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George Plimpton George Plimpton is offline
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Default Glasgow: the vegan capital of*Britain?

On 8/12/2013 7:08 PM, Jay Stevens, the jyotishithead - not a doctor, not
a Hindoo, just a fraud - lied:

> Glasgow: the vegan capital of Britain?
>
> The Scottish city is often associated with rather less
> healthy dietary trends, but it turns out to be a hotbed
> of healthy animal-free food


Shut your goddamned drooling mouth, Stevens, before I bang a shovel into
it. You're not a "doctor", you ****ing squat-to-**** faggot.



"The sickest city in the West "

http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/...-west-1.782595

GLASGOW -- At a store called A&S Greengrocer, the only greens for sale
are cans of ''marrowfat processed peas''.

piles cases of cola where the fruit used to be. One wall holds 24 types

of potato chip. The cooler chills squares of lard. In the window sits a

hangover cure called ''healthsalt,'' an abandoned scale, and an ad for

cut-price cigarettes.''

''My best seller,'' Mr Qaddus says.

A few doors down at Remo's Fish and Chicken Bar, there's no fish or

chicken. The lunch menu is a 35-cent ''roll and fritters'' -- sliced

potato, soaked in batter and deep-fried in a vat of beef fat, served on

a buttery slab of white bread. At night, the shop sells steak pies and

pizza. The pizza is deep-fried.

Clutching a greasy paper bundle, the day's first diner shrugs off

healthy eating. ''I'm on the seafood diet -- I see food, I eat it,'' he

quips, patting an ample gut. Glancing skywards, he adds: ''When the Big

Man wants you, you go.''

In Glasgow, the West's sickest city, people go uncommonly young.

NO Fresh Fruit: This is the lung cancer capital of the globe. Glasgow

also is tops for heart attacks, with coronary death rates 800% higher

than in Japan. Life expectancy is on a par with Cuba, and trails the US

by about six years.

This grisly resume has made Glasgow a laboratory of unhealthy living,

with medical sleuths probing Scottish recipes, ashtrays, stature -- even

rainfall -- in search of clues. ''For lifestyle-related disease,

Glasgow's in a class of its own,'' says David McQueen, a behavioural

scientist who left John Hopkins University to survey Scottish habits.

''People are literally eating and smoking themselves to death.''

Telling shards unearthed so far: 50% of Glasgow's residents get

virtually no exercise; 83% of its middle-aged men have been regular

smokers at some stage of their lives; 30% of men in some districts eat

no fresh fruit at all. Such habits, though, are part of a lethal

cocktail of hazards -- cultural, environmental, and economic -- that

puts some Glaswegians at much greater risk than others. ''If you're out

of work and you've got black fungus crawling up your walls, changing

your diet isn't at the top of your list of priorities,'' says Aine

Kennedy, a health worker in Drumchapel, one of the city's poorest

districts.

THE Fourth World: In Glasgow, living dangerously has always come with

the territory. Wealth first arrived with the import of sugar and

tobacco; the city still has streets named Jamaica and Virginia -- and a

famed addiction to nicotine and sweets. (Across Glasgow more than a

third of people wear dentures by the age of 35.) Glasgow later became

the workhorse of the British empire, producing a third of its ships and

trains. Industry also bred smog and slums so foul that a parliamentarian

branded Glasgow ''earth's nearest summit to hell''.

The city has long since scrubbed the soot from its sandstone and

turned itself into a cultural centre, but for many of Greater Glasgow's

1,000,000 inhabitants, the legacy of the industrial revolution remains

etched in arteries and lungs. ''This is the Fourth World -- the one the

First World used and threw away,'' says Thomas Riley, an unemployed

factory worker, touring a grim concrete housing project teeming with

idle adults.

Mr Riley lives in Drumchapel, a post-war ''township'' built to replace

Victorian slums. A generation later, with more than 20% of Glaswegians

still jobless and 75% receiving some form of public aid, these cramped,

damp tenements have become new slums, with 22,000 people crammed into

some of the city's poorest streets, In Mr Riley's two-bedroom flat,

which he shares with a family of five, mold speckles on the floor and

wallpaper peels off within days. In winter, when the Rileys can afford

to heat only one room, he says: ''It's colder inside than out.''

SOLE Survivor: Mr Riley, 43, is the only surviving adult male in his

building of 14 people; four other men died in their forties and fifties

from heart or lung disease. ''I used to use their coughing as an alarm

clock,'' he says. Now, if there's a noise or suspected burglar in the

night, ''I'm the one all the kids come running for.''

Across the street, Daniel and Josie Lough's four children caught

dystentery when a pipe burst this winter, spewing raw sewage. Now their

10-month-old daughter has bronchitis. Ms Lough fills the baby's bottle

with a sweet fizzy soft drink called Irn-Bru. ''It's cheaper than milk

and it keeps her calm,'' she says.

Mr Lough, an unemployed labourer, sits hand-rolling ''coffin nails'',

the harsh, unfiltered cigarettes favoured by Glasgow's men. He says

healthy living is easy for ''posh people'' but hard for families such as

his, getting by on state aid of $200 a week. Like most Glaswegians, the

Loughs own no car, so they shop at poorly stocked local stores. With a

cucumber costing as much as a 5lb bag of chips (french fries), ''I buy

what's filling,'' he says.

As for smoking, Mr Lough knows he should quit. ''But I can't afford to

go to the pub, to eat out, to do anything,'' he says, nursing the stub

of his cigarette, ''Smoking's the only pleasure in life I have left.''

Others, however, find solace in drugs and drink. One fast escape: a

cocktail of fortified wine and methylated spirits known as ''electric

soup''.

A few pockets of Glasgow do enjoy good health, quashing notions that

the city's climate or water may be deadly. But there is a line

connecting the black dots of premature death across Glasgow. It's

poverty. Drumchapel is among Scotland's sickest districts. Yet a few

streets away, an upper middle class area called Bearsden is among the

healthiest, with death rates half what they are next door. ''In terms of

health, this is Scandinavia and that's Romania,'' says Michael Kelly, a

public health expert, driving along the park separating Bearsden's wide

lawns from Drumchapel tenements.

One factor is that chronic unemployment has so dislocated life in poor

families, with sleep and meal times jumbled, that basic domestic skills

are eroding. ''I never really learned to cook, except for dumping chips

in the Masterfry,'' says Ms Lough, the Drumchapel mother, echoing a

trend observed by public-health workers across Glasgow.

Scotland's national pantry includes a rich selection of foods to die

for, and from: desserts called ''cream crowdie'' (cream, oatmeal, sugar

and rum) and ''hattit kit'' (buttermilk, cream, sugar, nutmeg), a

breakfast of Scotch eggs (hard-boiled eggs wrapped in sausage and

deep-fried, forming what one tour book describes as ''a greasy

cannonball''); and refreshments such as ''heavy'' (bitter beer) and ''a

nippy sweetie'' (a glass of spirits, usually whisky).

DEADLY Obstinacy: The machismo and conservatism of Glasgow men make it

hard to wean them off such foods, particular in favour of fruit and

vegetables. At a health food fair near the river Clyde's docks,

middle-aged wives compare their husbands' favourite dishes. ''Sugar,

spice, treacle, sugar,'' Evelyn Dick says, listing the ingredients of a

desert called clootie dumpling. ''If there's any left over, you add

sugar and fry it for breakfast with bacon, black pudding, sausage and

eggs.''

Ms Dick's husband died of a heart attack at 59, a few months shy of

retirement. She still thinks about the tour of Scotland they had

planned, and also about the meals she cooked him. ''I feel guilty,'' she

says, staring into her salad. ''He was always a stubborn man and loved

stodgy food. But maybe that's what killed him.''

Across the table, Margaret O'Neil nods sympathetically, and talks of

her own husband, a maintenance worker. ''I cooked him some greens last

year,'' she says. ''He said, 'That's for cows in the field, not for

men'.''

Her husband, Frank, rolls up his sleeve to reveal a bulging bicep

tattooed with the words, ''Scotland the Brave''. He's 36, smokes, and

has high cholesterol. ''All that stuff, it canna touch me,'' he says,

squeezing a hand-grip that measures strength. ''I'm young. I'm strong.

I'm insured.''

In western Scotland, a cold, wet region that traditionally has had

little produce in its diet, consumption of fruit and vegetables is so

low that doctors still encounter scurvy and rickets, vitamin-starved

conditions that vanished elsewhere decades ago. Such deficiencies may

affect the immune systems of Glaswegians, helping to explain, for

instance, why smokers here have rates of lung cancer double those of

comparable smokers in the US.

READY for a Funeral: Another major suspect is asbestos. Exposure to

the fibre may hugely increase the risk of lung cancer among smokers, and

is linked to a very rare and lethal cancer called mesothelioma. In

Glasgow's riverside districts, where asbestos from shipyards once misted

the streets, rates of mesothelioma are among the highest in the world.

''I keep a black suit at the office, just in case another mate pops

off,'' rasps Bert Connor, an ailing former shipyard worker who runs an

asbestos victims group from a tenement marked by a skull and crossbones.

''Like many Glaswegians, he harbours odd notions about health.

Cigarettes coat the lungs, protecting them from asbestos,'' he says.

Such folk-wisdom even infects Glasgow's health-food stores. Eric

Miller, who runs a grain shop, stocks buttery shortbread and

additive-rich prepared foods amid the lentils and bran. He also smokes,

as do the women running a nearby health-food cafe (non-smoking areas a

novelty here). ''Smoking and food have nothing to do with bad health,''

Mr Miller claims. He points at six pubs nearby. ''Clearly, it's the

booze.''

In a city where people have always died young, from scourges such as

tuberculosis and smallpox, fatalism is rampant. Men in their early

forties talk about triple by-pass as if it were a wisdom-tooth

extraction: inconvenient but inevitable. Others hide behind a wall of

denial. When people visit Karla Kinsella to have their palms inspected

or tarot cards read, ''a lot of them say, 'If there's anything bad about

my health, I don't want to know'.''

Scottish stoicism compounds the city's health troubles, often causing

the stricken to delay calling for help, says James Pickett, a 25-year

veteran of Glasgow's ambulance crew. Alochol also fuzzes judgment. ''I

found a man who'd been dead for hours while his mates just sat there

drinking,'' he says. ''They reckoned he was catching up on his sleep.''

THE Dying Scotsman: Mr Pickett now drives a paramedic van fitted with

heart-start gear, part of a new campaign to boost survival rates. Siren

wailing, hands clutched on the wheel, he hurtles down the rain-slicked

streets beside the River Clyde. The radio crackles again:

Male. Collapse. Chest pains.

''Our commonest call,'' Mr Pickett says.

Cutting through empty factory lots, Mr Pickett reaches the caller's

home to find an ashen-faced man slumped beside a butt-choked ashtray.

The stricken man quit smoking three years ago, following a coronary, but

started again after a few weeks. ''He was feeling OK by then,'' his wife

explains.

Mr Pickett gives the man oxygen and loads him into a waiting

ambulance. Then he speeds off to rescue a drunk, a drug addict, and a

battered wife. During a rare quiet spell, Mr Pickett pulls into a

hospital driveway. A parking attendant -- a potbellied smoker in his

mid-thirties -- ambles over to tell about his night at the pub. ''I made

it home without anyone walking on my hands,'' he boasts. Meaning, he was

drunk but not so drunk that he had to crawl.

As the man wanders off, lighting a cigarette, Mr Pickett shakes his

head. ''Another dying Scotsman,'' he says.

Education can help change the habits that kill. In the US since the

mid-1960s heart-disease deaths have fallen by 37% and rates of adult

smoking by almost half. The UK is a health-promotion laggard, but

Glasgow has started its own aggressive campaign. New ads show young

hipsters saying no to cigarettes and beer. The city has issued vouchers

to shoppers for healthful but costlier goods, such as whole-grain bread.

The campaign also has harnessed Glasgow's famed wit and ''patter'' to

drive its message home. One TV cartoon featured a stunted, drunken,

chain-smoking bloke who returns from the pub to a wife who complains:

''So you've had another six pints of yon contraceptive.''

But Glaswegians also deploy humour to deflect health worries. At the

Quarter Gill pub, Rob McKay sits with a friend tossing back whiskies and

beer chasers. The talk turns to health and diet. ''You have to take all

that with a wee grain of salt,'' quips Mr McKay. Adds his friend:

''Salad's for rabbits. Haven't had one since I was a bunny.''

The two men laugh, then tally up the funerals they attended the month

before, eight in all. This prompts a recital of local slang for being

dead, or, as the Scots say it, ''deed.''

''Snuffed it,'' quips Mr McKay.

''Lights out,'' his friend fires back. ''Up the road.''

''He's pan-bread,'' Mr McKay says. Pan-breed. ''Or Sam Snead.''

Mr McKay, an obsese man of 39, then cheerfully reveals that he had a

coronary a year ago and was told to avoid booze and fried foods. He

hasn't. As he orders another round, he jokes: ''You can smell the clay

on me already.''