I have moved my blog to http://aaronhegde.blogspot.com. I seem to be able to incorporate more features on blogspot. So I will try it out for a few weeks and see the difference.

An article in last week’s Economist magazine, titled ‘Better than Cure’ discusses a study led by Dean Cornish at UCSF which looked at the impact of vegetarian diet on prostate cancer. They found that a low-fat vegetarian diet, with whole grains, for a period of three months led to the switching off of oncogenes (cancer causing genes) and the turning on of disease-preventing genes in a group of 30 men who were in the beginning stages of prostate cancer. While there are some questions about the study (there was no control group, small number of subjects, etc), it nonetheless is a step towards the validation of healthy diets and decreased incidences of diseases and the continuing notion of an apple a day keeping the doctor and his/her meds away. Source (full article): Cancer and Diet (click here)

It is often believed that in order to be eco-friendly one needs to consume locally grown foods. Some even advocate this militantly, saying that it is not ‘natural’ to consume strawberries/cherries in the middle of winter, when it is evident that they would have had to travel miles from the Southern Hemisphere to get to their wintery destinations in the northern hemisphere. A new study titled ‘Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States‘ by Christopher Weber and Scott Matthews, both from Carnegie Mellon, forthcoming in the journal Environmental Science and Technology suggests that it is the production of the food (how it is produced) that matters more than its transportation (how far it travels). They find that transportation adds only 11% to the average household’s contribution to greenhouse gases (GHG) due to food consumption, the rest due to the food production itself. Of the remainder, the largest contributor of GHG was found to be Red meat (30%) and dairy (18%), with fruits and vegetables (11%) and cereals and grains (11%) contributing among the least. Chicken, fish and eggs contributed 10% towards GHGs. Another evidence of the fact that red meat is not healthy, whether to the health of an individual or our earth. A chapter in the S. Clark edited book ‘Food Politics at Home and Abroad‘ discusses the water usage in the production process of various types of foods. This chapter, written by Michael Ault and Monica Evans, titled ‘Verities of Vegetarianism: Why They Pay Less and We Pay More‘ finds that more water is needed to produce one pound of meat than for an equivalent pound of vegetables.