My Trip to a Plant-Based Diet

The question is why would someone want to eat just plants? Is it really that healthy? Do you get all the nutrients you need and if so how? The most important question, is there enough plant-based foods to please your pallet and enjoy what you are eating?

I consider myself a healthy person; I eat healthy, work out and do not take any medication unless necessary! Well, I am now in the stage of my life where I consider myself uh… older! I may be aging, yet I feel like I have good years to live. While I am living I want to be as active as I possibly can so hence looking into the healthiest version I can make myself!

Let’s look at some facts:

• 70% of Americans are overweight

• 40% of us are carrying 30 or more pounds of extra baggage

• The US is ranked 43rd in the world for life expectancy (wow, not the healthy county we want to be)!

We have a health care system that’s great at identifying problems once they exist and managing them with pills and procedures – what about prevention before we get to this? The basic concept of the US – We have sick care, not health care!

• We consume about 3 pounds of food per day. This amounts to 80,000 pounds of food in an average lifetime.

• 10 milligrams of medicine WILL NEVER be more important than the 80,000 pounds of food you eat.

• Since 1950 – Type 1 Diabetes, Multiple Sclerosis, and Crohn’s disease have risen 300% or more.

Benjamin Franklin once quoted, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!”

I will be writing a series or blogs to show how much what you eat can alter how you feel and your entire life actually! Did you take science class and learn about Microbiomes? Well, your body is a microbiome, and I will explain this in another post.

A small example of how eating a healthy diet can save your life:

Let’s say you are diagnosed with a type of cancer. The treatment is a type of chemotherapy. For that chemotherapy to work, it is dependent on your gut to activate it. So, the healthier your gut is, the better chance you have of fighting off the cancer. This was a proven fact in a study published in ‘Science 2014’.

I have heard so many people, (and I have probably said it myself), it is just genetic, and I can’t help it. Reality is that less than 20% of diseases are genetic. 80% of your disease risk is determined by your environment and what you eat! Change your health and stop saying, it’s genetic!

I plan to transform my health from inside out based on the above and knowing that the 21st century life in the US is overfed, undernourished and hyper-medicated. The modern lifestyle is destroying our health. As a country, we are fatter, sicker, and more heavily medicated than at any other time in human history. In fact, you can say that every 3 in 4 people are overweight in the US.

Think of all the inventions created to make us sick and lazy:

• Plastic (BPA) – food storage, floss, clothing, baby toys, and more.

• Travel – Planes, trains, automobiles, motorized scooter – reduce mobility

• Technology – Television, computers, smartphones, video games to forego exercise for your body and brain. (Why read a book when you can watch it in 90 minutes or why build a fort when you can have a video game create it, or why go to sleep when the sun goes down when you can stay up and read Twitter or watch Tik Toks?)

I have been killing my brain with information and I want to share with everyone! I am in awe of all the information I have gathered and how so particularly important your food is. Below is a brief history lesson for you to know just how great we are and yet how dumb we are when it comes to realizing what we are doing to our bodies:

In the late 19th Century, the average life expectancy was 47 years. The top causes of death were infections and infectious diseases. Cancer and Heart disease at that time were small problems. Louis Pasteur discovered what we now call modern germ theory – finally understanding the top causes of death is a germ!

Facts:

• Bacteria is the #1, 2, and 3 top public enemies of illness and death.

• What did we do about this?

• Added chlorine to drinking water

• Developed vaccines

• Improved sanitation

• Began metal canning and early preservatives

• Penicillin was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming and became available commercially in 1945.

• Life expectancy jumped tremendously, so in 1969 US Surgeon General William Stewart declared to congress that it was time to “close the books on infectious diseases”.

More Facts:

• After World War II, we developed synthetic herbicides, fungicides and insecticides.

• Discovered that antibiotics and synthetic hormones accelerated livestock growth so pumped both into them.

• Created antibacterial soap, astringents, industrial cleaning products

We were basically nuking the crap out of bacteria and winning the war and allowing heart disease and cancer to emerge in herd!