Taking Stock: February

Time to sum up my second month of being vegan. It's been a short month with its share of long posts, so I'll make this one brief.

Over the course of the month, I ran for 12 hours, snowshoed for 4 hours, rode for 5.5 hours and swam for 2 hours (riding and swimming really suffered due to the extended Rome trip). I caught a slight cold in a psychosomatic protest at returning to Switzerland, and I have a bruised right hip from an icy bike slip, which has subsequently turned all the colours of the rainbow (a bit like watching a display of the northern lights in slow-mo). I've been tinged with some winter melancholy that I go through every February, but in spite of that, my energy levels have been excellent. I'm noticing the total absence of muscular tiredness or stiffness between workouts. It's early days, and my longest run was only 2 hours, but I don't believe I've ever experienced such excellent recovery. Time, and harder workouts, will tell. My weight has remained consistent, and I'm blaming the pizza, wine and the discovery that drinking black coffee and eating dark chocolate makes me feel so chic for the lack of weight loss with increased training volume. Besides, I'm quite sure that the extra cushioning protected my hip from worse damage on the ice.

Now to recipe of the month. I've done a little less experimentation in the kitchen this month, mostly becasue I was eating vegan pizza in sunny piazzas for a good portion of it. But I was particularity inspired by a non-Italian dish in one Roman restaurant: babaganoush. Besides being delicious and easy to make, the name of the dish is so much fun to say out loud: babaganoush. Babaganoush can be made with yogurt, but it can certainly be made without, as this restaurant did. They kindly told me their recipe, which I promptly forgot the details of after my second glass of wine. Fortunately, there are plenty of online recipes. I like this one (adapted from The Victory Garden Cookbook):

1/2 lb eggplant (or aubergine, for the Brits)
3 tb lemon juice
1 ts salt
2 ts minced fresh garlic
3 tb sesame tahini
1/4 c chopped parsley
1/2 c toasted pine nuts
2 tb olive oil

Preheat oven to 400F. Prick eggplant all over with a fork. Bake whole until tender (about 30 minutes). Remove from oven, halve and scoop out the flesh. Blend in a food processor with the lemon juice until smooth. Mash the salt and garlic together and combine with the eggplant, along with the tahini. Cool and stir in the parsley and pine nuts. Before serving, drizzle with the olive oil. Serve as a dip with tortilla chips or triangles of pita bread.

And there rests February. I made it through another.

How to Kill a Craving, Part II

To preface today’s post, I want to reiterate what I mentioned at the close of my previous to last post. When I turn to the internet to educate myself on a topic, I do what I can to vet out claims that are backed by a particular industry lobby (of particular relevance to this topic is the soy lobby, who are not the granola-eating, Birkenstock-wearing ensemble of yogis one might suppose them to be) or worse, plain bad science. I usually look for a) what research was conducted to back the claim being made and b) who sponsored that research. If a particular claim references research that was published in a peer-reviewed journal, all the better, however this is rarely the case and it’s otherwise frustrating when evidence is given that may have good merit, but the writer has failed to cite his or her sources. So what follows are my conclusions from a review conducted under these criteria, and my references point to the original source of the data wherever possible. As a reminder, this whole review was sparked by a particularly sudden and unexpected cheese craving in a train station (see previous post)

Having led with that footnote, let’s go back to the beginning. When, exactly, did we decide it was a good idea to drink the milk of another mammal? None of the other animals are doing it. It's actually a relatively recent occurrence in the history of man: somewhere around 10,000 and 6,000 years ago there was a switch from hunting goats and cattle for their meat to domesticating them for their meat and milk (1). It’s important to note that only the Western world started and continues this practice. The majority of the world’s population has a dairy-free diet, and this becomes important later on when we look at why non-milk consuming countries have the best bone strength (which I’m interested in as an athlete).

The agricultural revolution brought dairy farming along in leaps and bounds. By the 1940's, we’d developed various ways to make a cow produce an average of 3,000 litres of milk per year, which is about 5 times the amount that a calf would normally drink (2). These days, we achieve over 6,300 litres per cow per year (3). These impressive gains in milk yields have been achieved through a number of methods, which are only relevant to my topic here in as much as they are relevant to what ends up in our milk as a result.

So bear with me as I run through the life cycle of a modern dairy cow; it really is worth it in terms of getting to the bottom of things. And the punch line at the end is highly rewarding, I promise.

Within hours after giving birth, the dairy cow's calf is taken from her. Male calves are sold for pet food or become veal (since dairy cows are bred for intensive milk production, the little-boy calves are a sort of unwanted by-product). The female calves are sequestered until they are old enough to be artificially inseminated to begin milk production (a cow must obviously first become pregnant and have a calf in order to produce milk). From that point on, she will be milked for 10 months out of the year, including seven months of each of her consecutive nine-month pregnancies (4). This practice of milking pregnant cows will become important later on – stay with me.

Once she begins her milk production, the dairy cow is treated with a number of hormones to further increase her yield. She is also fed a high-protein diet that contains nothing that she would naturally eat (grass is so passé for dairy cows). When it recently became apparent that turning natural herbivores into carnivores and, later, cannibals, was not very well thought-out (think BSE), most countries have switched to feeding genetically-modified soy and fish meal to dairy cows to keep the high-protein diet up.

Back to the hormones though. We’ve all heard that there are artificial hormones in our milk, so I’m not going to get into the details of which ones and in what amounts. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot. The most controversial, Bovine Somatotrophin (BST), has endless studies linking it to girls starting puberty at younger and younger ages (the average age is now 11 in North America – and there are plenty of cases of girls developing breasts at 9 and 10 years old (5). This makes some intuitive sense to me, since these are hormones designed to stimulate the mammary glands. (Sidenote to those of us in Europe and Canada: while BST milk has been banned in our countries, the ban does not apply to imports of dairy products, e.g. ice cream, from BST-legal countries such as the US).

All of this high-intensity milk production is bound to cause some stresses on the cow’s health, so a medley of antibiotics, the most common being penicillin, are used to treat the various illnesses related to this, pardon the pun, labour-intensive life. One of the most common afflictions for a dairy cow relates to the actual milking process. Being milked two to three times a day, seven days a week, by an electric milking machine tends to result in mastitis, an inflammation of the udders that causes them to become hot and hard and produce an abnormal discharge. Some 35-40 incidences of mastitis are found per 100 cows (6). Antibiotics are injected directly into the udder to reduce the swelling of mastitis, but that doesn’t stop the abnormal discharge. So certain amounts of these antibiotics are not the only thing to end up in our milk – avert your eyes from the rest of this sentence if you have a sensitive stomach – the presence of puss in our milk is completely normal and legal (7). This point becomes important later on, when we look at why it’s become necessary to heat our milk to very high temperatures (pasteurization) to kill, amongst other things, the bacteria in the puss.

(Another side note: this for those who chose organic milk in an effort to avoid the artificial hormones and antibiotics, as I used to. The organic dairy cow is still subject to the cycle of artificial insemination and continual intensive milk production, and because they are not given medication to treat the various associated stresses...yes, you guessed it, sick cows are being milked. The extent of this varies widely from organic dairy farm to organic dairy farm, but you can bet there is some serious puss in organic milk, not to mention the absence of pain relief for the cow suffering from mastitis, lameness and various systemic infections (8)).

Back to the life cycle: a dairy cow lives for an average of four years; under natural conditions, she might live up to 25 years (9) (so that hyperbole about dairy cows literally being ‘milked to death’? It’s perhaps not as far from the mark as I’d assumed). At the end of four years, her milk production begins to decline and she is transported to her final destination - the slaughterhouse. Interestingly, about 40% of America's hamburger is made from "spent" dairy cows.

Besides the presence of hormones and antibiotics in our milk, there is a little bit of an issue that arises from us drinking the milk of cows that are perpetually pregnant. I think this is where my doctor’s acne link might come into play. Various natural hormones are produced during pregnancy (mostly dihydrotestosterone, DHT, precursors) that stimulate the growth of skin cells and signal the skin cells to produce more sebum. These, in addition to the cow’s other growth-stimulating hormones that are there because a baby cow requires them for growth and development, and you might just have an acne-causing cocktail (10). Incidentally, these same growth-stimulating hormones, which are entirely natural and appropriate for turning a baby calf into a 1000-pound steer, are a little less appropriate for adult humans and are known to cause excessive cell growth by another name: cancer (11). (There is so much research on this that I don’t even know what to reference – just google dairy and any kind of human cancer, in particular breast cancer, for rather obvious reasons)

So now we are done with the cow, and we are close to the punchline, I promise. If you’ve stayed with me this far, then you deserve to know what good nutrients are in a glass of cold milk. The ones I had always had in mind, especially as an athlete, were protein and calcium. But before we look at that, we have to talk about pasteurization - try and stay with me.

Pasteurization, the heating of milk to very high temperatures, kills harmful microorganisms that may be living in the milk (remember the puss). Cooking the milk at high temperatures, unfortunately, also destroys all of the enzymes (this is actually the test for successful pasteurization) including lactase, contributing to lactose-intolerance. It also either destroys or alters the chemical structure of the naturally-occurring vitamins so that many are no longer bioavailable. So all that calcium that is packed in a glass of cold milk? We can’t ingest much of it (12).

This again makes some intuitive sense: North America has one of the highest consumptions of dairy products, and also the highest rate of osteoporosis. There is actually evidence (way too complicated to go into here) that consuming diary products causes the loss of calcium from our bodies. Worldwide, the lowest rates of osteoporosis are found in the populations that consume little or no dairy at all. For example, the women of the Bantus tribe in South Africa exist on a laregly plant-based diet and consume about 200 to 350 mg of calcium a day, about half of western women's intake. The women have virtually no osteoporosis despite bearing six or more children and nursing them for prolonged periods (13). When African women immigrate to the United States, do they develop osteoporosis? The answer is yes. Similarly, osteoporosis incidence in female Asians is much lower than in Asian females living in the USA (14), so it's not something in the genes of Westerners that makes us more susceptible to brittle bones, it's something else that we're doing.

But here's where it gets even more interesting for athletes: it seems that pasteurization might just kill something else that we think we are getting in milk. Things get muddy here, because there are many different pasteurization techniques and temperatures used, and the laws vary from country to country. Milk protein consists of two major proteins: casein and whey. As far as I can tell, there is decent evidence that both whey and casein start to denture when exposed to temperatures over 72C (15, 16). Most pasteurization techniques now cook milk at temperatures over 75C, not least of all over growing fears about the paratuberculosis virus, which is linked to Crohn's Disease (17). The dairy industry firmly states otherwise, but non-dairy-sponsored research suggests that the proteins in modern pasteurized milk are in varying denatured states.

If you're tired of reading this ridiculously long post, you might have just missed the punchline, so I'll spell it out. If the vitamins and minerals in milk are no longer in bioavailable form, and the proteins have been denatured, then what we are left with is a rather bizarre cocktail of artificial and natural cow hormones, antibiotics, saturated fat and some carbohydrate.

I think that did it, my cheese craving seems to have passed.

1. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/741074.html
2. Epstein, S. S. Potential public health hazards of biosynthetic milk hormones. International Journal of Health Services, 20:73-84, 1990.
3. FAWC, 1997. Report on the Welfare of Dairy Cattle. Farm Animal Welfare Council. Surbiton: Surrey
4. MAFF, 2001. Welfare of Calves. Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries & Food.
5. Stoll BA. Western diet, early puberty and breast cancer risk. Breast Cancer Res Treat (England) Jun 1998;49(3):187-93.
6. FAWC, 1997. Report on the Welfare of Dairy Cattle. Farm Animal Welfare Council. Surbiton: Surrey
7. http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/ansci/dairy/as1131w.htm
8. www.organicconsumers.org
9. Winter, M., Fry, C. and Carruthers, P., 1997. Farm animal Welfare and the Common Agricultural Policy in Europe. Compassion in World Farming Trust. Petersfield: Hampshire
10. Holmes et al. Dietary Correlates of Plasma Insulin-like Growth Factor I and Insulin-like Growth Factor Binding Protein 3 Concentrations, Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention Vol. 11, 852-861, September 2002
11. Outwater JL, et al. Dairy products and breast cancer: the IGF-I, estrogen and bGH hypothesis. Med Hypotheses Jun 1997;48(6):453-61
12. Lanou, A. Pediatrics, March 2005; vol 115: pp 736-743.
13. Walker, A., Osteoporosis and Calcium Deficiency, Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 1965 / 16 / 327.
14. Memon, A. et al, Incidence of hip fracture in Kuwait. Int.J.Epidemiol.1998 / 5 / 860-865.
15. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T7C-4CHRJ1H-4&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=5b9ccebebefce3d241edf7a1df846e7e
16. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119136566/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
17. Collins MT. "M paratuberculosis in Foods and the Public Health Implications." Proceedings of the Fufth International Colloquium on Paratuberculosis, Chiodini RK, Hines ME, and MT Collins (Eds.) Madison, WI: International Association for Paratuberculosis, 1996:352

Vegan Shriving

I'm taking a break from the arduousness of trying to find The Truth in internet information to share about my pancake breakfast.

It's Shrove Tuesday today. Not being entirely familiar with the historical significance of Shrove Tuesday (beyond it being as good a reason as any to eat pancakes), I turned to Wikipedia and was delighted to find that shrove is the past tense of the English verb shrive, which means to obtain absolution for one's sins by way of confession and doing penance. For practicing Christians, the idea is to get yourself absolved before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. Fabulous! What better way to obtain final absolution from my egg incident in Rome than to make egg-free pancakes.

And what is the significance of pancakes on Shrove Tuesday?

"Pancakes and doughnuts are associated with the day preceding Lent because they were a way to use up rich foodstuffs such as eggs, milk, and sugar, before the fasting season of the 40 days of Lent. The liturgical fasting emphasized eating plainer food and refraining from food that would give pleasure: in many cultures, this means no meat, dairy, or eggs."

Aha. So, since we practicing vegans are in a state of permanently denied pleasure and are thus one step ahead of the game, Shrove Tuesday really is just a good reason to eat pancakes.

I fished around online until I found a recipe that I had all the ingredients for, and with much fanfare in the kitchen at 6am this morning, made a batch of truly beautiful vegan pancakes. With the right amount of banging pots and use of the high-speed setting on the blender, I successfully woke Michael up and we shared pancakes and coffee together as the sun came up on a beautiful day.

The recipe:

• 1 cup flour (I used buckwheat)
• 1T baking powder
• 1/4t salt
• 1 cup water (soymilk if you want, but I just used water)
• 1/2t oil
• 1/2t maple syrup

Mix it all together. Pour 1/4 cup at a time into the pan on medium heat. When it is bubbling and dry on the edges flip over and brown the other side. Smother in maple syrup and eat with loved ones before heading out for a 10km run and a 2km swim.

Since I've reproduced the recipe here, it is not a candidate for February's recipe of the month (that's a rule I just made up, of course), but I wanted to include it in today's posting in case any readers on the other side of the Atlantic are waking up and feel inspired to start their Lent a day early, without missing the fun of pancake-making. You closet vegans know who you are.

How to Kill a Craving Using Google

I was sideswiped by a cheese craving this morning, when passing between platforms at Geneva train station. I’ve never been a big cheese buff, but a sudden and unexpected longing came over me when I caught sight of a beautifully assembled tomato and bocconcini sandwich in the window of the sandwich kiosk. Alternating wedges of fresh white cheese slices and brilliant red tomatoes were peeping out from the edge of a rustic ciabatta bun. I approached the window and stopped just short of pressing my hands and face to the glass with wide-eyed wistfulness.

The spell was broken an instant later when I was distracted by the cover of Gala magazine in the neighbouring kiosk, which featured Obama and his daughters in a three-way embrace and carried the intriguing title ‘Le SuperDaddy à la Maison-Blanche’ (strong words of praise indeed from the French). Sometimes a short attention span is truly a blessing, but the experience gave me cause to return home and conduct some research into the downside of dairy; I figured it would be helpful to have some mental ammo should this sort of situation arise in the future.

I seem to have inoculated myself against meat cravings using a similar methodology: having reviewed a critical mass of disturbing facts about modern meat consumption - on both our bodies and the environment - I haven’t had a single meat craving. In fact, I am even contemplating whether I will reintroduce meat at the end of this experimental year (and I am not suggesting that we are designed as herbivores, although there are some good arguments in support of this hypothesis. I remain agnostic on this point until there is a critical mass of research into the basis for either side of the argument. I am simply saying that I find the evidence against consuming the meat we find on our supermarket shelves today compelling enough to give thought to calling it quits, permanently).

So, I came home and took to my keyboard with the intention of quashing my outstanding cravings for dairy products, with a little help from Google. I figured some word combos such as ‘lactose and bad effects’, ‘dairy and health concerns’, ‘milk products and athletic performance’ and (remembering something my GP told me when I was a anxious adolescent searching for answers) ‘chocolate and acne’, should do it.

I got more than I bargained for.

The plethora of information on this subject is overwhelming. I am going to have to set aside some time to wade through the junk science, data-less assumptions and emotionally-driven hyperbole about how cows are literally ‘milked to death’ to provide us with a drink that was never intended for us, but was intended for the young of their own species, giving us a whole host of health complications and providing few of the nutrients that we have been raised to believe it does (the latter is of particular interest to me as an athlete). It would be too easy to read some claims about the link between dairy and just about every major disease of our time, then look at some pictures of cows with udders that are swollen to four times their natural size from artificial hormone treatment, distended to a point where they cannot stand up, and conclude that milk is bad, bad bad. I’m more interested in finding out what studies have been done in this area, who sponsored that research, have the results been reviewed by peers in the scientific community, and can we therefore draw some meaningful conclusions.

So, once I have sifted out the credible data and turned it into a digestible (no pun intended) piece of writing, I will pick up where I leave off here. For now, suffice it to say that my reading so far has killed my cheese craving, possibly for good.

Back on the Bike, and Abruptly off Again

My sniffles have progressed into a throaty cough, but I otherwise feel physically good. In defiance of my malaise, the three feet of snow on the ground, and two days of moping around the house, I pulled out my mountain bike at day break. Plus, the empty fridge was giving rise to another concern: what was I going to have for lunch today?

So I headed out with my backpack to get an hour ride in and pick up some vegetables from a vente direct (buy direct) farm on the way home (Francois told me about this place and it's a literal God-send. While the vegetables are no more affordable than the supermarket, they are much fresher and they even have celery, a very elusive vegetable in Switzerland. Francois, have I thanked you enough for telling me about this place?) The ride went well until, about two kilometers from home, I skidded out on black ice and the vegetables and I hit the road hard. After an inital few seconds of lying on the ground, wondering how serious this is, I got up and assessed the damage to the vegetables, my bike, and me (in that order). My bike took the worst of it, and my shifting has an unidentifeid probelm that I will sum up with a diagnosis of 'not working' when Michael asks me to be specific about what's wrong later tonight, and I - luckily - have nothing more than some bruising. It was nevertheless a long two kilometre walk home.

So now I have a bruised right hip, some bruised vegetables (on the lunch menu now: soup) and something new to mope about. I have no idea how I'm going to carry out Ironman training over the next two months with conditions like this. My schedule calls for a 1.5 hour run later today (fat chance) and a 3-hour ride tomorrow. I would kill for a gym membership right now and am considering biting the bullet and paying for some drop-in sessions to get my through to spring. I will hand over my credit card and ask them not to tell me what the session costs, otherwise I can see myself waking up in the morning and thinking: do I eat today, or workout today?

Ah, the dilemmas of life in Switzerland.

All Good Things

I knew that I couldn't stay in Rome forever, but I was trying. With both money and clean underwear running out, my days were numbered. And so, after one final slice of vegan pizza yesterday, I (very grudgingly) dragged my wheely case to Termini station and boarded the train for Lausanne.

The beauty of the Tuscan countryside gliding by the train window helped to defray some of the sadness at leaving a city that captured my heart. So much has been written about Rome that I am not going to even attempt to do it any sort of literary justice here (I am, after all, supposed to be talking about being a vegan Ironman-in-training, although I have talked about vegan pizza more than once, right?) So here's my final muse on the eternal city:

They say that you can feel the presence of the dead in Rome, and when I ran along the banks of the Tiber I thought about how the waters ran red with bloodshed more than once in the city's history. How can a city where the past is so present still teem with life and passion in a unabashedly modern way? How can a city exude chaos the moment you step onto it's streets, but never fail to communicate a sense of harmony and equilibrium as you walk through them? This ability to be concurrently vibrant and somber, unruly and majestic, ancient and alive, is something I have never experienced in a place before. Either Rome is special, or I have some more traveling to do.

I developed a cold on the journey home (a psychosomatic response to returning to Switzerland, I'm sure), and have woken to a white landscape under grey skies this morning. I went for a 30-minute run on icy roads, taking itty-bitty steps to avoid slipping. My energy levels are excellent and I long to do more, but I don't want my current low-grade sniffles to develop into anything more. So I plan to stay home and mope for the rest of today, and perhaps tomorrow.

I miss my vegan pizza.

More Confessions

If I didn't have anything serious to confess to in my last post, I do in this one.

I think I might have eaten egg this morning. In fact, I am almost positive I did. And the worst part is...I suspected there was some egg contamination after my first bite of the breakfast item in question, and I ate it anyway.

It happened like this: I got up for an early morning visit to Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the four major basilicas in Rome (yes, I'm still here). Even though tourists are delightfully thin on the ground in Rome right now, the major basilicas still manage to draw a critical mass of camera-snapping, backpack-wielding day trippers that make one's experience of a church less...churchy. So my plan was to give myself a quiet hour at Santa Maria at sunrise, and then find somewhere closeby for breakfast.

My planning paid off, and it was just the nuns and I who enjoyed the silence of the dimly lit Borghese chapel, their heads bowed in prayer and mine staring upwards at the 16-century coffered ceiling that is said to be gilded with Inca gold.

I was hungry when I exited into the Piazza dell'Esquilino, and (I should have foreseen this) was in no mood to vet out cafes for both good coffee and vegan-friendly breakfast. Good coffee was the number one priority, and I would have settled for an uninteresting panne of some sort to buffer my stomach until a market could be found. After trying three cafes and finding each to be lacking on one of these fronts, I found an establishment on the far side of the piazza, with a view back over Santa Maria's medieval bell tower. The coffee smelt good and there seemed to be an interesting selection of baked fruit things in the display fridge. I've mastered how to confirm that a pie or torte crust does not contain butter in Italian (senza burro, si?) and so I picked out what looked like an innocent apple and nut torte and ordered my coffee.

One bite later, and a faint alarm bell started ringing in a distant chamber of my mind. It hadn't occurred to me to check whether the filling had egg in it, and I could taste something that was faintly eggy. But I was hungry and undercaffeinated, and whether an egg was involved in the making of my overpriced slice of torte seemed like splitting hairs at that moment. And besides, I wasn't about to spit into a napkin in an upscale Roman cafe. So I swallowed my first bite, and having effectively crossed the Rubicon, I snuffed out the alarm bell, finished my torte and drank my coffee in a state of blissful denial.

The denial proved to have a limited shelf-life, and it was replaced by the inevitable weight of remorse in short order. I called to mind the lineup of confession boxes that I had just walked past in the main hall of Santa Maria's: I noted how some of the little red 'in-use' lights were on and I had thought to myself how pleasant it was that people confess their sins at such an early hour. Now I had something more serious to purge, and it wasn't even 9am. Would it matter that I have not been christened a Catholic? Would the gaping void in my Italian vocabulary for fessing up to sins leave me in a greater state of distress than I was currently feeling, staring at my empty coffee cup and plate like it was a crime scene, and I was the only suspect?

A cloud of shame followed me back to the hotel. After a morning of mental self-flagellation, I eventually settled on my own brand of repentance. Hence, today's post. I'm certain that if I can confess my sin to the public, I can resolve to forgive myself and move on. And I will run an extra set of intervals on the Spanish Steps tonight for good moral measure. I'm considering it my offering of Hail Mary's.