go vegan and take up yoga

My mother will be 67 in just a few months and I'm already wondering if she'll see 70. Like far too many Americans, she is obese and has serious health issues as a result: high blood pressure, diabetes, heart damage, kidney damage. And she is on a virtual rainbow of pills, all of which affect what she can and cannot eat and what she can or cannot do. Her weight makes it hard to exercise. Further exacerbating the situation, she has always been a "picky" eater, but the drugs and diabetes further limit what she can eat (at least in theory), ironically enough eliminating many foods otherwise considered healthy. And then to top it all off, last week she sends me an email: She has gout.

Look up gout on wikipedia and you will find that it was once called "the rich man's disease" because it was associated with rich food. Essentially, the body is overloaded and cannot clean out all the waste and it builds up in the joints.

So my advice to her: go vegan and take up yoga.

I knew she would never listen to me and she had a ready list of excuses. I am not a vegan and I do not oppose eating meat, so why did I tell my mother to go vegan if I haven't? The first and foremost answer is that her bad eating habits have so destroyed her body that only an extreme change is going to make a difference. Meat and animal products are harder to process than plant products. The gout signals that she is consuming too much rich food, meat in particular.

But there is a second, subtler reason I told her what I did: awareness. I feed my family a vegan meal at least once a week. Not only is it healthy, but it helps put things back into perspective. Meat and and rich foods taste great but there are so many wonderful flavors in foods that are healthier for us on a day to day basis and so much of that has been lost. My advice was to rediscover those basic foods that sustained so many generations before us, when meat and fat-rich foods were saved for special occasions. If you examine French cooking, notorious for being "rich," what you find is peasant fare built on simple, healthy foods. The fats (such as olive oil or duck fat) that are added not only to contribute flavor but boost the calories so that the meals could sustain someone through a day of manual labor. Ratatouille is a good example. It is essentially a vegetable stew of eggplant, zucchini and tomato flavored with herbs and olive oil. It tastes wonderful, the kids eat it up, and it just happens to be vegan.

When studying Economics, one of the first ideas discussed is that of "unlimited wants." This is most easily seen in children. Parents discover quickly that you can never satisfy a child's desire for new toys. It doesn't matter if you spend a hundred dollars or a million, when it is all finished, the child would still want more. As adults, I don't think we ever really outgrow our "unlimited wants," but (hopefully) we learn to control them. But the capacity in our society to eat so much rich food, especially meat, means we have lost sight of wants versus needs. Just because we want it and it is cheap, doesn't mean we should have it.

The epidemic of obesity in this country could be curbed if not reversed by a return to simpler fare. If factory farms were abolished either through legal or social pressure, then the price of meat would increase and the problem would solve itself. But I don't see that happening. Fortunately, our lives, at least for the moment, do not depend on those around us discovering the pleasures and joys of simple foods. We can do this ourselves with no laws or regulations.

Now if I can just find someone around here who teaches yoga.