(This is Part 2 of a series. Go back to Part 1.)
Perhaps seven or eight years ago I became increasingly aware that dairy products were not a health food. Up until this time I was vegetarian but I was eating a fair amount of cheese, yogurt and some eggs, and of course, sweets, which often contain both dairy and eggs, not to mention lots of sugar.
At that point I became a vegan "except for" sweets. You must be crazy if you think I was going to give up my cakes, pies, cookies, chocolate puddings, etc. No way!
But I gradually did become aware of two things: First, that milk and its products are just as unnatural in our diet as meat, fish and poultry. Can you imagine yourself living in nature for millions of years—with no tools, etc.—and getting yourself under the teat of a cow or sheep so you can drink its milk? Doubtful.
And in any event, that would have only become a realistic possibility with the domestication of animals about 10,000 years ago. And it only really became possible for the vast majority of people with, again, the rise of the middle class in the last century as a result of the Industrial Revolution.
Anyway, over time I came to understand that milk, eggs and their products are at bottom just more animal foods. They have the same lack of fiber and phytochemicals and the same high levels of hormones, pesticides and the same animal protein and fat linked so decisively—in The China Project and other studies—to all the degenerative diseases.
So I became a vegan, with the occasional falling off the wagon to indulge my addiction to sweets. And sometimes more than occasional, but I was pretty much vegan more or less. My diet consisted basically of cooked vegetables and grains and I came to enjoy it a great deal. I came to really love a simple meal like brown rice and beans with a salad, or perhaps brown rice and lightly-cooked broccoli.
But I still had four big discoveries in front of me:
The first concerned vegetable oils. I was already aware of the deleterious effects of animal fat and protein, of refined white flour and sugar, of excess salt and so forth. These were clearly not part of a natural diet in nature, and they all had been linked to various diseases. But I didn't realise the importance of eliminating vegetable oils.
Weren't vegetable oils healthy? After all, we've all heard of the benefits of olive oil, flax seed oil, sesame seed oil and so on—pick your favorite.
Mike Anderson, who's made a marvelous video and book called Eating, finally helped me to see that all vegetable oils were simply another refined product, in their essential nature not dissimilar to refined sugar, refined white flour and other refined products made in a factory.
Vegetable oils are devoid of fiber and phytochemicals. And, of course, they're extremely high in fat and calories. Moreover, it's been shown that all fat in the diet, whether of animal or vegetable origin, is linked to the promotion of cancer in the body. Why is that?
Simply put, cancer cells thrive in a low-oxygen, anaerobic
environment. Our regular bodily cells, on the other hand, thrive in an oxygen-rich environment. The more oxygen in our blood, the better our body's normal cells like it. That's one of the reasons why exercise is so beneficial.
Well, it turns out that vegetable oils—not to mention animal fats—drastically lower the oxygen-carrying ability of the blood, so that our cells have to subsist on a lower amount of oxygen than they'd like.
However, the cancer cells in our body—and we all have some at all times from various toxins, cosmic rays and so forth—love this oxygen-poor environment and thrive in it. Hence the strong connection that's been demonstrated between various cancers and the total amount of fat in the diet, from whatever source.
But don't we all need some fat, some essential fatty acids? Indeed we do. But it turns out that natural foods from the plant kingdom already have an optimum amount of fat for us. Fruits average about 4-5% fat, vegetables 6-7%, grains about 7-10%. Foods like that will keep us under 10% fat by calories, which is the figure below which heart disease has been proven to be reversible.
In our country right now a diet where we get 42% of our calories from fat is considered normal. Medical authorities recommend that we get down to 30% of our calories from fat. However, a 30% fat diet has been shown to promote the progression of heart disease—again, our biggest killer.
In fact, even a 20% fat diet will not reverse heart disease (and many other diseases). We must get down under 10% before we begin to see the body healing itself of various diseases brought on by excess fat intake—an intake far more than nature designed us for.
A second effect of too much fat from any source is that it depresses the immune system—the very thing the body continuously uses to destroy cancer cells in the body, and the very thing we want to facilitate in any true healing from a cancerous condition.
Thus we can be "vegan", but if we're eating french fries, chips, cookies, salads or cole slaw drowning in vegetable oil, baked potatoes slathered in margarine, virtually all commercial baked goods and so on—we're not yet really eating a healthy diet.
I slowly came to see that all vegetable oils would have to go—that they just didn't serve the body. In the end, they were just more fractionated foods—foods isolated from the whole plant, and thus from the whole plant's benefits.
(This is the end of Part 2. Go to Part 3.)
—jim sloman, 12.1.05
|
