FredVegrox

From

The Forks Over Knives Plan  

Alona Pulde, MD, and Matthew Lederman, MD

Americans are sick, tired, and overmedicated. Every fifty-three seconds someone in the United States dies of heart disease, which, as the nation's number one killer, claims about 600,000 lives per year. Cancer, now the second leading cause of death, takes the lives of more than 1500 people per day. Meanwhile, nearly 10 percent of the population has diabetes; and our children are getting sicker, as indicated by the startling fact that obesity has more than doubled in children and tripled in adolescents in the past thirty years. We have turned to the medical system for help, and it has delivered medication in a big way: Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug, more than 50 percent take two, and 20 percent are on five or more prescription drugs. Despite the billions of dollars being spent on pharmaceuticals, the needle almost never moves downward on the rates of chronic disease, and the people still feel lousy and sick.

Health statistics aren't just about numbers on a page or data on a statistician's ledger. These are our mothers, fathers, siblings, and children. These are our friends. The health crisis is taking a real toll on our daily lives, profoundly affecting the personal happiness and productivity of millions of us every single day.

There is good news, though. Research is revealing with greater certainty that we understand the main cause of this epidemic: an American diet that derives more than 90 percent of what we eat from animal-based and processed foods. Understanding the cause means there's hope! The research tells us that if we change to an entirely different way of eating, we can dramatically alter our health destiny.

Modern pioneers like T. Colin Cambell, PhD; Caldwell Esselstyn, MD; Dean Ornish, MD; John McDougall, MD; Neal Barnard, MD; and others are leading the charge. Thanks to these doctors and researchers, along with an emerging body of scientific evidence from all corners, we now know that a whole-food, plant-based diet is more powerful at preventing and treating chronic diseases than any medication or procedure. We are so convinced by the evidence that we believe if this diet came in a pill, it would be heralded on the front pages of newspapers and magazines around the world for its effectiveness.

There is a movement under way as hundreds of thousands of people, if not more, are trying the whole-food, plant-based lifestyle for themselves and finding great success. We have personally seen remarkable results in our own medical practice, not to mention experienced it in our own lives. Here are just a few of the significant life-changing results you may expect:

Prevent and reverse the leading chronic ailments. A whole-food, plant-based diet can prevent, halt, and even reverse heart disease and diabetes. Other diseases that are also positively impacted by this type of diet include: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity, and overall mortality. Cancer is also significantly affected by this diet. In fact, the foods that make up this diet are the exact same foods that were recommended in the first "surviving cancer" dietary recommendations. There is also evidence that a plant-based diet may reduce the risk of diverticular disease, gallstones, rheumatoid arthritis, gout, and kidney disease. Furthermore, after switching to a plant-based diet, people routinely report experiencing or seeing in others improvements in a range of ailments, including osteoporosis, arthritis, headaches, acne, asthma, sexual dysfunction, reflux, lupus, inflammatory bowel disease, constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, dementia, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, infertility, insomnia, and sleep apnea. They even find themselves experiencing fewer or less intense colds, viruses, and allergies.

Reach your ideal weight. Humans and their domesticated pets are the only earthly creatures that suffer from being overweight and obese ... in spite of the fact that we're also the only creatures who practice portion control! Why is this the case? It's simple. All the other animals on earth are eating foods that are appropriate for their species. If we also eat foods that are appropriate for our species -- whole, plant-based foods -- then we, too, will be able to eat without portion control and will naturally reach a comfortable weight.

Improve mental clarity Eating a whole-food, plant-based diet improves cognitive function and protects against dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Most people experience greater clarity of thought, improved ability to concentrate, and better memory.

Experience only positive effects, not "side effects". Perhaps you would choose to transition to a plant-based diet to reverse heart disease or reduce your diabetes medications, but now you could see that you would welcome into your life an abundance of positive effects. These can include better mood, sounder sleep, improved bowel function, and more vibrant skin. You will have more energy to do the things you love, like playing with your children or grandchildren, biking, gardening, walking, swimming. You may even want to exercise more. By contrast, as we'll discuss more, medical procedures and medications can have all sorts of major unintended negative consequences.

Have a sense of well-being and empowerment. You are in control of your health. You do not have to settle for compromised health or believe that you are destined to succumb to chronic disease. You can live with less fear that a heart attack can happen at any time or that you will be struck by the same chronic ailment from which other members of your family have suffered.

Save time and money. Whether you have health insurance or not, you will likely have to pay out of pocket for at least some of your health care expenses if you are sick. Fewer trips to the doctor and fewer procedures and pills equal more time and money you can spend in other areas of your life.

I avoid animal body parts or anything from them, and I avoid mushrooms, okra, and also brussel sprouts because of a traumatic experience to me when I was little that I cannot forget, I would not eat peanuts or products with them because any of it is an allergen that I would avoid. Yet I do keep trying new things. There are over a dozen more things that I eat now that I was not eating before, when younger.

My cooked meal  last Thursday had lasagna noodles in it, cut up potato, cut up delicata squash, lentils, bits of broccoli, cut up celery, shredded jackfruit, olives, cabbage, guacamole, hummus, Follow Your Heart dairy free cheese, medium salsa, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, ginger, turmeric, cumin, parsley, and Italian seasoning. It was spectacular. The healthier way we can choose involves having whole food that is all from plants, there is more sustainability with people doing this, with less resources, water, and land used for the living feed for all the animal agriculture, with loss of environments, and more extinction of species on a great scale, and significant contribution to climate change from the emissions, there is no truly good reason to still use animals anyway for what any of us have.

Having a variety of whole foods from plants while avoiding animal products and processed stuff from what is added to prepared food is so good for us it greatly helps against having cancers, or circulatory issues like strokes and heart attacks, along with other great issues to health or well being. Even Alzheimer's disease is avoidable with certain vegetables, which you would have with eating the good variety we should have. It is better to have even more foods from plants, up to a variety of thirty different. Doctors you see will never tell you a good diet to have, in general they don't know, they do not have more nutritional training than anyone, and most assume you can't willingly change your diet. For many, that might be right. Good information made generally available is often lacking. I have a sandwich and a bean burrito each day generally, besides my cooked meals which I alternate between using cut up potato, quinoa, or whole grain noodles, with vegetables cut up in them, hummus, medium salsa, and seasonings, and on some occasions some dried seaweed I put in it too.

I was vegetarian for years, before taking the steps to really be vegan. But, if I knew what I know now to do, I would have been vegan faster, earlier, and I really want that I would have been. I found delicious ways, that matters a lot for changing, but with finding those, including all the use of hummus that I made, it was still very important to find the healthy way, to go on with it, without wavering. And I found it a bit more than a couple of years of certainly being vegan, I just did not know if this was a healthy way for me. I wanted a healthy way, too. I had been using hummus almost all along, before this, and what I found was using whole foods, avoiding modified things like white bread, or even wheat bread, but just having whole grain bread without added things that were not just natural, even preservatives, and still no animal products. It can be any vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts and seeds. Everything I eat is from these, besides occasional dried seaweed. Medication and additives should not be needed when there is this way to eat that is helpful to our best health still possible and will not add to weight gain but help us toward our natural healthy weight. It is this whole food plant based eating, without adding other things, that will be so good for us.

For many issues in the world and to the animals people being vegan is a more effective change, yet more than just being vegetarian, animals are still slaughtered for demands vegetarians have and there are the issues in the world any of animal agriculture contributes significantly more to, with more resources being used up more, while all animals in the industries are being slaughtered, in egg laying and milk production as soon as not useful still, and male babies being killed immediately. The healthiest way does not need animal products.

I didn't have difficulty going vegan though I had been vegetarian already, that wasn't difficult either. Then the healthiest way with whole foods was easy. Just having other food that will always be enjoyed makes any change possible. There are certainly the good reasons for this.

There is the most healthy way that we can have just eating of all the fresh food that is grown. I do wish many more people were trying this.. Variety of foods from plants is important for health, and I include many in each cooked meal.

Animals, which have done nothing to deserve any of the suffering or slaughter, should not have to go through what they do go through that people would have meat, eggs, and dairy from that, and we should not contribute to it. So everything needed for food can all be from plants.

According to meat-eaters, Pythagoras was the main “cultist vegan.”

Then Einstein joined the same “cult”

And a whole bunch of other weirdos too: Leonardo da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Tolstoy, Newton…

Just imagine,the greatest minds of humanity, the ones who pushed science and art forward,
all of them were “crazy vegans.”

There is no sustainability with any continued use of animals in any way, as environments are being ruined more rapidly and oceans are being depleted and contribution to climate change is greater, with it, and there is a healthier way to eat without animal products anyway so they are not justifiably needed, which can be shown. The vegan ethics I see is about not supporting human use of animals, which are generally kept captive all their shortened lives for that. They are not destructive and would not attack unprovoked. There is so much exploitation that is not generally acknowledged or recognized that I see preferable to not continue any involvement in, and the real sustainable ways that need our attention to live responsibly do not need any of that.

“Cigarettes only kills about half a million Americans every year, whereas our diet kills many more,” Dr. Greger.
https://f.mtr.cool/skcqnwbwnp

While eating food from just plants may seem more limiting to others more than me, I see it as all the food I need. There is enough variety and includes the tastiest things, and I would mention such things I have.