Why A Plant-Based Diet?
All You Need to Know for Ideal Weight and Health
Introduction
A Whole Foods Plant-Based (WFPB) lifestyle not only promotes optimum health and weight but is economical as well. In promoting optimum health, a WFPB lifestyle offers necessary nutrients contrary to much public misinformation. Also, major diseases of western society are mitigated and frequently reversed. WFPB diet interventions have been shown in studies to actually reverse heart disease and cancer, our two major causes of death. Not only is a WFPB lifestyle health-promoting, but it is also economical at individual, society, and planet levels.
Problem
SAD Causes Overweight, Heart Disease, and Diabetes
SAD is the Standard American Diet that is the cause of being overweight, heart disease and Type 2 Diabetes. As a result of SAD, two-thirds of Americans are overweight, and of this, one-third are obese. Being overweight is associated with diabetes and our number-one killer, heart disease and number two, cancer. Glucose is the fuel you burn in your cells; the “gasoline” your body runs on. The SAD diet of excess oil, fat, meat, and little vegetable food results in locking glucose out of your cells (insulin resistance) and keeping it and fat in your bloodstream. It is often thought that sugar is the principal problem with Type 2 Diabetes, but the main problem is fat in your diet that blocks glucose from entering your cells.1,2,3 Extra fat and glucose in your blood can damage your pancreas, kidneys, and other organs, causing diabetes. The major killer of those with Type 2 Diabetes is heart disease.
Solution
A Whole Food Plant-Based Lifestyle
A delicious Whole Food Plant-Based (WFPB) diet of food that may be cooked but is unprocessed can overcome SAD and diabetes. Brown rice, beans, lentils, sweet and white potatoes, corn, carrots, peas, broccoli, and spinach are just a few such foods. Highly processed food and all animal products should be avoided. Unlike taking drugs which only treat symptoms, you will be treating a primary cause of overweight, obesity, and type 2 diabetes which is fat in your diet.4, 5 Presented here is a lifestyle that works based on scientific research and does not cater to bad habits people want to reinforce as in some other diets such as Atkins and its offspring Paleo and Ketogenic.
Is This Lifestyle Extreme?
A Whole Food Plant-Based lifestyle has been called extreme. But, which is more extreme eating SAD and having your heart ripped out of your body and an artery from your leg attached to it in a bypass operation or simply eating salads, broccoli and grains? With “moderation” your diabetes may only result in your losing your foot instead of your whole leg. Moderation may help you to get used to a WFPB lifestyle, but you are better off avoiding any fatty meal like a SAD hamburger to get the artery-clogging fat out of your system.
It may take a month or two but eventually, you will down-regulate the fat and sugar receptors in your brain as you eventually find you prefer natural flavors of plant food and no longer are addicted to processed fat and sugar-laden processed foods.
The beauty of a WFPB lifestyle is that it applies, not only to obesity but most other major diseases as well. A free-from-obesity WFPB diet is a heart, kidney, liver, brain, muscle, stomach and bone healthy diet.11
