Got Veg?: How to Thrive On a Plant-Based Diet
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Got Veg? - Esosa Edosomwan
www.mainstreetvegan.net
Chapter One
WHAT IS A PLANT-BASED DIET?
We live in a fast-paced world where we are inundated with dietary choices daily. Whether it is the latest fad diet, or commercials for fast food, we now have more choices than ever before as to what to fuel our bodies with. Unfortunately, as food choices expand, so have diseases and illnesses that result from improper diet. The S.A.D. diet, or Standard American Diet consists primarily of bread, meat, dairy, processed foods, sugar, and very little fruits and vegetables. When you go to the grocery store, you think you are going to buy food right? What most people do not realize is that their diets are not comprised of real food that can provide the best nourishment, nutrients, and energy to the body. Consider packaged cookies, crackers, chips, sodas, and other treats that may be staples in your diet. What nutrition are you really getting from them? How much sugar or salt is present? Are there a variety of added natural flavors
? These questions can help to point you in the direction of whole foods, as you realize most of what you thought was nourishment is not at all.
Whole foods contain all of their nutritional value and come direct from their source without additives, colorings, flavors, or extractions. This includes fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and whole grains, eggs, and animal sources. Whole grains are the seeds of a variety of plants such as barley, rye, millet, buckwheat, amaranth, quinoa, corn, kasha, kamut, spelt, and wild rice. To be considered whole
the grain must have all of its parts intact including the bran (outer layer), the endosperm (the main sustenance), and the germ, (the small inner core, the vital force). It is possible to eat a diet comprised of whole foods and consume high quality meat products. A whole food diet is very much a plant-based diet, because you will be filling your meals with ingredients that are fresh from the soil and undisturbed by science. However, a true plant-based diet, focuses only on fruits, vegetables, seeds, and grains and avoids animal products altogether.
In this book we will focus on the different variations of plant-based diets, the nutrients your body will need to thrive, and considerations you should take in order to have success on your plant-based journey. Hopefully you will not only be equipped with a starting point, but come to truly understand the benefits that eating in harmony with nature can provide. As the saying goes, You are what you eat.
Eating whole foods unprocessed and uncontaminated allows you to fuel your body temple with pure intentions. Yogic traditions speak to this, as devotees are generally required to adopt a plant-based diet to encourage their spiritual evolution. Stress and negative emotions can play a huge role in disease and can clearly deter a devotee from accelerating on a spiritual path. Yogis acknowledge that there is a direct link between body, mind, and spirit, and that purification of the body, can also lead to a purification of the mind. A plant-based diet does just that; it stills the mind. Therefore eating a whole food plant-based diet is a powerful tool that can yield positive results not only for health and the body temple; it also promotes emotional and spiritual well-being.
Chapter Two
LEVELS OF A PLANT-BASED DIET
If you consider yourself a global citizen of our modern world, by now it would be nearly impossible for you to be completely oblivious to the idea of a plant-based diet. That is, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock! You may have heard the different terms by now like: vegetarian, raw foodist, vegan, or have a friend, acquaintance, or family member who has jumped in full force. From celebrities like Alicia Silverstone and Samuel L. Jackson to politicians like Al Sharpton and Bill Clinton, the plant-based lifestyle has caught on and is all the rage in popular culture, for good reasons. We live in a world where we have advanced in a many ways, yet find that more than ever people are getting sick with terminal diseases and illnesses due to lifestyle and diet choices. The plant-based revolution is one way that consumers are grabbing the bull by the horns,
and taking health back into their own hands.
The American Diabetes Association’s updated statistics show that diabetes was the seventh leading cause of death in 2010. In 2012, 29.1 million Americans had diabetes, and in that same year the total cost of diagnosed diabetes came to a grand total of 24.5 billion dollars. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) 67 million Americans or 31% have high blood pressure, which costs the nation a staggering 47.5 billion dollars each year. The CDC stats also show that another 71 million Americans have high cholesterol. These depressing statics on a range of conditions go on and on and the total cost of these illnesses including medical expenses, medications, time off from work, and pain and suffering surely amount to more than hundreds of billions of dollars. Dr. Gabriel Cousens, a raw food advocate who cured a group of diabetics in the documentary Simply Raw asserts: In terms of health, meat eaters have four times more breast cancer, 3.6 times more prostate cancer, four times more diabetes, and much more in general chronic disease. If you’re just having milk, that’s three times more leukemia. In diabetes of course the main cause is sugar, but we know that a meat, fish, and chicken diet creates four times more diabetes because it creates insulin-resistance, which is called pre-diabetes.
A plant-based diet has been proven through research to reverse and/or drastically improve all of the aforementioned conditions and many more not listed. The Journal of the American Medical Association stated in 1961 that heart disease would be reduced by ninety seven percent if people chose to switch to vegetarianism. Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, a surgeon, researcher, and clinician formerly of the Cleveland Clinic, conducted a study over a 20-year period that proves that changes in diet and nutrition can cure heart disease. All patients in Dr. Esselstyn’s initial study had advanced coronary artery disease, and five of the patients in the original group were told by their cardiologists they had less than a year to live. Within months on Dr. Esselstyn’s program, their cholesterol levels, angina symptoms, and blood flow improved dramatically. Twelve years later seventeen compliant patients had no further cardiac events. Adherent patients survived beyond twenty years free of symptoms. After five years on Dr. Esselstyn’s plant-based diet, the average total cholesterol levels of his research group dropped from 246 milligrams per deciliter to 137 mg/dL (Above 240 mg/dL is considered ‘high risk,’ below 150 mg/dL is the total cholesterol level seen in cultures where heart disease is essentially nonexistent.) This is the most profound drop in cholesterol ever documented in medical literature in a study of this type.
Diabetes can also be cured on a plant-based, specifically raw diet. Max Gerson who cured Albert Schweitzer in the 1920s, was the first to go on record as curing diabetes with live food. Dr. Gabriel Cousens, who has worked to turn the process into a repeatable system, says: In medical school this is taught as incurable because in their way (of treating it) it is; if you’re having meat, sugar and all that. But from our approach it is curable: in three weeks, 53% of type 2 diabetes are off all medication and cured. In type 1 diabetes, 30% of people are off all medication and cured. It works because it stimulates the anti-aging genes, and diabetes is accelerated aging. Why is it important now? Because today diabetes is an epidemic: there are 246 million people in the world with diabetes, and one person dies from this disease every ten seconds.
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