Check out our monthly newsletter here! 

As a physician specializing in nutrition, Dr. Kumara Sidhartha knows the health and environmental benefits of eating a plant-based diet.

But rather than trying to convert patients to vegetarianism, he enourages them to simply take the lifestyle for a spin once a week.

“A lot of people are starting with meatless Mondays,” he says. “They’re just taking one day a week without meat.”

Sidhartha and one of his colleagues at Emerald Physicians, physician’s assistant Andrea Lyonnais, will answer questions Friday after a 7 p.m. screening of the movie PLANEAT at the Unity on Cape Cod Church, 147 Walton St. in Hyannis.

According to the website for the independent film, www.planeat.tv/, “PLANEAT is the story of three men’s life-long search for a diet, which is good for our health, good for the environment and good for the future of the planet. With an additional cast of pioneering chefs and some of the best cooking you have ever seen, the scientists and doctors in the film present a convincing case for the West to re-examine its love affair with meat and dairy.”

The film explores studies of three scientists; Dr. T Colin Campbell in China who is exploring the link between diet and disease, Dr.Caldwell Esselstyn’s use of nutrition to treat chronically ill heart disease patients, and professor Gidon Eshel’s investigations into how food choices contribute to global warming, wasteful land use and lifeless oceans. More recently, Campbell and Esselstyn

have become known for their role in turning former President Bill Clinton onto a vegan diet.

“With the help of some innovative farmers and chefs,

PLANEAT shows how the problems we face today can be solved, without simply resorting to a diet of lentils and lettuce leaves,” Unity on Cape Cod volunteer Martha Powers writes in an email.

The movie includes chefs demonstrating more adventurous ways to cook vegetables.

“I just would like to see a heightened awareness of people realizing what they’re putting in their bodies and the consequences. It’s so easy to be unconscious about eating,” says Powers, who leads the church’s EarthCare Ministry Team.

That volunteer team is observing Earth Day for the sixth year by hosting an April film festival and speaker program. Friday’s film seeks to increase awareness of how raising animals en masse for food requires more of the earth’s resources than growing plants to provide the same amount of nutrition.

In an appearance earlier this month on the cable access show “Homefront,” Sidhartha said vegan (no animal products at all) diets use one-third the fossil fuels as meat.

According to the Environmental Defense Fund, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off U.S. roads.

Both Sidhartha and Powers point to the 2006 United Nations report “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” an investigation by the Food and Agricultural Organization into resources used in livestock production. It included statistics such as how 70 percent of Amazon forest is used for grazing, 70 percent of antibiotic use is for livestock and animal farming is responsible for half of topsoil erosion.

After the report, senior U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization official Dr. Henning Steinfeld said the meat industry was a signficant contributor to environmental problems and required urgent action.

For Sidhartha, that action starts at the dinner table.

As a primary care physician now working on his Master of Public Health in Nutrition degree, Sidhartha has seen studies showing that a plant-based diet can help prevent chronic conditions such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes. He is fascinated, Sidhartha says, by emerging evidence showing the effect of healthy vegan diets to reverse existing heart disease and diabetes in patients.

Sidhartha offers a sample menu and recipes he shares with patients.

Nutty-Choc-Oatmeal

Serves 1

1 cup of cooked rolled oats

Add the following to the cooked oatmeal, mix with spoon:

1/2 cup of almond or soy milk

1 tablespoon blackstrap molasses

Half banana or pear or apple (chopped) or 1/4 cup berries

2 teaspoons cocoa powder (pure cocoa with no dairy or sugar added)

2 tablespoons ground flax seed

Few raisins or two chopped dates

2 ounces of walnuts or pistachios

Crunchy-Chickpea Salad

Serves 2 to 4

One 15-ounce can of chickpeas, rinsed

1 packet of matchstick carrots (about 8 ounces)

4 celery sticks, chopped

1 red bell pepper, diced

2 tablespoons Nayonaisse or Veganaisse

2 tablespoons Dijon or brown mustard

1/2 teaspoon of curry powder

1 teaspoon turmeric

Salt and pepper

• Mash the chickpeas in a large bowl. Leave half of the chickpeas unmashed or partly mashed.
• Add Nayonaisse or Veganaisse, mustard, curry powder and turmeric and mix. Add the remaining vegetables and mix again.
• Add a pinch of salt and pepper and mix. Serve it just like that or on a leaf of lettuce
• From the blog, www.lapuremama.com

Neat Loaf

Serves 8 to 10

2 cups cooked brown rice

1 cup walnuts, finely chopped

1 cup chopped mushrooms

1 onion, finely chopped

1/2 medium bell pepper, finely chopped

2 medium carrots, shredded or finely chopped

1 cup wheat germ

1 cup quick-cooking rolled oats

1/2 teaspoon EACH thyme, marjoram, sage

2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 tablespoons stoneground or Dijon mustard

Barbeque Sauce or ketchup

• Preheat the oven to 350 F.
• Combine all the ingredients except the barbecue sauce or ketchup. Mix for 2 minutes with a large spoon. This will help bind it together.
• Pat into an oil-sprayed 5-by- 9-inch loaf pan and top with barbecue sauce or ketchup.
• Bake for 60 minutes. Let stand for 10 minutes before serving.
• Recipe from “The Peaceful Palate: Fine Vegetarian Cuisine”

By Gwenn Friss