Going Vegan: The Complete Guide to Making a Healthy Transition to a Plant-Based Lifestyle

Chapter 1

Do It for Your Health!

Whether you become a vegan for health, compassion, or both, everyone who eats should be educated about what’s in our food and how our bodies use the food we eat.

In this chapter, we’ll explore what is in the food we eat, how the food supply has changed over the past fifty years, and how that relates to the current state of our WellBeing. You’ll learn about an alkaline diet, why it is important for us to eat an alkaline diet, and how acidic foods affect digestion and the body’s ability to absorb nutrients from our food. We will discuss the body’s nutritional needs and what foods are the highest in those nutrients. We will also address some popular food myths out there.

Most important, we’ll provide the steps you need to take to use your food as medicine to prevent and reverse many of the diseases and health conditions that are on the rise today.

What’s in the Food We Eat?

For WeBes, understanding how our food is created is very important. We can’t trust labels to tell us how food is produced. In fact, labels aren’t even required to list all of the ingredients used in the product or the harmful chemicals used in the processing of ingredients that are listed on the labels. For example, manufacturers can use processing aids (e.g., chemicals that will help foods bake faster) and not declare them on the ingredient label. This is because the chemical should be gone once the product is done baking, and only a slight trace may be left. We should have the right to know that this chemical was added though. So, we need to do our own research. Lucky for you, we’ve already done a lot of the work. First, we’ll start by taking a look at genetically modified foods, overprocessed foods, and Frankenfoods.

GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS

Essentially, a genetically modified organism (GMO) is an organism that is genetically altered at the DNA level. There is much controversy over GMO foods, and rightfully so because in order to create a GMO, genetic engineers most commonly use a bacteria or a virus in combination with an antibiotic as a vehicle to splice in a gene from another organism. As the laws exist right now, no regulations require companies to disclose if their foods are made using GMOs.

Most conventionally grown (non-organic) corn, soy, and sugar beet crops are genetically modified. In fact, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) the area of land devoted to genetically modified crops has ballooned by 100 times since farmers first started growing the crops commercially in 1996. Over the past 17 years, millions of farmers in 28 countries have planted and replanted GMO crop seeds on a cumulative 3.7 billion acres of land.

For wheat in particular, chemical companies have introduced herbicide-ready crops to the market, then pulled them, then reintroduced them, and pulled them again, when the international market rejected them. Unfortunately, once GMOs are introduced into the food supply, it is hard to eliminate them. Over the years, random wheat crops have been tested and shown to be GMO crops.

What are the problems created through genetic engineering of food and crops? Genetic engineers continually encounter unintended side effects. For example, GM plants create toxins, react to weather differently, contain too many or too few nutrients, become diseased or malfunction, and die. When foreign genes are inserted, dormant genes may be activated or the functioning of genes may be altered, creating new or unknown proteins, or increasing or decreasing the output of existing proteins inside the plant. The effects of consuming these new combinations of proteins are unknown.

Scientists also experiment with inter-species genetic modification (transgenic). This is a real and present danger, both ethically and physically. It’s now possible for plants to be engineered with genes taken from bacteria, viruses, insects, animals, or even humans. To name a few frightening combinations: Arctic fish genes gave tomatoes and strawberries tolerance to frost. Lightning bugs crossed with potatoes make them glow in the dark when they need watering. Human genes inserted into corn produced spermicide. Other trials have inserted jellyfish genes into corn, rice engineered with human genes, and corn engineered with hepatitis virus genes, just to name a few.

While this may all be in the name of science, we feel that we have a right to know what’s in our food, especially if it involves inserting potentially dangerous allergens or animal products into our tomatoes!

It’s interesting to consider that the time frame when GMOs became more prevalent is the same time frame that gluten, peanut, and soy allergies also began to climb exponentially.

OVERPROCESSED FOODS

What’s the difference between picking an apple off a tree and opening a jar of store-bought apple-flavored fruit strips? The fruit strips are dramatically processed. The overprocessing, overpasteurization, and overuse of chemical additives and preservatives have also changed the makeup of our food. This makes it more difficult to digest properly and causes adverse reactions and allergies to what should be healthy, nutritious foods.

To make matters worse, highly processed foods contain very few, if any nutrients. They are also loaded with sugars, unhealthy fats, and sodium, all of which cause diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure, just to name a few.

We also mentioned pasteurization. It’s true that pasteurization creates a product that is free of harmful bacteria, which is something we all want. Yet there is really no reason to consume these often highly processed foods that do not provide nourishment. Cow, sheep, and goat milk, cheese, yogurt, and other dairy foods can simply be replaced with nondairy, plant-based versions. The high temperatures used to pasteurize fruit juices kill important health-promoting enzymes, making a good case to replace them with fresh squeezed and pressed juices.

So many foods today are also chock-full of chemical additives and preservatives. Our bodies are not equipped to digest and effectively eliminate preservatives and manmade chemicals in our food. Once these types of products are ingested, anything the body cannot eliminate or break down gets stored in fat. These substances then cause irritation and contamination to the body, resulting in disease. Many well-documented studies show a link between artificial preservatives and chemical additives and cancers and other diseases.

FRANKENFOODS

In 1950, the average chicken raised for meat weighed about 2 pounds (908 g). That’s less than half of the average poultry chicken today. The breasts (the most desirable portion of the chicken) are so large on today’s factory-farmed chickens that their legs cannot support their weight. How do these chickens grow so big? With the use of antibiotics, growth hormones, and selective breeding. The steriods cause the chickens to grow to the size of a six-month-old in only three months.

When our grandparents grew up, they most likely got their eggs from the same chicken that was slaughtered for Sunday dinner. Back then, most chickens and eggs came from small family farms. Technological advances—such as the discovery of vitamin D supplementation that allows chickens to be kept year-round without fear of ailments due to lack of sunlight—led to larger operations. Poultry farms grew bigger and bigger, eventually leading to the factory farms we see today.

Cows are raised similarly. Just like chickens, the dairy cows and beef cattle raised today are nothing like Bessie that Ma and Pa had to milk every morning on the family farm.

Large factory farms are not without problems. Housing many animals in a small space provides the perfect breeding ground for parasites, bacteria, and viruses. To try to combat this, even more antibiotics are fed to the animals.

In recent years, the amount of antibiotics being sold (over 30 million pounds, or 13,608 metric tons, in 2011 in the United States alone) for use on livestock has increased to record numbers. Over 80 percent of all antibiotics produced worldwide go to food animals. Unfortunately most of these drugs were not sold to farmers to cure animals that had gotten sick. Rather most of these drugs were sold to make the animals grow faster and to suppress diseases from taking hold because of the alarmingly close animal quarters.

Farmers and ranchers discovered that small doses of antibiotics administered daily made most animals gain as much as 3 percent more weight than they otherwise would. More and more farmers and ranchers are using these drugs to promote artificial growth in their herds.

The problem is that we don’t know enough about these drugs to know if they are safe. We do know that overuse of low-dose amounts of antibiotics in people, such as tetracycline, is leading to more and more drug-resistant strains of bacteria.

In addition to antibiotics, recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH or rBST) is injected into cows to make them produce more milk. This hormone causes health problems in cows. That increases the use of antibiotics on dairy farms even more. Studies show that rBGH poses a cancer-causing risk in humans. Yet, at the time this book went to print, the FDA does not require that products produced from cows that have been given rBST declare that on labels.

An Alkaline Diet

Over the past forty to fifty years, the science of nutrition has made great strides in understanding how the molecular makeup of foods affects our health. The only time we ever talked about alkaline and acid levels in the past was as it related to preserving a jar of homemade jam. Now we are hearing talk about the pH of our food and whether our bodies are acidic or alkaline.

Have you ever considered the pH of your food? It’s actually quite important to think about pH levels in the foods that you eat. When your body’s pH is out of balance, it becomes vulnerable to all sorts of ailments, including headaches, fatigue, inflammation, joint and muscle pain, skin problems, cancer, and a weakened immune system.

Let’s take a step back. What is pH? The abbreviation pH is short for potential of hydrogen. It’s a measure of the acidity or alkalinity of our body’s fluids and tissues. pH is measured on a scale from 0 to 14. The more acidic a solution is, the lower its pH. The more alkaline a solution is, the higher its pH. A pH of 7 is perfectly neutral. The healthiest pH for food is one that is slightly alkaline. Fruits and vegetables, especially those high in potassium, are more alkaline, and so they are natural neutralizers and lower your pH when you eat them. On the other hand, animal foods are more acidic, and when you eat them, they tend to raise your acidity levels. The good news is that eating a plant-based vegan diet will effortlessly increase the pH of your food, making it more alkaline, and therefore more healthful.

WHAT IS FOOD SCIENCE?

Food science is the application of basic sciences and engineering to study the physical, chemical, and biochemical nature of foods and the principles of food processing. It’s amazing to realize that very few people know anything about food science, yet it is the very reason we have food on our grocery shelves.

Food science brings together multiple scientific disciplines. It incorporates concepts from fields such as microbiology, chemical engineering, packaging, preservation, and biochemistry.

It is because of the expansion of the study of food science, combined with the study of nutrition over the past forty to fifty years, that we now know much more about vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals and how these micronutrients are used in our bodies.

Most people say that they don’t like chemistry, don’t understand it, and don’t have anything to do with it. This is not true. Whether we know it or not, we live with and through chemistry every day. The human body is a living, breathing machine fueled by millions of chemical reactions every minute. Our health depends on whether those chemical reactions have what they need to create the products that make us healthy or make us sick.

After you eat, foods are broken down by your digestive system into single elements—such as oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon. Your body uses these elements for chemical reactions, such as giving you energy, growing your hair and nails, replacing old worn-out cells with new ones, and keeping your immune system strong and ready to attack germs, bacteria, and viruses that might invade your body.

The body is programed to keep us healthy. So when we make sure that we are fueling our bodies with food that works in concert with all of these chemical reactions, everything works right. We are specimens of health. On the other hand, when we eat foods that cause these reactions to use plan B and have to work much harder to rid our systems of too much sugar, fat, and toxins, the system eventually breaks down. We become sick.

The Truth behind Food Myths

With television, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet all shouting out different and conflicting information about health and nutrition, it’s easy to get confused. Some myths have been perpetuated for so long that they’re simply assumed to be true. Next, we discuss a few of the most common food myths out there and the truth behind them.

MYTH: EATING TOO MUCH SOY CAUSES BOYS TO GROW BOOBS

There is a lot of misinformation about soy out there. Will eating soy cause boys to grow breasts or reduce their testosterone levels? Can too much soy cause or cure cancer? Is genetically modified soy causing girls to start their menstrual cycles at younger ages? What are the benefits and dangers associated with soy protein?

According to the FDA, 25 grams of soy protein per day, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol, may reduce the risk of heart disease. The good news is that organic soy products can add a heart-healthy dose of protein to one’s diet. Study after study shows that eating a diet rich in foods that are low in saturated fats (such as soy) can help to reduce heart disease and lower blood cholesterol levels.

Soy, in particular, is especially well suited for this, because soy protein itself can directly lower LDL cholesterol levels by as much as 4 percent. Lunasin, which is a naturally occurring peptide in soy, disrupts the production of cholesterol in the liver and clears LDL cholesterol from the bloodstream.

Most soy foods also contain fiber. Plants are the only foods that contain fiber. Fiber has many very important roles, one of which is to stick to cholesterol, preventing it from being absorbed by the body.

Also, soy is a complete protein. That means it provides all eight of the essential amino acids needed for good health.

In addition, consuming one or two servings (up to 25 to 30 grams) of soy protein per day has been shown to promote bone strength. Protein helps with the production of collagen fibers that provide the framework for bones. A 2000 study conducted at Loma Linda University, a vegetarian promoting school in California, shows that in comparison with animal protein, soy protein decreases calcium excretion, a result of the lower sulfur amino acid content of soy protein. And, according to several large studies, adults over age eighty with low protein intake had much more rapid bone loss and a higher risk of fractures than those who ate plenty of