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March 28, 2024

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The confusion about health and diet seems to be never-ending. I would argue that this mostly boils down to intellectual laziness. Below, I will explore a taxonomy of the issues, and identify a path forward. In the end, it is all much simpler than you might think. The bottom line is some people have already done the hard work for you.

We cannot gain a Ph.D. in every discipline to live our lives. Nor can we necessarily always find the best advice, even if we wanted to and were able to pay for it. But common sense is a powerful ally, along with your own intuition or inner guidance, whatever you may call it. Yes, I know it is easy to fool yourself also, but that is a matter of learning, and simply never giving up.

In terms of nutrition, we have a traditional, “accepted,” model of nutrition that is being taught in schools to this day, and within it, there are numerous variations that mostly rest on exceptions to the rule. The model itself is sort of a historical agglomeration of facts, which goes back to some normative assumptions of “healthy” nutrition from Germany, in the 19th century, along with various historical discoveries of the criticality of certain nutrients. Perhaps the most famous ones are:

>  Vitamin C – was discovered because citrus fruits cured scurvy.

>  Vitamin B1 – discovered because it cured Beriberi.

>  Vitamin D – was really put on the map during COVID; we know we needed it, but nobody paid attention, and in most cases the levels are too low anyway, and during COVID, it suddenly came to light this made a major difference.

>  Iron, iodine, B12, Calcium, Vitamin A, Magnesium.

Especially B12 usually often needs to be supplemented, especially for plant-predominant diets, and Vitamin D should come from the sun, but we don’t always get enough exposure.

The fallacy that evolved is a lot of fads, based on discoveries about one nutrient or another, resulting in endlessly changing, and sometimes contradictory, diet recommendations. Very prominently, there is an emphasis on protein, because it happens to be the first macronutrient that was discovered. What ultimately makes these traditional concepts dubious is that even getting 100% of the RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) of all known nutrients, if that were even realistic and possible, does not make for a healthy diet. Here is where reductionism finds out that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Also, we know that with the traditional concepts of nutrition, we have a plague of chronic illnesses that can be prevented with lifestyle changes, principally nutrition.

A leading alternative that has emerged in our time, is the work of Prof. T. Colin Campbell, who is Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, where he now has his own institute, the T. Colin Campbell Institute for Nutrition Studies. It seems Cornell was not necessarily always his biggest fan, although he was a tenured professor. His class became very popular, but Cornell saw fit to cancel it in 2007. Fortunately, by that time, his family had already convinced him to put his work out to a larger public, and with his son Thomas who is an MD, they published his major research findings.

It should be noted that Prof. Campbell grew up on a dairy farm, with the assumption that milk does a body good. When he was working on an assignment in the Philippines to develop better nutrition for malnourished children, he happened to observe that rich kids ate more meat and also developed more cancers (mainly liver cancer). He also found similar results in some research from India. The rest is history. The bottom line is he proved in the laboratory that the levels of animal protein in the nutrition of rats could stimulate tumor growth, or put the brakes on ⏤ on the basis of levels of casein in the food of rats.

Gradually, he researched every assumption in nutrition, and out came a model based on purely plant-based nutrition, and he called it Whole Foods, Plant-Based nutrition. Importantly, it is nutrition, not a diet. The practical meaning of that is that it is a set of guidelines of what you do eat, not a list of exceptions of what you don’t eat, within the standard nutritional package. Here are the simple rules:

  • Minimally processed, whole plant foods. i.e., cutting and cooking are fine, but not extraction, etc.
  • No need to watch calories within the guidelines, but the proportions of intake are:
    • 80% of calories come from carbs, but never refined products, so whole grains, etc.
    • 10% of calories come from naturally occurring fats, e.g., beans, etc.
    • 10% of calories come from plant-based proteins.
  • The above means no animal nutrition at all, not meat, fish, fowl, or dairy. It also means no heavily processed foods like oil, white flour, white rice, etc.
  • If you get a diverse intake, within the above guidelines, there is mostly no need for supplementation, except:
    • Vitamin D
    • Especially Vitamin B12, which is hard to get from plant-based nutrition.

One of Campbell’s students, an engineer by training, boiled the whole thing down into a simple scoring system, called the Four Leaf Survey, so you can see how well your particular food habits align with the above goals. You can take that inventory regularly, and from your rating, you will know how to adjust the mix of foods you consume to get closer to the optimal intake. Or you can go to his other site, the Four Leaf Program, and there you can find more information and/or print this program out, so you can do your survey from a piece of paper. With this tool, switching over to Whole Foods, Plant-Based nutrition is as easy as can be.

What matters more is that the results are there, and this is the reason why there is now a vibrant Lifestyle Medicine community, and the American College of Lifestyle Medicine is training more and more doctors every year. Large hospital systems are coming aboard, such as Kaiser Permanente, NYC, and California. It is finally dawning on some in the medical profession that it makes no sense to have heart operations and patients feeding on cheeseburgers.

Plant-based food helps the body heal much quicker, and hopefully, if the hospitals do a good job, people would want to continue the habit at home. A cancer hospital in Mexico, Oasis of Hope, does routinely put people on a complete whole foods, plant-based diet for two weeks prior to an operation. They also have a demo kitchen in the hospitals, for many patients travel with a significant other, and this support may help them to continue this style of nutrition when they return home. Lately, there has been some comparative research and it has been shown that a whole foods, plant-based diet is strongly anti-inflammatory, even more so than a Mediterranean diet, probably mainly because it avoids oil.

Experience with switching to a whole foods plant-based diet has resulted in a format of a 10 or 21-day “jumpstart” program, in order to learn the tricks of cooking this way and to make sure people learn how to do this at home. Plant Pure Communities even has produced two very good documentaries that explain the process, the first one was called Plant Pure Nation, and the latest one is called From Food to Freedom, and it is about six diabetics in a house doing a 10-day jumpstart, followed by a 6-month follow-up. Both documentaries are available on YouTube.

The upshot is that once you know the basics, cooking this way is actually easy, and there are lots of support organizations that can help, with grassroots support in various communities. This approach on total nutrition shifts the emphasis from individual nutrients towards the total picture, and essentially, as long as you stay within the guidelines, and you eat sufficient variety (“all the colors of the rainbow,”), you pretty much can’t go wrong, just keep in mind that for vitamin D and B12, you should get some supplements. Easy peasy. The whole thing shifts the emphasis towards staying healthy in the first place, but there is extensive experience with disease reversal, and particularly if you are on medication, you should do this change with medical supervision, for you may have to adjust your medicines.

There is another way of looking at the difference between any type of a ‘diet’ and whole foods, plant-based nutrition. First of all, traditional nutrition, including all the various ‘diets,’ are largely responsible for the avalanche of chronic disease, and the Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet reduces inflammation and thereby makes disease reversal possible in many cases, or else it prevents these types of diseases. Aside from the initial difficulties with the change-over, including establishing new cooking routines, etc., the results are that people stick with this diet, for it is very satisfying, once you adjust to the fact that you will eat more volume, for plant foods are not as calorie-dense as animal foods.

In fact, people’s palates change, and after a while, they wonder about why they could ever eat their old diet. It just won’t taste as good anymore. Looked at from the standpoint of cardiology, Dr. Dean Ornish reports in his book Undo It!, that with statins, 50% of people drop the drugs by six months because of side effects, but on a Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet, he has 80% retention after a full year. There are various support networks also, all run by volunteers, either through Plant Pure Communities or locally, like in the case of Plant-Powered Metro New York.

  • Rogier Fentener van Vlissingen

    Rogier Fentener van Vlissingen is a Dutch native, living in America since 1979, in both Connecticut and New York. He has worked in international shipping and most recently he has mostly been involved in energy efficiency and retrofitting. He is also a co-founder of a biotech, BCM Industries, which develops autologous organ repair tissues, and also a line of revolutionary IT equipment, computers and storage appliances, running on live neurons. He is an eager student of business, literature, history and spiritual traditions. He also teaches whole foods, plant-based nutrition and cooking. He published his first book in Holland in 1973. In 2007, Rogier published the book Closing the Circle: The Gospel of Thomas and A Course in Miracles. He blogs about energy retrofitting, energy finance, spirituality and whole-foods, plant-based nutrition and healthcare.

MANY VOICES, ONE FREEDOM: UNITED IN THE 1ST AMENDMENT

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