Authors: Rip Esselstyn
Wrong!
The truth is that the majority of your calories should come from unrefined, unprocessed complex carbs and simple carbs found in fruits, veggies, and whole grains. These excellent carbs are converted into glucose, which is basically gasoline for our bodies.
Processed carbs, on the other hand, have been chemically altered by humans. These “Frankencarbs,” stripped of all fiber and minerals and vitamins, are rich in calories and digested more quickly by the body, and can cause your blood sugar levels to spike. This, in turn, shoves your pancreas into insulin-pumping overdrive, inundating blood cells with extra glucose at pendulum-like intervals and leaving you fatigued and even more hungry. Why wouldn’t you be? Most nutrients, fiber, and water have been removed, so they don’t fill you up and people often overeat. If you’ve ever had a bad case of the munchies, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about.
But hey, how the heck do I know which carbs are processed and which aren’t? Well, if they’re in a box full of fancy marketing, most likely they’re processed. If you order them on a microphone from your car, they’re probably processed. Processed carbs are shells of their former selves, and really shouldn’t even be called carbohydrates.
But until the FDA gets its act together and requires packaging to label them as
Frankencarbs
, you’ll need to be careful when looking for the real stuff. Whole and unprocessed carbs (both simple and complex) are abundant in a plant-based diet. They’re found in vegetables; whole grains and whole-grain breads, pasta, and dry cereals; peas; beans; sweet potatoes; oats; brown rice; and fruit.
Unlike processed and refined Frankencarbs, whole-grain carbohydrates cause a slow and stable release of sugar into the bloodstream, which is then converted into energy by your body, rather than stored as fat. And because these natural carbohydrates retain all their water and energy, your stomach fills up fast, ensuring that you’ll never overeat.
So drop the white bread for whole-grain bread, park the candy for fruit, ditch the soda pop for water, and bury the white pasta for whole-grain pasta. It’ll make a world of difference, and you can stop being a carbophobe!
If you want to be healthy, it isn’t always enough to eat plant-based foods. It’s possible, for instance, to carve out a plant-based diet that’s composed of poor choices such as potato chips, pretzels, candy, and fruit juice.
Did I just say fruit juice? Healthy, vitamin-C-filled, all-natural fruit juice? The beverage we’ve been encouraging our kids to drink for decades?
Yes, I did. A glass of juice might not be as beneficial as you think. In fact, it could be harmful; new research says fruit juice contains so much sugar it can actually increase, rather than prevent, the risk of certain cancers. When I was a firefighter and we responded to medical emergency calls for diabetic patients with low blood sugar, the first thing we would give them to raise their glucose levels was orange juice. Believe it or not, a glass of OJ contains more sugar than a soda pop!
Not only that, because you seldom drink the freshly squeezed juice of a fruit but typically down only the processed and packaged liquid version of that fruit, you are missing many of the ingredients in fruit that protect against disease. In fact, in a 2011 Australian study published in the
Journal of the American Dietetic Association
, researchers found that eating apples, sprouts, cauliflower, or broccoli on a daily basis reduced the likelihood of rectal cancer, whereas three glasses of fruit juice a day increased the risk.
Scientists believe the high sugar content in juice may be the culprit (as a 2011 British study found), pointing out that many of the healthy benefits of fruit, such as fiber, vitamin C, and antioxidants, are lost during the
juice’s processing. In addition, when you separate fructose from the fiber (like you do when you whiz something up in a blender), you’re getting a concentrated and pulverized form of fruit that bypasses your salivary digestive enzymes and causes a huge sugar spike, followed by an insulin spike, and then, believe it or not, about 30 percent of the fructose is converted straight to fat! So eat the fruit and get happily filled up with all the bulk, water, and fiber.
T
here’s been a lot of talk about soy recently and it’s all over the map: Soy is a miracle food; soy is bad for you. Soy is full of healthy phytochemicals; soy will make men grow breasts. Soy will keep you from getting cancer; soy will give you cancer. The truth is that a diet consisting solely or even mainly of soy is not a good idea. The best diet is one composed of many different foods. Eaten intelligently, however, soy is a terrific source of protein and a rich source of carbs, minerals, and essential fatty acids.
Although it’s relatively new to the American diet, soy has been around longer than most foods we know. It comes from a bean that is native to East Asia and was first cultivated in China more than 1,300 years ago. Back then, soy was eaten fermented, cultured, and ground into a liquid that we now call soy milk.
In 1765 colonists brought the beans with them to the United States. But soybeans, which were used mostly as animal feed, didn’t catch on as a crop in America until the early 1900s, when chemist George Washington Carver realized their nutritional benefits and discovered their ability to replenish nitrogen and minerals in soil. Based on his findings, Carver developed the first system of crop rotation in the United States. By 2007, soybeans had become a $27 billion industry, covering 22 percent of America’s croplands, or 64.7 million acres.
The misconceptions about soy started when tofu was “discovered” by proponents—and manufacturers—of health foods in the 1990s, who then rushed to pin as many miraculous properties on it as possible: Soy lowers your cholesterol, soy protects against breast cancer, soy makes you smarter… yada, yada, yada. Unfortunately, some of these claims
were often based only on scant preliminary evidence rather than robust long-term research. Longer studies and meta-analyses have since shown that eating soy won’t make you immortal after all.
The most famous case of overstated findings was a study declaring that soy
will
reduce your LDL, or bad cholesterol. But you’d have to wolf down 50 grams of soy protein a day, or 1.5 pounds of tofu, just in case you were considering it.
On the other hand, the pet cause of a few anti-soy organizations has been to convince people that soy is more harmful than nuclear waste. These groups have accused soy of causing everything from cancer to brain atrophy. Their so-called evidence is usually based on partial readings of much more complex studies. They also love to crib quotes from research abstracts the way commercials for bad movies pull the few good lines out of really bad reviews.
The good news: There is credible scientific evidence that eating reasonable amounts of soy in a natural form won’t do anything but fill you up and give you a lot of great nutrients.
And all those soy allergies you keep hearing about? Infants are the most common sufferers, but they usually grow out of them (unlike peanut allergies). Adults rarely have them at all.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to eat soy, though. Asians generally eat it the right way: in its natural form, without additives and preservatives. Americans tend to eat it the wrong way—processed to death or pounded and ground into supplements. Some soy burgers contain more sodium than a grilled steak, and taking straight doses of soy protein, as some people do in their smoothies, hasn’t been proven effective or even safe.
In addition, you’ll find soy protein isolates as an ingredient (which most of the time are hexane-extracted) in most soy burgers, soy dogs, soy cheese, soy ice cream, and soy nuggets. This is a concentrated dose of isolated soy protein that has mega amounts of IGF-1, which is highly unhealthy and a tumor and cancer promoter.
In all the discussions of soy pros and cons, isoflavones are the questionable components. They are organic compounds that many people consider an invaluable health aid, while others believe they are detrimental to health.
Isoflavones are classified as phytoestrogens, named for the hormone
estrogen. This means that they can have very mild estrogenic (estrogen enhancing) effects under some conditions and anti-estrogenic effects under others, as they block the body’s hormonally active compounds. Because of this, soy isoflavones have been and continue to be studied to determine their relationship to conditions and diseases of particular concern to women.
There is not yet conclusive evidence about isoflavones, and they may in fact both help and hurt us, depending on how much we consume. What we do know is that isoflavones, like most natural nutrients, don’t do anything bad to you if you don’t eat too much of them.
In some Asian countries, people are estimated to consume 10 to 30 milligrams of isoflavones by eating tofu and miso every single day and suffer no consequences. In the United States, on the other hand, some people eat as much as 80 to 100 milligrams per day via soy shakes, soy energy bars, soy cereal, and a ton of other processed, reconstituted soy foods. You don’t have to be a scientist to guess that OD’ing on this junk isn’t going to do your body any favors.
The most common, accessible type of natural soy is tofu, which is what you get when you coagulate soy milk and press the remaining curds. Sound gross? It’s not. It tastes mild and nutty, with a texture like scrambled eggs. In fact, tofu is a great stand-in for scrambled eggs. It comes in a variety of types, so you can choose anything from very soft and crumbly silken tofu all the way through very firm varieties with a texture like hard cheese. Softer is better for soups, but you’ll want firmer varieties in your stir-fries. I love marinating and grilling a slab of very firm tofu and putting it on a whole wheat roll with lettuce and tomato for a burger. Tofu has a tendency to absorb the flavor of whatever it’s eaten with, so go wild with it—there’s almost nothing it can’t complement.
As I say, like any other food, soy by itself won’t cure all that ails you or make you live longer. But even without any magic nutrients, if you eat soy in place of meat, you’ll be taking in less fat and calories. That alone makes it a heart-healthy food.
T
he Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.”
The longer I’ve been on this “plant-tastic” journey, the more I realize how inexcusable it is that we eat animals. It’s terrifyingly pathetic, sad, and completely unnecessary.
Did you know humans eat more than sixty billion animals each year? Sixty (swallow) billion!
To give you an idea of how many that is, I want you to think about this: One million seconds is the equivalent of thirteen days. One billion seconds is the equivalent of thirty-three years. Or, if you want a visual, strung together from head to hoof and beak to feet, all the animals that humans slaughter and then consume every year would stretch from the earth to the moon and back two-and-a-half times!
This is absolute carnage in the name of satisfying our insatiable addiction to unhealthful food. It is a display of selfishness, arrogance, elitism, and ignorance beyond reproach. And the more you know, the worse it gets. Hundreds of books have been written about the torture that farm animals must live through, but I won’t go into it in depth here.
But in a nutshell, animals raised on typical industrial-style or “factory” farms lead excruciatingly miserable lives—almost beyond belief. Their existence is controlled from conception to consumption; they are treated like commodities, not living creatures. Chickens raised for meat are bred to grow so fast and large that millions die of heart attacks at just weeks old; they experience chronic pain as their legs struggle to support their unwieldy bodies. Millions of animals, such as calves raised for veal,
sows used for breeding, and hens used in egg production, are packed into cages and crates so tightly that they can barely move—their entire lives are spent in a pen that restricts them from even stretching a limb.
Farm animals are routinely mutilated without painkillers: Pigs have their tails cut off, as do some dairy cows; egg-laying hens have parts of their beaks cut off; turkeys have parts of their beaks and toes cut off; and male cattle and pigs are castrated. At slaughterhouses, the kill line moves quickly and animals (particularly chickens) often are not adequately stunned unconscious, such that they are boiled or dismembered while still aware.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the extraordinary cruelty we display in slaughtering these sixty billion creatures a year. Ask yourself: When I eat an animal, am I not basically condoning this kind of torture? And the United States has no federal laws to protect these poor creatures.
At this moment, the only person who can help stop these animals from being tortured and eaten is you. You and your family, that is. My now six-year-old son, Kole, and four-year-old daughter, Sophie, are at that adorable age when they only see the beauty, wonder, and good in the world. They have zero prejudices, and haven’t yet developed any of the biases we hold as adults. They are the ones who can teach us—if we’ll just listen.
Kole and Sophie don’t understand why people eat animals. They love every animal from the hippo to the horse to the pig and the cow. The biggest and most popular field trip they take at their school is the one to Crow’s Nest Farm to see the animals. Their favorite books, too, are the ones with animals in them:
The Cat in the Hat
,
Peter Rabbit
,
Charlotte’s Web
,
The Story of Noah’s Ark
… and many more.
When we gently let Kole and Sophie know that people eat pigs and cows and chickens in the form of hot dogs, hamburgers, and nuggets, they became sad and confused. We were recently at a grocery store and when we passed the meat section, Kole commented, “All the meat looks gross and bloody and they cut off the heads and I don’t want people to kill the ‘aminals’ because the ‘aminals’ are nice. I don’t get why people eat lambs, and gooses, and cows, and pigs, and chickens, and tigers, and fish.”