Vegetarianism: Movement Or Moment: Promoting A Lifestyle For Cult Change

2. Vegetarian Diets and the Health Professions: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Issues

2 Vegetarian Diets and the Health Professions Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Issues Many vegetarian diets do have certain inherent deficiencies. They are adequate only if they are supplemented with dairy and poultry products, which are necessary to meet the nutritional requirements of all age groups. —Darla Erhard, “The New Vegetarians,” 1973 Vegetarian diets are consistent with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and can meet Recommended Dietary Allowances for Nutrients. —U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Nutrition and Your Health, 1995 Although people in the nineteenth century often linked vegetarian diets with such social causes as abolition and temperance , Graham and other charismatic health leaders successfully encouraged many people to adopt vegetarian diets to cure or assuage health problems. Today, most North American vegetarians are still motivated by health concerns,1 unlike their British counterparts, who historically and contemporarily have been more concerned with animal rights and ethics.2 Although the reform components of the nineteenth-century North American vegetarian movement weakened over time, 22 many individuals and groups have incorporated vegetarianism into various forms of political and social reform. For example, in 1948, John Maxwell ran for U.S. president on the Vegetarian Party ticket, which advocated the “extermination of cattle [raising] and conversion of their grazing lands to food production .”3 And in the 1996 U.S. presidential elections, both the Green Party and the Natural Law Party endorsed vegetarianism and sustainable agriculture in broad terms. Although vegetarian diets are occasionally mentioned in the political arena, however, vegetarian individuals and groups have focused more on legitimizing and publicizing the health benefits of vegetarianism than on making political demands. Historically, health professionals have marginalized vegetarian diets, but beginning in the last quarter of the twentieth century, this attitude began to change dramatically. Because medical and nutritional scientists provide a voice of authority that structures the discourse on what constitutes healthful eating , they are important to the successful promotion of vegetarianism .4 According to one survey, for example, 75 percent of Americans look to dietitians for “expert advice on issues of health and nutrition.”5 The support that the ADA, the American Heart Association (AHA), the American Cancer Society (ACS), and other such organizations have given to diets based on whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables has contributed greatly to the ability of vegetarian groups to support their claims about the healthfulness of vegetarianism.6 Although health organizations typically do not promote vegetarian diets outright (the ADA being, to some degree, an exception ), their acknowledgment that a plant-based diet can be healthful (and perhaps even more healthful than an omnivorous diet) contributes to a more positive image than existed in the past. Still, controversy lingers about whether some segments of the population (for example, infants and teenage girls) are at risk for medical problems that stem from inadequate vegetarian nutrition. Vegetarian Diets and the Health Professions 23 Although vegetarianism itself is a philosophy, an ideology, most people initially approach vegetarianism as a diet. They think about what they will eat “instead of meat” and what choices they will make in a variety of social contexts. Even ethically motivated vegetarians find that nonvegetarians typically ask them questions that focus on health: Where do you get your protein? How do you take in enough iron? The North American vegetarian movement has always promoted diet as a means of bringing about self-improvement rather than as a means of achieving a public moral good, and popular discourse on health and fitness has perhaps strengthened this emphasis on contemporary vegetarianism as a personal, self-benefiting choice. A Brief Historical Overview of Vegetarianism in the United States Nineteenth-century vegetarian reformers argued the benefits of vegetarianism on both moral and medical grounds.7 Like many Jacksonian movements, the vegetarian movement reacted to industrialization’s encroachment into everyday life.8 Medicine was becoming more technical, with the advent of new instruments (such as the stethoscope), inhalation anesthesia , diagnosis with reference to clinical statistics, and new medicines derived from vegetable sources. Science began to replace religion as the predominant moral paradigm.9 And in the early 1800s, industrialization and modernization conflicted with new philosophical concepts that began to acknowledge the individual’s capacity to reattune with nature and with God through independent, moral action.10 The early vegetarian health reformers, sometimes called moral physiologists , offered a “system of everyday piety,” a structure that enabled followers to...