Article From My Paper

[Guest guest]

This is a bit long so I'm going to post some of it and then link the rest. We had a Veg*n shing ding a few months ago and a few of the folks mentioned were there

Choosing a vegetarian diet changed their health

Here's how local people made the switch

By LISA MARTIN / Special contributor to the Dallas Morning News

 

Though no physician ever suggested that Barbara Bush of Carrollton

become a vegetarian, the assistant professor at the University of North

Texas realized that she inherited a legacy of diet-related diseases

that included diabetes and heart problems. A dozen years

ago, she began as a vegetarian, then transitioned to a vegan, someone

who eats no animal products whatsoever, including dairy and eggs. " Doctors seem to enjoy telling me I'm in good health, " she says. " And I feel like I'm in good health. "

She's part of a growing trend of people abstaining from or limiting the

amount of meat and other animal-based products in their diet. As of

last year, there were an estimated 4.8 million vegetarians in the

United States, one-third to one-half of them vegan, according to the

Vegetarian Resource Group, a nonprofit educational organization. That

number has nearly doubled since 1997. So why have those

people decided to go vegetarian? The reasons vary nearly as much as the

people themselves, although definite themes motivate the choice, namely

health and ethical and environmental reasons.

As a teenager in the Czech Republic, Barbara Dillard feared that a

nasty bout of hepatitis would end her dreams of becoming a professional

ballerina. Traditional medicine may have saved her life at age 17, but

she despaired that the constant fatigue and accompanying weakness might

end her aspirations. Out of desperation and after much research, she

decided to try vegetarianism. " My doctors

were amazed at my recovery, " says Mrs. Dillard, a Dallasite since the

late 1990s. " But it wasn't easy to be a vegetarian. I even had to learn

to make my own soy milk. " That's because such products were not readily

available at the time in the Eastern European country.

She went on to spend four years as a member of the National Theatre

ballet company in the Czech Republic before moving stateside, where she

is a stay-at-home mom. Dr. Manisha Chandalia, an

endocrinologist and metabolism specialist at UT Southwestern Medical

Center, also brought a tradition of vegetarianism with her to Dallas.

" I don't have strong religious reasons for being a vegetarian, but

growing up in India, nobody in my family was very keen on meat, " she

explains. " Here, it's more difficult for me to be a vegetarian. It's

easy to become sloppy and end up with a carb intake that's too high. "

Dr. Chandalia describes herself as an ovo-lacto vegetarian: someone who

eats no meat, poultry or fish but whose diet includes dairy products

and eggs. Mrs. Dillard, on the other hand, is a vegan:

She will not consume animal products, which means checking food labels

for ingredients such as lard and gelatin. Dallas Morning News

-- Gymbo in Texas " We're going to go fast for Bobby! " RIP Bobby Hamilton 5/29/57-1/7/07 " Cue the Duck! " RIP BP 7/12/41-1/16/07

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