(This is Part 1 of a series.)
Recently I wound up in the hospital with pancreatitis.
Pat Raffalovich, a good friend and business partner, had flown in for a week to co-give a seminar with me and we had gone out to dinner every night and pigged out. I was still eating vegan, but way too much, and in particular way too many sweets/desserts—my particular weakness. So of course even though I was a "vegan" I was taking in way too much fat and refined sugar.
If the phrase comes to mind—"Healer, heal thyself"—well, that would be a good one. Amen.
After leaving the hospital I immediately went into a ten-day water fast, followed by two days of fruit juices, then spent three or four days transitioning to an all-raw vegan diet, essentially a living-fruitarian diet.
And "my" body, that faithful and beautiful organism, has responded wonderfully. And I'm reminded all over again of how regenerative the body can be on a raw-vegan diet. It allows our body to potentially take us to a state of bodily vitality, clarity and efferescence that, as far as I can tell, just doesn't seem to be available otherwise.
In my opinion, this is true almost no matter what state of health or disease our body is in. Even if we're "past the point of no return"—and that's always somewhat in doubt because our bodies have remarkable recuperative powers if given half a chance—such a diet will, I believe, give us the greatest ease and clarity in our transition through the death process—which, to our surprise, may take years.
My first studying of nutrition and its effects upon health occurred when a friend gave me a copy of Let's Eat Right To Keep Fit by Adelle Davis. I was 21 years old, in chronic low-health, and that admirable author turned me on to the idea that what I ate had a profound effect upon my health.
Though I had been to numerous doctors, none had ever suggested even a whisper of that idea to me. According to the prevailing wisdom then and now, "health" came from finding the right physician and the right combination of drugs and procedures. The idea that I was basically in charge of my own health through what I ate was like a light turning on. What a concept!
Over the next couple of decades I became quite adept at suggesting what might be termed a "whole-grain, high-protein" diet and the right combination of supplements to facilitate various friends in recovering from all sorts of "intractable" diseases.
Nevertheless, in my heart of hearts I knew that something was still missing, because I continued to feel kind of toxic and low in energy at times, even though in general I felt a good deal better than I ever had before.
Around 20 years ago I began to turn on to the idea that vegetarianism was the way to go, and I got rid of meat, poultry and fish in my diet. I began to realise—backed by literally thousands of research studies demonstrating that vegetarians were healthier and lived longer—that animal foods were high-fat, high-pesticide, high-hormone, low-fiber foods and they were damaging my body.
In giving them up, I had to overcome two things: 1) my habit of preferring them, an addictive food habit formed through decades since childhood; and 2) my idea that I had to make sure to "get enough complete protein", of which meat, fish and/or poultry seemed the ideal choice.
As to the first point, I discovered after several months that my taste buds had changed and that I now preferred the clean taste of fruits and vegetables.
And as to the second point, I found out that all fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes contain protein (ranging from 5% to 20% or so by calories) and that the body maintains an amino acid pool that allows it to construct any body proteins it wants from the varied amino acids obtained from different meals from the plant kingdom.
It also didn't escape my attention that various herbivorous animals such as the horse and the bull didn't seem to be lacking in strength, so I was able to let go of the idea that I had to "eat animal protein for strength".
In fact, I found out that animal-fat and -protein were increasingly linked to the various degenerative diseases that plague "modern" societies—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis and hundreds of others.
Due to the wealth efffects of the Industrial Revolution in the last century or so, all classes of society were now able to eat animal food at every meal—a revolution in diet—and thus bring on the degenerative diseases once reserved only for the very wealthy. Imagine: Medical textbooks of a century ago didn't even mention heart disease—now our biggest killer—since it was such a rare disease.
(This is the end of Part 1. Go to Part 2.)
—jim sloman, 11.30.05
|
