CHERYL EVE LANDAU COLE Health Care News :
The smell of onions fills Dayna Panella's kitchen as she prepares
ingredients for her pumpkin baked ziti and bakes a pie in the oven. Her
children, 1-year-old Jake and 3-year-old Lily, are escorted to another
room by her husband, Dan, as they ask when they are going to see
grandma.

As Panella whirls around the kitchen in a black and white apron,
stirring and whipping and chopping, it's for the most part a normal
Thanksgiving scene. Except this: There is no turkey or eggs or milk to
be found anywhere.

Panella is cooking two vegan dishes to take to her mother and
mother-in-law's Thanksgiving dinners. She is part of a growing trend to
eliminate all food that comes from animals, like meat and dairy
products, from dinner tables and replace them with recipes using only
freshly grown food.

While it is hard to estimate the number of vegans nationwide, a
Harris Interactive Service Bureau study of 5,050 people in 2008
estimated about 0.5 percent of the population, or 1 million Americans,
are vegan.

Compared to when she started as a vegetarian 11 years ago, Panella
said there is more interest in the vegan lifestyle with the green,
environmental movement.

Now that there are many vegan substitutes available for meat items,
including bacon and sausage made from tofu and other organic materials,
and stores focus on selling more organic produce, Panella said vegan
foods are more available for people to try.

After family and friends started asking about Panella's lifestyle,
she began teaching a class about two-and-a-half years ago. About every
six weeks, Panella has classes called Conscious Cooking to teach people
how to cook vegan recipes. Most people schedule the classes by
contacting her at Vine and Branches, the business she owns with her
husband.

"I wanted to show people you can whip stuff together, even if you haven't had time to grocery shop," she said.

Lori Moore and her 18-year-old daughter, Miriam, attend Panella's
classes to broaden their cooking skills since going vegan in June, when
they attended a health workshop at the Grape Festival Grounds.

When looking at a traditional Thanksgiving meal, Lori Moore said
they will be able to eat most of the dishes. They will skip the gravy,
mashed potatoes and butter, and green bean casserole, which Miriam will
miss most this year.

"We will be eating the same thing as the rest of the family, with the exception of the turkey." she said.

As a main dish, they will instead eat stuffed butternut squash.
They use basic stuffing mix from the store and replace the chicken
broth. They are also bringing mashed sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie.

While both families are predominately vegan, they will still be
attending Thanksgivings with family members who are looking forward to
carving the turkey.

Panella said her husband's Italian family has had to adjust to the
fact that she doesn't eat meat and cheese, which are both plentiful in
their cooking.

"It's hard with my in-laws being Italian, but they do well with it. As well as they can in an Italian family," she said.

Making the change

Even within their immediate families, they don't always strictly
adhere to veganism. Moore's teenage son still cooks meat occasionally
to eat with dinner. Because her children are young, Panella lets them
have macaroni and cheese because it is one of the few foods they will
eat.

There are a variety of reasons people choose to make the switch to
veganism. Lori and Miram Moore changed their diets mostly because they
had heard so much about protein causing diseases, like diabetes, heart
disease or obesity.

Since going vegan, Lori Moore said she has gone down two dress sizes even though she hasn't been exercising.

"You are eating fresh produce so low in calories but so high in what your bodies want," she said.

The amount of time they spend in the kitchen to make vegan dishes
is about the same, Lori Moore said, but they do have to be more
conscious about their choices. She has learned how to read nutrition
labels for dairy and meat byproducts, and Miriam Moore often looks for
new recipes online.

But since they have gone vegan, they both agree that the range of flavors in their food has expanded.

Panella was a vegetarian before she became a zookeeper, and has
been vegan off-and-on for the past 11 years. While she believes humans
were meant to eat meat, she does not believe we should be consuming so
much of it, and her concerns about unsustainable farming practices is
what made her go vegan permanently three years ago.

"If we lower the amount of meat we eat, it will lower the demand,
lower the health risks and create a lot more feed and grain to feed
people," she said.

Socially, some of the people who work in the factories are
traumatized by slaughtering so many cows, she said. Environmentally,
there is runoff from the farms polluting waterways, corn fields are
being stripped to mainly be used as grain instead of food and the
animals are being cranked through for slaughter.

But even though her commitment to being vegan is firm, she admits
it can be hard around the holidays when there are so many recipes
calling for dairy. She said it is usually easy to avoid the meat, but
it's hard to avoid all the chocolate dishes and the comfort food.

Both families solve this problem by bringing vegan options when
possible. This year, at the end of the Moores' Thanksgiving dinner,
their family will top off the meal with a vegan pumpkin pie.

CHERYL EVE LANDAU COLE How To Eat Right

A food that has flavoured many dishes across cultures over hundreds —
even thousands — of years, garlic is a species of onion that's not only
strong in taste, but pungent in odour too. So much so that in
mythologies past, the pungent smell of garlic was believed to ward off
vampires and prevent them from sucking your blood.

And with good reason as garlic contains a chemical called Allyl
methyl sulfide (AMS) which directly enters your bloodstream causing its
odour to literally permeate from your inside out. Hence the
after-effects of a garlic meal can often cause the strategic avoidance
of loved ones, colleagues and friends from coming too close to you. In
other words, garlic tends to linger in our systems more noticeably than
other herbs.

Not to be shunned, garlic's sheer potency is also part of its charm
and healing properties. Just as eating garlic or keeping it close to
your person was believed to be effective against vampires in mythology,
so the consumption of garlic is effective against blood-sucking insects
like mosquitos.

And still, the pro's of the garlic plant continue to outweigh that smelly con.

Our previous Health Minister wasn't wrong when she called on garlic
as a plant with properties that assist with a balanced digestive
system, though she may have been going a bit far with claims that it
(along with a list of other vegetables) could replace antiretrovirals
for those suffering from HIV/Aids.

Never-the-less, garlic is claimed to reduce high blood pressure and
boost our immune systems since it is high in those antioxidants that
our bodies require. These antioxiodants also play their part in
reducing our risk of developing cancers

It doesn't stop there, did you know that the garlic plant is a
powerful antibiotic that helps to stop infection too? That's played in
part by its immune-boosting qualities as well as its role as an
antiseptic. The famed Dr. Louis Pasteur, who developed the method of
pasteurisation we still use to this day for milk, also discovered
garlic's good antibacterial activity resulting in its use against
gangrene in both World Wars.

Garlic enhances many different dishes, from Italian pastas and
pizzas, to assisting in flavouring meat with a most delicious and
succulent result. Yet, be careful. Cooking with too much garlic can
'desensitise' your tastebuds to its pungency so that you keep adding
more garlic to your meals for the same effect.

Keep your palette sensitive to different tastes by varying the
herbs and spices you use. Just as we can become too used to large
amounts of salt in food, so we can become used to too much garlic.

Lastly, your garden will benefit from a couple of garlic plants
scattered here and there. Not only will you have fresh garlic at hand,
you'll also be warding off those garden pests that like to nibble on
other plants. Garlic is a great natural insecticide.

CHERYL EVE LANDAU COLE

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