This is an introduction to the most important nutritional research and the dietary advice that has developed from it. The research includes the largest epidemiological study ever conducted on nutrition and health often referred to as The China Study. This show is based on six episodes that will
give you the basic guide to the world's finest diet, if that means a diet that gives protection against most chronic diseases and is the foundation of vibrant health.
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The World's Finest Diet Episode 7 Your Diet and Your Breathing
By now you will be convinced that what you eat has profound effect on your health and future health risks, did you know that your quality of breathing is also vital to ensure good health and reduce the risk of future chronic diseases?
Your doctor will often check your blood pressure, blood profile, wait, etc. but it is rare for any doctor to check your diet or breathing unless you presented with a respiratory problem. Yet we now know that our diet and breathing are two vital factors governing health.
My research over the past three years involved checking my patients’ diet and the breathing quality. On the basis of almost 300 data sets it appears that there is a strong correlation between the diet eat and the way we breathe. The good news is, that as we improve one the other will improve in time.
I don't believe this relationship has been examined before despite its importance in helping people to achieve optimal health. It does however support my belief that our health is connected to almost everything we do in our daily lives as discussed at length in my book “Connection”- towards a better understanding of health in medicine today. By Michael Lingard. This is available from Amazon HERE.
So, in conclusion, if you want to improve your health further, change your diet and improve your breathing. You can learn how to do the latter with my free podcast that takes you through the whole Buteyko Breath Training Course over fifteen episodes for free! It is entitled Better Breathing Means Better Health. HERE
I do recommend you invest in the accompanying small book for recording your exercises and as a reference book on the impact of breathing on our health. This is available from Lulu.com HERE
Episode 6. Problems On The Way.
Episode 6
Thursday, August 29, 2019 • Duration 07:27
Episode 6. Problems On The Way.
A general reaction when people are presented with the challenge of switching to a whole plant diet is a sense of confusion as to what to buy, cook and eat, now that many of their usual foods are to be eliminated. This radical change to their entire cooking and eating habits of a lifetime is indeed a challenge. This is probably true, but what we eat has been something of a habit over many years, what we have been accustomed to enjoying with family and friends, but not really a habit impossible to change with determination, good organization and enthusiasm. The good news is that probably over half the world's population are living pretty close to a whole plant diet, not perhaps by choice, but by tradition or by simply the economy of eating vegetables, fruit and grains and not be being able to afford large amounts of other foods found in our Western diet. We have all enjoyed eating out at Indian, Arab, Chinese, Thai or Japanese restaurants from time to time, and many of the dishes served in these restaurants traditionally have a very high vegetable grain content and a very low meat, dairy, poultry or fish content, so it does appear that the are thousands of recipes we can use that will give us enjoyable stimulating and tasty dishes despite the fact they may not contain many of the foods we have grown used to having in our meals. At the end of this transcript you will find a list of Internet sites that can provide a host of fascinating recipes, you can also see a list of some of the major recipe books and there are a few apps which give recipes as well. It is even possible to modify many of the recipes you and the family enjoy and have got used to, are by removing some of the non-whole plant food items and maybe modifying some of the flavourings and spices to bring the dish back to the table in a way that people can still enjoy it.
How do you manage when you eat out in restaurants and cafes? Luckily the vast majority of restaurants are now offering a range of dishes that are based on meals without meat, dairy or fish. Some of the dishes are vegetarian, some vegan and some based much more closely on whole plant nutrition. The authors of the 4Leaf Guide and the 4LeafSurvey system have also hit upon an ingenious way not only eating the kind of meals they want but saving money at the same time when they eat out. By going into a restaurant and ordering a dish that may be a Thai prawn curry and requesting the dish without the prawns and requesting they adjust the price. Most restaurants are quite happy to provide such an accommodation, especially if they don't have a vegetarian or vegan alternative to choose from.
Episode 5. Guidelines on the Whole Plant Diet
Episode 5
Thursday, August 29, 2019 • Duration 06:07
The World's Finest Diet. Episode 5. Guidelines on the Whole Plant Diet
Whatever your 4LeafSurvey score is, don’t despair if it was low, because everyone can improve on their diet following the advice given in this episode. The aim is to raise your 4LeafSurvey score by simple diet changes. You may have already noticed that the first four food groups all score positive, and the remaining food groups score negative. So to increase your overall score it is obviously quite simple, you increase the consumption of the first four food groups that include: vegetables, fruit, grains and Omega-3 foods and/or reduce your consumption of the negative scoring foods that include: dairy foods, eggs, cows milk and cream, sugar, white flour, sweet & salty snacks, meat poultry and fish and vegetable oil.
At this stage most people are surprised or shocked at the suggestion of removing some of the usually highly recommended foods for a well-balanced diet and greater health. Sadly there are many myths and questions attached to dietary habits and there are powerful market forces that will encourage consumption of meat, dairy and processed foods. It will be a good idea to go through just a few of them right now.
Firstly is there evidence that most modern diseases are diet related and a whole plant-based diet reduces this risk? YES! Particularly for diabetes, heart disease, strokes, Alzheimer's disease and many cancers have links to our diet.
Does our diet affect cholesterol levels? YES! A whole plant-based diet lowers it as it contains no cholesterol but a dairy and meat diet is the main source of cholesterol in everyone's diet. We don’t need any cholesterol in our diets.
We need meat to ensure we get adequate protein. NO! The protein content per 100 calories is the same for both forms of diet.
Children need dairy produce for the growing bones. NO! There is double the calcium content in a plant-based diet compared with a dairy & meat diet.
We need meat for our iron supply. NO! A plant-based diet provides ten times more iron than a dairy & meat diet.
We need a meat & dairy diet to get vital vitamins and antioxidants. NO! An animal-based diet provides almost none and a plant-based diet is the only significant source of these vital nutrients. Animals have already used these vital micro nutrients for themselves.
Episode 4. Getting Started with the 4LeafSurvey.
Episode 4
Thursday, August 29, 2019 • Duration 07:30
The Worlds Finest Diet. Episode 4. Getting Started with the 4LeafSurvey.
The first stage in your journey towards better nutrition is to establish just where you are on this road already. Usually anyone wanting nutritional advice would attend a consultation with a nutritionist or diet specialist and spend perhaps over an hour completing a vast amount of form filling gathering data on your eating habits, nutritional requirements and so forth, however with the whole plant diet it is possible to gain sufficient information from a very simple questionnaire based on just twelve questions about your normal eating habits.
This questionnaire is called the 4LeafSurvey and it is based on an eating concept designed to make it easy for everyone to learn how to eat a near optimal diet.
Well, what in fact is an optimal diet for humans? This has been the basis of many thousands of hours of debate discussion and argument over the years but to cut to the chase let's just take a statement from the Cornell Professor who led the most comprehensive study of nutrition ever conducted. He summarizes his conclusions after half a century in a career as a nutritional scientist as follows:
“The closer we get to eating a diet of whole, plant-based foods, the better off we will be” Dr.T.Colin Campbell, Ph.D., nutritional biochemist.
So the 4LeafSurvey is a guide to where a person is on this journey towards the optimal diet. There are six levels that are based primarily on the percentage of calories derived from whole plant foods.
At the bottom we call this a typical Western diet or the SAD Standard American Diet, it is the unhealthy diet and this usually contains a combination of meat, dairy, eggs, fish and more highly processed foods for almost every meal. This is probably the most popular diet style and is associated with a whole series of serious health problems and less than 10% of calories are derived from whole plants.
At the next level, which is better than most, the percentage of calories derived from whole plants ranges from 10 to 20%, and those at this level are trying to eat a little healthier diet but they do need a better understanding of what promotes good health.
Episode 3. Making The Change.
Episode 3
Thursday, August 29, 2019 • Duration 04:07
The Worlds Finest Diet. Episode 3. Making The Change.
So by now you have decided to try to make a change in your eating habits, the question now arises whether to do this in small steps or you can do it in one giant leap. Which course you take will depend a lot on your circumstances but there are a few factors to take into account. What we eat tends to be a long-standing habit and almost, there can be an element of addiction to some foods or particular dishes, so this can present a problem in itself. Will you be just making the changes for yourself or for others you live with who may not want to join you on this challenge. Again, it depends on how well motivated you are to make this change, if you currently have significant health problems it's understandable you would like to make the change quickly if however you are reasonably healthy you may be satisfied with taking your time and achieving the change over a period of months.
The advice from the leading doctors in America on this question is that if you are sincere about making the change go for it with 100% of your effort. How difficult this will be depends on how close you are to the whole plant diet already, some people will have to make a major change in their stocks of food and their daily weekly buying habits but for others it will be minor changes to bring them up to the whole plant diet. In my practice I routinely check everyone's diet and as a generality I suggest that they make changes in their diet systematically and in steps over weeks and months, the only exception to this would be people with serious health problems who I would strongly advised to make the change rapidly and thoroughly to gain the most benefit immediately.
So the decision will be yours as you will have to research new recipes, learn how to cook new dishes and re-organize your buying of food, but all that is part and parcel of this important health promotion journey. This podcast will help guide you along the route in all these areas.
I would strongly recommend you purchase "The 4LeafGuide to Vibrant Health" by D. Kerry Graff and J Morris Hicks , available from Amazon [HERE] that deals with many of these problems with very good advice based on many years of experience. Dr. Graff generally offers her patients a plan of change over four weeks. Week one being the planning period to get rid of any unhealthy breakfast and snacks replacing them with healthier ones, week two putting into action healthy breakfast and snacks, week three doing the same for lunch and week four introducing healthier eating for your dinners.
Episode 2. Why Eat Mostly Plants?
Episode 2
Thursday, August 29, 2019 • Duration 09:04
The World’s Finest Diet. Episode 2. Why Eat Mostly Plants?
Let's begin with the basics. We need fuel for our bodies and this includes three major nutrients; carbohydrates, fat and protein. Yes, we need all three to live and eating them in the right proportion. In addition we need micronutrients such as vitamins, minerals, fibre and phytonutrients. A whole plant-based diet contains all the above nutrients in the right proportions so long as it is sufficiently varied and balanced.
A whole plant diet offers roughly 80% carbohydrate 10% fat and 10% protein with plenty of vitamins, minerals, fibre and phytonutrients, the perfect diet.
The typical Western diet as found in America and largely now in the UK is composed of a combination of meat, dairy, eggs, fish, and processed foods and provides approximately 40% carbohydrates 40% fat and 20% protein. Besides this it provides very little fibre, vitamins, minerals or phytonutrients. As you see, it does contain an excess of fat, cholesterol and animal proteins which are all linked to major health problems.
So why should you eat a whole plant diet? Here are just a few of the possible reasons for this advice.
A whole plant diet will provide you with the balance of all the nutrients body requires.
There is sufficient evidence now to suggest that a whole plant diet not only can protect us from major chronic diseases, but may reverse many of these serious ailments.
International studies of cultures that subsist mainly on a whole plant diet demonstrate excellent health and great longevity with little or no chronic diseases found in the West.
Observation of people migrating from countries that predominantly eat a plant diet to America or other countries in the West show they develop the same frequency of chronic disease that we experience, the major change causing this being their diet.
There is a widespread concern that the whole plant diet will not give adequate protein for our needs, in fact a whole plant diet provides all the protein we need.
Detailed scientific research by Dr. T Colin Campbell, the author of the China Study has suggested that animal protein consumption along with insufficient whole plant food is a key reason for most of our chronic diseases.
Why Change Your Diet?
Episode 1
Thursday, August 29, 2019 • Duration 07:33
The World's Finest Diet
Episode 1. Why Change Your Diet?
We all know what we enjoy eating and most of us have been eating a similar diet for most of our lives unless you have tried various slimming diets or keep fit diets or other publicised diets which have promised improved health greater fitness or whatever. The choice of food we eat is one of the most profound activities we humans engage in. For 100,000 years man has eaten a diet which really derives straight from nature be it berries, leaves, roots from the land, the occasional insect or grub, the animals came his way and the fish fro the sea and rivers. Anything which in fact gave him some sustenance. One theory why humans have large brains compared with other mammals is that we were hunter gatherers and had to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of fauna and flora, when it was ready to eat, what was edible what was poisonous and where to find these sources of nutrition when they were in season, all this knowledge was essential for simple survival. The effect of this was that the environment that man lived in coped very easily with his appetite and little damage was done to it.
Modern man however is a different matter, we have learned to farm industrially, we have learned to provide ourselves with a very rich, high calorific diet, seven days a week, 365 days a year by simply visiting our local supermarket and picking the food off the shelves. The effect of this change in diet choice and food provision has had two major catastrophic effects on the planet and our selves. It has led to an epidemic of ill-health principally caused by excessive eating of foods which in moderation would have been fine but in the excessive amounts now consumed and in their modified state have led to most of our chronic diseases and the second major problem is that the provision of such food has demanded massive farming on the scale never seen before which has caused huge devastation of natural forests and increased greenhouse gases to create our current existentialist problem of global warming.
This is no longer speculation, this is no longer based on a small group of people with this opinion, it is based soundly on observed research and scientific investigation. We are where we were when it was discovered that smoking could seriously damage our health; it took almost fifty years before this simple fact was accepted by the medical establishment and governments and for changes in the advice and law to discourage smoking. It may take less time, I hope, for this message about our diet to influence us all.
Beating your cravings. Most of us have specific foods that we really feel we could hardly live without. Some of the common foods in this category would include cheese, steak, eggs, and perhaps even something as simple as good plain white bread. Luckily most of these cravings tend to be based on habit of eating these foods for a long period of time and these foods should be fairly easy to put aside quickly, but there are foods that also have an addictive quality for a very good reason. It's not well known that every form of milk, whether it is cows milk, goats milk or mouse milk contains what are called caso-morphines, substances which are allied to morphine-like medications and drugs which give a very pleasant experience when consuming them. This is nature's way of ensuring that the young creature, sucking mother's milk should find that experience far more enjoyable than playing or doing anything else to ensure the well-being and growth the the young creature. When we consume concentrated milk products such as cheese, maybe this increased dosage of caso-morphines adds to the attractiveness of the food and this may well be more difficult to leave aside than the ones that we have simply grown accustomed to eating habitually. Cutting these out of our diet is more akin to giving up smoking. There is another attraction which is a genetic element in our make-up designed for our survival, and that is a preference for any foods which have a high calorific density, high-protein or high-fat density so that in times of hardship getting hold of such foods will keep us going for longer than trying to get all our calories from gathering fruits and leaves. In our hunter-gatherer days this made good sense, if you came across an opportunity to catch and eat a small animal, fish or eggs it would add enormously to your survival. Unfortunately, unlike the hunter-gatherer who would have had to seek out the prey, hunt it, kill it and take it back to his cave to eat, today we can simply walk into any supermarket and take as much as we want from the shelves with very little effort and it is this genetic drive towards a higher fat and protein food that encourages to eat an excess of this type of food.
The family and fellow diners. Many people wanting to make a change in their eating habits may have a problem of carrying those around them in the same direction. It becomes quite easy if husband and wife both want to make a change in• their dietary eating habits, but often there are members of the family or fellow diners would rather not take on the same dietary challenge. Here it requires ingenuity on the part of the cook to try to satisfy both groups of people, maybe by keeping the meat, poultry or fish content out till the end of the cooking and adding it to those who want an it. This would be one way of providing a meal for everyone with the same ingredients but some lacking the meat, dairy or fish constituents. Perhaps the most practical approach is to slowly and gently encourage others around you to take on board your new dietary regime by example and through education and understanding why you are making these changes in the first place. Luckily in the recent past there has been a encouraging level of support from nutritional advisers in government and in the medical profession that we all need to move in a direction of more vegetables, fruits and grains and less meat and dairy and refined foods in our diets not only for our own health but for the health of the planet too. This is another factor that will help you on your journey towards the world’s finest diet. Generally it is wise not to be critical of other’s eating habits and to avoid pressing your own dietary choices on others.
Internet sites to visit:
4LeafProgram.com [HERE
DrMcDougall.com HERE
Engine2Diet.com HERE
ForksOverKnives.com HERE
NutritionStudies.org HERE
Cookbooks:
The China Study All-Star Collection by Leanne Campbell
The China Study Cookbook by Leanne Campbell
Forks Over Knives The Cookbook by Del Sroufe
Prevent & Reverse Heart Disease by Caldwell Esselstyn
Apps:
Forks Over Knives (Recipes) on the App Store HERE
Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen HERE
21-Day Vegan Kickstart HERE
We can get adequate fibre in an animal-based diet. NO! There is almost no fibre in a dairy and meat diet, but plenty in a plant-based diet and this is essential for our gut health.
Is it really possible to live a healthy life just on plants? YES! Remember some of the largest and strongest mammals eat only plants. Some people may need B12 or vitamin D supplements you can check for any deficiency with your doctor.
The guide to eating is based on three food groups, A, B and C.
Group A includes: vegetables, fruits, starch rich foods, pulses and beans, mushroom, dried fruit, cereals and grains, and nuts and seeds.
Group B includes: refined carbohydrate foods, vegetable oils and fish.
Group C includes: meat, poultry, dairy, eggs, non-food, and fun drinks.
The practical advice is very simple:
Try to increase the Group A foods before eliminating Group C foods.
Ensure you increase the variety foods you eat.
Replace cow’s milk with any of the plant-based alternatives such as; coconut, cashew, almond, oat or soya milk.
Try to eliminate dairy first in Group C whilst reducing the portion size of meat, replacing some with fish.
Check your 4LeafSurvey Score from time to time, to measure your progress.
Remember eating habits have often been with us for decades and to make major changes is a challenge. Those with no major health problems can make small progressive changes over a period of time, but those with major health problems should try to effect the change as quickly as possible to gain maximum benefit.
Note with no meat or fish in your diet you may need an occasional B12 supplement.
One of the problems many people have when making these changes is discovering what they can eat and cook with this new diet.
In the next episode will be giving more advice on buying foods, on recipes and cooking your future meals.
Read the transcript of this episode for more information on the different food groups referred to and you may also be interested in a table of nutritional content of all the major food groups that goes a long way to explaining the pros and cons of each diet.
At the one-leaf level we are looking at a diet that consists of between 20 and 40% of calories derived from whole plants. Although this is eating more plants than the majority of folks, people at this level are not consuming enough to provide much protection against disease.
At the two-leaf level the percentage of calories derived from whole plants has risen to 40 to 60% and you are now eating 4 to 5 times more whole plants than most. Those at this level are still falling short of ensuring long-term vibrant health.
At the three-leaf level 60 to 80% of calories are derived from plants. These people are getting over half the total calories from health promoting whole plant-based food and are experiencing many of the benefits of healthy eating.
At the four-leaf level over 80% of calories are derived from whole plants. In the West this represents a very small minority of the population, and these people tend to be trim and enjoy vibrant health, lots of energy, take no medications and rarely have any disease and are likely to live a long and healthy life.
So proceeding to complete this questionnaire, you will need to give your best estimate of your daily consumption of just twelve food groups. These are the questions you will need to answer:
Fresh fruit. On average, how many daily servings of whole, fresh fruit do you eat? (fruit juice doesn't count as is not the whole plant.)
2.Whole vegetables. On average, how many daily servings of whole vegetables do you eat.
Whole grains, legumes, potatoes. On average how many daily servings of these do you eat.
Omega-3s. Are you getting all you need from whole plant-based sources like flax seeds, walnuts and chia seeds?
Dairy foods. How many days per week do you eat dairy foods like cheese and yoghurt and ice cream?
Eggs. How many days per week do either eat eggs or add them as an ingredient when cooking?
Cows milk or cream. How many days per week you drink or add these to your food like cereal, coffee, etc?
Added sugar. Are you really serious about eliminating added sugar at home and in food products that you buy?
White flour. Bread, pasta, cakes & biscuits made with white flour. How would you describe your consumption level of these foods?
Sweets and salty snacks. How would you best describe your consumption level of these foods?
Meat, poultry and fish. How many of your meals per week include any animal flesh? (beef, pork, lamb, chicken, turkey or fish)
Vegetable oil. How many of your meals per week include any oil, like olive, canola or coconut? All oil is 100% fat not a whole plant.
So now you know what questions you will be asked to go to the 4LeafSurvey online HEREor complete the 4leafsurvey questionnaire HERE
Whichever route you take you will find your 4LeafSurvey score that can range from -44 to +44.
The six levels on the 4leafsurvey score system correspond to the following scores.
A score of -21 to -44 is the bottom level and the most unhealthy diet.
A score of -1 to -20 is in the second level and is better than most.
A score of 0 to +9 is the one-leaf level,
A score of +10 to +19 is the two-leaf level,
A score of +20 to +29 is the three-leaf level
A score of +30 to +44 is the four-leaf level.
Now that you have your 4LeafScore the next episode will give you the advice as to how to improve on it and so progress to an optimal diet for your health and wellbeing.
Remember that our diet has a profound effect on our health, so make sure you keep your doctor informed of this change you are making in your diet as it may mean you will need less medication if you are being treated for certain conditions, especially if you are on medication for diabetes or for control of your cholesterol. Other chronic conditions will improve with your dietary changes but they will take longer to affect any medication changes.
In the next episode you will be introduced to the 4LeafSurvey, a simple checklist that will give you a measure of where you are starting from and how far you have to go to reach an optimal whole plant diet. So when you are ready, listen to Episode 4. Getting Started with the 4LeafSurvey
Finally our typical Western diet is now demonstrated to be unsustainable, we do not have sufficient water or land to provide such a diet for the entire world. Some estimate we would need the nine planets to have sufficient land and water to allow everyone to eat the typical western diet. The United Nations have reported that we require a shift towards a plant diet to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change.
You may have other reasons for wanting to move in this direction with your diet, they may include wanting to lose weight, protecting yourself from health problems which run in the family, a desire to reduce the need for animal farming, as an alternative to drug therapy or any other possible reason. What you can be assured of is that such a move to a whole plant diet will probably meet all your requirements and more.
There is a growing acceptance of the urgent need for a shift from our traditional western diet, towards more vegetable, fruit and grain diet for global survival reasons that include a few of the following problems.
World Hunger and Starvation. There is insufficient land and natural resources to provide a typical Western diet to the entire world this is largely because it requires on average more than ten times as much land water and energy to produce a diet based on animal foods rather than one based on plant foods.
Healthcare Costs Escalating. Our current dietary regime in the West is in fact generating ever-increasing health-care costs to all the Western economies. It has been estimated that 80% of medical costs are lifestyle related with diet being a huge part this, a shift in our dietary choices will bring this unsustainable cost under control.
Water Scarcity. Freshwater supply will be the key problem for our future. Freshwater will be more valuable than oil. One of the main reasons for this is that it takes an excessive amount of freshwater to provide animal-based food compared with plant-based food and that the supplies globally of freshwater are not only limited but are currently being exhausted at a severe rate.
Environmental Damage. Valuable fertile land is a limited resource on the planet and due to soil erosion and deforestation this is being rapidly depleted. The destruction of rainforests is another factor in the problem that not only reduces the biodiversity found in such forests but impacts severely on climate change.
Climate Change. This is now recognized as a reality that is a problem that has to be addressed with urgency, but the fact that the raising of livestock generates more greenhouse gases than all transportation combined has not been brought to the fore as a key issue. This may be partly due to the fact that any organization suggesting the reduction of meat and dairy in our diets will be unpopular with the majority of the public.
Fossil Fuel Dependency. This is a second major contributor to global warming and climate change and any approach to try to eliminate the use of fossil fuels replacing them with solar panels and other eco-friendly energy systems will take a massive investment and many decades to effect any substantial change. The fact that livestock industry already uses massive amounts of fossil fuels to grow transport and feed the animals is a faster and more effective way of reducing the demand for fossil fuels in the near future.
Species Extinction. It is now clearly seen that the rate of species extinction is ever increasing primarily due to our human activity and raising of livestock. Not only do we know that there is a complex inter-relationship of all fauna and flora on the planet for the health of the planet that needs to be preserved for sustainability we should realize that we too may be susceptible to species extinction once the planet becomes unfit for human habitation.
We must come to see that this is not a global problem that can be dealt with by governments but involves each and every one of us throughout the world understanding the need to care for and protect this unique planet we live on.
It will require a total shift in attitude towards living a healthy and sustainable lifestyle both for individual humans and for the planet at large. This is the positive hope for the future that this change of heart, change of thinking and change of lifestyle will become the norm over the next decade.
I hope that the information presented so far is sufficient to give you the answer to why we should eat mostly plants and that you will now listen to Episode 3, resolved to make a start for yourself on this journey of improved health for yourself and the planet.
However, for whatever the reason you are interested in improving your diet, this podcast will lead you in the right direction with the certainty, as far as one can be certain with such complex matters, that derives from over fifty years of research and the largest epidemiological studies ever conducted in nutrition and health. As regards the facts and the research I won't bore you with this at this stage you can refer to the references at the end of this podcast.
Let me tell you my personal story. As an osteopath I practiced for a thirty years, really trying to avoid the question of dietary advice. Any patient coming to me asking for advice on diet I would refer them to a very good nutritionist who worked with me. Why was this? Mainly because over the years I had seen so much conflicting advice, and numerous books promoting the latest diet for slimming, improved fitness, this condition or that condition but all lacking adequate scientific evidence to support their claims. The nearest I got to helping people was to say “try to eat as varied diet as you can and that way you be pretty sure of getting all the nutrients you need and probably not exceeding any particular one cause to you trouble”. I based this advice on the fact that our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate a diet consisting of up to two thousand foods whereas modern western man often ate fewer than a few dozen foods.
In 2015 I happened to read a book called the China Study by Dr. T Colin Campbell, I read this book from cover to cover and I was overwhelmed by the story it was telling. Here was what I'd been looking for over the past thirty years; dietary advice built over a long period of time on thousands of hours of research and clinical trials, International observations and every source of investigation possible. I was so impressed that the following year I enrolled on an internet study course with eCornell University, called the whole plant nutrition certification course. This was an intensive course developed by a number of doctors and nutritionists based on the work of the China study. I found this course was perhaps the most rewarding educational training I had had over all my career and was so impressed that I introduced nutrition into my daily work in my practice. Obviously it's not ethical to advise people to do things you're not doing yourself, so I took on board the advice which this dietary system was giving and since then I have been keeping pretty closely to what is called a whole plant nutrition diet. Has it been good for me? The answer is decidedly, yes! I was overweight and now am a healthy normal weight, I lacked energy at times but now, heading into my 80’s I can still keep up with my younger sons in building work, and I know this diet is going to protect me from some of the worst chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease & strokes. Has it been easy following such a regime? Not really, but what is worthwhile that is does not require a little effort?
So Episode Two will introduce you to this amazing diet which will give you improved health, reduce your risk of most chronic diseases, reverse many diseases and just as a bonus will help the planet survive for a few more thousand years for our children and grandchildren?
Welcome to The Whole Plant Diet!
References:
www.Nutritionfacts.org
The China Study by Dr. T Colin Campbell ISBN 978-1-932100-66-2
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