By Lance Gay / Scripps Howard News Service
A Johns Hopkins University physician says he has a simple solution to deal with the obesity crisis: Cut out meat one day a week.
Dr. Robert Lawrence said it could be any day, but suggested that Monday is a good day to start because it marks the end of weekend excess for many people and the start of a new week.
Besides, he said he also likes how �Meatless Monday� sounds.
But he said if people have another day that better fits into their schedules, it will do just as well. And Lawrence said there�s nothing really radical involved here. Just switching to fish or pasta that one day a week would cut Americans� consumption of saturated fats by 15 percent � or by one-seventh � and thus reduce cholesterol and lower the risk of heart attacks.
Lawrence, a professor of preventive medicine at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said the Meatless Monday campaign hopes to avoid the problems of most public health campaigns, which fail because they are too ambitious.
The Center for Consumer Freedom, an organization funded by the restaurant and food industry, criticized the Meatless Monday campaign as being an anti-agriculture move paid for by environmental and anti-meat interests. Lawrence said he�s not promoting vegetarianism, just urging Americans to cut back on saturated fats.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that U.S. per-capita meat consumption (red meat, poultry and fish) hit an all-time high of 222 pounds a year in 2003 � up from about 155 pounds in 1960. The American Meat Institute estimates that a little more than half of meat consumption involves the red meats � beef, mutton, pork and veal.