I thought it would be an interesting exercise to try to summarise what I've learned over the past few months about Whole Food Plant Based Diets. By the time I had most of it written, I figured it would be a shame to keep it to myself :) In a series of 7-8 blog posts I'm going to go through how I came to a decision to adopt this diet; why it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective; what the diet is and how it differs from a “vegan diet”; good sources of information that I recommend; bad sources of information that you should be on guard against; how you can start working with this diet; and possibly an appendix on the counter-diet Atkins/low-carb.
First of all I'll talk a little bit about my own history and the path that led me here.
For most of my life, if I heard the word “vegan” I'd think of either an ineffectual hippy (picture Neil from The Young Ones) or a hectoring animal rights activist. As with most stereotypes, you can find some people who match up. However, growing up in rural Northern Ireland in the 70s literally surrounded by dairy farms, I certainly didn't know any actual vegans for comparison.
So we ate a standard diet for the time. Meat, potatoes and veg, with plenty of dairy on the side. Fish and chips on Saturday. From The Golden Chipper if I remember correctly. Thick chips fried to a crisp in oil and saturated with salt - absolutely delicious. To be fair to my parents, it was absolutely standard at the time and could have been worse. Generally it was just that one takeaway meal a week, and we were pressed to eat our vegetables as all children will be to the end of time.
At around the age of 16 I started to suffer from occasional but crippling stomach pain. This came and went through my student years and when I was out on my own, feeding myself a frankly awful diet. Finally at the age of 24, one morning the pain hadn't gone away when I woke up and I started coughing up blood. I was diagnosed with pancreatitis, had my appendix whipped out the next day and another operation on my gall bladder 8 months later.
It's impossible to know, but I strongly suspect, especially given what I've learned recently, that my diet was the prime cause of this illness. After that I was a bit more careful about what I ate (by which I mean kebabs were generally off the rotation), and the pancreatitis has never returned. Nonetheless it was a standard diet, heavy on meat and especially dairy as milk was basically what I drank until a few months ago. I had a brief flirtation with an Atkins style diet on the advice of a physio (in hindsight the problem there is clear enough), and like most people who try it, experienced some initial weight loss before stalling, giving in to the craving for carbs and blaming those lapses for the lack of results.
Four months ago I was looking at some meat frying away in a pan, and just thought “That doesn't look great. I'm not looking forward to eating this”. I looked around my kitchen at the slight but noticeable layer of grease that coated just about everything, as it would if I went a few days without cleaning properly. I started looking at some Youtube videos and fell right down the rabbit hole. Like many, I came across What The Health and that motivated me to do some in depth research. What The Health is a touch sensationalist, and if you want my “if you only watch one” recommendation I'd go with Forks Over Knives, but it's backed by solid science. “Rebuttals” of these documentaries were comically inept and obviously disingenuous by turns. I stopped eating meat. A couple of weeks after that I stopped eating dairy. It felt great. Problems I was having with constipation disappeared inside a week (still regular as clockwork, thanks for sharing). Excess weight dropped off. I felt lighter on my feet. I experimented back and forward with vegan substitutes like veggie burgers and tofu steaks before becoming sure that a Whole Food Plant Based (WFPB) Diet is the way to go.
If this diet was neutral in health terms, it would still have a lot going for it. It's better for the environment. It helps reduce animal cruelty. My kitchen isn't (and I dare say my lungs I aren't) coated in a thin layer of grease any more. But, as I hope to explain to you over the next few posts, all those factors are dwarfed by the health benefits. Knocked out of the park for six. A WFPB Diet is what our bodies are adapted to eat. It's what we thrive on. A WFPB diet will reduce your risk of death [1] from the Top 15 killer diseases in Western society.. It can stop many of these diseases in their tracks. In some cases it has been shown to reverse these diseases, including 3 of the biggest – Heart Disease, Cancer and Diabetes.
Our entire health system, whether largely private in the US or largely public in the UK, is not set up to incentivize disease prevention through diet. Dr T. Colin Campbell details his lifelong struggle against the system in his excellent book “Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition” and concludes that top-down change is almost impossible. Bottom-up is the only way it's going to happen. And that's what I'm here to try to do, in as much as I can.
[1] Obviously we're all going to die. Our risk of death is 100%. What the colloquial “risk of death is reduced” actually means here is that mortality is reduced. A 50 year old man on a WFPB diet is less likely to die of heart disease in the next year than a 50 year old man on an SAD (the appropriately acronymed Standard American Diet), all other things being equal.
Further Viewing :
Forks Over Knives
What The Health
Search your regular platforms to find the actual films.
Next time I'll be looking at how we got here, in evolutionary terms, and why the foods that helped us to survive 100,000 years ago are killing us today.
