Thursday 27 January 2011

Weather Disasters Likely To Rise

OfficialWire: Weather Disasters Likely To Rise:

More reasons to follow a healthy sustainable Plantarian path

The Center for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters, at that Universite Catholique de Louvain in Brussels, found that the 373 natural disasters in 2010 killed more than 296,800 people and caused about $110 billion in damages.

Margareta Wahlstrom, the U.N. special envoy for disasters, said 'These figures are bad but could be seen as benign in years to come,'

'Unless we act now, we will see more and more disasters due to unplanned urbanization and environmental degradation.'

Wahlstrom said weather-related disasters are likely to rise because of complications tied to global climate change. A heat wave during the summer caused more than 50,000 fatalities in Russia and the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti killed more than 222,000.

ONE WORLD DAY - November 1st Make a Difference!

ONE WORLD DAY - November 1st Make a Difference!

It's finally live ! - polls, forums, ideas, videos, pictures, sponsorship opportunities, blog and anything else you want.

A day of focus to promote a healthier more sustainable lifestyle to people who need a healthier more sustainable plantarian lifestyle.

www.1worldday.org

Tuesday 25 January 2011

Doctors Deliver Giant Power Plate to White House to Protest Government Inaction on Obesity >> News and Media Center >> PCRM

Doctors Deliver Giant Power Plate to White House to Protest Government Inaction on Obesity

Plantarians Protest at Governmental Ill Health Policy
PCRM doctors and dietitians protest outside the White House with a colorful 6-foot-high Power Plate food guide.
The doctors, led by Neal Barnard, M.D., president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, also delivered letters to President Obama and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack calling on them to replace MyPyramid with the Power Plate. Earlier this month, PCRM sued the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services for ignoring a petition to replace MyPyramid with the Power Plate.
“Americans are getting fatter and sicker by the day,” Dr. Barnard said. “If we’re going to beat this national crisis, the federal government must offer straightforward, accurate advice on the power of vegetarian foods to fight obesity. Our Power Plate offers lifesaving advice, and it is simple enough for a child to follow.”
The Power Plate was developed by PCRM dietitians as a replacement for the USDA’s confusing MyPyramid food guide. The Power Plate is a simple, colorful graphic depicting a plate divided into four food groups: fruits, vegetables, grains, and legumes. There are no confusing portion sizes and food hierarchies to follow; the Power Plate simply asks people to eat a variety of all four food groups each day.
Since the first Food Pyramid was introduced nearly two decades ago, obesity and diabetes have become commonplace. About 27 percent of young adults are now too overweight to qualify for military service, and an estimated one in three children born in 2000 will develop diabetes.
PCRM’s lawsuit asks the USDA and HHS to address the worsening epidemics of obesity and diet-related diseases by exercising their joint authority under the National Nutrition Monitoring & Related Research Act to withdraw the MyPyramid diagram and adopt the Power Plate food diagram and dietary guidelines.
The Power Plate graphic is based on current nutrition research showing that plant-based foods are the most nutrient-dense and help prevent chronic diseases.

Friday 21 January 2011

1 World Day

1 World Day: It was thought a One World Day would reach a larger audience than the normal World Vegan Day making large organizations and their members more likely to hear about it.

Hopefully making our target for a world record for plant based eating more achievable.

Perhaps we can encourage some of the millions of people who supported  Earth Day to think about the potential weapons of mass destruction that they use to eat their food.

Wednesday 19 January 2011

Study: Heart Disease, 8 Fruit & Veg a Day

European Society of Cardiology

Eating more fruit and vegetables is linked to a lower risk of dying from ischaemic heart disease

A European study investigating the links between diet and disease has found that people who consume more fruit and vegetables have a lower risk of dying from ischaemic heart disease – the most common form of heart disease and one of the leading causes of death in Europe. However, the authors point out that a higher fruit and vegetable intake occurs among people with other healthy eating habits and lifestyles, and that these factors could also be associated with the lower risk of dying from IHD. The study is published online today (Wednesday 19 January) in the European Heart Journal [1].

Data analysed from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) Heart study has shown that people who ate at least eight portions of fruit and vegetables a day had a 22% lower risk of dying from IHD than did those who consumed fewer than three portions a day. A portion weighed 80 grams, equal to a small banana, a medium apple, or a small carrot.

Dr Francesca Crowe of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford, UK, and the first author of the paper by the EPIC study collaborators, said: “This study involved over 300,000 people in eight different European countries, with 1,636 deaths from IHD. It shows a 4% reduced risk of dying from IHD for each additional portion of fruit and vegetables consumed above the lowest intake of two portions. In other words, the risk of a fatal IHD for someone eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day would be 4% lower compared to someone consuming four portions a day, and so on up to eight portions or more.”

Ischaemic heart disease (IHD) is characterised by reduced blood supply to the heart; people suffering from it can develop angina, chest pains and have a heart attack.

The EPIC study started in 1992 and recruited participants from a total of ten European countries [2] until 2000. For the analysis of IHD deaths, data from eight countries for people aged between 40 and 85 were used. Participants answered questions about their diet at the time of entry to the study and other questions about health, socio-economic status and life-style, such as smoking, drinking and exercise habits. They were followed-up for an average of nearly eight and a half years.

The researchers found that the average intake of fruit and vegetables was five portions a day; people in Greece, Italy and Spain ate more, and those in Sweden ate less.

When analysing the data, the researchers made allowances for confounding factors such as differences in lifestyles and eating habits. However, the study could be limited by errors in measuring correctly people’s fruit and vegetable intake as well as other aspects of their diet. In addition, the study had a higher proportion of women, which might not be generalisable to the wider European population.

Dr Crowe said: “The main message from this analysis is that, in this study, people who consume more fruits and vegetables have lower risk of dying from IHD. However, we need to be cautious in our interpretation of the results because we are unsure whether the association between fruit and vegetable intake and risk of IHD is due to some other component of diet or lifestyle.

“If we could understand, by means of well-designed intervention studies, the biological mechanisms that could underlie the association between fruits and vegetables and IHD, this might help to determine whether or not the relation between fruit and vegetables with IHD risk is causal.”

In an accompanying editorial [3], Professor Sir Michael Marmot, director of the University College London (UCL) International Institute for Society and Health, head of the UCL Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, and chairman of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health, writes that it is difficult to reach firm conclusions about causation from results that show a 22% lower risk of dying from IHD (an odds ration of 0.78) in people who eat eight portions of fruit and vegetables a day.

He continues: “Such an odds ratio is, however, of huge practical importance. Cardiovascular disease is the most common cause of death. A reduction of 22% is huge. But... this reduction in mortality comes with consumption of eight portions a day, or 640g. Such a high consumption was found in only 18% of the men and women in these eight cohorts. There would need to be big shift in dietary patterns to achieve this healthy consumption of eight portions a day. It is worth trying to move in that direction. Reductions in cancers of several sites, in blood pressure and stroke, would add to this reduction in fatal CHD. Moving to a diet that emphasises fruit and vegetables is of great importance to public health.”


Notes:
[1] “Fruit and vegetable intake and mortality from ischaemic heart disease: results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-Heart study”. European Heart Journal. doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehq465
[2] The ten countries include: Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. For the Heart component of the study, data from France and Norway were excluded due to the small number of IHD deaths at the end of the follow-up period.
[3] “Fruit and vegetable intake reduces risk of fatal coronary heart disease”. European Heart Journal. doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehq506


http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/eurheartj/press_releases/freepdf/ehq465.pdf
and
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/eurheartj/press_releases/freepdf/ehq506.pdf

The European Heart Journal is the flagship journal of the European Society of Cardiology (http://www.escardio.org). It is published on behalf of the ESC by Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press.

Wednesday 5 January 2011

Plantarian Diet in the News

Plantarian health vegetarian vegan diets:

Nutritionist Yvonne Bishop-Weston kicks the new Plantarian year off to a good start with a Plantarian  article in Bella magazine with a cold turkey diet

 Booja Booja chocolates get a plug as does LoNo Alcohol free champagne

World Vegan Day - Vegan News

Plantarian the Road to Health

Plantarian healthy diet: The Double One Diet Challenge

Plantarian : World Vegan Day 2011

Online Diary -