Al Gore goes vegan

Al Gore is following in Clinton’s footsteps as the former Vice President is now a vegan.

Bill Clinton switched to the plant-based diet in 2010 following a number of heart scares.

Now his former Vice President has also given up all animal-based food and Gore’s veganism also falls in line with his environmental activism.

Al Gore has decided to follow his former political partner’s lead and has switched to a vegan diet.

The former Vice President has expressed and investment interest in a food start up that is trying to develop a plant-based mayonnaise in an effort to cut down American’s dependence on eggs.

In a Forbes article about the eco-friendly company, Hampton Creek, it is revealed that Gore is a ‘newly turned vegan’.

The switch doesn’t come as a massive surprise considering his weight has fluctuated over the years and recently admitted that he was trying to be healthier.

During an interview with New York Magazine , he was described as serving himself a vegetable soup and salad followed by a fruit salad for dessert.

‘I have been eating more healthfully. I’ve been trying to get in much better shape, and I’ve enjoyed that,’ he told the magazine.

The switch to a completely animal-free diet does show a shift in ideology, at least on the personal level, for the politician-turned-environmental advocate.

Gore has dedicated much of his career following the presidential defeat in 2000 to working against climate change and global warming, but he came under fire from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals for not pushing for vegetarianism- or even being fully vegetarian himself.

‘I’m not a vegetarian, but I have cut back sharply on the meat that I eat,’ he said in 2009.

‘I’ve made those changes, and while I don’t go quite as far as… saying everybody should become a vegetarian… it is a legitimate point of view.’

Gore’s former running mate Bill Clinton made a very public switch to a vegetable-heavy diet after a number of heart problems including quadruple bypass in 2004 and the implementation of two stents in 2010.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

An Interview with Mr. John Robbins – part 3

Interviewer:  So I want to ask you about food additives and particularly in animal production; there are a lot of hormones and other additives. We practice vegetarianism but we also don’t eat eggs. There used to be a feeling that it is one of the most perfect proteins. Could you speak a little about eggs and the vegan lifestyle?

John:  Well, I don’t eat eggs either. The idea that eggs are the perfect protein stems from rat experiments. They found that rats, baby rats, prospered when they were fed eggs, so they sort of made the assumption from that. This is originally the research. A lot has been done since, but that’s how it first got started. Well it turns out that baby rats’ needs are so different than a human baby’s needs. Rat mother’s milk is about 45% protein, a human mothers’ milk is about 8% protein. So it’s not a really comparable food. I look at the constituency of human breast milk as nature’s answer to the question, “What is the ideal food for a human baby?” I don’t look at what makes a rat grow the fastest, I look at what will help a human being thrive, and that’s obviously human breast milk for a human infant.

What we’ve learned since in medical science is that the need for animal protein was vastly exaggerated, because many of the studies were done and funded by animal product industries – the National Dairy Council, the Egg Board, the Meat Board, the National Cattlemen’s Association, a whole slew of industry groups that profit from people thinking they need to eat their products to get adequate protein.

Plant-based proteins are more than adequate, they are excellent. And they don’t come along with the saturated fat, cholesterol and these other things that the animal proteins come with that do us such damage. If you want to have a lean, fit, thriving body that operates on all cylinders, gives you the most mental clarity, the most emotional serenity, gives you the most physical strength and strongest immune system, eat a plant-based diet.

You don’t need eggs for protein; you don’t need meat for protein. I cannot tell you how many times people have said to me, “You’re a vegetarian? Where do you get your protein?” Well I get it from plants, I get it from beans, I get it from seeds and nuts, I get it from whole grains, I get it from vegetables, because I don’t fill my diet with a bunch of junk food, and I don’t fill my diet with a bunch of sugar, white flour and things like that. I make every calorie count. I don’t have a lot of wasted empty calories in the diet that I consume. Therefore the protein percentage doesn’t have to be so high.

If the calories you’re eating, most of them, are junk and empty, then the few remaining ones that have any nutrition better be solid protein in order for you to get enough. But if all your foods are good, then protein comes from all the foods that you eat. You don’t have to say, “There’s where I get my protein.” I’m getting it from all of the foods that I eat. There is good protein in whole grains, fresh vegetables and certainly in beans and in soy products.

Interviewer:  So vegetarian and especially a vegan diet is a way to become, as in the title of your new book, “Healthy at 100.”

John:  Well yes, I’ve looked at cultures where people have thrived for the longest times, where they’re not just champions of longevity and that they live long but they live long, healthy lives. And their elder hoods are filled with fitness, mental clarity, contribution, joy and beauty; and they almost always eat plant-based diets or very close to this.

Interviewer:  Yeah, that’s interesting. I also wanted to congratulate you on the “Shining World Leadership Award” for humanitarianism from Supreme Master Ching Hai. She was very excited and impressed with the nobility you demonstrated in walking away from what could’ve been a very wealthy lifestyle, in the name of your values and your choices.

John:  Well I did it in the name of all of our aspirations for a humane and sustainable world. It wasn’t just for me. It really was for the planet, for all of us who are striving and inspiring towards creating a spiritually fulfilling, socially just and environmentally sustainable human presence on this planet.

Interviewer:  Thank you so much for your work because I’ve read that for a couple of years after “A Diet for a New America” came out, beef sales in the US dropped almost 20% and there’s been Howard Lyman and a number of other activists that have brought out the terrors of what has gone on in the beef industry. So I think it’s interesting to see the ripple effect 20 years later.

John:   And I mean you can translate that 20 % reduction of beef consumption into how many fewer heart attacks occurred, how many fewer cases of cancer occurred, how much less diabetes there was. Not that these epidemics aren’t still major issues, but they have been to a degree ameliorated by that reduction. You can also translate it into how many square miles of tropical rainforests are still standing that would otherwise would have been destroyed? How many species are still with us that would otherwise have been extinguished? How much less water pollution we have to deal with, how much less greenhouse gases are in our atmosphere as a result of that reduction? We’re still trashing the environment, but this was a big step; and I will feel fulfilled only when it is a step that many other people take, and we continue on that path, because the day that slaughter houses are a memory, the day that world hunger is a memory, the day that environmental destruction is a memory, will be the day that I rejoice.

Lowering Healthcare Costs and Promoting Wellness Through the Vegan Lifestyle (part -1)

This time we examine how the vegan lifestyle can significantly lower the cost of food, health insurance and healthcare while promoting wellness.

We’ll hear the views of three individuals in the US who’ve made important contributions to the field of public health: Dr. Pamela Popper, a vegan nutrition expert, naturopath, and founder and Executive Director of the Wellness Forum;  Dr. Neal Barnard, a vegan physician, researcher, bestselling author and President of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and Ellen Jaffe Jones, a vegan former Emmy-winning TV investigative reporter and anchor, certified personal-fitness trainer and author of “Eat Vegan on $4 a Day.”

We hear first from Ms. Jaffe Jones, who shares how a plant-based diet, free from meat, fish, eggs and dairy products, can substantially reduce our grocery bills.

I wrote, “Eat Vegan on $4 a Day” because I saw so many stories on the news that said you can’t eat well on a budget. I just felt like reporters need more resources than that very biased opinion that, in order to eat healthy, it has to cost a lot of money. I have eaten this way most of the last 30 years. So I knew personally that it wasn’t true.

And I also knew that it costs so much money when you don’t eat this way, not only at the grocery store, but then when you start getting the diseases of affluence like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. You know, a bypass surgery in the United States can cost upwards of US$100,000 to US$200,000.

So if you really average out, as we liked to do when I was a financial consultant, the cost of that bypass surgery into the cost of a US$5 burger, that US$5 burger may actually cost like US$100 or US$1,000, depending on how many years you live and how many burgers you eat.

So it’s not just as simple as what you save at the grocery store. It’s the amount of money you have to pay when you get sick or when you have to go to the hospital or when you have to hire people to help you when you are so debilitated.

How is it possible to eat on just US$4 a day? It is simpler than one might think.

The big secret to eating well on US$4 a day is buying foods in bulk, and buying them when they’re on sale. For example, a big bag of beans at a big box store is about 10 cents for a four-ounce serving of cooked beans, with high fiber, and is a great source of protein. You compare that at the same big box store to the cheapest form of hamburger meat.

Now that’s going to be 30% fat. I don’t know what else is in the other 70%, stuff you wouldn’t want to eat anyway. But that is going to cost about 60 cents. So burger meat is six times more expensive than bean protein. And if you start going to more expensive cuts of meat like tenderloin, for example, it’s going to be even more expensive. And if you go to a restaurant, it’s going to be even more expensive.

So, you really save a lot of money by eating bean protein. And even if you don’t buy the biggest bag of beans, canned beans are only twice as expensive as cooking beans from scratch. And it’s just not a big deal to cook beans from scratch. My book has a lot of tips on how to do that in a quick way, in an easy way. I give all the proportions of water to beans. So if people have never cooked beans from scratch, it’s not a big deal.

Ms. Jaffe Jones has several recommendations regarding shopping for groceries. First, make sure you eat before going shopping, as we tend to buy “impulse foods” when we’re hungry. Second, purchase fruits and vegetables when they’re in season or on sale. Third, if the price of some of the fruits or veggies is exceptionally good, buy extra quantities and freeze or dehydrate them for use in the winter months when prices are much higher.

There’s a great deal of variety in a plant-based diet, even eating on US$4 a day. The big secret to eating on US$4 a day, is, “beans, greens, and grains.” The more extended answer is to cook foods in their natural states. Stay away from the frozen processed food aisles. Shop the perimeter of the store.

But it’s very easy to have beans be the source of your protein, whether it’s lunch or dinner. You can combine it with a wholegrain, and even grains are only about 5 cents to 10 cents more expensive per ounce than beans. So when you combine those two, you get all your calories.

And then you have plenty of money left over to go buy the vegetables and the fruits that might be a little more expensive. But even a banana costs only 22 cents. So it is nature’s perfect “fast food.” You just don’t need to buy Twinkies.

For the price of one Twinkie, you can have three servings of bean protein. So you really can save your health so much by looking at different options in the plant kingdom. People say, “Well, isn’t that kind of a boring diet?” And I go, “Excuse me? There are 90 different fruits and vegetables out there. So if you don’t like one or two fruits or vegetables, try another one.”

Produce comes in a wide range of colors, and for good reason.

Nature gave us these beautiful colors and foods. Why? So we would eat them; so we would be attracted to them. And I like to say, “Eat the colors of the rainbow, because nature did a great job in putting almost every color with an associated anti-oxidant or nutrient or vitamin that makes you just want to crave that purple cabbage or the eggplant or a red apple or a yellow squash.” There are just so many different colors out there. They’re great and they’re cheap.

Many meat-based recipes can easily be converted into delicious, money-saving vegan dishes.

An example of a specific recipe would be if you’re used to making chili with hamburger meat. Given the example of beans costing 10 cents versus the same quantity serving of hamburger meat costing 60 cents, just in that meal alone, if you’re cooking for your family, you can see how this would multiply out not only over that meal but over that day, the course of a week, the course of a year and a lifetime.

The savings are really phenomenal when you start multiplying this out. And that’s just the food that costs money at the grocery store. When you figure out that you don’t need the US$100,000 bypass surgery, the savings are tremendous.

One of the best ways to save money and improve one’s health is to avoid purchasing processed foods.

Cookies and crackers are probably some of the worst kinds of processed foods that you can buy, in part because they’re so addictive, but they’re also very expensive. So if you are eating rice as a whole grain by itself, that’s going to cost you maybe 10 cents to 15 cents for a quarter-cup serving (45 grams), and that’s going to fill you up for that meal, as opposed to a package of cookies, which costs maybe US$3-US$4.

Another big one would be cereals that are very processed and very expensive, in the big boxes. Then when you look inside the box there’s not quite so much inside, and a whole a lot of sugar, a lot of high fructose corn syrup in many products, a lot of added sugar in different forms. What I like to eat in the morning is a quarter cup of oats, and that cooks into a half-cup serving.

And I add some fruit to that and that costs me maybe 20-25 cents; verses 50 cents to a dollar for a grocery store serving of the same quantity. And that doesn’t even include the fruit.

Once people experience how wonderful they feel and how much money they save on a plant-based diet, they become enthusiastic advocates of the vegan way.

My book has only been out four months and already I’m getting a tremendous response from people on Facebook. I have close to 4,000 followers, and the response really has been amazing. People are getting the book and within a week of reading it saying, “I’m already seeing a difference.” And some of the people are already vegan. Some of them are not.

So especially, when they’re not vegan and they trade out a few meat meals a week for bean protein, for example, they really start to see some significant savings. And if it’s more than just them, say they have a family of four, it’s really quite noticeable. And I give a lot of tips in the book about how to save money at the grocery store.

And it’s important to understand that it’s not just looking for beans in quantity but there are other ways to save money, like understanding that products, especially the more expensive products, are placed right in front of your eyes, at eye level, so you will be sure to buy those things. And understanding what the stores are doing to try to get us to buy is important, too.

But saving money on grocery bills is only the beginning. Consuming animal products leads to many serious, life-threatening illnesses which are entirely preventable.

It is really important that you understand you will save not only money in the choices of the food that you buy, but by avoiding the diseases and illnesses that making poor food selections will cause. Many people tell me, and I certainly have had this experience, that once they adopt a vegan diet, they don’t get sick. Every time when I was younger and I used to run a great distance like six miles, I would get sick like clockwork.

And since I have adopted a plant-based diet, I just never get sick. When most people make this change, they never go back. They are amazed how delicious the food tastes, how colorful and vibrant it is, how energized they feel by it. And then, when they start saving money on their medical bills, they’re going like, “Well, why didn’t I start this 20 years ago?”

And how much time is lost because they didn’t start it sooner. So my advice would be: “Do it now. Don’t waste another minute.” You’re going to have so much energy. You’re going to save so much money, and I think it’s something that you will never regret.

Consumption of animal products is the primary cause of heart attacks and strokes which, according to the World Health Organization, are the world’s most common diseases, and account for about 23% of all annual deaths globally.

We know that in the United States, the cost of a (coronary) bypass surgery, just one bypass can be between US$100,000 and US$200,000. So if you are able to avoid that surgery, whether you pay for it, the insurance company pays for it or the government pays for it, that is just for one person. If you multiply that by all the heart procedures that could be avoided, I think billions of dollars could be saved, billions.

And the bottom line is preventable diseases are just not sustainable. It doesn’t matter who pays for them. It’s not only the medicine that is used to treat cancer, but the caregiver expenses that must be maintained. Again, billions of dollars will be saved if we can avoid just one of these diseases.

So many people, especially in the United States are going bankrupt because they can’t afford either insurance or the diseases that they’re getting, that insurance companies won’t pay for, or can’t pay for.

So I think this is really, at least in my mind, very much a solution, that if everybody went vegan, we would save so much money in insurance and medical costs.

And I’m amazed at how many women probably could have avoided a hysterectomy if they’d had a doctor who said, “Why don’t try a plant-based (diet).” And I am also astounded at the amount of money that could be saved with women who are seeking answers in the medical community for menopause treatments. If they could just try a plant-based diet. Food really is powerful medicine.

Ellen Jaffe Jones http://www.VegCoach.com

Karyn Calabrese – Chicago’s own vegevangelist is living proof of the power of clean eating

by Judy Hevrdejs, Tribune Newspapers

For evidence that eating vegetables (especially raw ones) is good for you, look no further than Karyn Calabrese. You’ll probably find her perched at the desk in her office, one floor up from the restaurant, cafe and holistic therapy center on North Halsted Street that bears her name.

Calabrese has been preaching her gospel of good eating and the power of wheat grass for almost 20 years, opening her first restaurant, Karyn’s Fresh Corner and Garden Cafe, on North Lincoln Avenue, in 1995. She now has four eponymous restaurants: Fresh Corner and Raw Bistro, both on Halsted, Cooked and On Green. Also: a takeout meal program (Karyn’s at Home), holistic therapy programs (Inner Beauty Center), a book (Soak Your Nuts: Cleansing with Karyn: Detox Secrets for Inner Healing and Outer Beauty), a line of Karyn-branded food products (from agave nectar to yacon syrup), makeup and skin care lines, speeches, workshops and a staff of more than 100. Overseeing it all is the energetic (“I’m 5-foot-7, 107 pounds”), almost 65-year-old Calabrese.

Yet her road to raw food evangelism was by no means direct. Born in Hyde Park, she began cooking early. “My great-grandmother and I — we used to cook for the church ladies on Sunday,” she remembers. “I was butt high, and I would be in the kitchen helping her wash greens or helping her put the fat on top of the biscuits.”

A 17-year modeling career (magazines, commercials, album covers, etc.) followed. So did a family. “I have a living daughter. My son passed away four years ago. And I have two grandchildren from my son,” Calabrese says. “I am on my second marriage, and we just celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary. We’ve been together 30 years.”

A vegetarian for decades, Calabrese is far from inflexible on the matter. “People try to go all or nothing right away. Allow it to be a process for you. Realize that food is supposed to be delicious. A lot of people think that boring, bland food is vegetarian food, like steamed rice and boiled vegetables. There’s no way I could have eaten this way for 43 years if I was eating steamed rice and boiled vegetables.

“I feel my role is to bring a whole different aspect to a plant-based diet because people tend to have this narrow view of what people are who are vegan, vegetarian or rawfoodist. I don’t fit the mold.”

Q: How did you find your way to vegetarian, vegan and raw food diets?

A: All the women in my family died overweight and very young. My mom died at 48. My grandmother at 50 and my great-grandmother at 60. I was very sickly. And they had all started out tiny like me, and they all got very large, and they died of degenerative diseases. I was just very fortunate, blessed to meet the right people at the right time in my life to inspire me to go a different route. My mother was the first to inspire me. She started me drinking vegetable juice.

I believe we all intuitively know how to take care of ourselves. … But we’ve covered it up, so that we’ve forgotten how to think for ourselves. I really believe everybody knows how to vibrate in the kitchen. We’re just so used to giving it away we don’t do it any longer.

Q: What is the best lesson you learned from your mother?

A: She taught me that they made a mistake when they wrote the word “can’t” into the English language. It doesn’t exist. There’s no such word as “can’t.” When I opened up the first raw food restaurant, it never occurred to me that I was opening up a raw food restaurant in Chicago, the meatpacking capital of the world. It never occurred to me that, oh, that doesn’t make sense.

 

Q: What is your greatest attribute?

A: I’m very focused. When I get something in my mind that needs to be done, it doesn’t leave until it’s done.

Q: And your greatest fault?

A: I buy shoes. I love to shop, I love clothes, I love shoes – if that’s a fault. I love beauty, the beauty of things. But also, I have a tendency to never say no to anything and try to act on everything I want to do which can really kind of jumble up your plate too much sometimes.

Q: What is your secret to success?

A: That would be where the focus comes in. And acting on your ideas – and my gut – and not expecting it to go from A to Z overnight either. Allow the process, and feel comfortable with it along the way. You know, when I had my little hippie joint up on Lincoln Avenue, I had no idea that I wasn’t successful. I thought I was. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t. I always say that God takes care of fools and children, and I’m not a child.

Q: What was your biggest mistake?

A: That’s hard to say because I believe all my mistakes (propelled) me to the success that I have. My biggest mistake – probably the turmoil that I went through with my first divorce for my children. It was not an easy divorce, though we’re best friends now. … I feel bad for what my children went through with my divorce. If I could do that differently, I would.

Q: What is your professional mantra?

A: I can. And I will.

Q: What did you want to be when you were 13?

A: Well, actually I was a candy striper for a while, and I wanted to be a radiologist.

Q: What is your least favorite vegetable?

A: Until we started making it at Green, it was brussels sprouts. We make raw brussels sprouts into a salad, marinated. I’m not real big on cooking them, though we do a glazed one at Green Street that’s really delicious. (www.karynraw.com)

source>articles.chicagotribune.com

George Eisman: Growth Hormones in Animal Products Equals Cancer

George Eisman, a highly respected vegan registered dietitian in the United States, will explain how consuming animal products causes cancer as well as how the animal agriculture industry destroys public health.
Mr. Eisman served as a faculty member in dietetics and nutrition at several universities and colleges and has worked in a children’s hospital and a nursing home, as well as for public health agencies in four states. He founded The Association of Vegetarian Dietitians and Nutrition Educators, is the co-founder and first Chairman-Elect of the Vegetarian Nutrition Practice Group of the American Dietetic Association, is the director of the Coalition for Cancer Prevention Through Plant-Based Eating and is also an Advisory Board Member of EarthSave International. Mr. Eisman is the author of two books, “The Most Noble Diet” and “A Basic Course in Vegetarian and Vegan Nutrition.”

I’ve been vegetarian for over 40 years now. And I’ve been vegan for about 28 years. And my life’s work is trying to make people aware of the connection between what they eat and their risk of diseases like cancer. And a vegan diet is by far the best way to lower your cancer risk.

There was a study done in Japan a few years ago that found when people in rural areas went from eating animal products just once a week to three times a week, the breast cancer rate went up by 70%. If you can find a drug that would lower people’s breast cancer rate by 70%, you could make a billion dollars. So all you have to do is get them to cut animal products out of their diet and it goes down by that much.

There were an estimated 12.7 million cancer cases diagnosed around the world in 2008, and this number is expected to rise to 21 million by 2030. Cancer is a term used for more than 100 diseases and is characterized by out-of-control cell reproduction.

To be healthy, the body needs a constant supply of new cells and their regulation is an orderly path of growth, division, and death. When this process is damaged, some cells do not end their lives as a normal part of the cell life cycle. These irregular ones grow uncontrollably and divide, forming a mass of abnormal cells. The complex mechanism of cell regulation is tightly controlled by growth hormones.

The best thing about a vegan diet, from a standpoint of cancer risk is that a vegan diet contains no growth hormones. Growth hormones are proteins that promote growth. And cancer is a disease of abnormal growth. So to put growth hormones in your body, when you’re trying to fight cancer or prevent cancer, is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. It’s just going to make it worse, because it’s going to promote growth.

And growth hormones are animal products, because all the animals that are slaughtered for us are killed when they’re still fairly young, so they’re still growing. And of course, dairy products are meant to grow a baby calf into a thousand pound cow in a year, so they’re full of growth hormones. And eggs are full of growth hormones. So in order to get these growth hormones out of our diet, we have to go to a plant-based diet, and use plant-based milks and egg-substitutes made from plant foods, and of course, things like veggie burgers and tofu and other plant products in place of meat and other animal products.

Organic meats and grass-fed, non-hormone enhanced meats, still are full of growth hormones, because of the age of the animals. We don’t let them get old before we slaughter them, we eat them when they’re still young. So these growth hormones are in their bodies, whether they’re enhanced, injected with them, or they’re just naturally there. Those growth hormones are in our animal products that we consume. These growth hormones are proteins; they’re not fats. So if you eat low-fat meat and low-fat dairy products, it’s actually worse because they have more protein than they do fats, so they have more growth hormone.

Mr. Eisman learned about how dietary growth hormones cause cancer from the work of Professor Jane Plant, a cancer victim herself whose tumor went into remission shortly after she adopted a vegan diet.

I came across this book in 1999 called “The No Dairy Breast Cancer Prevention Program” by a woman named Jane Plant, who was one of the top scientists in England. And this book opened up my eyes to the link between cancer and dairy products, and as well as all other animal products. So dairy products are the one food that people think is healthy for them, and it really isn’t. It’s just as unhealthy as meat and chicken and eggs, because it has these growth hormones that encourage abnormal growth.

And that’s why she features this. And that’s inspired me as a dietitian, because we dietitians are also brainwashed into thinking that dairy products are necessary foods. And they’re not only not necessary, but they are not even healthful. And they actually shorten our lives by raising our risk of this deadly disease of cancer.

Let me tell you the story of Jane Plant herself. Jane Plant was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1987. And after five operations, which she lost all of one breast and part of the other breast, she was told she had at most six months to live. Her breast cancer had spread to her neck. She traveled around the world to countries where breast cancer was not a common disease, and compared it to countries where breast cancer was a common disease.

And she said this pattern was very clear to her that the more dairy products, and actually other animal products as well in a diet, the higher the country’s rate of breast cancer. And so she gave up eating all animal products. And within a few weeks, the tumor on her neck started to itch, and it started to shrink. And when she went back to her doctor six months later, instead of being dead, she was cancer-free. And 15 years later she’s still writing books.

Why is it that not enough nutritionists and medical doctors know about this?

Well, first of all medical doctors are doctors of medicine. They’re not doctors of health, they’re not doctors of nutrition, they’re not doctors of food. They are doctors of medicine. My brother is a medical doctor, and he says, “We never learn anything about food. I learn about what each vitamin might do in your body, but I don’t learn about what foods they’re in. If someone, wants to get that vitamin, I prescribe a pill.”

And if you think about it, if people are healthy from what they eat, there’s not a lot of sickness and there is not a lot of business for the hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry. It’s not the doctors themselves, but the doctors are pushed by the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry to treat disease and not to prevent disease.

Dietitians are not trained to prescribe diets. They’re trained to teach people how to follow diets that are prescribed by doctors. But the ideal diet is not something that is really pushed, because it’s not economically beneficial for anybody except the individual.

With much of the medical community not informed as to the innumerable benefits of a plant-based diet, it is no wonder the misconception exists that this diet lacks sufficient protein. However nothing could be further from the truth.

Most people think you need to have a lot of protein in your diet, and you really don’t need to have very much. Just a couple of ounces of a day is all you need. And it’s easily gotten from plant foods. And you don’t have to even eat things like soybeans, which are very high in protein. You can eat other beans, things like kidney beans, garbanzo beans, black beans, but also vegetables and grains and nuts and seeds. They all have adequate amounts of protein to meet our needs.

In the US, one can purchase a hamburger at a fast-food outlet for 99 cents. A study by the Center for Science and Environment estimated that the true cost of a hamburger in the US, including government subsidies to the livestock industry, the harm to public health from consuming beef and environmental damage caused by producing it is US$200.

What we really should stop doing is stop subsidizing the meat and dairy industry. We have these farm bills that pass every year, and meat and dairy get most of the money, that’s our tax money subsidizing those foods. They’re the unhealthiest foods. And those are the foods that should be the most expensive. Instead they’re the cheapest because of the subsidies.

Every farm animal is bred intentionally so if we stop consuming them, we can stop breeding them tomorrow and there won’t be millions of them to be producing all these pollutants that are destroying the atmosphere and polluting the water, as well as creating all this unhealthy food. We can stop the breeding of farm animals tomorrow.

On top of all the wonderful things that a vegan lifestyle brings to us in terms of health and well-being, it has many other beneficial effects as well.

But if we really care about our health and the health of the environment and the health of other people, and the health of the animals that we’re trying to spare unnecessary suffering, then a whole foods plant-based diet is a win-win-win situation for everybody concerned. We don’t get hurt, the animals don’t get hurt, the beautiful dog on your lap, and the cows, and the pigs, and the chickens, and the sheep, they have the same feelings that that dog does. And if somebody were to snatch that dog off your lap and try to eat it, people would be so upset. And yet we do that everyday with these other animals who have the same feeling of wanting to survive, of wanting to not be harmed.

Our sincere gratitude, George Eisman, for providing such essential information about the plant strong diet that ensures cancer-free, fulfilling lives. May you always enjoy utmost success on your noble path.

For more information on the Coalition for Cancer Prevention Through Plant-Based Eating, please visit http://www.CoalitionForCancerPrevention.org
Mr. Eisman’s books, “The Most Noble Diet” and “A Basic Course in Vegetarian and Vegan Nutrition,” are available at the same website and http://www.Amazon.com

Why Do Vegetarians Live Longer?

by Kathy Freston  Health and Wellness Activist, Author    www.huffingtonpost.com

 

 

Nearly a decade of extra life — that’s what you get when you move away from eating animal foods and toward a plant-based diet. This is really exciting science for anyone seeking healthy longevity (and who isn’t?)!

According to a recent report on the largest study of vegetarians and vegans to date, those eating plant-based diets appear to have a significantly longer life expectancy. Vegetarians live on average almost eight years longer than the general population, which is similar to the gap between smokers and nonsmokers. This is not surprising, given the reasons most of us are dying. In an online video, “Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death,” Michael Greger, M.D. explores the role a healthy diet can play in preventing, treating, and even reversing the top 15 killers in the United States. Let’s take a closer look at what the good doctor has pulled together…

Heart disease is our leading cause of death. The 35-year follow-up of the Harvard Nurses Health Study was recently published, now the most definitive long-term study on older women’s health. Dietary cholesterol intake — only found in animal foods — was associated with living a significantly shorter life and fiber intake — only found in plant foods — was associated with living a significantly longer life. Consuming the amount of cholesterol found in just a single egg a day may cut a woman’s life short as much as smoking five cigarettes daily for 15 years, whereas eating a daily cup of oatmeal’s worth of fiber appears to extend a woman’s life as much as four hours of jogging a week. (But there’s no reason we can’t do both!)

What if your cholesterol’s normal, though? I hear that a lot. But here’s the thing: having a “normal” cholesterol in a society where it’s “normal” to drop dead of a heart attack is not necessarily a good thing. According to the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Cardiology, “For the build-up of plaque in our arteries to cease, it appears that the serum total cholesterol needs to be lowered to the 150 area. In other words the serum total cholesterol must be lowered to that of the average pure vegetarian.”

More than 20 years ago, Dr. Dean Ornish showed that heart disease could not just be stopped but actually reversed with a vegan diet, arteries opened up without drugs or surgery. Since this lifestyle cure was discovered, hundreds of thousands have died unnecessary deaths. What more does one have to know about a diet that reverses our deadliest disease?

Cancer is killer number two. Ah, the dreaded “C” word — but look at this hopeful science. According to the largest forward-looking study on diet and cancer so far performed, “the incidence of all cancers combined is lower among vegetarians.” The link between meat and cancer is such that even a paper published in the journal Meat Science recently asked, “Should we become vegetarians, or can we make meat safer?” There are a bunch of additives under investigation to suppress the toxic effects the blood-based “heme” iron, for example, which could provide what they called an “acceptable” way to prevent cancer. Why not just reduce meat consumption? The meat science researchers noted that if such public health guidance were adhered to, “Cancer incidence may be reduced, but farmers and [the] meat industry would suffer important economical problems…” Hmmm, so Big Ag chooses profit over health; what a surprise.

After Dr. Ornish’s team showed that the bloodstreams of men eating vegan for a year had nearly eight times the cancer-stopping power, a series of elegant experiments showed that women could boost their defenses against breast cancer after just two weeks on a plant-based diet. See the before and after here (nutritionfacts.org/video). If you or anyone you know has ever had a cancer scare, this research will make your heart soar. Because there is real, true hope — something you can do to stave off “the big C.”

So, the top three leading causes of death used to be heart disease, cancer, then stroke, but the latest CDC stats place COPD third — lung diseases such as emphysema. Surprisingly, COPD can be prevented with the help of a plant-based diet, and can even be treated with plants. Of course, the tobacco industry viewed these landmark findings a little differently. Instead of adding plants to one’s diet to prevent emphysema, wouldn’t it be simpler to just add them to the cigarettes? Hence the study “Addition of Açaí [Berries] to Cigarettes Has a Protective Effect Against Emphysema in [Smoking] Mice.” Seriously.

The meat industry tried the same tack. Putting fruit extracts in burgers was not without its glitches, though. The blackberries “literally dyed burger patties with a distinct purplish color,” and though it was possible to improve the nutritional profile of frankfurters with powdered grape seeds, there were complaints that the grape seed “particles became visible” in the final product. And if there’s one thing we know about hot dog eaters, it’s that they’re picky about what goes in their food!

Onward to strokes: The key to preventing strokes may be to eat potassium-rich foods. Though Chiquita may have had a good PR firm, bananas don’t even make the top 50 sources. The leading whole food sources include dark green leafy vegetables, beans, and dates. We eat so few plants that 98 percent of Americans don’t even reach the recommended minimum daily intake of potassium. And if you look at killer number five — accidents — bananas (and their peels) could be downright dangerous!

Alzheimer’s disease is now our sixth leading killer. We’ve known for nearly 20 years now that those who eat meat — including chicken and fish — appear three times more likely to become demented compared to long-term vegetarians. Exciting new research suggests one can treat Alzheimer’s using natural plant products such as the spice saffron, which beat out placebo and worked as well as a leading Alzheimer’s drug.

Diabetes is next on the kick-the-bucket list. Plant-based diets help prevent, treat, and even reverse Type 2 diabetes. Since vegans are, on average, about 30 pounds skinnier than meat-eaters, this comes as no surprise; but researchers found that vegans appear to have just a fraction of the diabetes risk, even after controlling for their slimmer figures.

Kidney failure, our eighth leading cause of death, may also be prevented and treated with a plant-based diet. The three dietary risk factors Harvard researchers found for declining kidney function were animal protein, animal fat, and cholesterol, all of which are only found in animal products.

Leading killer number nine is respiratory infections. With flu shot season upon us, it’s good to know that fruit and vegetable consumption can significantly boost one’s protective immune response to vaccination. Check out the short video “Kale and the Immune System,” and you’ll see there’s not much kale can’t do.

Suicide is number 10. Oh yes, vegan food even has something good to offer on this one! Cross-sectional studies have shown that the moods of those on plant-based diets tend to be superior, but taken in just a snapshot in time one can’t tease out cause-and-effect. Maybe happier people end up eating healthier and not the other way around. But this year an interventional trial was published in which all meat, poultry, fish, and eggs were removed from people’s diets and a significant improvement in mood scores was found after just two weeks. It can take drugs like Prozac a month or more to take effect. So you may be able to get happier faster by cutting out animal foods than by using drugs.

Drugs can help with the other conditions as well, but instead of taking one drug for cholesterol every day for the rest of your life, maybe a few for high blood pressure or diabetes, the same diet appears to work across the board without the risk of drug side-effects. One study found that prescription medications kill an estimated 106,000 Americans every year. That’s not from errors or overdose, but from adverse drug reactions, arguably making doctors the sixth leading cause of death.

Based on a study of 15,000 American vegetarians, those that eat meat have about twice the odds of being on antacids, aspirin, blood pressure medications, insulin, laxatives, painkillers, sleeping pills, and tranquilizers. So plant-based diets are great for those that don’t like taking drugs, paying for drugs, or risking adverse side effects.

Imagine if, like President Clinton, our nation embraced a plant-based diet. Imagine if we just significantly cut back on animal products. There is one country that tried. After World War II, Finland joined us in packing on the meat, eggs, and dairy. By the 1970s, the mortality rate from heart disease of Finnish men was the highest in the world, and so they initiated a country-wide program to decrease their saturated fat intake. Farmers were encouraged to switch from dairies to berries. Towns were pitted against each other in friendly cholesterol-lowering competitions. Their efforts resulted in an 80 percent drop in cardiac mortality across the entire country.

Conflicts of interest on the U.S. dietary guidelines committee may have prevented similar action from our own government, but with our health-care crisis deepening, our obesity epidemic widening, and the health of our nation’s children in decline, we may need to take it upon ourselves, families, and communities to embrace Food Day ideals of healthy, affordable, sustainable foods by moving towards a more plant-centered diet. If we do, we may be afforded added years to enjoy the harvest.