Veg*n Awesomeness: Chicago & Children

It's been all over the veg*n blogosphere; following is the intro to the Chicago Tribune article covering the position taken by the city's health commissioner:

Chicago health commissioner Dr. Terry Mason has a message for Chicagoans who enjoy devouring meat in all its fat-dripping, artery-clogging glory: Don't do it.

As part of his campaign to slim down waists and lower blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol citywide, Mason is encouraging everyone to join him in going vegetarian for January.

"For the entire month, I'm not eating any meat," he has told listeners to his Sunday morning radio show, "Doctor in the House," on WVON-AM. "If it walks, runs, hops, flies, swims, crawls or slithers, I won't eat it. If it has eyes, I won't eat it. If it had a momma and a daddy, I won't eat it. . . . I'm going to focus on eating a healthy and delicious variety of fresh vegetables and fresh fruit. . . . And I want you to do the same."

How happy would I be for Dr. Mason (and the animals) if this turned out to be more than a month-long change? Quite happy. And that very well may happen:

This is Mason's fourth year campaigning for a meatless January. Paul Ellison, 71, of the Far South Side enlisted in the healthy eating crusade three years ago and then decided to forgo meat for good.

"It hasn't been that hard either," said Ellison, who has lost 40 pounds on a vegetarian diet.

For Mason, animal fats are enemy No. 1. He has stared down this enemy and it looks a lot like pork chops smothered with dressing, rib tips dripping in greasy barbecue sauce and hamburgers heaped with cheese.

Mason said his vegetarianism lasted seven months last year and he plans to stay with it for good this time. Mason suffers from high cholesterol and had a coronary stent implanted in 2005. Both of his parents died young of cancer—his mother at 51 and his father at 39. . . .

Andrea Giancoli, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, praised Mason's efforts.

"Typically a vegetarian diet is a healthier diet," said Giancoli, a registered dietitian. "People who follow more plant-based diets have better health outcomes—lower rates of chronic disease and lower rates of obesity. We all need to be moving more toward a plant-based diet."

And then there are the kids. Some might be surprised at how many children, in addition to those who are vegetarian, want to be vegetarian because they realize early on that they don't want to be a part of the unnecessary killing of animals, but are not allowed this choice by their parents. That's a sad situation that we'll discuss at another time perhaps, but for now, let's focus on the recent news covering a study of the number of young vegetarians:

Silverman [a vegetarian and co-captain of his high school football team] may feel like a vegetable vendor at a butchers' convention, but about 367,000 other kids are in the same boat, according to a recent study that provides the government's first estimate of how many children avoid meat. That's about 1 in 200.

Other surveys suggest the rate could be four to six times that among older teens who have more control over what they eat than young children do. . . .

The new estimate of young vegetarians comes from a recent federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of alternative medicine based on a survey of thousands of Americans in 2007. Information on children's diet habits was gleaned from about 9,000 parents and other adults speaking on the behalf of those under 18.

"I don't think we've done a good job of counting the number of vegetarian youth, but I think this is reasonable," Amy Lanou, a nutrition scientist at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, said of the government estimate. She works with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a vegan advocacy group.

Vegetarians say it's animal welfare, not health, that most often causes kids to stop eating meat.

"Compassion for animals is the major, major reason," said Richard Schwartz, president of Jewish Vegetarians of North America, an organization with a newsletter mailing list of about 800. "When kids find out the things they are eating are living animals — and if they have a pet...."

Case in point is Nicole Nightingale, 14, of Safety Harbor, Fla. In 2007, Nightingale was on the Internet to read about chicken when she came across a video on YouTube that showed the birds being slaughtered. At the end, viewers were invited to go to the Web site peta.org — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Nicole told her parents she was going vegan, prompting her mother to send an angry letter to PETA. But the vegan diet is working out, and now her mother is taking steps to become a vegetarian, too, said Nightingale, an eighth-grader.

I love that last brief story. Compassionate kids helping to make compassionate adults--how lovely is that?