I can’t help but get just a bit upset when I see posts and articles about the latest diet craze or this week’s go-to superfood. There are no silver bullets.
The authors of such articles are right about one thing, though. They all imply that you are what you eat, and that’s right. Your body composition is 75% to 80% determined by what you eat, not by how much you work out.
So the answer to many of our health woes is to simply eat right.
But … but … but … what is right?
That’s a tough one, and you can probably find a proponent of any diet you want to adopt as your lifestyle. Low carb, low fat, meat based, plant based, whole foods only, all processed foods. You name it, you can find people advocating it.
I can honestly say I’ve been through just about all of them, and the one that makes the most sense to me is a primarily whole food, plant-based diet.
According to T. Colin Campbell, author of The China Study, and a leading proponent of a whole-food, plant-based diet, if you add up all the deaths directly attributable to poor nutrition — 67% of cancers, 90% of heart diseases, 80% of strokes and diabetes — you end up with more than a million deaths a year, and that easily makes poor nutrition the #1 cause of death in the US.
Campbell entered into his research many years ago with an agenda to get more animal protein into the mouths of nutritionally starved third-world people. However, he discovered along the way, via others and, eventually, his own extensive study into the effects of animal protein on rodents, that animal protein is a tremendous promoter of cancer.
He was even able to turn cancer on and off by adding and removing animal protein from his experimental subjects’ diets.
From an interview with Campbell here:
What is your most important nutrition-based finding?
Studying animal protein has occupied most of my medical research career. For me, it was an evolution in thinking, and what I learned flew in the face of existing, dogmatic views about nutrition. One finding was that we can turn on and turn off cancer cells from animal protein. If you get animal protein in excess of what’s needed, you turn on cancer. If you replace it with plant protein, that doesn’t turn it on. That is a shocking concept.
My personal experience with what is now 7 months of a 99% vegan diet (I have incidental dairy every once in a while when dining out), with about 75% whole foods (I also eat breads and pastas), are that:
- My eyes are whiter and don’t burn like they used to.
- My skin is softer, which is especially noticeable in my hands and feet. I used to have to put moisturizer on my feet and that is no longer necessary.
- My weight has been level.
- I feel emotionally better about what I am eating.
- I don’t miss animal protein in general, but I have a desire for eggs and raw fish from time to time, so I may incorporate them back into my diet on a limited basis at some point.
If you have a lot of weight to lose, choose a diet — any sensible diet — and stick with it, because you will experience many health benefits from simply losing the fat. Once you get to the point where you are fine-tuning, though, you may want to settle on a primarily whole food, plant-based diet.
Ultimately, to get as fit and healthy as possible, you should also exercise. After all, exercise can raise your HDL (good cholesterol), lower your blood pressure, boost your energy, and help you sleep better, among a host of other things. What’s not to like about that?