can vegetarianism be unhealthy?

There was a very interesting article in the Independent newspaper on Thursday (21/02/13) titled From vegetarian to confirmed carnivore where John Nicholson stated that when he was eating a low-fat wholefood vegan diet he felt ill. He became obese and had irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), diarrhea, fatigue and headaches. His partner, who shared his way of eating, had depression and mood swings.

They decided to ditch the wheat, rice and potatoes and eat lots of meat, butter, cream, lard and goose fat. He felt better straight away and lost lots of weight. His cholesterol levels went down. This seems on the face of it to contradict everything that I have been saying on this blog, about people eating less meat and more starchy foods and vegetables. However, I think I can understand what is happening here.

John seems to have gone from one extreme to another. From veganism to eating lots of meat and animal fat. When people make radical changes in the way that they eat, often excluding whole food groups, they often gain weight or lose weight without trying. They may be getting more calories or fewer without knowing.

The placebo effect might explain some of why John started to feel a lot better straight away. I don't want to dismiss what he says though. It is possible that John had an iron or zinc deficiency which was rectified as soon as he started eating meat, especially as his first meat was ox liver. It might even be that he wasn't getting enough protein, although it's not that difficult to get enought protein on a vegan diet. Another possibility is that he was suffering from an allergy to wheat.

If he had been eating soya products, that might have caused problems. Soya contains phytic acid which reduces our ability to absorb iron and zinc and trypsin inhibitors which reduce our ability to digest protein. This might not be a problem with traditional foods like miso, tofu or tempeh, but might be more of a problem with other ways of eating soya.

John seems to have moved to what is in effect the Atkins diet. In the Atkins diet people do not try to control calories but eat as much meat and animal fat as they like. The main thing they are trying to avoid is carbohydrate. It is a low-carbohydrate diet. When you digest carbohydrate, glucose enters the bloodstream. If you have too much glucose in your bloodstream your body needs to remove the excess or it will cause problems. Your pancreas secretes the hormone insulin which tells the body to remove some glucose.

In most people insulin and glucose levels rise and fall. Too much of this causes problems though. Obesity is only one problem that can happen when we have big rises and falls of insulin and glucose. Obesity can give rise to other problems. It is now recognised that this is one of the biggest causes of ill health.

People on the Atkins diet tend not to eat vast numbers of calories because the diet is less varied than a normal diet. They can easily get bored with it or even a bit nauseous contemplating the prospect of yet more meat and fat. It is often said that people crave fat, but a lot of the fat we eat is hidden. If you eat a slice of cake, you don't realise how much fat is in it because the flavour is masked by sugar or something acidic such as lemon. We eat so much fat not because we love it so much but because we don't know it is there.

I don't have a problem with the Atkins diet. It does seem to work at helping people to slim. I do wonder about the long-term effects of staying on the Atkins diet though. I'm not just worried about heart disease and strokes, reducing protein has been linked to increased longevity.

I wonder if it would work just as well if instead of meat they ate fish, and instead of eating butter and lard they ate avocados and olive oil. In Crete people traditionally got lots of their calories from olive oil and far from harming them it seems to have contributed to health and long life.

Also, there are some forms of carbohydrate that are better than others at not flooding your bloodstream with glucose. Starch is better than sugar, and the amylopectin form of starch is better than the amylose form. You can measure the effect that a food has on your blood glucose levels. A low glycemic index (GI) is better than a high glycemic index. Long-grain rice is better than short-grain rice. Brown rice is better than white rice. Pasta and porridge are good too. If you eat some low GI forms of starch it won't have too bad an effect on your blood glucose levels.

Vegetables can seem to have a high GI but really they are mostly OK. Baked potatoes are not good though. So I shall continue to eat my long-grain rice and pasta, together with my pulses and vegetables. I do eat meat, cheese, fish and eggs sometimes but not every day. What John Nicholson has said in no way invalidates what I have stated on this blog about the problems of trying to feed everyone on the planet with lots of meat. We can't feed 7, 8 or 9 billion people with a diet high in meat.

A good point that John makes is that not everbody is the same. People vary as to what sort of foods they thrive on. I think it is likely that some people digest starch more readily than others. If so, they are less likely to thrive on a high starch diet even if it is low GI.

In case people are thinking that they can just add butter and cream to their normal foods and get away with it, it doesn't work like that. If you want to eat lots of meat and fat and lose weight then you would have to go on an extremely low-carbohydrate diet, or you will just put on weight.

why some people think healthy food is expensive

I have written two posts contradicting people who think that healthy food is expensive and that poor people can't afford healthy food, poor people can't afford to eat healthy food? and more about poverty and food. I have also compiled a table comparing the cheapness of foods in terms of calories per penny. This is an important issue because unemployment is very high now. People need to know how they can best spend their money.

Just recently I have been looking at a web forum where people have been discussing this issue. I can see why some people believe that healthy foods are more expensive. I can see where they are going wrong. Eating healthy food doesn't mean you have to buy organic food or eat wholegrains or any of the expensive stuff.

Let's take one food as an example. White rice. People ask 'What is the healthy alternative to white rice?'. The answer? - brown rice. And brown rice is more expensive than white rice. Therefore the healthy food is more expensive than the unhealthy food. But white rice is the healthier alternative to processed foods. Both brown and white rice are healthier - and both cheaper - than burgers or crisps. So, it's not true to say that healthy foods are more expensive. Here are more points, usually in response to what people wrote on the forum.

• fresh or organic vegetables are more expensive than frozen vegetables, but frozen vegetables are just as good or nearly just as good
• organic foods are more expensive than non-organic foods but you don't need them, if they are healthier then they're not much healthier
• fancy breads are more expensive than a cheap white loaf, but the cheapest form of bread is in the form of chapattis you make at home
• free-range or organic chicken is more expensive than cheap chicken, but not if you eat a smaller amount; people eat far more protein than they need
• free-range or organic eggs are more expensive than cheap eggs, but cheap eggs aren't that much less nutritious, if at all
• cheap cheddar from the supermarket or cheese triangles are cheaper than fancy cheeses from a farmers' market, but all cheeses are much the same in terms of nutrients, cheap cheese isn't less healthy
• tofu may be more expensive than cheap chicken, but you don't need that much protein and the cheapest form of protein will always be beans, peas and lentils
• blueberries and other 'superfoods' are more expensive than more common fruit but you don't need them; you can get most of your vitamins and minerals from vegetables
• fish is often more expensive than meat, but you don't need either
• soya milk is more expensive than cow's milk, but soya milk isn't much healthier than skimmed cow's milk
• fruit juice is more expensive than soft drinks; do what I do and drink water from the tap

Another thing is, you have to ask yourself why is brown rice more expensive than white rice. After all, they don't have to process it so much, and processing costs money, so you would think it would be cheaper. The only thing I can think of is economies of scale. People buy so much white rice that it's produced on a much bigger scale, and people aren't going to buy overpriced rice. If more people bought brown rice then it would be as cheap, or maybe even cheaper, than white rice. Having said that, brown rice can still be cheaper than processed foods, as my comparison table shows. So, I think I am justified in saying that even poor people can buy brown rice.

Other issues that came up in the forum were availability of healthy food and the amount of time needed to prepare healthier foods. These are different issues from affordability, but they're not big problems. I have lived in different parts of London and different parts of England and I have never had a problem with availability. I have lived on council estates. Supermarkets and street markets have always been nearby. I'm sure that if you're a journalist and you can spare the time then you could find a housing estate in Britain where there aren't any supermarkets or street markets nearby, but to pretend that this is representative of how the majority of poor people live is wrong.

As for preparation time, I don't spend hours in the kitchen. I don't soak beans, but although it takes hours for them to soak, you don't need to stand over them while they're soaking. It takes only 15 minutes to cook rice or pasta. Same with lentils or frozen vegetables. You put them in a saucepan, pour on boiling water from the kettle, bring them to the boil and simmer. Pasta sauce and other sauces from a jar are cheap and aren't going to push up the cost of the meal a lot.

People tend to be cash rich and time poor, or time rich and cash poor. Either way you can eat healthy food. If you are cash poor and time poor then you've got a big problem. You have to work out for yourself what you're going to do about that one. But buying burgers and crisps is not the answer. Not only will you be making yourself ill, but you will be wasting your money.

If you wanted to cook elaborate dishes like macaroni cheese then it would take more time, but I don't bother with the complicated and less healthy stuff. If someone buys a cheap macaroni cheese from Iceland, they might think that it would cost more to buy a marginally more healthy one from Marks & Spencer. So what? They might think it would cost more to make one from scratch at home in their kitchen using marginally healthier ingredients, and take a lot more time. So what?

Pasta doesn't need to have cheese added to it. You can get a kilo of pasta for about 60p. It doesn't take much more money to make it palatable. A tomato-based pasta sauce is cheap and healthy. If you think about that then the £1 macaroni cheese doesn't seem so cheap.

If people insist on eating rich food full of cheese and butter and cream then they can do so. Or they can think about what poor people all over the world have been eating for thousands of years, a starchy staple with some pulses and lots of vegetables, flavoured with herbs and some spice. It's cheap, tasty and nutritious, and it doesn't result in ecological or animal welfare problems.

more about poverty and food

This post is a continuation of my previous post where I am trying to dispel the myth that poor people can't afford to eat healthy food. Zoe Williams stated in a recent Guardian article that a Big Mac is good value for money in terms of calories per penny.

We need a certain number of calories per day. If someone ate 3 Big Macs per day for breakfast, lunch and evening meal they would get 1,770 calories. That would be almost enough for a woman but not a man. Women need 1,940 calories per day and men need 2,550 calories per day. 4 Big Macs a day would give someone 2,360 calories per day. That's kind of an average requirement so let's work with that. 4 Big Macs a day would cost £66.92 a week. Job Seekers Allowance for someone aged 16 to 24 is £53.45, and for someone 25 or over £67.50. So a young person would not be able to afford it and an older person would have 58p left over at the end of the week to spend on everything else. And a man still wouldn't be getting enough calories.

I've just looked on the McDonald's site and it says a Big Mac has 490 calories. I'm sure that I saw somewhere that it has 590. I'm going to have to check that, but if it is 490 that supports my case even better. Here it says it could be 590 or even more.

The more you think about it the more you realise how absurd her advice to poor people is. When I was a child I thought that poor people ate fish and chips. When I became poor I realised I could not afford the fish and that even the chips have to be an occasional treat. You cannot get a bag of chips for less than £1.

It should be obvious that if you cook food at home it is likely to be cheaper than a fast food outlet. They have to pay for staff and premises etc and that comes from the price of the food. These foods tend to be highly advertised, the costs of which can make up a good fraction of the price of the foods.

The processing of food costs a certain amount of money. White rice is barely processed and brown rice not at all. So much so that if you spill some of certain brands of brown rice on the ground it will grow into rice plants (I know I've tried it). Brown rice is more expensive than white rice, but I expect that is because of 'economies of scale'. If people ate as much brown rice as they do white then it might be as cheap or even cheaper.

Meat can never be cheap food. Cheaper forms of meat will come from factory farms where the animals are fed maize and soya, and some wheat and barley. So therefore meat will always be more expensive than maize, soya, wheat and barley. We can eat all these things.

Zoe Williams thinks that people like me 'secretly yearn for a Big Mac'. I am not a vegetarian, although most of my food is vegetarian (vegan in fact). When I want fast food I will have a bacon butty or a salt beef sandwich. I might do that once a week. Big Macs are boring food.

In her article, Zoe Williams mentions the case of a grandmother who fed her grandchildren for five weeks on nothing but eggs, beans, chip and toast. This is supposed to be an example of what poor people can afford. This doesn't really support her argument, however, for two reasons. Firstly, because it's not a particularly bad diet. Secondly, because it is easy to see how the grandmother could have made improvements without additional cost.

This diet is low in saturated fat. Eggs might have cholesterol in them but it doesn't increase blood cholesterol. Eggs are a good source of protein and micronutrients. The main problem is the lack of vegetables and fruit. It is true (as Zoe Williams says) that vegetables don't provide many calories per penny. However, if you use grains to provide most of your calories in the form of starch, then vegetables can bulk it out so you feel fuller. And they have lots of micronutrients. Vegetables are cheap.

There are many ways to cook potatoes. Boiled, baked, mashed, or as bubble-and-squeak. It's not going to cost more to cook your potatoes in different ways each day. Vegetable oil for deep frying usually has too much omega-6 and more calories than you'd want.

By beans, I assume she means baked beans. There are other beans ready cooked from tins. There are many other beans bought dried in packets. There are other pulses like chick peas, peas and lentils. Pulses are high in protein and starch.

Toast is one way to eat wheat. Wheat is consumed in many forms; bread, pasta, couscous, cracked wheat and bulgur. There are other grains, such as rice, maize, oats and barley. Eggs are just one of the cheap ways to get animal protein.

My guess is that the grandmother was putting butter on her toast, in which case it wouldn't have been the low saturated fat diet it might seem. The best quality olive oil is cheaper than even the cheapest butter.

So there is no need for a cheap diet to be a boring one. Or an unhealthy one.

See my table comparing cheapness of foods.

poor people can't afford to eat healthy food?

There has been another article in the Guardian stating that poor people cannot possibly afford to eat healthy food. They do this from time to time, there was one written a while ago by Julie Bindel. I know it is not true because I am a poor person and I eat healthy food. These are the three main points in the article.

1. Cheap foods are fatty, and fat stops people from being hungry. Vegetables can't do that, and organic vegetables are especially poor value in this respect. There is nothing cheaper than fatty foods to stop hunger.
2. People battling food scarcity tend to overeat when food is available.
3. Poor people have to buy food that their children will eat. If children don't eat the food they are given then it will be wasted, and people can't afford to waste food.

I shall go through each point one by one.

1. The cheapest foods are not fatty. It is wrong for Zoe Williams - who wrote the article - to state that the choice for poor people is between fatty foods and vegetables. The choice is between fatty foods and things like bread, pasta, rice, potatoes and beans. Vegetables can bulk out these and so are valuable, in addition to providing vitamins and minerals. 1 kg of rice costs 40p from Lidl and provides 3,470 calories. A Big Mac costs £2.39 and provides 590 calories, more than half of them from fat. I have done some simple calculations, shown towards the end of this post, and it works out that healthy foods are on average about ten times cheaper than the unhealthy foods that Zoe Williams mentions.

2. I know what it's like to be on Job Seekers Allowance and to run out of money at the end of a fortnight before the next payment. You can buy 1kg of rice for 40p from Lidl and keep it in the back of a cupboard for if you might need it. Or use the loose change in your pocket or ask a neighbour to lend you 40p. You can live off that for days if necessary, especially if you have a few other ingredients in the cupboard. With a few beans and not much else you could make Rice and Peas, which is a traditional West Indian dish, or another rice dish. There's no reason for people to be 'battling food scarcity'. People with children have more money than single people on Job Seekers Allowance because the previous government was so keen to lessen child poverty.

3. When I was a child I had to eat what was provided for me or go without. In most parts of the world that is still true. Children don't starve themselves if they are not allowed to eat only their favourite foods all the time. If they leave food it can be eaten by adults and not wasted. It's wrong to think that children don't like healthy food. Baked beans on toast is reasonably healthy and is something that children like.

To understand the relationship between food and health, it is important to realise that we are talking about three separate things. They are not equally important.

1. Too many calories. Too much fat, sugar and salt. Too many calories results in obesity, which contributes towards diabetes, heart disease and strokes. Saturated fat contributes towards heart disease and strokes. Sugar and refined starch contribute towards diabetes. Salt contributes towards heart disease and strokes.

If people ate 10% less food their health would improve and they would save 10p in every £1. They can do better than that by getting a smaller proportion of the calories they eat from fat and sugar and more from the starchy staples. They can also increase the quality of the fat they eat as well as decreasing the quantity. Saturated fats should be avoided, but some unsatured fats can be a problem too. Trans fats should be avoided wherever possible. Most vegetable oils contain more omega-6 than is healthy. Omega-9 (also called monounsaturated) rich oils are good. Olive oil is high in omega-9. You may think that poor people can't afford olive oil but in fact both Lidl and Aldi have cheap olive oils that have won a taste test. Extra virgin olive oil from Lidl or Aldi provides a lot more calories per penny than a Big Mac or crisps. Omega-3 rich oils are good too.

2. Too little fruit and vegetables. There is evidence that eating fruit and vegetables helps with heart disease and cancer. They contain vitamins and minerals that are needed in small quantities. Some of these are antioxidants. They also contain other things that are valuable, such as lycopene. Beta-carotene (for example) can be obtained cheaply from carrots or green vegetables, or slightly more expensively from sweet potatoes or mangoes. This is why we are told that we should eat 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day.

3. Organic food. The reason why people originally chose organic food was because nobody knows the long-term cumulative effects of small amounts of pesticides eaten every day. Pesticides and other agro-chemicals have been tested on animals, but animals don't live very long, vary in how they react to a substance, and don't have a cocktail of different substances in their bodies which interact with each other. Also, people are unhappy with certain aspects of modern agriculture, which could be ecological or animal welfare issues.

Today people may say they prefer the flavour, and there is some evidence that orgainically grown vegetables can be slightly higher in some vitamins. It is not essential for health for people to eat organically grown products.

What is important is that people reduce the amount of calories, fat, sugar and salt. It can save you money too. Eating more fruit and vegetables is of secondary importance. Eating organic vegetables is not important. So when Zoe Williams says that poor people can't afford organic carrots, or that they are not good value for money, she is not saying anything important.

People like Zoe Williams seem to think they are defending poor people against accusations of sloth. I don't think many people are making such an accusation. I'm certainly not doing that. I treat poor people the same as everyone else. People can use information to improve their lives. It isn't helping poor people to tell them that they can't possibly afford to eat healthy food so they might as well not try. It's not true. Such an attitude can only cause a large amount of ill health and suffering.

Poor people aren't just the British working class. They are also people from other continents where poverty is much greater and where people know how to cook cheap food. I have nothing to teach someone from Africa or India in that respect. Poor people are also many middle class people who have recently lost their jobs and are trying to survive on Job Seekers Allowance. We all need to know how to survive these difficult times, and people like Zoe Williams aren't helping.

These are two key statements made by Zoe Williams in her article. I have shown in this post that they are both factually incorrect, and below I have done the calculations to prove it.

"It's more palatable to blame diabetes on lifestyle than accept the fact that, on a penny-per-calorie basis, a Big Mac is simply cheaper"

"Once you accept crap food is an economic choice you have to accept that 24,000 deaths a year aren't related to sloth"

First let's calculate the number of calories per penny for some healthy foods such as rice and olive oil.

White long grain rice from Lidl costs 40p for 1kg. 1kg of rice is 3,470 calories (kcals). That works out as about 87 calories per penny.

White basmati rice from Lidl costs £10.99 for a 10kg bag. That works out at about 31.5 calories per penny.

Italian short grain brown rice from Whole Foods Market in Kensington costs £1.79 per kilo. That works out (assuming the same number of calories per kg as above) at about 19.5 calories per penny. It's probably more than that because I have been using the figure of 347 calories per 100g (read off the back of a packet of basmati) when the figure (looking on different places on the web) could be 350 or 360 or even more.

All of the types of rice above have a medium GI and so don't cause higher blood glucose and insulin levels that contribute towards diabetes. Some forms of rice have a high GI and are not so good.

Extra virgin olive oil from Lidl costs £2.25 for 750ml. Olive oil has 823 calories per 100ml. That works out as about 27.5 calories per penny.

Now let's compare this with the unhealthy forms of food mentioned in the article.

A Big Mac costs £2.39 and has 590 calories. That works out as about 2.5 calories per penny.

A McDonald's cheeseburger costs 99p and has 295 calories. That works out at just under 3 calories per penny.

A packet of Walkers ready salted crisps costs 30p for 25g. Each pack has 134 calories. That works out as about 4.5 calories per penny.

It can clearly be seen that all of the healthy foods above provide more calories per penny than any of the unhealthy foods. Even brown rice from Kensington High Street and extra virgin olive oil will assuage hunger pangs for less money than either a Big Mac or some crisps. Not only is extra virgin olive oil cheaper than a Big Mac in terms of calories per penny, it is more than 11 times cheaper.

Of course, the number of calories per penny (or penny-per-calorie as Zoe Williams would put it) is not the most important criterion for healthy food. But she has talked about how much it costs to overcome hunger. She believes that Big Macs and crisps are better for that and thinks that is why poor people eat these things. She's wrong.

I wouldn't expect anyone to eat just rice, there are so many ways to have rice with other things, including other cheap things. For example, rice with dal and vegetable curry. Dal is an Indian dish made with lentils (about 19.5 calories per penny). We're not talking austerity here. I would prefer to eat food from around the world than foods whose main flavours are fat, sugar and salt. I'm not expecting people to be vegetarian or vegan, there are cheap ways of eating animal protein too.

Even organic food can be cheaper than McDonald's or crisps. Lidl sell a 500g bag of organic whole durum wheat farfalle pasta for 84p (about 20 calories per penny). If you average out the calories per penny of the 6 healthy foods and the 3 unhealthy foods mentioned above then the unhealthy foods are about ten times more expensive.

Talk about poor people should be educated, it looks as if Zoe Williams needs to be educated. Talk about sloth, couldn't Zoe Williams be bothered to do a few simple calculations before saying something incorrect? Does she not think that the health of poor people is important? Has she not considered the effects of her words? Zoe Williams sees things in black-and-white. Either poor people are eating organic carrots or they're eating Big Macs. Either the poor are are totally responsible for what happens to them or they have no responsibility at all. The truth as always lies somewhere inbetween these two extremes.

See my table comparing cheapness of foods.