Heart Warming Testimonial - Healing Cancer the Natural Way

Ah, the fruit festival is rolling!

Had to miss it this year darn it!

But some good vids are already rolling in, and they give some of the flavor of the event, and the experience.

The Problem of Getting Sufficient Calories to Maintain Energy and Body Weight

Any diet with insufficient calories is going to crash sooner or later (usually sooner). On an insufficient calorie diet people become thin, drawn, and just generally unhealthy. Calories are the nutrient we need every day to get thru the day because they are our immediate source of energy. But the rest, vitamins, minerals, bioflavonoids, essential fatty acids, etc etc... we can get those essential needs met over the course of weeks from a variety of whole foods.

So on a low-fat, whole food, vegan diet the problem is getting enough calories. Most people get most of their calories from fat. Calories in fat are very dense, in other words a small quantity of fat has a lot of calories. This is why, on conventional high-fat diets, if one eats enough to "get full", they will have eaten a lot of calories, too many in fact to easily maintain a healthy body weight.

On a low-fat vegan diet there are two primary sources for "enough" calories, fruits, where the cals come from simple carbohydrates mostly, and starches, where the cals come from complex carbs. (The cals in whole veggies are minimal, but those foods are rich in other essential nutrients.)

Bananas are the potato of the fruit world: they are versatile, cheap, readily available, and rich in calories and other essential nutrients. Depending on ripeness they can have quite a bit of starch (less ripe), and spotted bananas have converted the starch to simple sugar.

Contrary to the current but incorrect meme, insulin resistance is not caused by sugar, it is in fact caused by free floating fat in the bloodstream, which is what happens on standard diets getting most cals from fat. Fat in the blood inhibits the uptake, transport, and delivery of fuel to the cells (fuel is glucose and oxygen in combination), a problem known as insulin resistance. If one insists on continuing with a conventional high-fat diet the only solution to this problem is to reduce carbohydrate consumption to nil, converting the bods primary fuel source to fat, a condition known as ketosis. This is the basis of the so-called Paleo diet, or the earlier Atkins diet. However it's not as efficient or healthy IMHO as simply getting the fat out of the blood to begin with.

Check out this book, a low-fat vegan approach, but less "radical" than the 100% raw Doug Graham version. It uses cooked starches as the base, for sufficient calorie intake.

"The Starch Solution"

http://www.amazon.com/Starch-Solution-Regain-Health-Weight-ebook/dp/B007PF7MGS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407765640&sr=8-1&keywords=the+starch+solution

"Healthy" Fats

There is a lot of discussion about healthy fats and being sure we have sufficient quantities of them in our daily diets. The so called Paleo diet proponents also suggest a diet with most calories coming from fats, including saturated fats (essentially a variation on the Atkins diet).

However the clinical evidence suggests a low fat vegan diet is highly effective in the context of disease reversal, and very possibly overall health, energy, and longevity. Drs. Esselstyn, Ornish, Bernard, McDougall, Fuhrman and many others not as well known have repeatedly shown and published consistent and decisive reversals of heart disease, diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, most of the other so-called metabolic disorders, and even cancer in some cases.

These doctors suggest healthy carbs as forming the bulk of caloric intake, as much as 80% of the total, with fats and proteins splitting the remainder at 10% each. They eliminate animal products and refined vegetable oils entirely from the diet, and reduce consumption of high fat plants such as avocado and nuts and seeds to moderate levels.

The two approaches essentially invert carbs and fats in the calo-nutrient ratio, but also incorporate other common sense ideas, most notably perhaps elimination of processed, refined or otherwise fractionated food products, sticking with whole foods nearly exclusively. Both approaches can have beneficial result, pointing to the benefit of a whole foods diet on its own regardless of calo-nutrient ratio, but to the best of my knowledge only the high carb approach is shown to be a consistently successful disease reversal protocol.

Check out the information at this link:

http://nutritionfacts.org/video/more-than-an-apple-a-day-preventing-our-most-common-diseases/