This Crazy Vegan Life: Christina Pirello Finished A Triathalon At Age 51~
Written: Oct 20 '09 (Updated Oct 21 '09)
Product Rating:
Pros: bold message; very convincing reasons for becoming vegan; most recipes sound delicious
Cons: clueless about coconut oil; most recipes take time, a few strange ingredients
The Bottom Line: I've happily been a vegan for 8 years, but learned interesting things from this book. Should encourage people to eat less animal food, if not eventually go vegan...
jankp's Full Review: Christina Pirello - This Crazy Vegan Life
Being a strict vegetarian, or vegan, where one eschews all animal foods (meat, poultry, fish, dairy and eggs) does not necessarily make a person weak, pale and sickly. Christina Pirello, author of the 2009-published This Crazy Vegan Life: A Prescription For An Endangered Species, has been a vegan for twenty-five years, survived terminal leukemia because of it, is the Emmy-winning host of public television's longest-running shows called Christina Cooks, has written other books I've reviewed (such as Cooking The Whole Foods Way), as well as putting out a newsletter and doing promotional work, and most recently has lost 38 pounds and finished a triathlon. She's more fit and healthy than most Americans who usually don't restrict their food groups and, as a result, burden (and acidify) their bodies with two to six times more protein than they need.
I, too, have been a vegan for eight years and have experienced the best health of my life. I had one brief, mild cold last winter (because I was low on Vitamin C) and that's it since I changed my diet. It wasn't Pirello's books that convinced me to become a vegan after being mostly a vegetarian since beginning college, although she did pass on helpful information about the vegan diet. Rather it was John Robbins' book after Diet For A New America, but I read and reviewed them both eight years ago. I picked up Pirello's new book out of curiosity mainly because she used to pour on the brown rice syrup very generously in her recipes (which she admits here caused her voluptuousness) and I'm glad that she's realized her mistake. Still I don't have the sweet tooth she does and her non-dessert recipes shouldn't even include a teaspoon or tablespoon of syrup. Her recent discovery of a fermented sugar alcohol called erythritol that tastes like sugar naturally has really excited her, but I'm not interested in using it. No long-term studies, either.
While I could start in on my criticisms, I'll save that for later. It's important that you first understand why Pirello wrote This Crazy Vegan Life and what she hopes we'll get out of it. Like most voluntary vegans (including myself and many doctors), Pirello believes that a conscientious vegan lifestyle is much healthier for ourselves and our environment. Eating beans, lentils, veggies, sea veggies, fruit, nuts, seeds, herbs, healthy oils (she prefers olive and avocado; I prefer grape seed and coconut) and whole grains gives vegans all the macro and micronutrients they need to be vibrantly healthy, although supplements may be needed in the beginning of your new diet, according to Pirello.
I'm not so sure about that. I've had to use an iron supplement when I became very low in iron (not Vitamin B-12) and I supplement with Vitamin C, niacin, Vitamin D3 for the dark days, the Vitamin E group and calcium from habit, though calcium from leafy greens like broccoli absorbs much better than from dairy products where most of the calcium is indigestible, accumulates as fat and leads to greater and greater need for calcium as the cycle continues. As Pirello states and is confirmed by medical doctors like John McDougall, Neal Barnard, Frank Oski and T. Colin Campbell, ‘excessive consumption of dairy products has created deficient immune function, weak constitutions, brittle bones, and rampant reproductive disorders.' She gives info likewise about how our bodies didn't evolve to eat much meat, poultry, (increasingly contaminated) fish, eggs, sugar, not to mention the chemicals, hormones and antibiotics in non-organic produce, and they're not working efficiently because of this.
Observing that only tweaking our diets has not and will not help us to lose weight and become healthier, Pirello explains that a drastic change in our diets, such as becoming vegan, will indeed help us to lose weight and be healthier. It certainly has been the case with me and I've had no desire to return to the way I used to eat. She's right in saying that your taste buds won't be detecting the flavors of veggies and fruits at first if you're a meat and potatoes kind of person, but that they'll catch up in a couple of weeks. Your digestive system will probably need different digestive enzymes, but they'll come, too. Don't give up, but ease into it. It took me three months to wean myself completely off meat. I really agree that eating is a much more tasty and sensual experience as a vegan.
Pirello stuffs a lot of good information about nutrition (except for coconut oil that she doen't trust in spite of the clinical evidence of its benefits since the 1970s), the vegan lifestyle, menu plans, over 100 recipes and working out with resistance bands mostly. I could bend your ear all night about the benefits to ourselves and the environment when we eat a vegan diet. Pirello includes many statistics that highlight these benefits, such as that if people ate ten percent less meat per week 100 million hungry people would be fed. Why? Because eighty percent of U.S. corn and ninety-five percent of oats are grown to feed livestock. And yet there's a fifty percent risk of heart attack for men who eat meat daily while only fifteen percent risk if they eat none. There's many more statistics involving cancer risk, fossil fuel use, water and land use that supports the inconvenient truth, as stated in the book, that animal food is the world's single, largest source of pollution as well as the world's single, largest contributor to degenerative disease. If we really wish to reduce health care costs, we'll start by being responsible with what and how much of it we put in our mouths.
To Sum Up This Crazy Vegan Life sounds like it might be a light-hearted book of nine chapters and while Pirello can be a bit irreverent and charmingly amusing, the book offers a bold, sincere message to the world and particularly Americans whose obesity and health problems have morphed into the chronic stage. The message: that the time is here to change to a vegan diet and conscientious, green lifestyle before we lose more of our health and the environment suffers irreparably. Her recipes, sometimes too ambitious and fancy, may be too much work for busy people (she cooks from scratch, doesn't use a slow cooker and most dishes will take a half hour and often more), but some are very doable. I haven't tried them because I never follow a recipe, but create my own after much practice.
Being a vegan actually isn't so crazy and throughout history public figures no less than Albert Einstein and Gandhi made social statements with their vegetarianism. Yes, vegans are a bit rebellious, but hopefully you now understand that that's a good thing!
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