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"Meatless Mondays" is a great concept, but it's really disappointing to see a recipe promoted for this event that is just plain awful, and the young female chef is promoted as having done something really good (e.g., mainstream recognition). But, I did the math. It ain't pretty. Here's the link to the recipe:
http://meatoutmondays.org/emails/10-09-27.htm
Okay, 5 cups of sugar is 3870 calories and around 1000 grams of sugar. 1 cup of coconut is 552 calories and 57 gms of fat. 1/2 cup of vegetable oil is 900 claories and 100 grams of PURE fat. 1/2 cup of coconut oil is 900 calories, 100 grams of fat, 94% of that SATURATED fat.
Strawberries, refined flour, chocolote, and immense amount of sugar and pure fat. What does that work out per serving?
FAT: over 20 grams (Esselstyn/Ornish daily recommendation, 14 to 24, Feds, 30 grams)
SUGAR: over 80 grams per serving. (American Heart Association recommendation for adult woman PER DAY, is around 24 grams of sugar)
CALORIES: around 500. A third to a fourth of what most people need PER DAY.
Is this recipe really worth promoting as vegan? It has an entire day's worth of fat per serving, a ton of saturated fat, and over three times the recommended sugar per day for a woman, somewhere around twice for a full grown adult man. PER SERVING. By conservative American Heart Association recommendations, it's bad for your heart on TWO counts: sugar and fat. By those who've reversed heart disease through diet, it's even worse.
IMHO, FARM should be embarassed to promote this recipe at all. Just because it's vegan, doesn't mean it's healthy. This is the kind of fat and sugar-ladden quasi-food products that are killing people on a massive scale in this country. Doesn't matter that it's vegan. It's toxic. Nutritionally a waste of time and it caters to fat/sugar taste addictions.
Furthermore, it's a travesty to the tasty, antioxident rich strawberries. Do they really need to wrapped in fat, flour, and sugar to be savored?
Chef Chloe, just like "fat is flavor Chef Tal" deserves no praise for creating and promoting such intrinsically unhealthy food mixtures under the "but it's vegan" conceptual umbrella. This is, well, crap. You may save an animal, but you will certainly contribute to the higher probability of killing a human prematurely from any number of chronic disorders.
Apparently, FARM doesn't care. In their zeal to protect the animals, they seem to have forgotten that, SURPRISE! humans are animal, too. And recipes like those of Chloe and Tal are deadly... to human animals. These Chefs should be admonished for promoting such unhealthy food mixtures instead of using their celebrity status to spread the word about truly health low-fat vegan meals.
We're sometimes like people who've just had a breakup and are so excited that anyone would be interested in us that we lower our standards and will go out with anyone who is even close to the former. We get so excited that "a young pretty vegan chef is getting recognized on cable" that we forget, it's not just "vegan." It's what's healthy vegan that matters. We don't need to be that desperate. Over 500,000 people die from heart disease each year in this country, and the research of Esselstyn and Ornish clearly shows it's the added fat that is a primary cause.
Sugar, non-food fat, flour, and a handful of strawberries, just isn't all that impressive as a recipe. I admire FARM's goals to promote vegan food, but let's get real and promote healthy vegan food. It's not the 60s. We know how to reverse Type II diabetes and heart disease: no-added fat vegan food. Promoting anything else in the vegan realm is hypocrisy... or ignorance.
2010.09.25 at 05:39 in Activism, Food and Drink, Heart Disease, Nutrition, Recipe(s), Statistics, Veganism | PermalinkTrackBackTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Mark, I found myself nodding in agreement at your sentence,"We're sometimes like people who've just had a breakup and are so excited that anyone would be interested in us that we lower our standards and will go out with anyone who is even close to the former." So true!
When I am counseling new vegans or people in transition, I sometimes find myself so eager to encourage them in baby-steps, no matter how small, that I sometimes lose track of the big picture. And that is a ultimately doing them a disservice.
Thanks for the excellent reality check.
[And thanks for your feedback and, well, encouragement. It's a tough issue to advocate: many vegans tell me "it's okay if they do the fatty faux cheese," etc., as they are transitioning.
But the more important problems, the taste addiction to fat, salt, and or sugar, aren't being addressed. As I've been blunt about, we may, in theory, save more animals, but we're still going to see humans dropping in what are literally epidemic numbers (and at what an emotional/financial cost) whether they are vegan or not, if they continue to consume so much unnecessary fat, oil, salt, and sugar.
I'm lucky in that I believe firmly in the research of Ornish, Esselstyn, and Barnard, let alone, that the concept of oil NOT being real food makes a helluva lot of sense to me. After over 3 and a half years, I love not being addicted to the taste of the aforementioned unholy trio.
I've no problem with the first transition, say, to vegan (with, say, fatty Daiya cheese), but there's need to be a second. Why waste the time and potential deterioration of one's cardiovascular system?
I'd rather take the, ahem, bull by the horns: rid myself of the taste addictions for fat, sugar, and salt.
It's going to be a tough and protracted battle, but those of us who can demonstrate, through our own health and persistence of the facts, that a no-added fat vegan diet is the best for our longevity will eventually be proven right.
I admire the raw vegan foodists, only must note that so many of their recipes have SO much fat in them. But that's another matter.
Again, thanks for your feedback and you've a nice website!
Best regards, Mark
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