The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [59]
Amazingly, only 4 percent of today’s vegetarians avoid animal products entirely, an inconsequential quarter of a percent of the total American adult population, or a mere five hundred thousand people from coast to coast. This is the group I joined a month ago, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
Most Americans go vegetarian for their health, giving “not sure” as their runner-up reason, distantly followed by the environment and animal rights. Vegetarians do have fewer heart attacks, lower blood pressure, and trimmer figures than meat eaters. But as vegetarians tend to lead healthier lives in general, and exercise more than average, a vegetarian diet in itself may not have much advantage over an omnivorous diet low in saturated fat, full of fruits and vegetables, and moderate though not phobic when it comes to meat. As a lacto-ovo vegetarian in the 1970s, I more than made up for the presumed health advantages of a vegetarian diet by cooking with generous quantities of butter and cream, consuming cheese to my heart’s content, and keeping the ice-cream churn perpetually spinning. That is why I am a vegan this time around.
The day before becoming a vegan, I had my cholesterol tested, and yesterday I had my blood taken again. I expect the results tomorrow. Then I will know whether strict vegetarianism does me any good. People vary widely in how closely their serum cholesterol reacts to changes in their diet. If I am very diet-sensitive, my cholesterol should have dropped by about 15 percent—half the maximum benefit one can hope for after staying on a diet extremely low in saturated fat for several months. But the problem is this: If my cholesterol has fallen by as much as 15 percent, how can I justify eating meat ever again for the rest of my life? I can’t decide which way to root.
The food press has recently been full of statements like “Eating low on the food chain has tended to be pretty disastrous from the gastronomic point of view—but not any longer!” The evidence presented is always a photo of an exquisite and sumptuous vegetable feast created by one of the country’s top young chefs. I happily sample several of these every year, and the problem with them is usually the same. They may be lovely to look at, artfully cooked, and sometimes delicious, but you would not survive very long on meals like these, because they rarely contain any protein. For that you must consume large platefuls of unglamorous legumes and grains.
Strict vegetarians need to be careful in making their nutritional ends meet. Most would suffer deficiencies of vitamin B12, vitamin D, and iron if they did not take vitamin pills or eat fortified foods such as Total and Special K cereals. These three common deficiencies are the subject of intense controversy, but pregnant or lactating women, children, and the elderly should be particularly watchful. Early signs that your body is starved for B12 can be dangerously masked (even until irreversible nerve damage occurs) by the plentiful folic acid in vegan diets.
An Immutable Law
From too much business they didn’t close.
—A waiter at Ratner’s dairy restaurant on the Lower East Side, explaining why its competitor Rappaport’s had gone out of business
Back in the palmy days of Diet for a Small Planet, protein was seen as the main thing to worry about. The average American diet serves up double the amount of protein we actually need (usually given as 0.36 grams for every pound of your weight, at least for adults, or about two ounces a day for a 180-pound man), but getting enough protein as a strict vegetarian does take a bit of planning. You won’t find much protein in a plate of delicate emerald greens dressed with balsamic vinegar or in a jewel-like mosaic of asparagus and beets. Lappé’s solution was to build complete