Posts Tagged ‘making a difference now’

Whole Foods for Health and Weight Loss Make All the Difference

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Kathy’s Weight Loss Success Can Be Yours Too

At age 65, Kathy Keller is more active than many people half her age. Although recently retired, she rarely takes time to pause. Her pursuits include chasing after her energetic 3 year old granddaughter, overseeing a major remodeling project, frequent travel, and almost daily volunteer commitments.

Kathy describes the typical foods she grew up with as “the standard American diet of the Midwest.” Her childhood staples included white bread, whole milk, meat, fried chicken, eggs, Velveeta, canned fish, ice cream, and pies. She also developed a taste for some

Kathy is an inspiration for the power of commitment

Kathy is an inspiration for the power of commitment

healthy foods, though, in peanut butter, home grown vegetables, and salad.

In the late 1980s, Kathy’s teenage son became vegetarian, and she decided that was the food path for her to follow as well. Six years ago, she discovered macrobiotics and became “more rigorous” about a whole foods diet based on organic, locally grown food and including miso, umeboshi plums, and sea vegetables. Here, in Kathy’s words, is how lifestyle choices impacted her health and weight.

“My health has been generally good since becoming vegetarian 22 years ago. However, having a sedentary/high stress lifestyle while I worked (retired 2007), over-indulging my sweet tooth, continuing to eat fish and dairy foods, not getting enough exercise, and aging all contributed to a 30 to 35 pound weight gain over the last five years. The Perfect Formula Diet has been instrumental in reversing this negative trend. I lost 10 pounds in my first three weeks of following this diet scrupulously… With The Perfect Formula Diet, I’ve lost weight that I needed to lose; I enjoy what I eat and am more satisfied after eating; I no longer get ravenously hungry between meals; I take pleasure in cooking for myself and others; and I feel good about the food choices that I make.”

Commitment has been absolutely critical to Kathy’s success. She makes sure she always has whole plant foods available and charts her success to maintain her resolve.

Kathy’s caring for others shows up in her food choices as much as in her service in a soup kitchen for the homeless. “Our small planet is burdened in so many ways: lower yield per acre than is optimal to feed an ever-growing population; environmental damage from (more…)

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Health Care Costs Continue Relentless Climb -You Pay

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

A Whole Foods Diet is the Best and Quickest Answer To Our National Black Hole for Money

Did you ever wonder why pharmacies are so conveniently found in supermarkets? You may take this so much for granted that even the question sounds strange. Here’s the connection.

The highest profit margin items in the supermarket are animal foods and manufactured foods. This is why industry pushes these

Put whole foods in your cart for health and savings

Put whole foods in your cart for health and savings

products with heavy advertising, coupons, and funds to develop ever more offerings. How often do you see an ad for fresh, unprocessed carrots or potatoes, or for dried beans or bulk brown rice? Industry makes few profits off these whole foods.

The animal protein, oils, and chemicals in animal and manufactured foods then contribute to chronic inflammation throughout your body. This ongoing inflammatory process underlies most chronic illnesses, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, migraines, sinusitis, allergies, depression, and more.

So high-profit-margin drugs and over-the-counter remedies are a natural complement to the bulk of the foods that line aisle after aisle in the supermarket. You can find whole food choices, though, in the produce section and scattered throughout the store. Look closely and you will see whole wheat bread made without animal products or hydrogenated oils, whole grain cereals and oatmeal, dried and canned beans, salsas, dairy-free milks, corn tortillas, and many other tasty options.

As supermarkets get larger and the dizzying menu of manufactured foods grows, it’s little surprise that health care costs reached a (more…)

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Justice and Sustainability on Martin Luther King Day

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

Dr. King’s Great Words Bolster Commitment to Healthy Eating for All

Great leaders inspire great effort. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a profound and moving orator. His speeches inspired millions to rise above their own limited concerns and work for the greater good, for justice, liberty, and equality.

If you are seeking change for the better in your own life, think about Dr. King’s words, “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

Another inspiring Dr. King quote is “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

The most fundamental justice is to ensure that all have the basic necessities. As long as some are not adequately fed, those who care must be committed to end this injustice.

Nourishing food for hungry people...or wasted as animal feed?

Nourishing food for hungry people...or wasted as animal feed?

In October 2009, the United Nations estimated over a billion people were undernourished, with the number not having enough to eat rising every year. At least five million children a year die from the effects of too little food. The desperately poor cannot afford food when its price increases by an amount that would be insignificant to wealthier people.

You may be wishing you ate a healthier diet, but have not quite gotten around to consistently basing your meals on whole plant foods. Paradoxically, the best way to build commitment to your own well-being is to look to ethical concerns and purpose outside yourself.

When you eat animal foods, such as meat, milk, and eggs, there are two to sixteen pounds of plant foods hidden in every pound of the animal food. Most of the nutrients in these plants, including protein, vitamins, minerals, and calories, are lost when the plant is eaten. Animals use these nutrients for their own metabolism and survival. The meat is a pale remnant of the whole plant food the animal ate. All the phytochemicals – beneficial plant nutrients (more…)

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Healthy People 2010: The Decade that Wasn’t

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Let’s Reach Our Goals, Not Lower Them

Imagine you are on a team that is not winning nearly as many games as you’d like to. So you set some goals that will get you to first place if you achieve them. But your team has no game plan and just practices at random. When the big game comes, your score has actually deteriorated.

What do you do now? Revisit how to achieve your goals? Set up a realistic plan? Imagine that instead of continuing to pursue your dreams, you decide to simply pick less able teams to play against so your problems won’t be so obvious.

Few would want to play on such a lackluster team. This strategy of diminishing goals does seem to appeal to the nation’s health navigators, though.

Every ten years, the federal government sets health goals for the upcoming decade. From 2000 through 2010 though, the country did not fare very well in getting to optimum health. In fact, only about one in five of the goals for Healthy People 2010 appears to have been met.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, responsible for the Healthy People program that started in the 1970s, will likely set lower goals for 2020 than it did for 2010. This is the official response to the nation’s poor performance in achieving the targets set for 2010.

Our children rely on us to point the way to lifelong health and vigor

Our children rely on us to point the way to lifelong health and vigor

As a country, we ended up going downhill on critical goals. Most importantly, obesity increased from about a quarter of all adults in 2000 to 34 percent in 2010. Obesity is the result of poor food choices, and there is no coordinated effort to educate people on the power of whole foods.

Our children are relying on us to shoot for optimum health. Let’s aim high and make a plan to get there. Plant-based nutrition is a major part of the solution, and would address virtually all goals to reduce chronic illness and risk factors. With such a straightforward way to get to the top, why settle for anything less? In the meantime, why wait for the government to wake up. You can move forward and improve your health, and your family’s, today.  Your next meal is the starting point for your own Healthy People program.

Intrigued? Now you can use our Whole Foods Blog Finder to target informative, fun postings on plant-based nutrition. Quick information at no cost!

Blog by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, a nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.

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My Best Decade Ever: Life with Meaning

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

A Ten-Year Adventure in Plant-Based Eating

I feel younger, healthier, and more vigorous now, when the clock is within striking distance of 2010, then I did back in 1999. In that year, I was more worried about my health and weight than I was about Y2K. Aging felt like it was overpowering me. Even though I was only 47, I was tired of coping with chronic pain and fatigue, weight that had a mind of its own, and ever-tightening clothes.

In 1999 I was meat-free, but still ate eggs and dairy products. I knew the remaining animal foods were at the root of my health issues, but simply did not feel ready to give them up early in that year. Partly habit held me back, partly fear, and partly laziness. What would the “center of the meal” be without some kind of animal foods?

I remember the last time I ate eggs for breakfast. They lay in my stomach all day like a chunk of cement. Finally about 4 in the afternoon I could feel them clearing and moving on to make room for me to breathe. I decided right then to never eat chickens’ reproductive materials again.

Finally, the big breakthrough for my health came at the end of 1999. I collected enough plant-based cookbooks and recipes to know I could make

Me hiking in gorgeous Northern California this summer

Me hiking in gorgeous Northern California this summer

satisfying food all day with many delicious alternatives. The last animal food to go for me was ice cream. I discovered soy-based frozen desserts in yummy flavors and never looked back. My prefernce quickly changed to these new frozen desserts, even if they tasted a little different at first.

Within months of going plant-based, I lost 25 pounds and have never regained them! My chronic pain episodes, sinusitis, and ear infections evaporated. Every day I felt more energetic than the last. How unexpected but how welcome.

Ever since 2000, I’ve felt like I’m aging in reverse. My body is detoxifying – this process takes years, not weeks. Toxic chemicals stored in fat are well incorporated and dissolved in the body. If you are still in the throes of an animal-based diet, you have no idea how fantastic it feels to give your body the time it needs to truly heal.

I keep setting new standards for myself in terms of health. This has been a gradual and highly fulfilling process over the last decade. Watching my two daughters also choose a plant-based diet, with vast improvements in their mood and energy, has also been deeply satisfying.

I am physically active every single day now. I’ve deleted virtually all manufactured foods from my diet, including trans fats, bottled oils, chips and any deep fried foods, white bread and bagels, and (more…)

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Global Warming Uncertainty: Here’s Help

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

Where Does the Weather End and Climate Change Begin?

Weather is simple – rain, snow, hail, sun, wind, temperature. You can look out your window and see what it is right now.

If you’ve lived in the same place for a while, you can probably guess what the weather will be like in a few hours, too. You may even be able to predict ahead a day, and be right as often as the weatherman is. Unless you live somewhere with monotonous weather, though, you will have a hard time projecting the specific temperature and rainfall next week without help from scientific measurements.

Climate, in contrast, is a billion piece jigsaw puzzle. Climate is a pattern. Unless you keep detailed records over a long period of time, you can’t really tell for sure if the climate is changing. This is because the day-to-day weather

The gathering clouds of climate change threatens life as we know it

The gathering clouds of climate change threatens life as we know it

will bounce around all over the place.

You may have a hard time seeing the overall climate picture even for your own little corner of the world. So you can understand how much more difficult it is to determine climate patterns over millions of years for the entire planet. Yet a world wide network of scientists is engaged in this urgent task.

Climate scientists are not all on one formal team. Instead, these researchers are a loosely knit and shifting network communicating by email, published journal articles, data exchange, conferences, telephone, and meetings.

As with any group of people, climate scientists will have their differences of opinion. Sometimes a few of these researchers will say or do something that they wish would never be publicly aired.

Think about any team you’re a part of, whether at work, on a sports team, in a club or neighborhood committee, at your church, or even an informal circle of friends that meets for lunch every once in a while. Really, aren’t there differences of opinion, people who are less (more…)

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Healthy for 2010: The Best Gift You Can Give!

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

Losing Weight Permanently is on Santa’s Wish List

Stumped for what to give your friends and family that already seem to have everything? Or even if they genuinely need another sweater, maybe you have different tastes. What if giving health were as easy as giving a package with a nice bow?

The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine just published a study showing that, as a country, we are losing ground to obesity. People are smoking less, which is great. Yet the hastening of death from obesity more than wipes out the gain from reduced smoking.

On average, because of being over their ideal weight, people will live a full

You can give the gift of health to yourself and others!

You can give the gift of health to yourself and others!

year less! Of course, this is an average. Normal weight people will not lose any of their allotted years, but obese people will lose a lot more.

Would you give your family or friends cigarettes as a holiday gift? Of course not! So why would you give them food that will shorten their lifespan as much or more?

If you are giving food as a holiday gift, choose yummy whole foods. Think about a fruit basket, dried fruit in nice packages, fancy nuts, or gourmet dark chocolate.

If you are serving food over the holiday or bringing a dish to a potluck, there are thousands of whole food recipes your party will enjoy. Check out the newsletter archives at Dr. McDougall’s site or the fat free vegan site with fantastic plant-based recipes. Not only will you be boosting health for one meal, but you will be educating all those enjoying your cooking. Maybe you’ll even set them on a path to permanent weight loss. Let them grab back that year that obesity is robbing them of.

The gift of health is truly the best, and yes, you can give it. Your example of your own healthy choices paves the way, educating and motivating others all year long.

Intrigued? Now you can use our Whole Foods Blog Finder to target informative, fun postings on plant-based nutrition. Quick information at no cost!

Blog posting by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, the smart person’s nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.

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Thanksgiving: A Time for Gratitude and Feasting

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Whole Foods at the Holidays Show Love and Abundance

Thanksgiving is a time for abundance. While many may find Thanksgiving without turkey to be lacking, an animal-free holiday maximizes love, caring, and great food.

My favorite celebration is an annual Thanksgiving potluck in a casual San Diego home. The hosts are committed to a plant-based diet; so the many choices people bring are animal-free. Some of the dishes crowding every corner of three large tables were Tofurky® (of course) with gravy, several kinds of potatoes, large pans of stuffing, homemade cranberry sauce, quinoa salads, polenta with pesto sauce and tomatoes, vegetables of all types,

Polenta topped with pesto, tomato, walnuts, and peppers was a huge hit at our animal-free Thanksgiving

Polenta topped with pesto, tomato, walnuts, and peppers was a huge hit at our animal-free Thanksgiving

yams, pasta dishes, garlic bread, rice paper rolls with spicy sauce, and way more. Too much to even take a forkful of everything.

A separate dessert table tempted with about eight pies of all types, several kinds of cookies, brownies, and cakes.

I basked on a sunny deck with dozens of relaxed friends, all enjoying the food, weather, and each other’s company. Laughter and quiet conversation created a pleasant background. A few dogs, ranging from an American bulldog to a standard poodle to a tiny Katrina rescue, roamed from person to person looking for pets and approval (and maybe a bit of Tofurky®).

For most of my life, I would have shuddered at a turkey-free Thanksgiving. I was the one who ate mounds of meat at dinner and nibbled at the leftovers for days.

Now I revel that Thanksgiving is animal-free. I LOVE a turkey-free thanksgiving. Then I can truly be grateful for the wonderful gifts in my life without damaging my own health or the planet. The food that would have gone to feed the turkey is now available to others, hungry and less fortunate, who deserve their own abundance. And I can eat way too much of the tastiest foods on earth – without guilt.

Intrigued? Now you can use our Whole Foods Blog Finder to target informative, fun postings on plant-based nutrition. Quick information at no cost!

Blog posting by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, the smart person’s nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.

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Roasting the Earth Along with Your Dinner

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

Five Ways that Raising Animals for Food Accelerates Global Warming More than We Thought

In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published the groundbreaking Livestock’s Long Shadow. This historical report focused attention on environmental facts that were long-known but studiously avoided by both consumers and policymakers.

Livestock’s Long Shadow documents the horrific environmental consequences of raising farmed animals for people to eat. Water shortages. Air and water pollution. Degraded soil. Deforestation. Extinction of wild plants and animals.

The list is heart breaking for anyone who cares about the future of our planet. I worry every day about the world my daughters are inheriting. How long

Global warming and climate change are here now

Global warming and climate change are here now

can we sustain even basic necessities on a plundered planet?

Most famously, this United Nations report documents that 18 % of greenhouse gas emissions can be directly traced to raising animals for food. This staggering impact is more than all transportation combined. You could scrap every truck, car, plane, and train on the planet – or you could stop raising farmed animals and have an even greater effect on climate change.

Now two respected researchers document that the impact of animal agriculture on global warming is almost three times worse that the UN estimated in 2006. The respected, independent nonprofit World Watch Institute published this analysis in their November/December 2009 magazine.

The study’s authors thoughtfully question what the United Nations left out or ignored. These pros have really done their homework. Their article demonstrates five major sources of greenhouse gas emissions from farmed animals left out of Livestock’s Long Shadow. The mistakes the authors found include overlooked sources of greenhouse gases, undercounted methane, and global warming contributors put into incorrect categories.

So what’s the bottom line? Over half – 51% – of global warming is directly caused by farming animals. You can have a direct, immediate impact on your kids’ future just by changing what you eat for dinner. Can you think of a single valid reason not to do this?

Changing what you eat is not nearly as hard as you think it might be. It’s not as painful as watching droughts, floods, disease, famine, and hurricanes rip people’s lives apart as global warming accelerates. Thank you World Watch Institute for these fearless insights. We don’t want to confront our comfortable habits, but we must.

Intrigued? Now you can use our Whole Foods Blog Finder to target informative, fun postings on plant-based nutrition. Quick information at no cost!

Blog posting by Janice Stanger, Ph.D. Janice authored The Perfect Formula Diet, the smart person’s nutrition book built on sustainable food choices. Enjoy six kinds of whole foods for permanent, hunger-free weight loss and health.

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