Modify your eating!
Vocal minority food zealots can be so tedious. They are invariably self-righteous, ill-informed “believers” who have some flaw in their existence that gets them liverish about something and they will bang on ad infinitum in their blinkered and myopic crusade. The vegan/vego brigade were out in force this week during National Diabetes Week putting the boot (golly is that leather?!) into meat producers.
Diabetes Week is a national community heads-up for that insidious condition that is infiltrating the population at an alarming rate. The effects of type 2 diabetes can all point to and exasperate other health threatening conditions. It simply is not a stand alone affliction.
There are some pretty basic dietary considerations for managing the condition (and avoiding it). Weight loss is a primary one and anyone who hasn’t been sleeping under a toadstool for the past decade would know that somewhere in the miasma of diets like Atkins and other high protein based diets there is a light bulb moment for shedding some kilos and girth. Obviously that notion won’t sit well with those who shun the reason they have incisors and an atrophied appendics.
The latest dietary findings on pork – yup a meat protein – from the folk that brought us The CSIRO Total Well-being Diet was issued this week and reported in the media (it had the catchy title of: The role of Australian pork in improving thiamine status, heart disease risk factors and glucose control in people with type 2 diabetes.) The research said, “a high protein diet including lean pork plus resistance exercise provides significant health benefits for weight and fat loss and diabetes control” and that pork was also chock full of thiamin, another good thing in the war on diabetes. The online Fairfax rural media were pretty gung ho about reporting it. But then so was the prattling of the photosynthesis push. Clearly they monitor these publications to add comments to slag-off anything in the agribusiness end of the world that farts and has a mother.
The war cry was the usual. We should all be grazing and browsing, in this case to best control diabetes, and that the research had a vested interest being funded by Australian Pork. Who the hell else is going to pay for this – how else will we find out? One comment even suggested CSIRO was pimping for them.
If it weren’t for the fact that these fanatics dig into their anthropomorphic chaff bag of skewed anecdotes from which to launch these sallies – on the face of it there would be a modicum of logic in the argument – but changing a person’s eating habits – changing lifestyle habits – are not done easily as most sane people who’ve ever tried to do – or not do something – would attest.
A quantum leap into vegetative boredom is a big call for anyone to seriously adopt and maintain from a lifetime of a normal omnivorous diet. So get over it. Modifying is the buzz word here. Modify the diet – make incremental changes – and it will stick … hopefully.
Today I read how there is a health issue with sprouts on the veggie market. There’s a whole lot of salmonella going down with mung, alfalfa and other mouth-watering sprout offerings. I have to say, I’d prefer to take my chances losing weight with one of 15 heart foundation approved cuts of lean pork than a gusset-filling gastro dose from alleged human grade fodder.