Living Vegan For Dummies - Alexandra Jamieson [9]
Do you have problems with constipation or diarrhea?
Do you eat fried foods often?
Do you have skin problems like acne, eczema, or rashes?
If you answered yes to even a few of these questions, your diet needs a serious cleanup.
Moving to a vegan diet that’s based on whole, unprocessed grains, beans, vegetables, and fruits, with some nuts and seeds thrown in, will give your body everything it needs to heal and recuperate from years of abuse. The benefits are clear, and it isn’t difficult to figure out how to eat this way.
If you want to live a life of high-energy, peak experiences, and accomplish your biggest goals and dreams, you need a diet that will fuel your body to meet those challenges. Meet the challenges without meat!
Heart-healthy, low-fat, cholesterol-free foods
Place your hand over your heart and feel it beating. Say out loud, “Thank you, heart, for always beating even though I don’t always treat you so well. From now on, I promise not to be so hard on you.”
Vegans, as a group, have healthier blood pressure levels and a lower risk for heart disease. Several major studies have shown that vegans and vegetarians are 15 to 20 percent less likely to die from heart disease than meat eaters.
If you have high blood pressure, just use a whole-foods, vegan diet for two weeks, and then get retested — you’ll most likely show an improvement. Plant foods are lower in fat and sodium and higher in potassium (a mineral that helps to lower blood pressure) than meat- and dairy-based foods. These are key reasons why switching to a vegan diet will improve your heart health.
Because vegan foods are naturally free of cholesterol, your arteries are less likely to get clogged up with the stuff. Humans do need cholesterol for many different functions, but the human body produces what it needs. Animal products are the biggest sources of cholesterol in modern diets, so eating a diet rich in whole, vegan foods cuts out the clogs pretty quickly. Not only will eating a low-fat, high-fiber vegan diet help you avoid heart disease, it’s also been proven to reverse atherosclerosis, or the hardening of the arteries.
Feeling fine with fiber
Fiber is the part of plant foods that our bodies can’t digest. Not being able to digest something sounds bad, but it’s actually excellent! All that fiber gets mashed up by your chewing and fills up your stomach, leading to a feeling of fullness when you eat more of the healthy complex carbohydrates. Simple carbohydrates, like white bread, rice, pasta, and sugar, have little fiber, so they get digested quickly and you don’t fill up on them.
Not only does fiber fill you up quickly, but it also cleans you out when it moves through your intestines. Moving things out fast is a must for overall health! This “fiber brush” effect scrapes out the food particles that can get stuck in the nooks and crannies of your gastrointestinal system. All this fiber means more elimination, which is a great way to keep the body clean and devoid of rotting material. One of the negative effects of a diet heavy in simple carbohydrates and meat is the huge amount of leftover rotting flesh and pasty glue stuck in people’s colons. The fiber brush effect is one of the main reasons why vegans have less colon cancer.
As vegans avoid the modern, processed diet and go for the veggie-based one, they get abundant vitamins, phytochemicals (chemical compounds found in plant foods that have health-promoting properties), and fiber associated with lower cancer rates.
If you’re eating a whole-foods based diet, you’re already taking in more fiber than the average person. The vegetables with the highest amounts of fiber are artichokes, beans, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbages, carrots, eggplant, leafy green vegetables, mushrooms, potatoes with the skin, pumpkin, peppers, rhubarb, spinach, and sweet potatoes. High-fiber fruits include apples, avocados, bananas, berries, dried fruit, guava, kiwi, oranges, pears, and prunes. Whole grains, nuts, and seeds also are good sources of fiber.