Why I prefer the term "disease reversal diet" to "vegan diet"

The term "vegan diet" has a problem in that it describes a very broad, inclusive, and general set of conditions, and includes the possibility of consuming some of the most health damaging processed foods yet conceived. One could for example consume a high fructose corn syrup soda and potato chip diet and yep you'd be vegan. If that's all you ate you wouldn't be long for this world, but you would have no problem finding all the "food" you wanted on that "diet", it's everywhere. In so-called "nutrition deserts" it's essentially the only diet on offer.

Let's face a few facts. It would be interesting in this context to know the population of Nutrition Desert vs Everywhere Else in the good ole USofA, because the Nutrition Desert areas are essentially an act of genocide. The good Dr. Fuhrman, who has coined the very useful term "Nutritarian Diet", has even written a book on this topic (and much more) titled "Fast Food Genocide: How Processed Food is killing Us and What We Can Do About It".

https://www.amazon.com/Fast-Food-Genocide-Processed-Killing-ebook/dp/B01N27P8BR/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

One can get the Genocide Diet anywhere in the USA, one need not travel to the local Nutrition Desert to partake, but of course "in the desert" it's pretty much all there is.

The disease reversal diet is not magic or some complex and mysterious secret known only to select few. It's basic common sense: fully nutritious foods that are also not system clogging, which means they do not present inefficiencies to the body in digestion, assimilation of nutrition, and disposal of waste. In other words you are giving your body sufficient fuel and nutrition without robbing it of the valuable energy it needs to take care of the pathogens and toxins we are exposed to every day. Basically you are simply "getting out of it's way".

Once you have really done that, the body immediately begins to vector toward health on all fronts. It may however be uncomfortable at first, when you clean house dust gets kicked up, and when you begin the disease reversal diet "lodged" toxins are mobilized into the pathways of detoxification and elimination, a process that may very well make one feel worse for a period of time (depending on how much "cleaning" has to be done).

Here's a few clues you may not be consuming the disease reversal diet:

- your energy fluctuates quite a bit during the day.

- digestive processes may cause you discomfort (you should not be any more aware of healthy digestion than you are of normal healthy breathing).

- it may take longer than a single minute to "do your business", and afterward you may feel compelled to open a window out of consideration.

- you may experience any of a broad variety of physical or emotional discomforts with relative frequency.

- your BMI is above the healthy range.

- you may have one or more of the very broad category of health conditions caused by not consuming the disease reversal diet.

There are additional terms other than "disease reversal diet" which identify essentially the same approach:

- SOS free whole food plant based (SOS free = no added salt sugar oil).

- 80/10/10 diet.

- Nutritarian diet.

- Fruits and vegetables with legumes and moderate nuts and seeds diet.

It's interesting how "fruits and vegetables" have been known as the healthiest diet since the time of Plato and Hippocrates, but quite recently has morphed into the "meat and vegetables" diet. Humm...how'd that happen? Was it "science" (using the term loosely) funded by the "disease induction and management consortium"? (Comprised primarily of these industries: meat & dairy, manufactured foods, fast food, big pharma, big health care.) Or was it post industrial cultural biases? Or both?

We love to hear good things about our bad habits...we're only human after all. But we can do better, it only takes education and personal experience to really see and feel the difference.

Let's shine a bright light onto this "invisible" genocide, and get rid of nutrition deserts wherever we find them (even, or especially, in our own bodies). It very likely won't be easy or quick...a huge slice of US GDP has become dependant on the "disease induction and management consortium"...it may even be greater than 50% all told? I somehow think the Fed does not publish that statistic.

Was Chipotle Sabotaged for banning GMO's?

I think it's quite possible after reading this:

You may remember that last year Chipotle was the first restaurant chain to announce that it would phase out the use of genetically modified foods, also known as “G.M.O.’s”. Shortly thereafter, and quite mysteriously, an E. coli outbreak was reported, across fourteen states, from Washington to Pennsylvania, and only in Chipotle restaurants. According the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.), the odds of an E. coli outbreak crossing a single state line is only three percent, as restaurants generally buy their produce and meat regionally for freshness. The likelihood of an E. coli outbreak crossing fourteen state lines, coast to coast, is probably a small fraction of one percent. Additionally, as many restaurant chains use produce and meat from the same sources, it is probably a fraction of a fraction of one percent that such a nationwide E. coli outbreak would only affect one restaurant and not any others.

After six months of thorough investigation by the Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.), the C.D.C., fourteen state and local Health Departments, as well as scientists hired by Chipotle themselves, all have independently concluded that there is not a single traceable source of E. coli from any Chipotle restaurant, in any food ingredient, preparatory surface, or piece of equipment. Literally thousands of individual tests were conducted on the all the foods, on all the kitchen surfaces, and on all the appliances at the suspect Chipotles, and no trace whatsoever of E. coli was found in any restaurant or food ingredient. The C.D.C. being unable to trace the source of a restaurant’s food poisoning, after thousands of tests and half a year of effort, has never happened before in the entire history of the organization.

from this page

https://www.march-against-monsanto.com/mystery-e-coli-strain-smoking-gun-in-chipotle-sabotage-federal-investigation-reveals/

Is it mere coincidence the disease reversal diet is also the way to fix global warming?

Anyone who is paying close attention to nutritional science, anecdotal experience, and epidemiological evidence already knows plant based whole food diets are exponentially better for human health than animal based diets. But what's this about the animal agriculture industry contributing more to global warming than all global transportation combined?

Perhaps it makes sense what is best for human health will be best for the health of the earth too...after all, we are the species destroying the ecosystem. Is there a link?

The new documentary film Vegan 2017 is worth a look.

Women's Nutritarian Diet Health Study looking for participants

The link below will take you directly to the info page.
https://nau.edu/nutritarian-womens-health-study/

Here are a few lines from that page:

The Nutritarian Women’s Health Study (NWHS) is a long term observational study on the effect of the Nutritarian diet on overall health plus the occurrence, recurrence, and progression of chronic diseases (including all forms of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke).

"We can reduce cancer rates – breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer – by 90 percent or more by people adopting what I call a nutritarian diet." ~ Joel Fuhrman, MD

Women over 18 years old who agree to participate in a research study that examines the effect of a nutrient dense, plant rich diet on a variety of lifestyle diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, and many cancers, especially breast cancer.

An introductory video about the study:

HOW CAN THINGS HAVE GONE SO WRONG? (a very brief overview of history)

A friend who reads this blog sent me an email saying he's reading food labels now and noticing all the stuff in "foods" we've never heard of and have no clue what it is. He ended saying "how can things have gone so wrong?"

Things have gone wrong in a number of ways over time. Grain storage is credited as the transition technology of nomadic humans to civilization humans...for the first time we did not have to migrate with the seasons, with distinct advantages to staying in one place with permanent structures, eventually leading to government buildings, libraries, schools, etc.

But grains aren't a food humans can pick in nature and eat directly, it must be hulled and cooked first. Some health experts use a thought experiment to quickly evaluate how "efficient" a given substance is: how much energy is expended finding and converting to an edible form, then once in the body breaking it down and converting to fuel and nutrition. If you found it growing "in the wild" could you make a meal of it in the original form you found it in? Could a child eat it? Would they want to? Animals in nature are hungry and looking for food a good bit of the time, but they don't eat just anything. Each animal has a "species specific diet", and knows what and what not to eat based on instinct, look, smell, and taste.

Digestion of food uses a lot of the body's energy reserves, which explains why we can get tired or sleepy after eating "heavy" meals. Heavy foods are not efficient foods, a lot of energy is required to convert them to usable energy.

Grains are carbs, therefore calories, which is the basic fuel supply we need to get through each day with energy. Fuel comes first, without it nothing else happens, and we are wired by nature to seek calories. An empty calorie is of course not good because it has little to no "micronutrient" content (vitamins and minerals). White rice will provide fuel, but without nutrient density eventually health will decline.

Whole grains do have some micronutrient content, but are not the most nutrient dense food we are adapted to. The broad range of fruits and vegetables better meet our need for both fuel and nutrition.

And this is the first step in how we started going wrong, a dependence on foods that are not sufficiently nutrient dense. Whole grains are not devoid of micronutrients, but they are not high in micronutrients either. Humans used stored grains at the beginning of civilization to get through winter. Then in the spring, summer, and fall would shift to more nutrient dense foods to build up their internal store of vitamins and minerals and get through the next lean months of winter.

The next major step in "going wrong" came with the industrial revolution and with technologic refinement of foods into concentrated substances. This hurt intrinsic value of foods in two ways. First foods could be refined to the point they were completely devoid of micro nutrients, creating the first empty calorie "food-like" substances. Grains became white flour, vegetables became oil, certain fruits and vegetables became sugar. These empty calorie food-like substances do provide "fuel", but ultimately their lack of micronutrient content catches up and health begins to deteriorate. 

Empty calories go a long way toward explaining why so many of us now suffer from so-called "post-industrial metabolic syndrome" diseases, which are degradations of the intricate and complex metabolic pathways in the body, resulting in the most common killers of developed world populations (heart disease, cancer, diabetes, auto-immune diseases).

The first vitamins were discovered in 1912 and initially thought of as "accessory factors". As they came to be understood as "essential" the assumption was made we had at last discovered the cause of health, and if we simply take these single chemicals out of foods their beneficial effect could be concentrated. "Fortified" foods would give us all we need, and even further these nutritional concentrates could be put into pills and capsules, taken daily, and et voila! disease would be banished forever.

Something happened on the way to paradise however, as Dr. Fuhrman points out (author of Fast Food Genocide: How Processed Food is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It), the advent of supplements coincides exactly with the sudden rise in cancer rates in developed world populations.

https://www.amazon.com/Fast-Food-Genocide-Processed-Killing/dp/0062571214/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Fortification of foods may have some value in certain cases, but as an overarching mechanism to improve human health it has been an abject failure. Contemporary nutrition scientists such as Colin Campbell (author of Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition) point to current studies that indicate nutrition only becomes effective when "nested" within the context of the many other hundreds of individual nutritional chemicals in a single whole food (like an apple). Their beneficial effect depends on collaboration. Dr. Campbell compares it to a symphony orchestra, an entity much greater than it's individual constituents.

Dr. Campbell also points out how extremely complex biology and nutrition are, and that much is still not known, but what we can know is that "nature's design" actually works quite well (else we would not still be here), and better than anything we are likely to come up with. His ultimate point perhaps is that biologic and nutritional systems are considerably more complex than currently appreciated, and this underappreciation impedes our approach to truth, sending us instead chasing down one blind alley after another.

https://www.amazon.com/Whole-Rethinking-Nutrition-Colin-Campbell/dp/1939529840

The next and final big step in "going wrong", was the advent of the food engineering industry with a focus on sales and profit instead of nutrition and health. These engineered "foods" can be thought of as "pleasure traps", purposely designed to subvert the interactive complex of instinctual biologic mechanisms that tell us when we've had enough, and what to eat and what to avoid. (A brilliant discussion of this in greater detail: "The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health and Happiness"). The purpose of these engineered "foods" is to create "return customers" by "cultivating" addiction.

https://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness-ebook/dp/B001A38YCC/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511125973&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Pleasure+Trap

Nature does not provide food trucked in 24/7/365 in unlimited quantities. Consequently we evolved in nature to seek calories. It works because it's almost impossible to over consume calories in nature (where no engineered substances loaded with concentrated fats and sugars are available). Purveyors of engineered food-like substances can (and do) use our instinctual responses "against us" for profit, creating wide spread health destroying addiction in the process. These engineered substances actually have way too many calories, and way too little usable micronutrient content, in a context our biologic instincts tell us to eat more of. The final insult is these calories are contained in goo-like substances that clog up our intricate metabolic pathways, and make us sick.

The whole thing is a nasty business that for the most part we have been unaware of. In my opinion it is no stretch to say we have been victims of unscrupulous marketing practices, sanctioned by governing regulatory bodies charged with protecting us from such practices. Instead they protect GDP and most significant revenue streams...has it ever been different? Moral? Educate and protect yourself.

When we eat these engineered substances until "satisfied" we are on a fast track to gain weight, develop insulin resistance, and eventually fall victim to one or more of the various so-called "metabolic syndrome" diseases that put individuals on an expensive merry-go-round of doctors, medications "you'll have to take the rest of your life", and suffering, ending lives decades prematurely.

It doesn't have to be this way. The first thing to realize is every individual is responsible for their own health, while also realizing (unfortunately) there is a forest of misinformation put forward by purveyors (and other economic beneficiaries) of industrial food products. And we love to hear good things about our bad habits, which is important to remember as we weigh and consider what we learn about the foods and practices that are responsible for the creation of health.

The solution is actually more simple, easy, and (shock!) enjoyable than one might think. Reading books such as those mentioned above can help tremendously with overview, perspective, and motivation.

Oh She Glows!

Oh She Glows quick vegan video recipes makes trying the plant based whole foods diet oh so easy.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGpp6-GXxWFhMLQGbX5VDKA/videos?flow=grid&view=0&sort=dd

Fitness buffs! Check this out - THE 300 POUND VEGAN

Jeff Morgan has landing some very good interviews. Here he speaks with NFL Defensive Lineman David Carter.

An Apple a Day Keeps the Lean Gains on the Way

Fitness buffs of all persuasions, check this post by Jeff Morgan.

Golden Handcuffs - The GDP Problem

As Doug Graham is fond of saying, you can be fit without being healthy, but you can't be healthy without being fit.

A friend took me to task recently for not pointing out sugar is bad in my blog posts. OK, agreed, sugar is bad, but let's look at that a bit deeper.

People of the developed west consume more calories from vegetable oils than sugar. Both are empty calorie substances (can't call them food). But more calories than sugar? How is that possible?

Oils are in everything. It is not difficult for us to get 1/3 cup of oil in a day! Oils and other fats create the precondition for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. True, any empty calorie is bad (displacing nutrition in the diet), but the precondition for insulin resistance and diabetes is the primary culprit, and sugar is not it.

People on an 80/10/10 diet can eat refined sugars (but it's not recommended) and will not develop insulin resistance or adult onset (type 2) diabetes. Most do not know this yet, but this is changing.

Then my friend (a good friend BTW) proposed the idea that most of the world eats more plants than we do but does not experience greater longevity.

Well, sure, but second and third world populations can suffer from impure water, poor sanitation, lack of calories, lack of nutrition, and lack of access to medical attention. However the evidence is clear, populations living in benign conditions (where basic needs are met) that also consume a whole foods plant based diet (low in fats and high in carbs) experience not only greater longevity (in many cases much longer), but perhaps more importantly, good health their entire lives. Peoples of the developed west typically experience a precipitous health decline well before death, for the last 20-30 years of life.

So if we add an additional condition to longevity studies - length of healthy life - a very different picture emerges.

Dr. Fuhrman, a whole food plant based medical doctor who has coined the term "Nutritarian Diet" proposes the idea if we integrate the benefits of technology and medicine intelligently with a plant based diet the healthy life expectancy in the developed world could extend to 120 years. Epidemiologic studies also show aggression tends to decrease in plant based populations...maybe we would be less inclined to blow ourselves up too.

So what's the hold up? Well, first of all the population would be healthy not sick (and getting sicker). What is the precondition for a healthy economy? Growth. Here's perhaps the most curious irony of our time (a time infested with curious ironies) - economic health depends on a sick population, and economic growth depends on a population getting continually sicker. Now there's a winning formula.

So if the entire developed world went to Dr. Fuhrman's Nutritarian Diet what would happen? Need (demand) for health care would fall off a cliff and force a massive reduction in scale of that industry. Most MDs would be forced out of practice. Big pharma would shrink precipitously. All the funds raised for "the search for cures" would no longer be needed. The processed and fast food industries would collapse. Big agriculture practices would be forced into major changes. We would only need 25% of current (and still growing) hospital bed capacity. Insurance costs would be much lower, forcing a big down size of the insurance industry. etc etc etc.

In other words, the collective impact on developed world GDP would be catastrophic. It's probably no stretch to propose that greater than half of developed world GDP has become dependent on the combinations of the "disease induction" and "disease management" industries.

Is it any coincidence the primary resistance to global warming solutions is also economic? Is it also coincidence the primary human contribution to global warming is animal agriculture? Did you know that? Most people still don't, that's changing too.

Dr. Garth Davis, Bariatric Surgeon

Dr. Davis underwent an interesting change of perspective in his practice as a bariatric surgeon (where the stomach is made smaller with surgery, forcing less consumption of calories).

Here's Dr. Davis in a wide ranging discussion covering weight loss, health, proteins, plant based diets, and paleo diets.

Health and Fitness Mentor Doug Graham answers the question - where do you get your PROTEIN?

Dr Doug Graham, author of the best selling book "The 80/10/10 Diet",  has begun producing a series of short videos that I quite like, and want to share with you.

First up: Where do you get your PROTEIN?

BTW, there's a clip in the vid of Doug deadlifting 385...Doug clocks in at about 145. And he's about 65 years old. And he only started lifting in a serious way about 3 years ago. Fans of lifting can do the math on that one.