Food For Thought- The Case for being Vegan
The Whole-Food, Plant-Based Diet
Who is a vegan? By definition, a vegan is a person who does not eat or use animal products. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition of a vegan is a “strict vegetarian” who eats no food that comes from animals (such as meat, eggs or dairy products) as well as “one who abstains from using animal products (such as leather)”.
To most people, including ovo-lacto vegetarians, that sounds extreme- why should one have to give up drinking milk and consuming yogurt and cottage cheese? While one can relate to Olympic athletes avoiding eating ice-cream and cheese, why are they giving up entirely on animal-derived foods for their source of so called good fats, protein and calcium? Simultaneously, why have some of the leading doctors in the field of human health and nutrition been urging humans to revert to eating a whole food plant-based diet and give up on what we’ve been consuming for the past century?
Well one of the reasons is, with meat and dairy consumption becoming main stream in the United States post World War II and in countries such as India more recently, increased national prosperity has resulted in governments heavily subsidising the practice of “factory farming”, albeit at the externalised cost of long-term human health and environmental damage which will be borne largely by our children and future generations. The meat and dairy industries, often compared to the notorious tobacco industry, have gained financially and hence gained lobbying power thereby falsely promoting the health benefits of consuming animal derived products, three times a day.
The ideal diet for Homo sapiens: What should we be eating today?
At this point I would like to make the distinction between a vegan diet, and a whole food plant based diet (a.k.a. a WFPB diet). The term “veganism” is associated with adopting an ethical approach that involves causing the least possible harm to other sentient beings.
However, renowned doctors and nutritional experts from the world over like to clarify that a vegan diet may not necessarily be the healthiest one. A vegan individual could be surviving on potato chips and sugary aerated drinks, and other plant based “junk food”. Instead they recommend eating whole food plant based diet comprising of starches (such as rice, grains, potatoes, beans and lentils) with the inclusion of vegetables and fruits and to a lesser degree, nuts and seeds. It so happens that a whole food plant based diet is vegan by default. It is also recognized to be far better for the environment and more compassionate towards the animal kingdom at large.
Where and when did the notion of eating a whole food plant based (vegan) diet gain mainstream popularity?
Nutritional biochemist Dr. T. Colin Campbell, PhD, a long-term professor at Cornell University wrote ‘The China Study’ along with his son, physician Thomas M. Campbell II. The book, first published in 2005, sold over a million copies by 2013, making it one of Americaʼs best-selling books about nutrition. It was arguably among the first to spurn todayʼs monumental movement in eating a plant based diet.
According to Dr. Campbell, he grew up on a farm milking cows and like everyone else, believed todayʼs widely accepted standard American diet comprising of meat, eggs and dairy, was the healthiest for the human body. Interestingly, he did his PhD dissertation on “an attempt to show how we could promote more animal protein”. Post further education at MIT, he went on to get involved at Virginia Tech University where he helped run a program in the Philippines concerning malnutrition in starving children. Until then he supported the mainstream consensus for increasing the protein content in their diets, especially animal based. It was here that he faced a conflict that he found to be “pretty shocking”, contrary to his background coming from a farm and going against his training and elite graduate education. He began seeing evidence that “more protein leads to more cancer”. For the next three decades, he then went on studying the consequences of increasing protein in the human diet. In one of the key experiments that he conducted, he found it “very exciting that we could turn on and turn off cancer growth just by adjusting the level of protein. This meant that one could control cancer by nutrition.”
A noteworthy finding documented in their book The China Study, was that amongst younger generations in China, the affluent were suffering chronic lifestyle illnesses such as coronary heart disease, diabetes and cancer (including though not limited to breast, prostate and bowel cancer) whilst the poor continued to live longer, healthier lives. They found that the rich, increasingly able to afford and adopt the mainstream American diet, were consuming significantly higher amounts of animal products (specifying the inclusion of dairy), which had previously not been part of the traditional Chinese diet and attributed this to the cause of such disease. They wrote that “eating foods that contain any cholesterol above 0 mg is unhealthy”, further clarifying that plant based foods contain no cholesterol.
How far back have we been eating a plant-based diet?
Dr. John McDougall, author of ‘The Starch Solution’, ironically also the son of a butcher, drew similar findings to Dr. Campbell. He found that Type 2 diabetes could be entirely reversed by adopting a starch based plant food diet. A starch based plant food diet was also successfully reversing chronic heart disease, colon, rectal, breast and prostate cancer as well as acne, leaky gut syndrome, Alzheimer’s, dementia, Leukemia and other auto immune diseases- the host of modern day lifestyle diseases that afflict the human species today. Though historically we had shorter life spans resulting from plagues, famines and such, he explains that we did not die of obesity and other dietary lifestyle diseases. “If you look back through recorded history or you look even today, what you will find is that ALL successful large populations of people in all of recorded history have lived on starch based diets”, says Dr. McDougall. These include the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Middle East, all of whom ate corn, potatoes, and grains such as wheat and barley as well as the people in Asia who lived on rice.
“Got Milk, Got Disease”
Dr. McDougall is famously known to say, “The fat you eat is the fat you wear”. He mentions that dairy-fat is 97% saturated fat and that it is loaded with cholesterol causing people to become overweight and even, obese. His online medical journals report that while “whole milk comprises 50% fat, milk advertised as 1% (low fat) is still 18% fat, and cheese is 70% fat.” Aside from attributing obesity to dairy products, he warns of cancer and brain damage resulting from the high levels of herbicides and pesticides present in milk. He adds, “Osteoporosis and kidney stones are from bone loss caused by eating animal proteins and dietary acids. Hard cheese is the greatest source of dietary acids”. Furthermore, cow’s milk protein is the “most common cause of allergy and autoimmune disease including kidney disease and severe forms of arthritis”. Contrary to popular belief, cowʼs milk has been associated with calcium deficiency leading to osteoporosis resulting from the human bodyʼs inability to absorb the calcium present, as well as to increased rates of arthritis, cancer promotion, kidney stones and kidney damage.
Dr. McDougall further points out that cowʼs milk comes from an impregnated female cow and is designed for a baby calf to grow into a full-grown cow. With its protein levels being around 27- 30%, as opposed to human breast milk which is designed for a human baby, the protein content of which is about 6%, he clarifies that “Milk... it does a body harm”. Infancy is the stage at which weʼre growing most rapidly and he advocates that this level of protein as a percentage of our overall calorie consumption is adequate for the rest of our lives. He further adds that humans are the only mammals that voluntarily drink the milk of another mammal habitually, and to their detriment.
What about our ancestors?
In agreement with Dr. Mcdougall are the findings of Dr. Michael Klaper, MD, leading expert on educating “the next generation of doctors”. Dr. Klaper explains that contrary to popular belief, it has long been proven that the Neanderthals, our Paleolithic ancestors, from whom we evolved, ate plants, and not the low- carb Atkins, paleo and ketogenic diets being touted and widely adopted today.
Dr. Micheal Gregor, as with the other two doctors mentioned above, is the author of a New York Times best-selling book called ‘How Not to Dieʼ. He ascertains that whilst dairy from cows may provide a high level of calcium, it [dairy] also comes with the addition of mammalian sex hormones, antibiotics, manure and pus.
More on the popular low-carb diets such as the Atkins, Paleo and Keto diet
Dr. Neal Bernard (MD) who founded the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) with the aim of promoting preventive medicine says “fibre tricks the brain into feeling full for a fraction of the calories contained in animal foods. Aligned with this thinking is Dr. Michael Klaper, who notes that as humans, we continue to have long intestinal tracts, designed for digesting plant based fibre and considers plant roughage vital for our satiation and colon health.
Dr. Klaper maintains that the “preferred fuel” for human beings is and always has been “glucose”. He explains that we continue to be “sugar burning organisms” and “not fat burning organisms”. He goes on to point out that our canine teeth do not compare with those of carnivores such as lions and tigers, adding that technology enabling the study of our ancestors’ teeth and bones has disproven the long-standing myth of the “big cave man chomping down on a dinosaur leg,” dispelling the notion as “fantasy”. Gorillas, chimpanzees and other primates ate 99% plant based diets, he adds.
The plant based doctors and nutritionists alike, warn of the long term dangers of popular low-carb diets such as the “Atkins”, “paleo” and “keto” diets being adopted by the younger generations today. Dr. Klaper explains that “the ketogenic fat-burning state, induced by ketones released in our bodies by adopting a diet high in flesh and vegetables and low in carbohydrates, leads to blood ketosis” which then leads to blocked arteries causing heart attacks, gout in joints, leaky gut, colon cancer, blocked insulin receptors (as a result of “all the fat stored up in muscles”) contributing towards “young people dying of old people diseases”. He calls it the “diet of death”.
On a similar note, Dr. Michael Gregor humorously points out that whilst the ketogenic diet may lead to lower body fat, it also leads to a “skinnier casket” as well as long term loss of lean muscle mass.
Back to Basics
Dr. Gregor was among the first to predict the widespread dangers of global pandemics resulting from the modern day practice of animal farming and keeping animals in “filthy conditions” leading to the increased possibility of the spread of zoonotic diseases including harmful viruses. Today, Covid-19, Swine Flu, Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease, HIV/ AIDS as well as Ebola are all attributed to eating animals.
Dr. Gregerʼs YouTube videos are especially popular amongst the plant-based generation as they are evidence based and simple to follow. He advocates a check-list that he calls “The Daily Dozen” and these include whole grains, beans, cruciferous vegetables (such as broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts), greens (such as spinach, kale, spring greens etc.), other vegetables (including starches such as sweet potatoes and sweetcorn), fruits, berries, nuts and seeds, flaxseeds (rich in essential Omega 3 fatty acids), spices, beverages (including but not limited to water, green tea etc.) and exercise.
Furthermore, he provides compelling evidence that eating just one egg a week is comparable to smoking 20 cigarettes a day in terms of its effects on our arteries and cholesterol level, proving eggs to be extremely harmful and high in saturated fats.
In addition, all the experts in the field of nutrition maintain that vitamin B12 is a micronutrient that is produced solely by plants and microbes found in soil. They clarify that carnivores tend also to be vitamin B12 deficient and that animal derived sources of B12 were not produced by the animals but rather absorbed by them when eating plants. As modern-day humans eat washed produce, it is important to add a B12 supplement, vital to long term brain function, in the whole food plant based diet, thus avoiding the perils of cancer, diabetes and other lifestyle diseases associated with consuming eggs, meat and dairy. The China Study, as well as the doctors mentioned, recommends sunshine exposure for adequate levels of vitamin D.
Getting Informed
Today, documentaries such as The Game Changers, What the Health, Forks Over Knives, Fast Food Nation and Cowspiracy have led to the rapid increase in awareness associated with the benefits of adopting a whole foods plant based vegan lifestyle. Iʼd recommend watching them all, today more than ever, as together we strive to overcome Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel corona virus, as well as for preventing other potential outbreaks resulting from animal to human disease transfer. According to the United Nations, the two greatest threats facing humanity are climate change and emerging infectious disease- particularly pandemic influenza. This pandemic has been a relatively gentle nudge on mother natures behalf urging us to revert back to thriving on the whole food plant based diet that we are designed to eat.
My Journey
My name is Sanam Bakshi. Iʼm a self taught artist by profession and a self-informed vegan by personal responsibility and compassion. I studied Real Estate Development at the University of Pennsylvania where I began my journey as a non-competing athlete. I ran 7 miles a day and eventually began practicing Ashtanga yoga. Recently, I have also started weight lifting and HIIT training.
This is relevant to my journey as a vegan for the following reasons. I grew up eating eggs, meat and dairy and went vegetarian for the animals several times. As an athlete, I believed the vegetarian diet wouldn’t provide me with sufficient protein so I began eating fish and egg whites believing it was the right thing to do and was relatively humane. As a teenager, I was also warned Iʼd grow stunted if I didnʼt eat flesh, and so thatʼs why Iʼd reverted to eating chicken. Like most children, I was forced to drink milk because it was considered healthy- but it always made me nauseous.
Despite my daily rigorous workouts, I didnʼt feel satiated and was not satisfied with my overall fitness levels either. I was looking for the ideal diet and had heard of Dr. John McDougall- causally celebrated as “the potato doctor”. I watched all of his videos, short and lengthy, eagerly. What he had to say was absolutely fascinating- it was intuitive, factual and the evidence he presented was undeniably compelling. Not just that, he had the formula down pat and didnʼt support a high fat diet. It worked! I grew stronger, satiated, my digestion was better than ever before and I didnʼt gain weight. This way of eating felt safe, fool proof, extremely satisfying and I continued building muscle without bulking up, which was my goal.
Words by Sanam Bakshi
