Caryn Hartglass, Episode 3

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Caryn Hartglass: What I’m going to be talking about today: I’m going to go through my week and tell you what I’ve been eating and some tips on healthy, diverse eating. Delicious eating. I had a request by one of the listeners to talk about vitamin B12. I’ll be going into that in detail, along with the omega-3, omega-6 fatty acids, DHA, EPA, and how they important they are in a healthy diet.

Okay, this week… I’m looking at my meal plan. It was Wednesday night that I had a lot of different things, it was really fun. We get a delivery of organic produce in a box every week, and what’s great about it is most of the food is locally grown. Certainly organic, it’s really, really fresh. But we don’t always know what we’re getting, so there are always some nice surprises.

We had some beet with the beet greens. What’s great about beets is the greens that are attached to the beets are very nutritious and very tasty. You can eat them raw, you can eat them in salad, you can sauté them. We had beet greens and chard (another great leafy green vegetable) sautéed with some onions, and I really love the combination of onions with dark green vegetables.

We happened to have had some leftover soup. I had talked about the faux pho last week, so we had some leftover soba noodles with veggies and we kind of made a stew out of that. It was just a little of it, but it was a nice side dish. We had also served some tofu burgers a few days before, and we had a leftover tofu burger. So we crumpled that up in some tomato sauce. There was a nice mix of foods and very, very healthy.

I tend to like to have salads in the morning and sometimes we make a lot of salad the night before. When I’m hungry in the morning, it makes a great breakfast. We had a red beet and onion salad, so we had the beet greens the night before. Then in the morning, I had this great red beet salad. They were cooked beets with onions. Put that on top of a green salad. Some of the greens that we hadn’t finished from the night before I had also added to the salad. Really filling, satisfying salad. It was great for breakfast.

Then Thursday for lunch, I had enchiladas. I like a lot of the Mexican style foods because you can eliminate the foods that really aren’t healthy like the meat, the cheese, and a lot of the unhealthy fat. There are a lot of wonderful flavors. You can take a corn tortilla—very inexpensive, and I like to get them organic—and fill them with a variety of things: tofu cut into very small cubes, some vegetables—and if you want, you can use frozen organic vegetables and mixed ones. You can make it real, real simple. Add some tomato sauce and then the Mexican spices like chili pepper, cumin. Fill a tortilla and then you can bake them with some tomato sauce. The sauce, of course, can be seasoned with those Mexican spices. Really, very satisfying.

Later that evening, we had a very large salad and more of the red beets with onions.

The next morning… I’ve mentioned before I’m a real big fan of oatmeal. I was actually an invited guest at someone’s home, and she really went out of her way to make sure that there was something vegan for me. She was serving up some doughnuts for some of her other guests. But I was the lucky one; I had oatmeal with almond milk, some ginger tea, grapes, and strawberries. It was really, very lovely.

That night we had another Mexican styled dinner with burritos. I thought it was funny because burritos are usually wheat-based and we had a brown rice-based tortilla. Instead of corn tortilla, we had whole frozen corn that was inside mixed with black beans and other vegetables. The corn was on the inside, and the rice—usually, you put the rice in a burrito—was actually in the form of a tortilla. And we had that with salad.

Saturday: I try to make something a little festive on the weekends and I made a wonderful buckwheat whole wheat, dairy-free, egg-free pancake. I used ground flax seeds. That makes it a wonderful egg replacer. When you mix the ground flax seeds with water, they become very gooey and have a consistency of egg whites, but they’re full of omega-3 fatty acids—we’re going to talk about how nutritious those are. I like to top my pancakes with some sort of frozen berry that I heat up in the saucepan and make a very simple syrup. Or a coulis with vegetables, (chuckles) with fruit. This was a blueberry sauce with the whole blueberries in it. Really, very lovely and very satisfying; that sticks with you for a long time.

This week I actually visited a few restaurants a little more than I normally do. Saturday night, we went to a Thai restaurant, and there are a lot of great vegetarian things you can get in a Thai restaurant. That’s one of the things that I wanted to bring out in telling you what I get at a variety of different restaurants because it’s very easy to eat healthy and vegetarian at many different kinds of restaurants. I had a woon sen type of dish, which means it had glass noodles and that’s a bean sprout-based noodle. That was tofu, the glass noodles—it had a really wonderful, very light, fresh ginger broth, and, of course, the vegetables.

Sunday I took the easy way out: I had some leftover pancakes with the blueberries. It was still fabulous. Then I was out with my family and we went to an Italian restaurant. Here is another great opportunity to be out in a restaurant and find lots of healthy choices.

I tend to stay away from white pasta, I don’t like eating a lot of white flour foods for lots of reasons. I find that they’re basically empty calories and white wheat flour can cause a lot of havoc with a lot of people. Certainly some people have problems digesting gluten; some people can’t eat any wheat products at all. There’s very little fiber in white flour. It causes constipation, all kinds of autoimmune problems. So I try to avoid white pasta,

But in an Italian restaurant, they have a lot of dishes with pasta. There was a pasta dish that said, “tomato sauce and vegetables” so I asked for the vegetables with the tomato sauce without the pasta. And I got this really large plate. Lots of fresh vegetables (zucchini, onions, broccoli, carrots) and really, very flavorful tomato sauce. It was great over the vegetables.

My partner Gary had a veggie pizza, and this had a very thin, very nice crust. A light layer of tomato sauce, some spinach, and some other wonderful vegetables, eggplant. Really very nice. There are lots of options that you can get that are healthy in a variety of different restaurants.

After such a big lunch, Sunday night, we had a very simple, light… I call it a pho chicken noodle soup. It was a very light broth with some thin noodles. The following morning, we followed up with some more of that soup.

I’ve been tending more and more away from sweet foods. I think once you start to eat less sugary foods, your desire for them also decreases. It’s a cyclical type of thing. And so I like to eat sweet foods but it’s not a strong craving for me.

So in the morning I had more of the light soup. We added some tofu to it and had a really big salad with romaine lettuce, carrots, celery, pecan, pumpkin seeds, a little red onion. I always try to add a some nuts and seeds because they have a lot of nutrients that are very important.

Monday I had a smoothie for lunch and this is another great, easy thing to do. Frozen strawberries, my favorite green powder, which is a mix of a lot of different leafy, green vegetables, soymilk, and a banana. Put that together in a blender, and it’s a great lunch or a great breakfast or a great snack, anytime.

I’m going to take a little break (thirty seconds) and we’ll come back with the rest of my week. And then we’ll talk more about vitamin B12. Thank you.

[musical interlude]

Caryn Hartglass: I’m Caryn Hartglass and this is All About Food. So I’m going to finish up with talking about my meal plan for my week to give you some ideas of a variety of foods that you can prepare and eat at home or things that you can choose when you’re out at restaurants.

Monday night we had a great dinner of some baked tofu. We grilled some onions and some mushrooms, mixed it together with some sliced tofu. We have a really nice paprika that has a nice smoky flavor to it; it’s a smoked paprika. It gives a really, really nice flavor to the tofu, so we mixed that in with the tofu and baked it. And then had some tomato vegetable soup and a salad.

Last week we made a very large amount of tomato sauce, I think I had mentioned it. I buy these cans of salt-free tomatoes by the case and we made a lot of tomato sauce. Some of it we froze, and then we use it over time as tomato sauce or as tomato soup. Sometimes it can be like a tomato soup like a minestrone (a variety of different beans in it) or just as a plain tomato soup. Sometimes we add vegetables. Another way is to make almost like a pho chicken soup, a brothy soup, very light, and mix just a small amount of tomato so it just flavors the soup a little bit. It’s not heavy laced tomato. But there are a lot of different things that you can do. And when you made the sauce and made it to your liking, without all the unnecessary added artificial ingredients, preservatives or salt, then you can do what you want with it for the week.

And then Tuesday was just like that: I had some more tomato soup in the morning breakfast. Big, big bowl of tomatoes and vegetables. Really satisfying.

Tuesday lunchtime I was in a Middle Eastern restaurant, and here’s another great opportunity to have a variety of foods. Middle Eastern restaurants which will serve up hummus which is a combination of chickpeas, olive oil, lemon, a little garlic, and sesame tahini—which is made from sesame seeds. Then there are typically a wide variety of different salads like the Israeli salad (cucumbers, tomatoes, onions). This particular place had a cabbage salad as well, so I had some of that; it was really, really nice.

Tuesday night, last night, I really splurged and I had some guests in from California. We went to another wonderful Manhattan restaurant called Blossom, which is in the Chelsea area. It’s all vegan and they do some really, really, lovely dishes. My mouth was watering just thinking about it. I had a walnut crusted seitan with mashed potatoes and asparagus.

Seitan is a wheat gluten. So if you take a wheat flour, what it consists of is gluten and starch, and you can separate the starch from the gluten. Wheat gluten is very chewy, has an elastic consistency. Some people unfortunately have allergies or digestive problems with gluten. But it’s a high protein food and it’s nice to eat from time to time, especially on a festive occasion, because it has a nice chewy texture and you can season it in any way that you like with different broths or flavorings.

Then we shared a dessert. What was really great about it was… some people may not realize how great this is, but it was a very nice tasting dessert. We had a chocolate cake and it came with a soy-based ice cream, but the portion was very small. So it was a rich dessert but small. This way, you got a nice taste, you finished the evening with a satisfying sweet taste, but you really don’t need to have a lot. It doesn’t need to be a really huge, giant piece of cake. Because there’s a lot of empty calories there. So that was a really, really, nice, nice dinner.

Okay, so that was my week. Again, if you have any questions or you want to share some of the meals that you’ve had at home or at restaurants that are healthy, interesting, and delicious, I welcome your call. I’m Caryn Hartglass, and this is (888) 873-4643. That’s the number to call. And this is All About Food.

So I had someone write in and ask to talk about vitamin B12. Now I had talked several shows ago about how when people hear when you want to try a vegetarian diet or that you’re a vegetarian or vegan, one of the first questions they ask you is, “Where do you get your protein?” And there are all these myths about protein and that vegetarians won’t get adequate protein. We talked about that, and it’s a myth. All plant foods have complete proteins and, if you’re eating a healthy vegetarian diet, that means lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole greens, legumes (which are beans and walnuts and seeds), you’re not going to have any difficulty at all getting protein. In fact, most Americans get too much protein on an animal-based meat and dairy diet.

But there’s another question that people bring up, and that’s vitamin B12. And I’m going to talk quite a bit about vitamin B12 today. The bottom line is that it is important to supplement with vitamin B12. That’s not just for vegetarians and vegans—although it is very important for vegetarians and vegans—but it’s also important for omnivores as well (that’s the meat eaters).

One of the things that really, really irks me is when I’m reading an article in a newspaper or a magazine, or hearing something on the radio talking about vegetarian diets and cautioning, being very careful, saying that, “With vegetarian diets, you have to be very, very careful to make sure you’re getting enough B12.” And that’s true. But. It’s always twisted like the vegetarian diet is a dangerous diet because you’re not getting enough vitamin B12.

And yet I’m looking at a chart here, Causes of Death in the U.S., —and it’s from 2002, so it might have varied a little bit in seven years—but basically the number one cause of death in the United States, as you probably well know, is diseases of the heart, namely heart attacks. The number two cause of death in the United States is cancer, all the varieties of cancer. And the third is cerebral vascular disease, or strokes. After that is chronic lower respiratory diseases like chronic bronchitis and emphysema. After that is unintentional injuries, or accidents. Then number six is diabetes. Number seven is flu and ammonia. Number eight is Alzheimer’s senility. Then there’s kidney disease, and number ten is systemic infection followed by other things like suicide, liver disease, high blood pressure, and homicide.

Nowhere in there do you see vegan diets, vegetarian diets, or vitamin B12.

My point is that the standard American diet, there are so many dangers in it today. So if someone’s thinking of vegetarian diet, they shouldn’t be told by the media or an article or by someone who’s relatively misinformed that it’s a dangerous diet. It can be a healthy—very, very healthy—diet.

When you’re eating a vegetarian or vegan diet, right away, your risk for all of these diseases or all these causes of death—other than unintentional injuries and homicide, but things like heart attack, cancer, stroke, bronchitis, diabetes, flu, ammonia, Alzheimer’s, kidney disease, those types of things—your risk goes down dramatically when you eliminate animal foods from your diet.

There’s a wonderful book by T. Colin Campbell of Cornell University. It’s called The China Study, and it’s a great book. There was a lot of research done between Cornell University, Oxford, and some health organizations in China. What’s unique about it is they were able to study a wide variety of the Chinese population. They basically had a homogeneous group (very similar people, same background, same ancestry), but they lived different lifestyles, they had different levels of stress, and they had different diets.

Now these diets that they had were primarily, relative to the American diet, full of fruits and vegetables. They certainly weren’t eating as much animal foods as in the United States. What he found was the more fruits and vegetables these people ate or the less amount of animal products they ate, their diseases dropped considerably. The implication is the more fruits and vegetables, the more plant-based your diet is, the healthier you are going to be.

So I am always frustrated when I see these articles that that’s not what’s highlighted. Instead, there are these warnings that, “Oh my goodness, if you’re going to be a vegetarian or a vegan, you really have to watch out for,” one or two things that, yes, are important but are really somewhat insignificant relative to all of these other things.

Vitamin B12: what about it? Well, we all need vitamin B12, and what is it? Vitamin B12 is actually from bacteria, and it’s found in things that aren’t it in some foods. Now at some point it was believed that certain fermented foods like tempeh and miso would give you adequate amounts of B12, but there has been some information and some research that shows that the vitamin B12 or what appeared to be vitamin B12 was actually some sort of analog and was not providing the necessary nutrient from these foods. But you can get it from fortified milks like soymilk and other non-diary milks can be fortified with vitamin B12. Red star nutritional yeast also has vitamin B12 and a variety of different cereals are fortified with B12. So it is really not hard to get. There are also some meat analogs, like the seitan I mentioned, some of them are fortified with

Vitamin B12. Lots of very easy ways to get it and you definitely should if you are on a vegan diet or a vegetarian diet get the vitamin B12. It is easy. There to my knowledge are no known toxicities. So if you get about 100 micrograms a day or

2,000 micrograms a week you will be fine.

It is not just vegetarians and vegans that have an issue with B12. There are a number of people that have deficiencies. So it is not just related to having a vegetarian diet and not eating vegetarian food. The way it is measured, if you could have a blood test to test your levels, what is typically measured is a number of different things. So what happens is in human beings there are these enzymatic reactions that occur that are dependent on vitamin B12. So there is something called methylmalonic acid and it needs vitamin B12. It uses it as a co factor to be converted to another product. If there is not enough vitamin B12, if there is a deficiency, then you will find that there are increased levels of serum methylmalonic acid because it is not being used to be converted. Then there is another reaction that occurs where homocystine is converted to methyamine and that uses vitamin B12 and folic acid. When there is a deficiency of vitamin B12 or folic acid that may lead to increased homocystine levels and so homocystine can be measured in order to diagnose whether there is a problem, a deficiency of vitamin B12. As just an example, I have a table here of the foods that are good sources of vitamin B12 and of course they are all animal foods and at the top of the list you have mollusks, clams, and it is not surprising to me because these are ground feeders. These are the animals that consume a lot of garbage and that is where this bacteria seems to thrive. It is a bacteria that thrives in dirt and soil, that type of thing. But you don’t want to get all of the real garbage that comes from these animals if you eat them. Then the second highest on this particular list of selected food sources of vitamin B12 is liver. Our liver is a cleansing organ. It is an organ that takes all of the toxins in our body and so when you eat it you are eating a concentrated source of things that you really don’t want. So I don’t think they are really ideal sources for vitamin B12.

There is another problem with vitamin B12 and it is an absorption problem. So this isn’t just regarding vegetarians and vegans. A lot of people have difficulty absorbing the vitamin and if they don’t have enough gastric acidity, then they have trouble releasing the vitamin B12 or having the availability of the vitamin B12. Sometimes when you have a lot of medications you have a decrease in gastric acidity. So that can significantly compromise your vitamin B12 status. So this doesn’t just affect vegetarians and vegans that is my point. Now another thing I wanted to talk about are the omega three and six fatty acids. So we talked about the omega 3 and 6 fatty acids. So we talked about vegetarian and meat eating diets and how a lot of people will focus on the things that are lacking in a vegetarian and vegan diet. Rather than the things that are in abundance in a meat eater’s diet that are dangerous to our health. There can also be a relatively healthy diet that includes animal products and a very unhealthy diet that includes a lot of animal products. You can be a vegan and have a very unhealthy diet if you are living on coca cola and French fries or lots of sodas, sweet drinks and empty calorie foods, lots of white flour foods, junk foods for example you can feel full but you are not getting any nutrients. There are a lot of empty calorie vegan foods out there today.

So if you compare the health of a junk food vegan per say with someone who is eating a small amount of animal products but a lot of fruits and vegetables; certainly the person eating a lot of junk food is going to have some compromised health. There really isn’t any evidence in the world today about what the ideal diet is.

Now as I mentioned there is The China Study, which shows that the more fruits and vegetables you eat and the least amount of animal products you eat, you are going to have less disease. But there are no studies really with a lot of information or a lot of people where they are comparing a healthy vegan diet with a healthy diet with a small amount of animal foods. So that information really isn’t there. But we do have a lot information that shows the benefit of a diet that is primarily plant base. So one of the problems today is not getting enough omega three fatty acids and as a result not having enough DHA in our diet. So a lot of people believe that having fish oil is very important. So what are omega three fatty acids, what is DHA, what is EPA and why are these things important? Well EPA and DHA, I am going to read their names just for moment, they stand for things, eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid, EPA and DHA. The abbreviations are much easier. They are omega three long chain unsaturated fatty acids normally found in fish oil but also found in some algaes. They help in a variety of different ways. They have some anti-inflammatory benefits but their main effect is to help lower blood fat levels. So it has been found that an increased intake of EPA and DHA has shown to lower blood triglyceride and cholesterol levels while raising the level of the high-density lipoprotein, HDL, the good cholesterol. So these are important things especially when heart disease is the number one cause of death in the United States. We want to do things that are going to give us a healthier heart. So it is important to make sure you have adequate levels of EPA and DHA. The body has the ability to manufacture these things but it needs a sufficient amount and in the right quantities of omega three fatty acids and omega six fatty acids and there is a ratio of omega six to omega three. In the United States Americans tend to get too much of the omega six fatty acids and not enough of the omega threes. So what I keep recommending is that we get the junk foods, get the processed foods out of our life. Get the high amount of oils in our diet in cooked foods for example out of our lives and we are going to reduce the amount of omega six fatty acids that we have so the balance between the omega six and the omega three will be closer to the correct ratio. But we also need to eat the foods that are high in omega three fatty acids and those are the hemp seeds, flax seeds, walnuts, and dark leafy green vegetables.

Over and over I keep recommending a diet that is rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, lots of dark green leafy vegetables. They are good for some many reasons. We can break it down one by one so for this example, it is an important diet because we are going to get the right ratio of omega six to omega three fatty acids naturally by the foods that we eat. But since a lot of people don’t eat properly and eat a lot of empty calories and are not getting the right ratio eat a lot of foods that have too much oil, and the wrong oils, I don’t know that there are any right oils, but they feel that fish oil is going to be a quick fix. There are a lot of problems with fish oil, especially the way they are shipped and packaged. Fish oils can be rancid. You can get them in a plastic bottle and they are not refrigerated, so they can already be rancid and not fresh and not healthy. The other problem with fish oils is that they may contain concentrated amounts of things that you don’t want, those harmful pollutants, dioxin and mercury. These are also things that you will get when you consume fatty fish in order to get the benefits of the omega 3 fatty acid and the DHA.

Fortunately there are alternatives. The healthy diet rich in green vegetables and then the nuts and seeds, flax seed, hemp seed, walnuts as examples. But you can also supplement your diet with an algae based DHA. There are a number of them on the market. It’s best to keep it refrigerated and have it in a dark glass bottle instead of plastic. As we age it gets more difficult for our bodies to naturally produce DHA even if we get the right ratio of omega six to omega three fatty acids. So it could be an important thing to supplement with.

What other things does DHA do? It is important for pregnant mothers, for example to have DHA because it will help the brain development of their children and their child’s intelligence. It can aid in depression and attention deficit disorder. It improves memory. DHA is important for brain and eye development. It can promote smoother skin, prevent wrinkles and as I mentioned before, it is great for the heart in preventing heart disease and arthritis and lowering bad cholesterol. So there are really a lot of good reasons to make sure you are getting DHA, certainly from healthy foods that have omega three fatty acids like flax seeds, hemp seeds, walnuts and green vegetables.

Okay so what we have talked about today is the importance of vitamin B12 and the omega three fatty acids and DHA and EPA. Now I want to take a little time to talk about the holidays and eating vegetarian or vegan on the holidays. So we’ve got two major holidays coming up. Tonight is Passover and this weekend is Easter.

It can be very difficult. A lot of people ask me questions about what to do over the holidays. Holidays are a wonderful time to be with our friends and family. There are a lot of wonderful traditions, a lot of wonderful foods. For Passover there is the chicken soup with the matzo balls, matzo which is often a white flour based food. With Passover there are a lot of foods made with eggs and the matzo and certainly a lot of meats and dairy products. What do you do? Now we are very fortunate because today on the internet and in the bookstores there are so many recipes today that will give you traditional holiday foods for Passover and other holidays for other religious backgrounds that are vegetarian, that are vegan, that are wonderful. But it is really important not to surprise your host when you show up at a family event or a friend’s event or any kind of event or a holiday event. We talked a little bit about this last week. You want to be very clear and let people know in advance what you expect or what you are going to be eating. There is nothing worse than somebody who has been slaving in the kitchen and brings all kinds of wonderful foods to the table and then finds out you are not going to eat them. So you need to be very clear and if it seems difficult you can always volunteer and bring foods that you will eat but that you will also welcome others to try and to share.

Passover is very interesting. There are a number of different items on the traditional sedar plate. If you are familiar with the Passover story it talks about how Moses left Egypt with the Jews and freed them from slavery. People sit around the table and tell this story. It is fun to tell a story and talk about how a people were exploited and how they were freed. So there are a lot of wonderful messages in the story and then there are different traditional foods that represent different parts of the story. Well one of the foods on the Seder plate is a shank bone and vegetarian and vegans don’t want to have a dead animal’s bone on this traditional plate and there are a number of different traditional foods, like a mushroom for example, that can be used to symbolize what this symbol represents on the plate. You don’t have to have animal products as a symbol of something else. You can always use anything that will be symbolic of something else. There is a lot of information on the Internet and if anybody has any questions I am happy to answer them at any time. There is a wonderful recipe that I am looking forward to that my mother has come up with. In the Jewish tradition a lot of people eat something called chopped liver. It is like a foie gras, a fatty liver, that is pureed into a pate and when you think about it is, it is really horrifying actually and not very healthy, but there is another version of it made with onions, walnuts, string beans and a little oil. All of this if finely sautéed and pureed into a pate and it has a very similar taste to the chopped liver because of the sautéed onions. But it is really a fabulous dish and great to spread on your matzo, which can be whole wheat. It doesn’t have to be the white flour. So there are lots of choices there. Again the very important thing is to be very clear about what it is you are eating and don’t surprise anybody. Now sometimes that can be difficult and you may not feel comfortable expressing your dietary needs to your family and that brings up a lot of other issues. I find people say it is really difficult to get their family to go along with them and my usual response to that is there is more at issue here than the diet. Sometimes when you change your diet and try to do something different, you are going to find some challenges in explaining yourself and in justifying yourself. So you need to dig a little deep and find a way to communicate to your loved ones and that may be some good work that you do.

In the news, I just wanted to bring up an article. I am always very excited when mainstream magazines get it. What do I mean by that? Well there was an article in the February 12 issue of Time called Eat Your Greens. I agreed with most of the information in the article but really excited that this sort of information is hitting the mainstream. So, it opens with “if you really want to go green, the conventional thinking goes buy a hybrid. Practical speaking though there is a faster and cheaper option. Shift to a low carbon diet. The meal plan of the average American family counts for 2.8 tons of CO2 omitted annually compared with 2.2 tons for driving. When it comes to cutting your carbon footprint today the truth is what you eat is as important as what you drive”. In fact there was a 2005 study by the University of Chicago found that one person switching from a red meat based diet to vegetarianism could save about the same amount of CO2 as trading in a Toyota Camry for a Toyota Prius. This was in Time magazine. This is really phenomenal information. It is all about the power of the fork that eating green a plant-based diet can make a big difference for the climate and can also make you healthier.

This is the message that we have here at All About Food and I can’t share it with you enough.

The article continues saying that it is hard to believe that a meal at McDonald’s produces more carbon than your trip to the drive-through until you consider just how vast and energy intensive the global food system is. You really need to think about it. To get a McDonald’s hamburger, what happens in order to make that happen? For example you have to start with obtaining the seed to grow the plants that you are going to feed the animal. So there are a lot of farm workers involved in tilling the soil, preparing the soil, growing the plants, harvesting the plants and then having those plants, typically soy, corn, alfalfa and a lot of cereal products are harvested, packaged, prepared and made into feed for the animals. Then there is the shipping and handling of that and then the delivery. Then the animal starting with the cow has to be artificially inseminated and then have the baby. Then the baby, typically if it is a veal calf for example, separated at birth and then other cows are grown for their beef, usually in terrible conditions, combined in a factory farm. They are fed all these grains, cereal foods; and then those animals after a period of time are slaughtered. Then their meat is shipped and packaged and goes to grocery stores or to McDonald’s for example. Then there is the white flour bun that has to be manufactured and put on it and then all the condiments. There are a lot of things that go on, a lot of different industries just for a simple little McDonald’s hamburger. As a result there is a huge carbon footprint. You can do a tremendous amount for the environment by simply eliminating that one burger a week or so and having a veggie burger instead or some other wonderful foods like we mentioned earlier, burritos, enchiladas that are vegetable based with beans and you will make a tremendous difference for the planet and for your health. So it is really exciting to read this article in Time Magazine.

So I just wanted to review today we talked about a lot of wonderful different things that you can eat at home and in the restaurant. The importance of vitamin B12, supplementing for vegetarians and vegans, but also for omnivores. To get a sufficient amount of omega three fatty acids, to try and back off from the processed foods, fast foods, oils that give you too much omega six fatty acids and then supplementing with an algae vegetable based plant based DHA. All very important.

I wanted to thank you today for your time. The music today has been composed by my brother, Barry Hartglass, and he has got a new jazz CD out and you can find more information about that at Batik Jazz.com. Really fabulous music. So I want to thank you very much for your attention today. Have a great holiday week, eat healthy and deliciously and I will talk to you next week. I am Caryn Hartglass and It Is All About Food. Thank you.

Transcribed by HT, 6/4/2017 and KC, 5/12/2017

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