Exploring The Virtues of a Whole Food Plant Based Diet

Over the past year I have been very busy exploring the virtues of a whole foods plant based diet. I have read so many books on the subject that you might find it boring for me to list all of them here. But what I feel is most important is to give you a little chance to do the same for yourself. In changing my diet my body has gradually transformed into one I no longer recognize. Growing up, although always vegetarian, the main staples of my diet were always dairy and wheat and almost all the vegetables I ate were “cooked to death.” Changing to a raw based (Don’t worry, we still eat plenty of cooked food) whole foods diet has dramatically changed my body, my skin, my nails, my hair and my lean muscle tone. Not to meantion, I feel healthier, lighter, and happier than I ever did eating the old way. I’m not entirely sure what the long term effects are of eating this way but based on how I feel, and how I seem to stay healthy even when those around me are sick, I can assume it will only be wonderful. I am now so strongly convinced that what is going on inside of our bodies is a direct reflection of what we put inside and therefore what we see on the outside that I have whole heartedly adopted this beautiful lifestyle… I only hope that through your own curiosity and research you can do the same…

To start you on your journey, here is an excerpt from a book I am currently reading “Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition“. It is written by renowned professor  Dr. T. Colin Campbell. I encourage you to read it in its entirety. It will spark a fire in you to look further into the concept of proper nutrition, the freedom from disease, and how best to eat your way to renewed energy, radiant skin, and a body you will always want to live in… We can talk about all the little details later… for now I encourage each of you to start to find your own path, your own way to this wisdom, to this simple hidden truth, that may have been hidden behind doors for decades…

“In 1965, my academic career looked promising, After four years as a research associate at MIT, I was settling into my new office at Virginia Tech’s Department of Biochemistry and Nutrition. Finally, I was a real professor! My research agenda couldn’t have been more noble: end childhood malnutrition in poor countries by figuring out how to get more high-quality protein into their diets. My arena was the Philippines, thanks to a generous grant from the U.S. State Department’s Agency for International Development.

The first challenge was to find a locally produced, inexpensive protein source. (Even though malnutrition  is largely an issue of not getting enough calories overall, in the mid-1960’s we thought that calories from protein were somehow special.) The second challenge was to develop a series of self-help centers around the country where we could show mothers how to raise their children out of malnutrition by using that protein source. My team and I chose peanuts, which are rich in protein and can grow under lots of different conditions.

At the same time, I was working on another project at the request of my department chair, Dean Charlie Engel. Charlie had secured U.S Department of Agriculture funding to study aflatoxin, a cancer-causing chemical produced by the fungus Aspergillus flavus, and my job was to learn all I could about how the fungus grew so we could prevent it from growing on various food sources. This was clearly an important project, as there was quite a bit of evidence that Aspergillus flavus caused liver cancer in lab rats (the mainstream assumption was, and still is to this day, that anything that causes cancer in rats or mice probably also causes cancer in humans).

One of the main foods Aspergillus flavus contaminates is peanuts, and so, in one of those cosmic coincidences that appears amazingly only years later, I found myself studying peanuts in two completely different contexts simultaneously. And what I found when I look deeply into these two seemingly unrelated issues (protein deficiency amount the poor children of the Philippines and the conditions under which Aspergillus flavus grows) started to shake my world and question many of the bedrock assumptions on which I and most other nutritional scientists had built our careers.

Here’s the main finding that turned my worldview-and ultimately, my world-upside down: the children in the Philippines who ate the highest-protein diets were the ones most likely to get liver cancer-even though the children with high-protein diets were significantly wealthier and had better access to all the things we typically associate with childhood health, like medical care and clean water.

I chose to follow this discovery everywhere it led me. As a result, the trajectory of my career veered in unexpected and unsetteling directions, many of which are detailed in my first book, The China Study. I ultimately became aware of two things: First, nutrition is the master key to human health. Second, what most of us think as proper nutrition-isn’t.

If you want to live free of cancer, hearth disease, and diabetes for you entire life, that power is in your hands (and your knife and fork). But, sadly, medical schools, hospitals, and governmental agencies continue to treat nutrition as if it plays only a minor role in health. And no wonder: the standard Western diet, along with its trendy “low fat” and “low carb” cousins, is actually the cause, not the cure, of most of what ails us. In a nutshell, the “miracle cure” science has been chasing for the past half century turns out not to be a new wonder drug painstakingly formulated after decades of brilliant and relentless lab work, or a cutting-edge surgical tool, or technique using lasers and nanotechnology, or some transformation of our DNA that will turn us all into immortal Apollos and Venuses. Instead, the secret of health has been in front of us all along, in the guise of a simple and perhaps boring word: nutrition. When it come to our health, it turns our the trump card is the food we put in our mouths every day. In the process of learning all this, I also learned something else very important: why most people didn’t know this already.

The medical and scientific research establishments, far form embracing these findings, have systematically dismissed and even suppressed them. Few medical professionals are aware that our food choices can be far more effective shields against disease then the pills they prescribe. Few health journalists report the unambiguous good news about radiant health and disease prevention through diet. Few scientists are trained to look at the “big picture” and instead specialize in scrutinizing single drops of data rather than comprehending meaningful rivers of wisdom. And paying the piper and calling the tune for all of them are the pharmaceutical and food industries, which are trying to convince us that salvation can be found in a pill or an enriched snack food made from plant fragments and artificial ingredients.

The truth. How it’s been kept form you. And why. That’s what this book is all about…”

-Dr. T. Colin Campbell