Here is a somewhat humorous look at the world of whole foods and plant based diet knowledge.

Our generation knows more about food than generation X or Z, and both those generations appear to be well on their way to childhood obesity, diabetes, and more – so say all of the scientific studies on this topic.

This would suggest that the younger generation needs to be “schooled” and the older generation are the ones who should do it.

But what is the real quality of your knowledge about whole foods and plant based diet?

Here is a quiz that we hope you’ll find fun and informative…it’s true or false quiz.

1. Whole foods are foods that come ready to eat out of the package.
2. Plant-based foods are foods that were processed in a packing plant.
3. Organic simply means they didn’t spray them with Roundup.
4. Foods are safe when you can read, pronounce, and explain all of the ingredients.
5. Anything that grows on a farm is good for you.
6. Cooking in vegetable oil is a healthy choice for frying foods.
7. Avoiding eating all fat is a good way to stay slim and fit.
8. Corn-fed beef is the best beef money can buy and the best tasting too.
9. Raising chickens in cages doesn’t affect the quality of the meat or the eggs.
10. Genetically Modified foods “GMO” have been approved by the FDA so they must be safe.
11. Pharmaceutical companies help subsidize food advertising because they believe eating our food will make us healthier.
12. It’s OK that the FDA is run by big agribusiness and big chemical companies, because they are in a position to know better what is and isn’t harmful in our food.
13. We should just convert all our prairies to raising grass-fed beef. That would solve the problem.
14. Fish raised on farms are the same as fish caught wild.
15. Companies who sell you food have to tell you about all the ingredients. Take for instance the dairy companies, they have to tell you if there is anything besides milk in your milk.
16. Eating fat makes you fat.
17. Everyone needs to eat plenty of protein – more is better. Most people should eat meat one or two meals per day.
18. Pasta is a great diet food.
19. Diet sodas don’t hurt you because they don’t have any sugar.
20. Diet foods and low calorie foods are healthier.
21. Feeding cows and chickens GMO grains doesn’t affect us.
22. Obese people get fat because they lack discipline.
23. Diabetics get sick because they eat too much sugar.
24. People who are slim and fit looking are healthier than people who aren’t.

Well now if you found you agreed with some of these then you might struggle with the task of educating the new generation. Mainly because every one of those statements were false. And there is plenty of scientific research and just plain facts to prove that.

So what should we be teaching? Aren’t the US dietary guidelines the basis for what’s good for our kids?

Hasn’t the Food Guide Pyramid served us well up to now?

Well – NO! Today following this guide, we have more obesity, more diabetes, and MS, more dementia, more Alzheimers than ever before in history. We have all kinds of neurological diseases that nobody 100 years ago had ever experienced – like “Fiber Myalgia.” As a society we’re failing in our food education and our general knowledge about what we eat. Eating the way this chart is arranged is killing us.

First, let’s look at the bottom of the pyramid. These grain-based foods are the most likely to cause food allergies or sensitivities. Most of the time they are too low level to notice and we just pass them off as external allergies or aging. But these foods turn into sugar in the body faster than sugar does. In fact, they should have occupied the top space on the pyramid. Early Paleolithic Man didn’t eat such foods so why should we? Is it because we think we’re smarter and can bend science to give us what we want?

And how about 2-4 servings of fruit. These are clearly sources of concentrated sugar.

And how about milk, yogurt, and cheese. Do you think that when this pyramid was created there were any political influences to contend with? Since this pyramid was created, a lot of changes have occurred in the diary farming industry. Widespread use of hormones and antibiotics, genetic modification of cows so they can give milk during the 9 months of their pregnancy providing almost 10X the estrogen with no labelling requirements (hello “man-boobs”), the introduction of GMOs into the food chain – milk really isn’t the same milk we envisioned when this guide was first established and negotiated with the dairy industry.

But you must realize that this guide has influenced your thinking about what’s good and what’s not when you make your food choices. It’s ingrained in everything we do.

So what should we be teaching the next generation?

Here are some simple suggestions…

• Most of your diet should be made up of plant-based organically raised foods free of pesticides, antibiotics, and GMOs.
• Most dairy even organic is marginally safe and should be minimized.
• Grains should be avoided regardless of organic or not. Grains include all forms of grain including rice and grains that are generally called “gluten free.” Some people may have gluten sensitivities but this is more comprehensive than that and includes anything that converts to sugar more rapidly than sugar itself (could be called a high glycemic load)
• Fruits should be eaten sparingly and mainly focused on the berry end of the spectrum.
• Packaged or processed foods of any kind should be avoided.
• Meat should be pasture-raised, 100% grass-fed, cage free, and organic and mainly a weekly event rather than daily.
• You can’t eat fast food and adhere to the guidelines above. You’ll never know what you ate no matter what they say, and believe me the fast food industry are “smart rats” in a maze they created – they know what they need to say to get your business.

I invite your comments.

I’ll just quickly summarize the key reasons to think about changing to a whole food plant based diet.

Your Health

A study published in April by the US National Academy of Sciences, concluded, “7.3 million deaths could be avoided annually” by following a whole foods diet.

In 2015, after careful review of more than 800 medical studies, the World Health Organization concluded that processed meat causes cancer and that red meat probably does, as well.

A plant based whole food diet is the only currently sustainable method for deriving our food. All of the science supports this conclusion.

The Environment

“Transitioning toward more plant-based diets that are in line with standard dietary guidelines could reduce global mortality by 6–10% and food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 29–70% compared with a reference scenario in 2050.”

In other words, the benefits are not just the traditional argument about eating better but also encompass the fact that raising beef and other animals for food consumes a significant portion of our natural resources and contributes to our greenhouse gas problems.

This study extends to looking at how we raise our food and the serious environmental impact. But most of us don’t really know how our food is raised and if we did we might have serious reservations about continuing the way things are going.

At this point we’ve taken to feeding our farm animals with GMO-grains, shooting them with antibiotics to prevent the inevitable health problems, and placed them in environments that can’t possible result in healthy animals or edible beef.

Meanwhile the advertising industry is busy “spinning” everything to make it sound better – remember “corn-fed beef”? It took 20 years or more for us to realize that cows don’t eat corn – ever.

Now in our current feed-lot environs, a hamburger takes 660 gallons of what to produce. That equivalent to two months of showers. The amount of green gas and waste produced is unsustainable. That basically means we’re produced more waste in one of these feedlots than is produced in a small city and more green gas than we can absorb in the next 10-20 years.

Basically all of the experts say if we keep raising beef and poultry the way we do, we’ll run out of options. We currently consume 209 pounds of beef per person each year.

This first video starts a little rough because of translation issues but it actually contains a good presentation on COWSpiracy the video which is a very important documentary.

This next video is an eye opener with facts that will “rock” your world. Very thought provoking.

Inflammation is a normal part of the body’s immune response; without it, we couldn’t heal. But when it’s out of control—as in rheumatoid arthritis—it can damage the body. Plus, it’s known to play a role in obesity, heart disease, all kinds of neurological disorders, and cancer.

So why do we get inflammation, why is it harmful, and what are some tips on how to reduce inflammation in the body?

Types of Inflammation

Inflammation is normal for many things that happen to us. A cut or abrasion, a strained or pulled muscle, a bump on the arm or leg – all of these are normal and temporary. We know when our immune system is being called to action because we experience heat, swelling, redness, and pain.

But there is another type of inflammation that remains with us every day, some days worse than others. And that’s “chronic inflammation.”

Chronic Inflammation can come from a variety of sources both psychological and physical. But more importantly, because it is Chronic, it can become the root source of many diseases that will surface later and sometimes too late to effectively counteract.

Causes of Chronic Inflammation

Unlike an injury, Chronic Inflammation slowly creeps up on you so that you may think it’s simply the symptoms of aging. Stiffness of muscles, minor aches and pains in the stomach or organs, headaches, indigestion, hair loss, memory loss, brain fog, painful joints, foot pains, back pains, changes in eyesight, changes in hearing, cancer, skin conditions, high blood pressure, diabetes, bronchitis, arthritis, pre-mature aging, and a list of symptoms just to long to attempt.

And the secondary affects of Chronic Inflammation are very subtle. By “Secondary” I mean that it can cause more subtle issues such as not digesting your food properly and therefore reducing your vitamin intake which then in turn affects many other bodily symptoms.

Here are a list of common, long term, low-level causes…

• Bacterial, viral, and fungal infections in the stomach or gut
• Low-grade food allergies/sensitivities
• An imbalance of bacteria and fungi in your gastrointestinal tract
• Stress
• Toxicity
• Diet and Lifestyle

Types of Stress in More Detail

• Bacterial, viral, and fungal infections in the stomach or gut – H Pylori is an example that is present in 50% of adults over 60. It can cause a variety of ailments including ulcers and even stress.
• Low-grade food allergies/sensitivities – these are barely noticeable but they tend to build up over time as you eat more and more of the primary foods you consume and your gut leaks a slight amount of protein into your bloodstream causing a gradual immune reaction. Having proteins from your favorite foods such as bread, milk, and sugar in your bloodstream means you’re constantly reacting and triggering your immune system.
• An imbalance of bacteria and fungi in your gastrointestinal tract – you have more bacteria in your gut than cells in your entire body. The primary location of your immune system is your gut. Early exposure to antibiotics as well as continued exposure to antibiotics in foods such as beef, chicken, eggs, and dairy products, and hormonal exposures such as the high levels of estrogen in milk have damaged the good bacteria in our gut and left the more resilient bad bacteria. The good bacteria likes roughage, fiber, and vegetables. The bad bacteria says, “Bring on the sugar, grains, carbs, etc.
• Stress – Stress comes in different packages – psychological, physical, and emotional stress raises the level of cortisol, and creates inflammation. You can tell if you have more than your share of cortisol because you’ll notice you’ve developed a bulge around your middle (if you are male) or more than your share of fat there and everywhere if you are female. Belly Fat is the key symptom and in the longer term this fat deposited around your organs is not doing you any good. And by the way, fat is not a dead tissue as most believe. Fat is another type of organ capable of producing hormones and distributing to the body – and guess what those hormones do? They increase inflammation.
• Toxicity – over time we absorb toxins and heavy metals such as mercury from our food, and from our environment in general. These in turn generate inflammation.
• Diet and Lifestyle – too much sugar, protein, or the wrong kinds of fat in your diet, chronic dehydration, not enough exercise, and lack of sleep are just a few of the elements of your lifestyle that can contribute to Chronic Inflammation.

Knowledge is Power but What to Do Next?

You could spend some significant time trying to guess which of these causes might be the culprit. A functional medicine doctor could help you run tests and isolate the causes. There can often be several so simply experimenting with various foods doesn’t always lead you to success. The older you are, the more likely you have multiple causes of inflammation.

One of the places that people generally start experimenting is with their food. It may be one of the easiest areas to change quickly. And if you’re over 50, it’s generally a safe bet that you have developed at least some mild sensitivities to certain foods that you eat most – dairy, bread/grains, beef or chicken, etc.

This food guide gives some excellent guidelines on how to re-think your diet to eliminate more of the inflammation causing foods. Not only does it deal with food types, but it also gives you hints on those foods that will have the highest level of toxins if not purchased organic.

If you want to get the big hits first then here’s what I recommend…

• stop drinking sodas, juices, or any kind of drink with sugar or sweetener of any kind – don’t kid yourself – the artificial sweeteners are toxic and will cause cancer faster than sugar – if you don’t believe it just do a search on google with your favorite sweetener + cancel like this “aspartame+cancer” and then read all the evidence and studies telling you why that’s a bad idea for a sweetener alternative. If you convinced that artificial sweeteners are a good choice so you can keep drinking these drinks then ask yourself what you’re really committed to?
• stop eating packaged foods – if it is manufactured and put into a box or a bag, chances are it has every bit of nutritional value long gone and it also has loads of ingredients that you can’t pronounce and have no idea what they are or why they’re in there. If you live in a food jungle (nothing but mini-marts for miles) then look for a local farmer – you’d be surprised – some people are growing gardens in Los Angeles in the public land on either side of the residential side walks. There are local farmers everywhere and I can guarantee they don’t use roundup or GMO seeds.
• stop eating grains – these are the most frequent cause of food allergies or sensitivities. Stopping eating these for a while to see what happens is a very good and worthwhile experiment – make note of the symptoms you have that you can’t currently explain without saying “getting older” and see if they go away. Grains including wheat, rye, barley, quinoa, rice, and anything else that looks like those. And if you’re eating “gluten free” flour just stop that as well for a while.
• stop eating dairy – they used to raise cows in fields where they ate natural grass with no pesticides or GMOs – and they didn’t milk cows during the 9 months they were pregnant because cows raised naturally don’t give milk while they’re “with calf” – but now we feed the cows GMO grains which they aren’t built to consume and before they can get sick because we know they will because their immune systems are depressed, we pump them full of antibiotics, and then we modify their genes so they can give milk while pregnant which pumps up the estrogen in milk by 5-10X, and then we wonder why we have “man boobs” from drinking milk? Milk and cheese are the ultimate future cocktail served by the “Twelve Monkeys” and the chances that you’re not at least mildly allergic to something in that cocktail is very slight.
• stop eating feed-lot raised beef – stuff a hundred cows in a space the size of a basketball court so they can’t move, sit, or lay down for 12-16 months, feed them GMO grains so they get sick and die and you have to hurry up and haul their carcasses out of the muck because they’re standing knee-deep in their own feces all their lives and a dead cow will infect the whole feed-lot, and then inject them with growth hormones and antibiotics to prevent disease which runs rampant, and then lastly take them to a slaughter house that brutally mistreats them during their last hours of life. And you want to eat that meat? Do you really believe there is any chance that your food raised in this manner is going to make you healthy? There are ranches that raise cows humanely, graze them on grasses that are non-GMO and non-pesticide, refrain from using antibiotics or hormones, and then slaughter them humanely to bring you “100% grass-fed beef” at a higher price so you will eat less.

I know by now, you’re probably saying, “What’s left to eat?” But you’re only going to do this experimentally for a while so taking the bigger possibilities out of your diet is just a test. It would take you a while to learn to purchase and prepare a diet complete in alternative to the above – granted. But if you can simply temporarily try eating only whole and mostly raw foods, you might possibly see some longstanding symptoms reduce or disappear. It’s becoming a lot more common nowadays. People are reporting remissions for cancer, MS, Parkinsons, and diabetes simply by changing their food.

Food is Medicine – Socrates

Getting Old

Let me suggest based on this study, that your body wasn’t made to get old. Your body was made to stay young much longer than we think. But inflammation creates free radicals that rust the body now more than ever in history because we lack the nutrition to produce the anti-inflammatories required to activate our system to reduce them. Watch this video.

Exercise

You can actually make things worse by exercising too much. I know this flies in the face of traditional wisdom but perhaps that’s what we need to do more of – fly in the face of what we have known for centuries that hasn’t been working for us.

Exercise does play an important role in your health, however, And that is that it activates genes that we all have that lay dormant, standing by, to produce substances and hormones our body needs to fight infection, to metabolize fats, to control insulin, and to do a myriad of other important things in the body.

How much exercise does it take? Really most experts are recommending 20-30 minutes a day. Some recommend simply walking at a moderate pace daily but most recommend doing some form of weight training or exercise like jumping jacks or push-ups because they temporarily raise your heart rate and this is the trick to activating your genes. Most experts who advocate a higher level of exercise promote rapid repetition for up to one minute and then resting for 2-3 minutes between repetitions.

Most important, this is not the traditional model for exercise but it is rather finding a way to quickly activate your genes preferably three times per day after each meal.

Take a look at this for more in-depth information on interval training.

Testing

Clinical tests used in allopathic medicine include:

• C-Reactive Protein (CRP) test, which measures a protein found in your body that signals responses to any forms of inflammation
• ESR (sed rate) test, which checks for non-specific indicators of inflammation

But you can also use your fasting blood insulin level to gauge inflammation.  Although this test is typically used to screen for diabetes, it’s also a marker for inflammation.

The Mental Game of Health

At the end of the day, I believe that it’s about our mental attitude toward health. If we have given up and decided that whatever is happening to us is inevitable – that’s how our traditional doctors are going to look at it and after all, they’re experts right? – and if we’ve decided that what is happening is the normal process of aging where the body runs down, or if we decide that we’ve been working hard all our lives and now we deserve a little rest – then no matter what we do or somebody else does for us, we’re not going to be able to make the effort to change.

One of my favorite books, God Works Through You, has a passage I have read almost everyday for 20 years and it says, “If the need is to be supplied, your consciousness must be changed. You must lift your vision above the appearance to the fact and keep it there until the Truth forms a Consciousness of Itself in you. Your positive attitude toward the negative state must be transformed into a positive attitude toward the positive state.”

I believe this passage applies to getting older and losing your health.

If you believe that obesity and diabetes are incurable then they are. If you believe that dementia and Alzheimers or heart disease is inevitable, then it is. If you could do one thing I would suggest that you create a vision – a dream – of you healthy doing healthy things, free of disease and free of worry and you keep that vision in your mind and your heart until “The truth forms a consciousness of itself in you.”

Most people have heard of gluten and gluten sensitivity or even the extreme form of gluten sensitivity, Celiac’s Disease.

Here is what I consider to be a more sober look at the issues with all grains – not just wheat – and why we might consider cutting back or eliminating grains from our diet.

As also, easiest way to see if it matters is to take yourself off the grains for 2-4 weeks and see if you have less inflammation – less pain.

You can read the article but I think the video is worth watching.

In the quest to find alternatives to chemo and radiation – a therapy that damages good and bad cells alike – a new study show promise for foods that fight cancel and specifically ingredients found in ginger.

Here is an extensive article on the subject, however, the bottom line is that including some dried and ground ginger in your cooking may be the best preventative option you have. A substance in ginger targets and inhibits the cancel t-cells that produce additional cancer cells.

Let’s get practical and sort out the real reasons why you might think about changing your food.

Now at 71 years old, I don’t consider such a decision an easy one and I don’t take it lightly. I mean really….we’ve been eating the food grown in America for 70 years – it might seem like it is too late to change.

But please – just hear me out and then decide.

Seriously – the FDA and the EPA and some others – “the government” – have been messing with your food for the last 50 years and the only notice or warning you have are the labels which rarely tell you the real story. If it wasn’t for “USDA Organic” you probably wouldn’t know anything. Meanwhile the food companies have been figuring out how to fool you – by calling things “All Natural” and “Country Fresh” and so on.

So the point is, you don’t really know what’s in your food. The label tells you the ingredients and now the nutrition label tells you how much fat and carbs and sugar, but that’s not really everything you need to know.

For instance, you probably don’t know that the dairy farmers used to have to wait for 9 months while a cow had their calf because they wouldn’t produce milk while they were pregnant. But now thanks to some modifications in their hormones, cows give milk through their entire pregnancy – great huh? unless you consider that milk taken while a cow is pregnant has at least 5 times the estrogen. Where is that on the label? But when you men start growing man-breasts will you look back at the milk label to see if that did it?

Another example – you probably think that USDA Organic Beef means your beef is going to be good for you? But “Organic” doesn’t mean grass-fed so what you’re getting is beef from a cow that was “finished” in a feed lot using corn and grains that were USDA Organic and didn’t get feed antibiotics.

Can you hear a politician in some dark hallways whispering, “OK if they want organic, we’ll give them organic – but we get to say what organic means.”

Now the significance of cows fed with corn or grains is that they don’t eat that. Cows have a different anatomy. They are ruminant – which means they have a 45+ gallon stomach that is setup to digest grass and grass-like wild plants like you find on the prairie. So feeding them corns and grains causes all kinds of problems – problems that can kill cows but generally if not, require lots of medications.

I’m assuming you know that anything that goes into a cow – herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics, grow hormones, GMOs, etc. – all end up in the food you eat?

So the reason you should think about changing your food, is that your government already has changed your food for you but they didn’t tell you that you and your children are now at a higher level of risk than ever before in history.

Will it solve all your problems if you just stop eating anything that isn’t organic? Well that would be a step in the right direction, but it would not save you the pain because what is labelled organic today just isn’t what you think.

Now the best way to eat organic vegetables is to go to your local farmer’s market and start buying from local farmers who are too small to get certified organic and you can go over there and look at what they do and see that they are growing organic anyway.

Now the FDA and congress are very busy trying to come up with a way to keep you from buying from local farmers. And your local market are quickly converting to buying from local farmers. So everyone sees the writing on the wall and as usual they are jockeying for position to control that.

But look, if congress is subsidizing the current beef and farming businesses which they are, they can afford to have you go buy from someone else. That will threaten the whole system they’ve setup. So they’re going to fight hard to get you to roll over and eat GMOs, feedlot-raised cattle, and so on.

So you can take a big step by eating organic but that’s just the first step. You’ve got to take control of your food supply chain for meats, fish, poultry, and vegetables.

It’s time to look seriously at changing your food not just for yourself but for your family members who do not want you to spend the rest of your life in a bed.