On Monday, Paul McCartney (one-time Beatle and long-time vegetarian) helped launch a "Meat Free Monday" campaign in Britain.

Actually, he’s a little bit late to the table, as I found out when I spoke with David Wallinga, MD, director of the Food and Health Program at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

"Meatless Mondays is an idea that’s been around for several years," Wallinga said. It began in 2003 at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md., he noted, and has been spreading with what seems like accelerating momentum to other cities and states, and around the world.

The project’s purpose is twofold: to lower our individual risk for preventable health-harming conditions (such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease and cancer), and to reduce our carbon footprint. According to a 2006 United Nations report, about one-fifth of global warming greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans are generated by the meat industry.

In the United Kingdom, said Wallinga, a commission issued a report earlier this year on ways to make the National Health Service more environmentally sustainable. “They estimated that the National Health Service is responsible for 3 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions” in England, he said. The commission proposed that one way to reduce those emissions is to offer fewer meat and dairy products on hospital menus. Similar efforts are underway in the United States, said Wallinga, under the auspieces of the HealthCare Without Harm campaign.

Is going meatless healthier?
I asked Wallinga what he thought of the health claims for forgoing meat once a week.

"There’s a huge health benefit," he said. "For one thing, meat tends to be higher in saturated fat than other foods."

Earlier this year, a large, decade-long study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that people who ate the most red or processed meat tended to die slightly sooner, including from cancer and heart disease, than their peers who ate much smaller amounts of those foods.

But as University of Minnesota health journalism professor Gary Schwitzer points out in his media watchdog blog, that was an "observational study [that] simply CAN NOT establish causation. It can only point to statistical association."

Still, wrote New York Times health writer Jane Brody in her column, the study’s findings mirror other research that has linked a high intake of red meat with chronic health problems.

It’s too late to have a meatless Monday this week, of course, but as Sir Paul suggests in this video, you can "have a think about it" and then, perhaps, give it a try next Monday.

Health-care myths debunked, Part 2

As I noted on Monday, a recent article in the Annals of Surgery lays out arguments, loaded with statistics, to debunk five myths about the U.S. health-care system. Here, as promised, is a summary of part two of the article.

Myth 2: There will always be a certain segment of the population that remains uninsured.

"There is a general misconception that the uninsured are also unemployed, that they represent the marginalized section of society," say the article’s authors. "Epidemiologcal studies clearly show that this is false."

• Two-thirds of non-elderly people without health insurance have jobs, and the number of uninsured people is steadily growing — 46.6 million according to a 2006 Census Bureau Report.
• People with incomes that are more than 200 percent of the federal poverty level accounted for one-third of the recent increase in the number of uninsured adults, and half that growth was among young adults aged 19 to 34.
• Fewer employers are offering health insurance to their employees, and employees with health insurance are being asked to contribute at a rate that’s rising more quickly than their incomes.
• When out-of-pocket payments are high, employees’ health suffers. One study found that people with the highest deductibles used 25 to 30 percent fewer medical services than their peers with free care. But high-deductible plans also had lower health outcomes, including poorer control of blood pressure.
• Between 1996-1997 and 2001-2002, the average American family’s out-of-pocket spending on health care rose nearly twice as fast as its income.

Tomorrow: Myth 3: The uninsured have equal access to medical care through the emergency room