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Posted to soc.culture.indian,alt.fan.jai-maharaj,alt.religion.hindu,alt.food.vegan,alt.animals.ethics.vegetarian,alt.animals.rights.promotion,soc.culture.british,soc.culture.usa
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Glasgow: the vegan capital of*Britain?
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 By Emine Saner The Guardian Monday, August 12, 2013 Glasgow has been shortlisted as a top city to live in for vegans. Photograph: Bon Appetit - Alamy/Alamy Glasgow is regularly credited with more dubious honours: it has been named as the place with the lowest life expectancy in western Europe, high rates of obesity, and the highest mortality rates among the working-age population in the UK. And yet it has also*just been named the most vegan-friendly city in the UK by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta). "Glasgow is fantastic for vegans," says Yvonne Taylor, a campaigner for Peta. "I've been going on about it for years whenever people talk about Brighton or London. Obviously here in Scotland we're not exactly known for our positive eating - we're known as having one of the fattest populations in the world – but in contrast we have this quickly emerging vegan movement." Taylor insists that if you go to vegan cafes, you can see all ages. "People are becoming more aware of their*health." But why Glasgow? Sam Calvert, spokesperson for the Vegan Society, thinks the city's vibrant youth culture is one reason why veganism has taken hold. The University of Glasgow was the first in the UK to be accredited by the Vegan Society, she says. "I think that probably did attract more young vegan people to the city. There is also a history of activism." Continues at: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...tal-of-britain Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi Om Shanti http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.jai-maharaj |
Posted to soc.culture.indian,alt.fan.jai-maharaj,alt.religion.hindu,alt.food.vegan,alt.animals.ethics.vegetarian,alt.animals.rights.promotion
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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.'' |
Posted to soc.culture.indian,alt.fan.jai-maharaj,alt.religion.hindu,alt.food.vegan,alt.animals.ethics.vegetarian,alt.animals.rights.promotion
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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.'' |
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