Health Journal Online

Tag: Impossible

  • A Meditation to Return to Ourselves When Practicing Feels Impossible

    A Meditation to Return to Ourselves When Practicing Feels Impossible

    If you’re burned out, discouraged, and disconnected by all the struggle and suffering in the world, you’re not alone. In times of intense upheaval, mindfulness practice can feel impossible. Try this simple, grounding meditation to pause, reconnect with compassion and clarity, and return to yourself.

    Many of us are bearing witness daily to suffering all over the planet. We care about others, and we want desperately to be of use—and seeing the horrors in images and videos and stories every day can be deeply dysregulating to our nervous systems. 

    When we get overwhelmed by this vicarious trauma, we tend to shut down. We disconnect for ourselves and each other. We’re so spun out in our anxiety, anger, or overwhelm that it can feel impossible to engage in any kind of mindfulness or meditation practice. 

    This week, Shalini Bahl offers tender and practical guidance for how to pause, reconnect, and return to ourselves and our essential practice in times of intense internal and external upheaval. 

    A Meditation to Return to Ourselves When Practicing Feels Impossible

    Read and practice the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.

    1. Welcome and thank you for being here, for caring enough to practice despite the gazillion things you could be doing with your time. The world needs people right now who can stay grounded while engaging with the suffering we’re all witnessing with open hearts and minds, people who can act from wisdom rather than overwhelm. People who haven’t lost themselves in the chaos. But we do lose ourselves, all of us. 
    2. When we bear witness to crisis after crisis after crisis, our nervous systems dysregulate. We lose contact with our wisdom, our intentions, our sense of what’s actually ours to do. This practice helps us return. 
    3. We’ll move through three pathways to return home to ourselves. First, inner calm, where you return to clarity and agency. Then compassion, where we are going to reconnect with our humanity and others. And finally curiosity, where you discover what’s actually yours to do, what’s possible for you to do. If you find one pathway calling to you more than others, feel free to linger there longer. Trust what you most need. So ready to begin? 
    4. Come to a posture that feels supported, lying down or seated. Feel the elongation along the back of your spine and neck. Roll your shoulders up, back and down. When you feel ready, lower or close your eyes. 
    5. From this place of presence let’s begin by taking three intentional breaths. Breathe in through the nose and exhale slowly through the mouth. If you like, you can make a sighing sound as you exhale. 
    6. Now return to your natural rhythm of the breath. Invite your mind to be here with your body, with your breath, resting in your awareness of the direct sensations of breathing in the region of your heart. Settle your attention in that one place in your body, in the region of your heart as you breathe in, perhaps noticing the space that’s created in your chest. And as you exhale the relaxation, letting go just for these few minutes letting go of any rushing, any expectations or judgments. 
    7. If you like, place one or both hands on your chest. Especially on days where our minds are busy, we feel fragmented. Placing one or both hands on the chest can really relieve the nervous system. Sense the warmth or coolness of your hands. The rising and falling of your chest under your hands, making contact with your body, sensing the beating heart. 
    8. Give your full care and attention to every inhale, to every exhale and resting in the pauses in between. Notice that space when your in-breath turns to an out-breath. And a slight pause before a new breath enters the body. 
    9. From time to time, your mind may wander away, and that’s natural. As soon as you notice that, with kindness invite your mind to return to this place of rest and awareness in the region of your heart. Connect with your direct experience of breathing, just the way you are. And notice if there’s any striving here, letting go of any effort to even meditate as the breath moves itself and your awareness. All you’re doing is returning to your awareness of this breath moving effortlessly in and out of your body. 
    10. Just for these few moments, allow yourself to rest. To replenish yourself, to feel resourced. And once your mind and body feel stabilized, listening within, ask yourself: What would support you in feeling rested, resourced? What would care for yourself look like in this moment? It might be as simple as turning towards yourself with kindness, appreciating the goodness of your heart and mind. Taking this time to listen within what you need more of, more rest, more movement, connection. Let yourself be held by your own loving kindness. 
    11. From this innate capacity for goodness, for compassion, gently note who you might have hardened against today. You don’t need to start with the hardest person, the one whose actions feel unforgivable. Start with someone easier. Maybe someone who said something online that rubbed you the wrong way. Maybe someone doesn’t understand or see you. Maybe a family member, a colleague, a stranger. Or maybe yourself. With kindness, simply notice the hardness. There’s no need to change it or fix it. Just feel the way it lives in your body, in your chest or belly, your throat. Breathe in to make space for it, to make space around it. 
    12. Recognize this hardness, its protection. You’ve seen unbearable things. You’ve been hurt. The hardness makes sense. And it’s also disconnection. Disconnection from our relational intelligence, from our capacity to see our shared humanity. And if it’s helpful gently invite this question: What if you had grown up in their circumstances? What if you’d received the same information, the same upbringing, the same experiences? Who would you be? Can you soften just a little when you consider this? That we’re all shaped by causes and conditions, often beyond our control. You may not agree with them or even condone what they’re doing. Can you consider saying this person has suffered just like me? This person also wants to be happy just like me? 
    13. Using your breath as an anchor to stay connected with yourself and with your good heart—can you feel that invisible thread connecting you? You’re both breathing the same air, drinking the same water. Living on this one planet we all call home. 
    14. Take a few moments to listen within. What shifts when we touch this shared humanity? 
    15. From this place of connection with yourself and our shared humanity, let’s explore what’s important to you, what’s possible, and what’s yours to do. So return to our open awareness. What’s most important to you in this moment? Take this time to reconnect with your deepest intentions and values. You might ask questions like: What am I not seeing? What might your body be trying to tell you that your mind is missing? 
    16. Without trying to find something special or seeking answers, just staying connected with your body. Trust your inner knowing as you consider the possibilities for actions you can take that are aligned with your intentions, with your unique gifts, with your values. What if there’s something you haven’t tried yet? Some approach you haven’t considered or some alliance you haven’t imagined? Open your mind and heart to new possibilities. Even if you don’t receive specific answers right now, just hold that question, being willing to love the unanswered question and being willing to live the question. 
    17. From this place of  open curiosity, willing to see what you’ve been missing, ask what’s actually possible here. Not what you’ve always done, not what everyone is doing or telling you to do but what is yours to do and what would actually help If you need more clarity. Try journaling, being in nature and any other activity that supports you in returning to yourself to feel connected, alive, present with the gift of this life at this time on this planet Earth. 
    18. Even as we end this practice, remember that you can come back anytime. Every time you notice you’re lost in the scroll, in the rage and the numbness, you can return to your inner calm, your compassion, and your innate capacity for keeping an open and curious mind. This is where clarity, humanity, and creativity live. 

    Thank you for your practice. May our practice together benefit us and benefit all beings.



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  • Heme and Impossible Burgers 

    Heme and Impossible Burgers 

    Is heme just an innocent bystander in the link between meat intake and breast cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure?

    In an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the chair of nutrition at Harvard pointed out that many plant-based meats, such as burgers made by Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, can be high in sodium. An issue specific to the Impossible burger is the “heme (an iron-containing molecule) from soy plants added to the burger patty to enhance the product’s meaty flavor and appearance.” Safety analyses have failed to find any toxicity risk specific to the soy heme churned out by yeast, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has agreed that it is safe, both for use as a flavor and color enhancer. In other words, it’s just as safe as the heme found in blood and muscle in meat—but how much is that really saying?

    The concern raised in the JAMA editorial, for example, was that “higher intake of heme iron has been associated with…elevated risk of developing type 2 diabetes,” killer number seven in the United States. That isn’t all, though. “Higher dietary intake of heme iron is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease,” as well, as killers numbered 1, 4, and 13—heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure. But since heme is found mostly in meat, heme intake may just be a marker for meat intake. It’s like with diabetes: Four meta-analyses have been published to date, and they all reported the same link, as seen below and at 1:25 in my video What About the Heme in Impossible Burgers?. But there are a lot of reasons meat may increase diabetes risk, like its advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), which are produced when animal products are baked, broiled, grilled, fried, or barbecued. So, how do we know that heme isn’t just an innocent bystander?

    The same issue arises with the link between heme intake and increased breast cancer risk. Since heme iron comes from animal foods, it could be any of the other components in meat, like animal fat or meat mutagens, which are compounds in meat that can cause DNA mutations. And what about all the hormonal steroids implanted into cattle that may play a role in the development of breast cancer? A study in Japan found that beef imported from the United States contained up to 600 times the levels of estrogens like estradiol. You can see the comparison of U.S. beef to Japanese beef below and at 2:20 in my video. “Higher consumption of estrogen-rich beef due to hormone application might facilitate estrogen accumulation in the [human] body and thus affect women’s risk for breast cancer.” So, yes, heme iron intake was associated with breast cancer risk, but maybe that’s just because the heme and the hormones traveled together in the same package—meat.

    The NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study is about as good as any observational study can get. It is the largest prospective study on diet and health ever, following more than half a million men and women for more than a decade now. With such a huge dataset, its researchers could take advantage of the fact that different meats have different amounts of heme, so they could try to tease out the heme components, in effect, by comparing people eating different amounts of heme, but the same amount of meat, to see if heme is independently associated with the disease. And, indeed, that’s what they showed: “independent associations between the intake of heme iron and nitrate/nitrite in processed meat and mortality from almost all causes”—death from diabetes, heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease, kidney disease, liver disease, cancer, and all causes put together, as seen here and a 3:33 in my video. 

    The researchers calculated that about one fifth of the association between eating burgers and the shortening of our lifespan, for example, could be statistically accounted for by just the heme itself, but that’s assuming cause-and-effect. An “independent association” is still an association. You can’t prove cause and effect until you put it to the test in interventional studies. 

    Normally, we don’t necessarily care about the mechanism. When the World Health Organization designated bacon, ham, hot dogs, lunch meat, and sausages to be Group 1 carcinogens, meaning we know these products cause cancer in human beings, who cares if it’s the heme iron, the heterocyclic aromatic amines, the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or the N-nitrosamines? They’re all wrapped up in the same place—processed meat—which we know causes cancer, so shouldn’t we try to stay away from it, regardless of the mechanism? With the advent of the Impossible Burger, we really do have to know, because, for the first time, we have a lot of heme without any actual meat, so we need to know if the heme itself is harmful. For that, we’ll have to turn to interventional studies, which we’ll cover next.

    This is the sixth in a nine-part series on plant-based meats. If you missed any of the previous installments, see the related posts below. 

    Up next: 



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  • How Healthy Are the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat vs. Beef? 

    How Healthy Are the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat vs. Beef? 

    What happens when you compare the trans fats, saturated fat, sodium, and cholesterol levels in plant-based meats versus animal-based burgers? 

    Global meat production has skyrocketed over the last half-century. As you can see below and at 0:20 in my video Are Beyond Meat and the Impossible Burger Healthy?, pork and poultry meat now exceed 100 megatons—that’s 100 million tons—a year, and “our growing demand for meat and dairy food products is unsustainable.” 

    “Anti-consumption and/or reduction of meat and animal by-products are arguably the most impactful ways in which consumers can alter their diets to positively impact individual and societal well-being.” Interest in plant-based diets and meat reduction is definitely growing, but even something like Meatless Mondays “requires dietary change and neither sustainability nor health approaches are likely to work with those who have strong positive beliefs about meat eating.” However, swapping in plant-based meat alternatives “may help disrupt the negativity around reducing meat.” For hardcore meat eaters, though, the substitutes have to taste like meat and look like meat.

    It’s interesting. The more people consume meat substitutes, the less likely they are to care that they have similar tastes, textures, appearances, or smells of meat, as you can see here and at 1:04 in my video. 

    But for plant-based alternatives to appeal to those who need them, the meatier, the better. This has certainly been accomplished with the spate of new plant-based products on the market, and study after study after study agree that they’re healthier for the planet. Are they healthier for us, too?

    As you can see below and at 1:30 in my video, when the labels of beef, Impossible, and Beyond burgers were compared and four of the worst components of the food supply—trans fats, saturated fat, sodium, and cholesterol—were assessed, the plant-based burgers won hands down when it came to trans fat and cholesterol. We all know that trans fats are “a serious risk factor to cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes,” but they’ve also been associated with symptoms of depression, a lowering of testosterone in men (even at just 1 percent of calories), as well as linked to “a greater risk of developing all-cause dementia and Alzheimer disease.” Indeed, higher levels of trans fat in our blood are associated with up to a 50 percent higher risk of developing dementia, including Alzheimer’s. 

    Now that partially hydrogenated oils have been phased out of the food supply in the United States, for example, the only major source of trans fats that remains will be animal products.

    What is the tolerable upper daily intake level for trans fat? An upper limit was not set for trans fat by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) “because any incremental increase in trans fatty acid intake increases CHD risk,” and coronary heart disease is the number one killer of men and women. That is, any intake of trans fat above zero “increases LDL cholesterol.”

    Because trans fatty acids are unavoidable in diets that contain meat and dairy, consuming zero trans fat “would require significant changes in patterns of dietary intake.” One of the authors of the Institute of Medicine’s report is from the Harvard School of Public Health’s nutrition department and offered a memorable explanation for why the IOM panel did not cap it at zero: “‘We can’t tell people to stop eating all meat and all dairy products,’ he said. ‘Well, we could tell people to become vegetarians,’ he added. ‘If we were truly basing this only on science we would, but it is a bit extreme.’” (We wouldn’t want scientists to base anything on science…)

    Anyway, plant-based meats being trans-fat-free is a big advantage, and, of course, they’re free of cholesterol, hormones, and antibiotics, and have not been designated as “probable human carcinogens” by the World Health Organization, as you can see here and at 3:30 in my video. 

    Now, I’m not happy with the plant-based burgers’ added salt, which is about a quarter of the American Heart Association’s 1,500-mg daily upper sodium limit, or their saturated fat (from added coconut oil), but those do seem to be outliers. In the largest study of the nutritional value of plant-based meats to date, saturated fat levels of similar products only average about 2 grams per serving, which is much better than the animal-based equivalents. Sodium remains a problem throughout the sector, though, like nearly any other processed food out there, as seen here and at 4:03 in my video. 

    How processed are these products? Let’s look at the fiber content, for example. Seeing any fiber in a burger is a good thing, but if we ate the same amount of protein from yellow peas, for example, the primary plant protein in Beyond Burger, there would be almost no saturated fat or sodium at all, and we’d get a full 20 grams of fiber, as seen here and at 4:25 in my video. 

    Processing plants in a processing plant can eliminate 90 percent of the fiber, but processing plants through animals eliminate 100 percent of the fiber.

    As the chair of Harvard’s nutrition department put it, “Nutrition policies and dietary guidelines should continue to emphasize a diet rich in plant-based foods such as nuts, seeds, and legumes or pulses, which are rich in protein and many other nutrients but require little industrial processing.” But we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Not everyone can go all kale and quinoa overnight. The choice on a U.S. Burger King menu isn’t between a beef Whopper and soybeans (a primary ingredient in the Impossible patty), but between a beef Whopper and an Impossible Whopper, and in that case, it’s a no-brainer.

    If you missed the first video in this series on plant-based meats, see The Environmental Impacts of Plant-Based Meat Substitutes.

    Stay tuned and check more videos in the related posts below.

    For a healthful, whole-food veggie burger, check out my recipe for Black Bean Burgers from my first cookbook. 



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