Underground Buzz

Two leading ladies of the vegan movement exhort us to value life, not destroy it!
Actress and animal rights activist Amala makes her own vegan desserts and believes in beauty without cruelty.

I turned vegan one-and-a-half years ago. It was during an inspection of slaughterhouses that I realised how animals were treated. Cows that should ideally live to 18 years are killed as they turn six, due to constant breeding and milking. Male cows are killed for veal.

The first week that I gave up milk, I realised I had been lactose intolerant without really knowing it. Like a lot of people, I had always felt uncomfortable without really knowing why. Initially, switching to soya milk had its own problems as very soon, I developed an allergy to it. Soya is fine as a bean. Now, I don’t really use food substitutes so much as i think differently.

If I need milk with my breakfast porridge, I soak five to six almonds overnight and blend it for instant milk. This is also great for adrak ki chai. I avoid tea, though, for the tannin content. For desserts, I make my own. I chop bananas and freeze them for 48 hours, which changes the texture completely, and then I blend it with coconut milk and sprinkle nuts. I use figs and raisins for natural sugar. I learnt some of this at a homeopathy workshop that I attended.

My husband Nagarjuna and sons are non-vegetarian, and I don’t impose my food choices on them. My husband tells me, however, that he feels inspired and will turn vegan one day, though he’s not ready yet. I lead by example!

From telling me not to turn vegan — because I was being ‘over-sensitive’ or would suffer from lack of calcium —people have turned to appreciating what I eat. I often carry my own food wherever I go, but sometimes, friends make something specially vegan if they know I’m coming over. When I eat out, I like to take the chef into confidence and explain what I would eat, so that the next vegan who comes along will have an easier time. Eating out can be tough, especially Indian cuisine, which is rich in ghee, like dal makhni or naan.

As for calcium, I get more from sesame seeds than I would from milk. I also take a course in B12 vitamins for a month every year.

Veganism is a lifestyle choice, and I am vegetarian in my choice of clothes (I wear artificial ‘sai’ silk), shoes and make-up too. It’s beauty without cruelty, all the way!

Make a difference, be vegan, says politician and activist Maneka Gandhi

Being vegan is not as much a food choice as a belief system. When you value life, you do not destroy it. I choose not to be part of any system that’s based on violence, greed and exploitation. Just as I would not wear a bag made of a baby’s skin or a coat of its hair, I would not use one made of a lamb or a calf or any other creature. Wouldn’t that seem the natural choice of any reasonable person?

There is nothing difficult or different about being vegan. Indian food is essentially vegan. Our sabzis, rotis, dals, pickles, papads, salads are all free of animal ingredients. Drinking milk is not only unnecessary, it’s unnatural. As with all animals, mother’s milk is intended as a complete food for babies only until they sprout teeth. After that, milk cannot be digested as your body stops producing lactase, the enzyme needed to digest lactose.

Also, 17 per cent of the world’s methane is produced by cows, who are forcibly bred to keep them lactating. This besides, milk production is immensely cruel with calves being killed so we can have their mothers’ milk.

As for food substitutes, you don’t substitute poison with anything. I eat and enjoy all kinds of food. All I’m giving up is cholesterol (no plant foods have any cholesterol), and the risk of bird flu, mad cow disease and all the many afflictions linked to meat and dairy.

All green leafy vegetables contain calcium. So do sesame seeds. Hummous is wonderful. In fact, the calcium in milk cannot be absorbed as it doesn’t have phosphorus in the right ratio.

On an average, vegans live six to 10 years longer than meat-eaters. Studies show that vegetarian kids grow taller and have higher IQs than their classmates. At 6 feet, my son is possibly the tallest member of the family and he has a Mensa IQ.

Being vegan is such a natural part of who I am! Veganism is common parlance abroad. Things are changing. I expect that in the not too distant future eating animals will be considered as barbaric as we now consider cannibalism. Being vegan is the single most powerful way an individual can make a difference.

Eggs are not bad for heart health, say experts.

US egg expert Dr Don McNamara insists that their bad reputation is no longer warranted and even Heart Foundation has lifted its recommended intake to six eggs a week.

“Seniors have been afraid to eat eggs because for 40 years they have been worried about the dietary cholesterol,”” the Herald Sun quoted nutritional biochemist McNamara as saying.

“But, over the years, the research has clearly shown that cholesterol in our food doesn’t impact our risk for heart disease – (what causes) that is saturated fat and trans fat,”’ he added.

Eggs are low in saturated fat and consist of some of the vital compounds like choline that are considered good for metabolism and for foetal brain development during pregnancy

It also contains lutein, which is known to lower the risk for cataracts and macular degeneration.

McNamara said those who eat eggs for breakfast feel fuller for longer and reduce the risk of overeating at lunch.

“Eggs have the highest quality protein you can buy in the supermarket for the lowest cost, and they contain every vitamin and mineral we need except for vitamin C,” he said.

“So they easily fit into a healthy diet for people with normal cholesterol levels, people with high cholesterol levels, diabetics and people with metabolic syndrome,” he added.

The Heart Foundation had conducted a survey earlier this year and reissued its guideline to recommend people eat up to six eggs a week.

“Cholesterol in food doesn’t equal cholesterol in the blood,”” said the foundation’s healthy weight spokeswoman Monique Blunden.

“It’s the saturated fat and trans fat we consume that is directly related to the rise in cholesterol in the blood,” she added.

Every year, millions of people set health and fitness goals and they tend to be the same, namely, the everlasting search for long lean muscles, less body fat, more energy, flexibility… 2010 is no different and has already ushered in three “new” fitness techniques and products that are hoping to one-up 2009’s international successes with efficiency.

Bellyfit
This is going after the female Zumba crowd. Originating in Canada, Bellyfit classes are women-only and are split into two sections. The first half is a melange of cardio dance including: belly dance, Bollywood, Bhangra, and African dance. The class then focuses on core strengthening and mind-body with various movements from Pilates, yoga and mudra meditation.

Bellyfit is actively training health and fitness professionals in Canada to expand Bellyfit to a gym near you.

Body by Science
This is the ultimate American invention promising complete body fitness in only 12 minutes a week. Doug McGuff, M.D., co-author of Body by Science and emergency room physician, created a research-based program for strength training, bodybuilding and complete fitness. The entire program requires rethinking everything you thought you knew about health, fitness and the science of your body.

Ultimate resistance training, slow movements, heavy weights, push you to your limits for exactly 12 minutes. According to Dr. McDuff, the 12-minute limit is not a marketing ploy, it is all the body can take.

ViPR
The ViPR (Vitality, Performance and Reconditioning) created in England boasts that it is the Swiss Army knife of exercise tools with the ability to integrate into 9,000 different exercises. Many are demonstrated on YouTube and ViPR-fit.com.

Proponents claim it can replace the barbell, dumbbell, Kettlebell, stability ball, medicine ball, balance device and speed ladder.

A fertility specialist based at St Mary’s Hospital in London has proved how little evidence is there to back up the claims of many diet products, by showing that even a placebo can make seven out of 10 persons lose weight.

Professor Lesley Regan tested the pill, costing just pennies to make from ingredients found in any kitchen, as part of a TV show that lifts the lid on the diet and supplement industry.

Regan showed that volunteers testing the dummy pill lost up to half a stone in six weeks, without such unpleasant side effects as are associated with the medicines available over the counter.

Those trying the pill were asked to take it three times a day before eating, to stick to a healthy diet, and keep active.

These are the same routine advices that are given with most weight-loss aids.

One Cassie Basham, a 39-year-old mother-of-four from Newmarket, Suffolk, weighed 14st 7lb when she signed up for the study.

She admits that she was desperate to try the pill.

“We were told the pill would reduce the fat molecules in our body. I was still eating my normal food, but a little bit less of it,” the Sun quoted her as saying.

“I never felt hungry and didn’t get the urge to snack on crisps or biscuits,” she added.

She revealed that she lost 7lb, dropping a dress size in the six-week trial, and she is presently down to 13st 5lb.

“I was stunned when I found out the pill was simply a placebo. It genuinely reduced my appetite,” she admitted.

Prof Regan says: “There are so many products packaged around a ‘magic ingredient’ that is supposed to have special weight-loss powers. There is no quick fix. The key to sustained weight loss is eating the right things, taking enough exercise and increasing your metabolic activity in little ways.”

The benefits of exercise can be greatly affected by the food we eat after it, a new study says.

“Differences in what you eat after exercise produce different effects on the body’s metabolism,” said the senior study author, Jeffrey F. Horowitz of the University of Michigan (U-M).

The study follows up on several previous studies that demonstrate that many benefits of exercise are transient: one exercise session produces benefits to the body that taper off, generally within hours or a few days.

“Many of the improvements in metabolic health associated with exercise stem largely from the most recent session of exercise, rather than from an increase in ‘fitness’ per se,” Horowitz said.

“But exercise doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and it is very important to look at both the effects of exercise and what you’re eating after exercise,” he said.

Specifically, the study found that exercise enhanced insulin sensitivity, particularly when meals eaten after the exercise session contained relatively low carbohydrate content.

Enhanced insulin sensitivity means that it is easier for the body to take up sugar from the blood stream into tissues like muscles, where it can be stored or used as fuel.

Impaired insulin sensitivity (i.e., “insulin resistance”) is a hallmark of Type II diabetes, as well as being a major risk factor for other chronic diseases, such as heart disease.

But the study also found that one does not have to starve after exercise to reap its benefits.

The study is based on healthy sedentary men, aged between 28 and 30 years, said a U-M release.

Indiscriminate use of high-dose Vitamin E supplementation does more harm than good, a new study has warned.

“There were so many conflicting reports about Vitamin E and its effect on various diseases, particularly heart disease, that we wanted to set the record straight, says Prof. Dov Lichtenberg of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine.

Study co-author Dr. Ilya Pinchuk said: “Our new study shows that some people may be harmed by the treatment, whereas others may benefit from it. Now we’re trying to identify groups of people that are most likely to benefit from the effects of Vitamin E.”

The researchers evaluated the results of the prominent studies measuring the health benefits of Vitamin E but reached varying conclusions. There have been many previous publications on the subject.

Analysis of the results of all these past publications together revealed that subjects who did not take a Vitamin E supplement enjoyed more quality-adjusted-life-years (QALY), a standard parameter used in medicine to assess the effect of medical interventions.

Dr. Pinchuk said: “To explain the meaning of this parameter, consider a participant who was healthy during the first 10 out of 20 years of the study, but then suffered a stroke and became dependent on others throughout the following 10 years.

“The QALY during the first 10 years of healthy life is 10, but after the stroke the quality of life is only half of what this person had before. Therefore, the second decade is considered the equivalent of merely 5 years of healthy life and in sum a person’s QALY is 15,” Dr. Pinchuk added.

The researchers examined data from more than 300,000 subjects in the US, Europe and Israel.

“Our major finding was that the average quality-adjusted life years (QALY) of Vitamin E-supplemented individuals was 0.30 less than that of untreated people. This, of course, does not mean that everybody consuming Vitamin E shortens their life by almost 4 months. But on average, the quality-adjusted longevity is lower for vitamin-treated people. This says something significant,” Dr. Pinchuk said.

A research team from Imperial College London and Harvard University claims to have made a major breakthrough that would help in developing new treatments for HIV infection.

They have grown a crystal that reveals the structure of an enzyme called integrase, which is found in retroviruses like HIV.

When HIV infects someone, it uses integrase to paste a copy of its genetic information into their DNA.

During the study, researchers grew a crystal using a version of integrase borrowed from a little-known retrovirus called Prototype Foamy Virus (PFV).

They conducted over 40,000 trials, out of which they were able to grow just seven kinds of crystals. Only one of these was of sufficient quality to allow determination of the three-dimensional structure.

The researchers later studied these crystals using a giant synchrotron machine at the Diamond Light Source in South Oxfordshire and collected X-ray diffraction data from these crystals.

It enabled them to determine the long-sought structure.

The researchers then soaked the crystals in solutions of the integrase inhibiting drugs Raltegravir (also known as Isentress) and Elvitegravir and observed for the first time how these antiretroviral drugs bind to and inactivate integrase.

“It is a truly amazing story,” Nature magazine quoted Dr Peter Cherepanov, lead author of the study from the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London, as saying.

“When we started out, we knew that the project was very difficult, and that many tricks had already been tried and given up by others long ago.

“Therefore, we went back to square one and started by looking for a better model of HIV integrase, which could be more amenable for crystallization.

“Despite initially painstakingly slow progress and very many failed attempts, we did not give up and our effort was finally rewarded,” he added.

Sleep deprived new mothers are at considerable risk of crashing when they get behind the wheel, says a new study.

Kerry Armstrong and Simon Smith, from Queensland University of Technology (QUT), studied mothers aged 22 to 39 years to examine the impact fatigue has on new mums’ everyday life functioning.

Armstrong said contrary to previous research which indicated post-partum fatigue should disappear after six weeks, new mums still felt exhausted 12 weeks after giving birth.

The study found lifestyle changes, interrupted sleep, lack of routine and high levels of unpredictability, cumulatively led to fatigue which could at times be overwhelming.

“The mothers reported debilitating physical and mental effects, likening their experience to ‘operating in a constant mental haze’ feeling ‘flu-like symptoms’ and ‘moving through the day like you’re on autopilot’,” Armstrong said.

Armstrong said while most people accepted women with babies would be exhausted, up until now no-one had looked at what this meant for their safety on and off the road.

“To put the danger of fatigue into some sort of perspective; if someone is awake for 17 hours they have a driving performance similar to that of a person with a blood alcohol level of 0.05 percent, and if they have been awake for 24 hours it is 0.1 percent, or two times the legal driving limit,” she said.

“This has serious implications for mothers suffering from interrupted sleep patterns, night after night and sometimes for several years.”

Armstrong said fatigue was a very real danger on our roads with tiredness contributing to one in three crashes, said a QUT release.

“Instead of resting, the mothers often ‘pushed on’ because tasks still needed to be done and the baby’s needs still had to be met.”

A new study has reversed the convention that age brings an increasing propensity for napping after showing that healthy young adults are more likely to doze off than older adults.

Scientists in the UK, who conducted the study, said that daytime sleepiness is more common in younger people and older adults are more alert during the day and need less sleep at night.

Despite spending a longer period asleep at night, young people aged 20 to 30 are more likely to find their eyes closing during the day than older people aged 65-plus.

Researchers at the University of Surrey studied 110 healthy adults at the University of Surrey who spent eight hours in bed.

They found that the older they were the less time they spent sleeping. Adults over 65 slept for six-and-a-half hours on average, 20 minutes less than adults aged 40-55. They in turn slept 23 minutes less than those aged 20-30, who spent on average seven hours 13 minutes asleep.

Older people also woke more during the night and spent less time in deep, slow wave sleep, which is thought to be the most restful. Despite this they showed less propensity of falling asleep during the day than the young adults.