Choices, Voices, And Veganism: Diet For The Many

As I write this, I am about to leave for Boston to speak at iV, the Ivy League Vegan Conference, at Harvard. Prominent voices will gather there and collectively, one anticipates, make the case for veganism. The timing is a bit ironic. A paper was just published in the Lancet, describing the lifestyle and health status of the Tsimane. The paper generated considerable excitement, and widespread media attention, because the Tsimane, a population in the Bolivian Amazon described as living “a subsistence lifestyle of hunting, gathering, fishing, and farming,” were found to have “the lowest reported levels of coronary artery disease of any population recorded to date.” The Tsimane, obviously, are not vegans, as the references to both hunting and fishing indicate. On the other hand, they are not hunting for meat in the supermarket, as I pointed out to one correspondent who sent me the study and asked if his penchant for meat was now exonerated. My answer was perhaps, provided it was satisfied by advent of bow and arrow and involved no cellophane. The Tsimane, in common with our Stone Age ancestors, eat the meat of wild animals and fish they obtain the hard and old-fashioned way. Those animals, in turn, get their food the hard and old-fashioned way, too; they are not fed copiously in captivity. Consequently, their own bodies are lean, and represent the fats they derive from their food sources. The result is that the Tsimane diet has virtually no trans fat, is very low...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news