Don't Eat - Grains, Legumes, Starches or Fruit!

We've heard forever not to eat starches because they make us fat. A more recent meme is to eat fruit in moderation, if at all, because it has sugar and will make us fat and give us diabetes. Grains are out because of gluten, and legumes are out because of lectin, and both are out in terms of Paleo philosophy.

Most people can't be expected to know this, but these food groups are considered by established experts on whole food plant based diets (WFPB) to be the cornerstone food groups that create day to day success on the diet, and support long term health. But...they are the foods we are not supposed to eat? Is the implication a plant based diet can't possibly work? If so, how can it be that a well constructed plant based diet reverses so many modern day diseases?

There is another cornerstone food group of the WFPB diet everyone agrees is good to eat...non-starchy vegetables. Well at least proponents of the WFPB diet get agreement with conventional dietary advice on one point. And it's an important one, these vegetables are high in nutrition, especially minerals.

But would there be a problem eating only non-starchy vegetables on a WFPB diet? Well, yes, they happen to be low in calories. And the aforementioned foods we are told not to eat happen to be high in calories. (They also happen to be high in micronutrients.) So what the heck is going on here?

Any diet that creates and supports health needs to provide two things essentially: 1) energy, also referred to as calories, or macronutrients; and 2) nutrition, also referred to as micronutrients, which are the tiny (micro) amounts of the various vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, and amino acids necessary for health and longevity. And of course there's a third all-important thing a healthy diet must provide: a lack of toxins.

In the most basic terms, calories "fuel" the body, and nutrients repair and maintain it. Of the two we need calories on a more immediate basis, for basic energy, and to get through each day with vitality.

So a person attempting to consume primarily non-starchy vegetables will not get enough calories to maintain day to day energy levels or long term health. In the parlance, they will "bonk" on the diet, and rather quickly at that.

And here we are left with a bit of an odd conundrum: of the food groups that recognized experts on WFPB nutrition say are the cornerstones of health - fruits, vegetables, whole grains, starches, and legumes, current popular advice says only vegetables are OK to eat.

This is not only an odd conundrum, but also, perhaps, it is telling in light of the fact that WFPB diets have produced the greatest levels of health and longevity in humans, as measured by countless epidemiological studies, and catalogued in books such as "Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World's Healthiest and Longest-Lived People" and "The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest".

Is it possible we have been given carefully crafted misinformation by those who stand to profit from conventional animal based diets? Or is all this some kind of misunderstanding? The many thousands of people undertaking WFPB diets for disease reversal and better health quickly come to see conventional recommendations as myth, misunderstanding, or disinformation promulgated by big industries protecting profits.

To wrap up, another real world example of the healing power of a whole foods plant based diet seems appropriate. Here's the story of Katherine Lawrence, an aerospace engineer who recovered from stage four endometriosis, as told by Dr. Neal Barnard, founder of The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, in Washington DC

And here is Katherine's website

https://www.foodsavedme.com/about-us