Loneliness: Worse Than Smoking

What could be worse for your health than smoking fifteen cigarettes a day or scrapping your exercise program? A study by Juliana Holt of Brigham Young University of 300,000 people over 7.5 years found that it is feeling lonely and isolated. Loneliness is twice as bad for your health as being obese.

From grade school to retirement home, we seek friendships not so we can live longer but because we crave someone to talk to, depend on and enjoy. "Friendships are so valuable," Dr. Kelli Harding of Columbia says, "as a medical doctor, I wish I could prescribe them for everyone." Having good friends and keeping them must be a priority in addition to healthy eating, exercise and stress reduction.

An 80-year study from Harvard University revealed those having the most satisfaction in their friendships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. In keeping with this trend, the famous Framingham Heart Study reported that participants who had a good listener in their lives protected them against dementia.

- Phil Brewer 

NYC Schools Going Vegan on Fridays!

NYC Mayor Eric Adams

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is leading the way towards a healthier future by implementing Vegan Fridays in NYC public schools! Adams, a former New York City police captain, has said he traded in a lifestyle with junk food for a plant-based diet that helped him overcome diabetes.

“I can’t tell people what to put on their grills on the weekend. But darn it, we should not be feeding the health care crisis in our prisons, our hospitals, and most importantly, in our schools, so we want to go in a more healthy direction,” Adams said in an interview on WNBC-TV on Friday.

Vegan options are already available in all of the city's public schools every day, but starting Friday and continuing weekly, the lunch offering will be vegan. Students can still request a non-vegan option, according to the city’s Department of Education, and milk, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, hummus and pretzels will always be available to students.

New York City public schools, which have about 938,000 students, have been offering Meatless Mondays since 2019 and Meatless Fridays since April. Around the country, 14% of school districts offered vegan meals and 56% offered vegetarian meals in at least one of their schools, according to a 2018 survey from the School Nutrition Association, a trade group representing school nutrition programs and workers.

It's unclear whether any other districts around the country plan to go vegan one day a week like New York City schools.

New York City schools says its vegan meals have been tested and approved by small groups of students.

Friday's menu included “vegan veggie tacos,” with a tortilla and salsa, with broccoli, and a carrot and lemon salad on the side. Other planned offerings this month include a Mediterranean chickpea dish with rice or pasta, and a black bean and plantain rice bowl.

Adams, a former New York City police captain, has said he traded in a lifestyle with junk food for a plant-based diet that helped him overcome diabetes. He wrote a book about his diet, “Healthy at Last.”

Nearly 40% of New York City public school children in grades K-8 were overweight or obese, according to data cited by the city in 2019.

Angela Odoms-Young, an associate professor in the nutritional sciences division at Cornell University who helped develop the nutrition standards for the National School Lunch Program, said the shift in New York City schools is “innovative and exciting.”

Odoms-Young said adding in plant-based meals can help ensure students are getting the recommended five servings of fruit and vegetables a day, expose them to foods they might not normally consume and reinforce lifelong healthy habits. She also said it could dispel the notion of children being resistant to eating vegetables.

“It doesn’t just have to be broccoli,” Odoms-Young said. “It can just be a whole host of things that maybe kids would eat — particularly if it’s prepared in different ways.”

The launch builds on the school system’s success with Meatless Mondays, which it introduced in 2019, and Meatless Fridays, which rolled out in April 2021. Vegan options like hummus and pretzels or PB&J have been available daily at NYC public schools since 2017. 

The Vegan Fridays initiative, however, takes the plant-based message a step further, as the entire menu features vegan food and stars a hot vegan entree. (Non-vegan options are available by request, including cow’s milk, which federal law requires public schools to offer at each meal.) Items offered last week on the first Vegan Friday, included veggie tacos and salsa, seasoned broccoli, and a carrot salad. 

Lifestyle medicine experts have welcomed the news. “Giving students more immune-boosting fruits, vegetables, grains, and beans is now more important—and will also help set them up for a lifetime of good health,” says Neal Barnard, MD, FACC, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Studies support the effectiveness of introducing kids to healthy habits early.  “The earlier in life that we can establish healthful eating habits, the better,” says Eugenia Gianos, MD, director of Cardiovascular Prevention for Northwell Health and director of Women’s Heart Health at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. “I see our young people struggle with [excess weight], obesity, and even diabetes at younger and younger ages. Research shows that plant-based diets help people achieve a healthy weight, so I applaud this positive step.”

Mayor of New York City Announces Dietary Changes for New Yorkers

At a recent press conference (Feb 8), the new Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, made a major policy announcement supported by some of the most prominent hospitals of the City.

He said, " Our current disease epidemic, centered largely on chronic diseases is no longer sustainable. The medical symptomatic management of these common diseases captures 86% of our national medical care budget without affecting medical cures which remain largely elusive and rare. We need to shift from foods that feed our chronic diseases to foods that prevent, arrest and reverse them."

Eric Adams, the new Mayor of New York City, announced the important shift towards a healthier diet for New Yorkers. Let him describe it for you. See clips above.

Meat, Mortality and COVID-19 Risk

The Quarterly Magazine GOOD MEDICINE published by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine reports in its Winter 2022 issue (p. 8):

“An unhealthy diet kills more people globally each year than tobacco smoking, according to the Global Burden of Disease study, which evaluated the major foods and nutrients in 195 countries. The study found that 11 million deaths annually—10 million from cardiovascular disease alone—are associated with poor nutrition Among the biggest risk factors are the lack of plant-based foods and the overemphasis on meat and dairy products.”

“More meat means more death and disease,” says Zeeshan Ali, PhD, Kick Start India program specialist at the Physicians Committee. “The meaty Western diet contributes to take hold in India, which has put the country in the grips of worsening heart disease, diabetes, and obesity epidemics.”  

However, India isn’t the only country facing health problems from meat imports. Research published in the British Medical Journal Global Health shows that the global increase in meat consumption has led to a sharp increase in deaths from colorectal cancer, diabetes, and heart disease worldwide.”

“Decades of research show that a plant-based diet can play a role in preventing and improving common chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, kidney disease, and even improve COVID-19 outcomes. The COVID Symptoms Study, which included more than half-million participants, found that people eating more fruits and vegetables, and plant-based foods in general, had a 41% lower risk of severe COVID-19. Evidence strongly suggests that addressing underlying health conditions with a plant-based diet would not only reduce the likelihood of severe infection and death from COVID-19, over time it may also help vaccines to work better.

“In addition to saving lives, a vegan diet saves money as well. A recent study in The Lancet Planetary Health looked at 150 countries and found that the most affordable diet is one built from plants.”

Diet and Prostate Cancer

Several new studies strengthen the positive diet – prostate cancer relationship.

#1 Reported in Cancer Medicine [2021;10(20):7298-7307], a major study known as the Japan Collaborative Cohort Study with more than 26,000 participants, showed that those who consumed the most milk had a 37% higher risk for developing prostate cancer than those who consumed less milk.

#2 Reported in the Nutrition Journal [2016;15(1):91-99], this major meta-analysis combining 11 prior studies had convincingly shown the positive relationship between dairy products and prostate cancer. The researchers suspect as a possible mechanism behind the increased risk the higher insulin-like growthfactor-1 (IGF-1).

#3 Reported as an abstract in the Journal of Urology [2021;Sept.1], the researchers followed more than 47,000 men comparing plant-based diet intake and prostate cancer incidence and mortality rates as part of the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Adherence to a more plant-base diet lowered the risk of death from cancer as well as risk for total and advanced prostate cancer among younger men by 19%.                                                                                               

#4. Reported in the Journal Urology, [2008;72(6):1319-1323] Dean Ornish MD and his team showed that an entirely plant-based diet could dramatically improve the clinical course among men previously diagnosed with prostate cancer.