filters merely a week and a half later (also known as a witch burner). I hate that guy... I always have and I don't think it is very use full to anyone so when it comes to my choices for going vegan I try to proceed with caution and more often opt for silence. I realize that it is a touchy subject that is wildly misunderstood and a lot of prejudice exists. I will cover this subject in installments and will try to keep my thoughts organized, but for those that know me this is no easy feat.

The first thing I want to convey is I was raised mostly vegetarian (a term that I rather despise these days, but it is the best way to describe my eating habits growing up). Now realize, that I was not a very healthy eater as a kid and favored white over green on almost any occasion and was reluctant to try anything new... but my mom did the best job with what she had. I only started eating Red meat while at boarding school... The first time I have a Fillet Mignon I though I had died and gone to heaven... then the bacon then the tri trip... pretty soon I was completely hooked and knew why my dad used to cook up steaks every time my mother went out of town (My mom didn't like the smell and meat and it was pretty much forbidden in our house except when she was gone or asleep).

My introduction to vegan-ism came while studying theatre at the University of Utah. There was an extremely nice happy fellow named Jason who ran in some of the same social circles as I did. He would very often and politely ask me from time to time if he could talk to me about being vegan and while I never really cared two hoots about it I always said yes and gave him my ear. He was very non imposing and didn't go for scare tactics. He simply explained why he made the choice offered me some literature if I cared to move forward and said he knew a whole bunch of people who were doing it and were happy and healthy who would be more then willing to help if I chose to go down that road. My attitude was thanks for the information but no thanks... I had no interest in even slightly inconveniencing myself... My life was a mess in other areas and this seemed to me to be the least of my worries and quite frankly I just did not see the point. Growing up I always heard "eat protein, you need protein, where are you going to get your protein"... Even the name protein sounds far superior to carbohydrates or fats... I understood that perhaps the way we did meat in this country was not necessarily all that good for the environment or for ourselves but ultimately I could not connect to it. I did not know enough about where my food came from and overall I would say I was pretty ignorant on the subject.

Fast forward a couple of years...

When Caitlin and I first got together she will attest to the horrendous dietary habits that I had developed. Primarily Fast Food... I was the heaviest I had ever been and my diet was horrific.

Once I took up cycling and was training for my first triathlon my eating habits began to improve somewhat. I cut out most of the fast food but still ate a bunch of crap feeling justified on account of the amount I was exercising. I also quit smoking around this time.

The next exposure I had to vegan-ism came after a Road Race in Northern California. I shared a ride home with two vegans and being curious about the subject started asking questions. Both Jason and Smitty were properly armed with the facts and principles which they believe were important reasons why they were vegan and shared generously with me. I decided that probably I too should be vegan and perhaps that would force me to eat more variety and more healthy. WRONG. I was vegan for exactly a week, but was not really sure why other than perhaps It would be healthier and better for the environment but I hadn't done any research of my own and it wasn't long before I was eating cheese and then back to large meat lover pizzas 3 times a week.
...but the seed was planted.

Everything about it made sense to me. If I could get all the nutrition that was found in meat with out participating in the horrible atrocity that is the meat and Dairy industry then why wouldn't I?

On my Honeymoon I started reading a bunch of books on the subject and the nail was pretty much in the coffin. I made a firm decision to give it a good honest try for at least a month and see how I felt. The experiment went so well that I am vegan today. And from then to know I have become an avid believer in the fact that animal exploitation is simply wrong. It is one thing if my life depended on it, but it doesn't. I can get all the nutrition from an eggs, milk, and animal products by eating a variety of other foods. I do not judge or condemn anyone's choices (lord knows I am in the minority) but the more I read the more I learn about the environmental impacts of veganism and the health benifits the more I become committed. I am a firm believer that all politics are local and that the only real way to change the world is to change the way that you live your own life. I choose to not buy or consumes animal products where ever I possibly can. I feel very good about this choice.

In close I want to leave you with an excerpt about and from one of my Favorite books, The China Study by Dr. Campbell.

I was the last graduate student of Professor Clive McCay, a Cornell professor famed for extending the lives of rats by feeding them much less food than they would otherwise eat. My Ph.D. research at Cornell was devoted to finding better ways to make cows and sheep grow faster. I was attempting to improve on our ability to produce animal protein, the cornerstone of what I was told was "good nutrition."

I was on a trail to promote better health by advocating the consumption of more meat, milk and eggs. It was an obvious sequel to my own life on the farm and I was happy to believe that the American diet was the best in the world. Through these formative years, I encountered a recurring theme: we were supposedly eating the right foods, especially plenty of high-quality animal protein.

Much of my early career was spent working with two of the most toxic chemicals ever discovered, dioxin and aflatoxin. I initially worked at MIT, where I was assigned a chicken feed puzzle. Millions of chicks a year were dying from an unknown toxic chemical in their feed, and I had the responsibility of isolating and determining the structure of this chemical. After two and one-half years, I helped discover dioxin, arguably the most toxic chemical ever found. This chemical has since received widespread attention, especially because it was part of the herbicide 2,4,5-T, or Agent Orange, then being used to defoliate forests in the Vietnam War.

After leaving MIT and taking a faculty position at Virginia Tech, I began coordinating technical assistance for a nationwide project in the Philippines working with malnourished children. Part of the project became an investigation of the unusually high prevalence of liver cancer, usually an adult disease, in Filipino children. It was thought that high consumption of aflatoxin, a mold toxin found in peanuts and corn, caused this problem. Aflatoxin has been called one of the most potent carcinogens ever discovered.

For ten years our primary goal in the Philippines was to improve childhood malnutrition among the poor, a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Eventually, we established about 110 nutrition "self-help" education centers around the country. The aim of these efforts in the Philippines was simple: make sure that children were getting as much protein as possible. It was widely thought that much of the childhood malnutrition in the world was caused by a lack of protein, especially from animal-based foods. Universities and governments around the world were working to alleviate a perceived "protein gap" in the developing world.

In this project, however, I uncovered a dark secret. Children who ate the highest-protein diets were the ones most likely to get liver cancer! They were the children of the wealthiest families.

I then noticed a research report from India that had some very provocative, relevant findings. Indian researchers had studied two groups of rats. In one group, they administered the cancer causing
aflatoxin, then fed a diet that was composed of 20% protein, a level near what many of us consume in the West. In the other group, they administered the same amount of aflatoxin, but then fed a diet that was only composed of 5% protein. Incredibly, every single animal that consumed the 20% protein diet had evidence of liver cancer, and every single animal that consumed a 5% protein diet avoided liver cancer. It was a 100 to 0 score, leaving no doubt that nutrition trumped chemical carcinogens, even very potent carcinogens, in controlling cancer.

This information countered everything I had been taught. It was heretical to say that protein wasn't healthy, let alone say it promoted cancer. It was a defining moment in my career. Investigating such a provocative question so early in my career was not a very wise choice. Questioning protein and animal-based foods in general ran the risk of my being labeled a heretic, even if it passed the test of "good science."

But I never was much for following directions just for the sake of following directions. When I first learned to drive a team of horses or herd cattle, to hunt animals, to fish our creek or to work in the fields, I came to accept that independent thinking was part of the deal. It had to be. Encountering problems in the field meant that I had to figure out what to do next. It was a great classroom, as any farm boy can tell you. That sense of independence has stayed with me
until today.

So, faced with a difficult decision, I decided to start an in-depth laboratory program that would investigate the role of nutrition, especially protein, in the development of cancer. My colleagues and I were cautious in framing our hypotheses, rigorous in our methodology and conservative in interpreting our findings. I chose to do this research at a very basic science level, studying the biochemical details of cancer formation. It was important to understand not only whether but also how protein might promote cancer. It was the best of all worlds. By carefully following the rules of good science, I was able to study a provocative topic without provoking knee-jerk responses that arise with radical ideas. Eventually, this research became handsomely funded for twenty-seven years by the best reviewed and most competitive funding sources [mostly the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Cancer Society and the American Institute for Cancer Research]. Then our results were reviewed (a second time) for publication in many of the best scientific journals.

What we found was shocking. Low-protein diets inhibited the initiation of cancer by aflatoxin, regardless of how much of this carcinogen was administered to these animals. After cancer initiation was completed, low-protein diets also dramatically blocked subsequent cancer growth. In other words, the cancer-producing effects of this highly carcinogenic chemical were rendered insignificant by a low-protein diet. In fact, dietary protein proved to be so powerful in its effect that we could turn on and turn off cancer growth simply by changing the level consumed.

Furthermore, the amounts of protein being fed were those that we humans routinely consume. We didn't use extraordinary levels, as is so often the case in carcinogen studies. But that's not all. We found that not all proteins had this effect. What protein consistently and strongly promoted cancer? Casein, which makes up 87% of cow's milk protein, promoted all stages of the cancer process. What type of protein did not promote cancer, even at high levels of intake? The safe proteins were from plants, including wheat and soy. As this picture came into view, it began to challenge and then to shatter some of my most cherished assumptions.

These experimental animal studies didn't end there. I went on to direct the most comprehensive study of diet, lifestyle and disease ever done with humans in the history of biomedical research. It was a massive undertaking jointly arranged through Cornell University, Oxford University and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine. The New York Times called it the "Grand Prix of Epidemiology." This project surveyed a vast range of diseases and diet and lifestyle factors in rural China and, more recently, in Taiwan. More commonly known as the China Study, this project eventually produced more than 8,000 statistically significant associations between various dietary factors and disease!

What made this project especially remarkable is that, among the many associations that are relevant to diet and disease, so many pointed to the same finding: people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease. Even relatively small intakes of animal-based food were associated with adverse effects. People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease. These results could not be ignored. From the initial experimental animal studies on animal protein effects to this massive human study on dietary patterns, the findings proved to be consistent. The health implications of consuming either animal or plant-based nutrients were remarkably different.