People get emotionally attached to food. Whale pods are found to have a varied diet based upon what the young were raised to think of as fuel. They hunt and dine according to their teaching. Like them, we’re taught at a young age what food is. If you were brought up on slow food, where a garden was grown with care, your parents brought home fresh produce and meals centered around wholesome home cooking that included fresh salads, fruits, and raw or lightly steamed veggies or lucky enough to be raised by hippies that went vegetarian and all organic, man, you have a lucky leg up on the rest of us. I was lucky enough to discover Seventh Day Adventism as a teen where most eat Old Testament or vegetarian. This is why the SDAs are their own blue zone with folks living triple-digit life spans. If you were raised in an environment where your parents weren’t knowledgeable about what food really is, didn’t cook, relied upon take-out and Wendys, then you’ve probably absorbed those habits as an adult. If you have kids, they have learned from you what food is. While challenging, these habits can be broken once we begin to realize what we are doing to ourselves and gain some self-respect and self-love and acceptance.
When we think about illnesses, we think in terms of family history and diseases that run in families. We tend to say ‘Cancer runs in our family’, or Diabetes, or heart disease rather than to acknowledge the truth, and self-empowerment in that truth, that it’s the fuel we feed our bodies that causes the disease. It’s our lifestyle that invites or shuns disease. In 90-95% of the cases, it isn’t your DNA. DNA, over time, is absolutely affected by generations of poor diet and lifestyle as we propagate our species and when I hear about this stuff I always go back to the bible where, as a kid and later as a teen, I remained flummoxed as to why God would be so mean as to decree the sins of the father should be played out on his children and his children’s children. Now I believe it was not meanness, but a warning because these things are just simply so, how it all works. This is where we get terms like ‘She comes from strong stock’. Our DNA, over time, can weaken as we load up on toxic substances rather than proper care. You can do yourself and any offspring a big favor by mending ways.
What is fast food? Fast food is junk food. It isn’t just what you get at McDonald’s or Jack-In-The-Box, it’s anything junk, overprocessed, rushed into being without the proper care. Fast food is also obtained at the supermarket which is why as a Plant-Based Lifestyle Coach, I help folks learn to read labels and learn how to best navigate the grocery store. There is no love in this kind of food, just opiates, sugar, grease, and greed. I will address the various junk/fast foods and why they are considered junk.
GMO’s – Going wild-crafted and organic or raising your own, is the only way to assure you are not digesting pesticides with every bite. Also, when you buy certified organic foods, this tells you that the product is not genetically modified or GMO. Nobody should eat Frankenfood. Whatever your personal religious beliefs and this blog is spiritual in many respects but is absolutely not about religion but I have to just say this….There is a grand and great design in how our world and everything in it has fit together. We are just beginning to unravel just a few of the threads of how one species helps another. The rainforests we are pummeling daily to make more beef contains a myriad of species we will never know as we cause their direct extinction. And when we genetically modify what nature has provided us in an attempt to make it better, we create Frankenfood. We create hens that cannot walk without breaking a leg or having a heart attack or a cow who drags her utters on the ground with milk nature designed for her baby who gets taken away so we can drink her milk. Her body was never designed to contain that much milk at once. She has to feel bloated and miserable. I believe it has to be a grave sin to do these things, to nature, to go against mother nature if you will. When we eat these foods we eat these sins.
PLANTS – When you just buy the typical produce, these fruits, veggies, processed bread, grains and pasta, all have pesticides in them and likely GMOs. When you eat out, unless you are very careful, this is what is served up.
MEAT – If the meats you buy aren’t organic and from a local better-intentioned farmer who truly raises his animals in sunlight on fields of grass etc, you are eating pain, misery, and cannibalism. Animals in these corporate or factory farms rarely if ever see the light of day. They are confined and treated horrifically and raised in dark sad environs. Their feed consists of things they’d dare not touch in natural life. They call it ‘enriched feed’ and they grind up euthanized dogs, cats, not bothering to remove tags and collars and not caring that euthanasia drugs are in the meat product. They grind up the tumors, the cancers, the pharmaceutical drugs these pets were one before death. Also included in ‘Enriched feed are other dead farm animals. This is how mad cow became a thing. Cows that would not normally eat their dead, were and were infected. And this affected people who ate the cows. We bastardize nature. A cow would not typically eat another cow or dog or kitty but on these farms they do.
DAIRY – Goat is better, but all cow-derived milk (and cheese) has casein in it. This is a protein that is carcinogenic and the more stressed the mother cow is, the more casein in the milk. While taking my Hippocrates training we were told someone bought their own organic dairy cow so they could enjoy the purest milk. Growing up I was told we drank the surplus. We don’t have a surplus anymore. What happens is that these mammals are subjugated, their joys and natural proclivities are ignored. They are regularly impregnated just so humans can take the milk meant for their babies. The babies are shot in the head or worse if male and if female, they get to grow up to be milk producers too. It’s hideous. Oh, and it is true that there’s puss in the milk you’re drinking. At the rates and volumes of pregnancies and milk pumping, this is very hard work on the mother, on her body, and her udders. Cows typically live at least 20 years but on these farms, they are lucky to live 5. When you drink their milk, you drink their grief over losing the baby the milk was created for. Got milk? Got grief!
Factory and corporate farmed animals eat genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and pesticide-laden grains and corn. We subject them to the very same awful (SAD) Standard American Diet that the greed machine encourages all of us to eat too. Very Soylent Green. Very unhealthy. When we eat them, we are ingesting all their suffering, their ill-health, their cancerous tissues, and chronic sadness and disease.
Farm animals are not carnivores by nature and neither were we in the beginning. All the great religions dovetail with humans being vegetarian. Biologically, we have the intestines of an herbivore. Even very educated people in the world of health and healing will tell me we are omnivores but really, in truth, we are not. Look at our guts. Our intestines are not short like a Cheeta’s but nice and long, like a plant-eater. Yes, like the plant eaters that we really are. I was raised on the bible. Biblically, we were to eat manna and when we fell and demanded meat, this was allowed with definitive rules in place. These rules were there to guide us into cleaner eating. In other words, if we were fallen and sullen about just eating veggies, then God allowed us to eat not only all the fruits of the fields but certain particular fish and animals that were not water bottom dwellers or pigs whose meat is absolutely as unclean as it is delicious. We were steered away from any land animals that did not chew their own cud and have cloven hooves. The reasons for the rules were entirely health-based but in today’s polluted world, you can just throw all of that out.
FISH – Whether wild-caught or farm-raised, it’s all bad for you. Greed again, but the reason farmed fish is horrible is due to the massive overcrowding, the putrid waters they swim in, and the doses of pharma drugs pumped into these sad fish to keep them swimming. Wild-caught is bad because, greed and negligence, we have pumped pharmaceuticals and plastic, mercury, and other toxic substances into our waters. There have been dead and sick pets coming to the forefront lately after well-meaning pet parents have served up Omega fish oils. My vet just a few months ago tried to get me on fish oils for our Doberman. I said absolutely not and suggested to them plant-based omegas as a far safer option. I get these looks when I begin talking this way with most veterinarians but when the article came out in my latest Dogs Naturally magazine, I said THERE!!! I AM correct in my thought process here…and motivated by the article kept preaching. Lastly, good people, we have over-fished our oceans to an alarming point where we are causing the starvation of species that fish IS their food source. They don’t have another option, polluted and filled with Mercury or not. This is what they eat. We can do better.
PLANTS – When you go out to eat and order a salad or are asleep when you grab a head of lettuce, you’re most likely getting pesticides, fewer vitamins and minerals and also GMOs. Go organic here and gain peace of mind and better nutrition.
To help you get and stay on track, as well as learn home remedies and recipes, I adore this Raw Vegan Series by Permachart, set designed with Brian Clement of Hippocrates Health Institute where I took my training. This makes for quick and easy reference for food combining, useful equipment, juicing vs blending, etc.
PROCESSED FOODS – Our bodies were designed for raw foods. Look at the entire rest of the animal kingdom and own that we are animals too, we are specifically mammals. The more we heat, blend and otherwise process our foods the less nutrition we end up with. Soil erosion (thanks Factory Farms) has caused a magnificent loss in minerals. Most Americans are mineral deficient. We also tend to be shallow breathers lacking proper oxygen levels and most of us (85%) are chronically dehydrated. When we cook our foods, we dry them out, kill off natural enzymes and vitamins and deplete oxygen. When you enjoy an organic fresh salad, you are eating oxygen as well as a better bio-available protein source rich in minerals and vitamins. You will be less thirsty, your body will have more oxygen at a cellular level and you will be better hydrated eating a plant-based raw diet.
When we stray far from our biologically designed diet, we invite trouble. Everything above applies also to our pets. If you feel you must eat meat because this is a thing you won’t give up, then it should be done minimally and only organically raised animals. If you must eat junk, such as french-fries, again, make it a minimal part of your life rather than something you’re taking in on a weekly or monthly basis. If you are willing to go 100% vegan, then yes, do that! There is a karmic debt when we kill other souls and while I believe plants are alive too, I also realize that nothing here on this plane is ever going to be perfect. We are trial and error here as we learn to grow in compassion, lose the judgment and rigidity and just be kinder. Eating plants is a kinder choice and healthier for us. I have actually had death threats over cashew cheese so when I tell you how very political veganism is today, believe me, I have the first-hand experience! A fellow vegan wished me cancer, my family to die of it, all my pets too and for my business to fail. This was over a cashew cheese that she misunderstood to be a dairy cheese. I believe when it comes to food, the majority of us have lost our way. I also believe that one step in the right direction is a step forward indeed. So if you are reading and sitting on the fence, try one kindness meal then another. Baby steps. Rather than an all-or-nothing approach, think of it in terms of this: The more you adhere to a plant-based raw and organic lifestyle, the healthier you will become. You will naturally share this lifestyle with family and friends by example. Toxins that are stored in your fat cells will finally have a chance to dissipate leaving your immune system refreshed while your arteries unclog themselves. Don’t you want to be your most resilient?
