Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [5]
The Diet Your Body Is Designed For
The fact is our bodies aren’t meant to ingest meat and dairy and eggs and fish. That’s right, our bodies aren’t meant to eat animals; they’re made for whole grains, vegetarian proteins like beans and legumes, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds. We may be omnivores in that our bodies are capable of living on just about anything—flesh included—in times of scarcity. But unless you are living in sub-Saharan Africa or some isolated part of the North Pole, scarcity is, fortunately, not a problem. In fact we are blessed with abundance. Our modern problem is obesity and all the degenerative diseases that are linked to obesity, like cancer, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes.
When we eat what our bodies were designed for, we thrive. All we have to do is look at what our own physiology shows us: Our molars are like those of an herbivore, flat and blunt, making them good for grinding, not gnashing and tearing. Our hands are nimble and flexible and great for picking fruits from trees and scooping vegetables from the ground; they don’t have claws to tear open flesh. We don’t have the concentration of hydrochloric acid in our stomachs necessary for the proper digestion of raw meat. And finally, a carnivore’s intestine is short and straight—perfect for quickly getting rid of rotting flesh, whereas ours is long and winding with notches along the inside that slow down the digestive process. Meat often rots on its way through our complex digestive system. There is an excellent article that covers all these details and more, titled “The Comparative Anatomy of Eating,” by Dr. Milton Mills, which you can easily find online.
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When the American Dietetic Association (ADA) surveyed all the studies on food and health, they concluded not just that a vegetarian or vegan diet is as healthy as one that includes meat, but that “vegetarians have been reported to have lower body mass indices than non-vegetarians, as well as lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease, lower blood cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer.”
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Among the many diets that have been popular over the past few decades, probably few have been more influential—or controversial—than carbohydrate-elimination diets. Yes, they promise—and often deliver—quick and substantial weight loss, but sadly most of them seem to be unsustainable and unhealthy, not to mention unscientific. Not only do they not work over the long run, but with their emphasis on animal foods, they’re making us fatter ultimately, while at the same time they are likely creating profound problems with our health. They make reassuring promises that we can keep eating the things we love—like cheeseburgers, chicken wings, bacon, turkey sausage, and the like—as long as we avoid the demonized carbohydrates. These trendy diets cause us great harm in so many ways.
For starters, they have people eating quantities of animal protein that our bodies simply cannot handle. As a culture we are eating twice as much animal protein as we did in the early part of the twentieth century. At the same time we have grown dangerously overweight, with more life-challenging illnesses plaguing our health-care system than at any other time in history. As I write this, three out of every five Americans is considered overweight or obese, and two out of every three of us will die of a disease that is strongly linked to obesity. And despite the fact that so much attention has been paid to this issue, as a nation our kids are getting more and more obese with each passing year. We should be alarmed by this and looking for every alternative.
The body recognizes when it has good nutrition and “turns off” the hunger switch because it has what it needs. On the other hand, when you eat heavy, fatty foods you get