WOW so I just watched the documentary "Forks over Knives" on Netflix. I was told about this documentary from my friend Brent who, like me, recently has been taking a closer look at what he eats (like most people should! The documentary follows the research of two esteemed professionals, one a scientist and one a medical doctor. The studies followed parts of the world and examined what types of foods people were eating and linked them directly to cancer, disease, depression, hypertension, diabetes, and all sorts of other health problems. The results were astounding and I for one cannot believe more people haven't heard of their studies!
What they found is that those peoples living in more industrialized cities, eating more meat and animal based products, eating more processed foods, had a SIGNIFICANTLY higher rate of liver failure, cancer, heart disease, and fatality. The smaller, undeveloped, and or rural areas eating primarily fruits, vegetables, grains, and seeds and only some animal products showed to have a ridiculously low presence of these sorts of problems.
Another similar study was done with rats in a laboratory. The first study was done with two separate groups of rats, one group being fed a typical "Western Diet" of primarily meat and animal products (other than meat: dairy, cheese, eggs, etc) and the other group fed plant based products (fruit, vegetables, grains, seeds, legumes, etc). What they found is that the rat group being fed primarily animal products all developed symptoms of cancers. The plant group developed none. To double test this hypothesis, they then used a single new group of rates and alternated their diet every three weeks between animal and plant based products. When the test was over, they found that cancer cell production increased in the weeks that the rats ate animal products and actually reversed in the weeks they ate plant based products. If that isn't a definite scientific conclusion I don't know what is.
What they said is that yes, animal based products are somewhat healthy for you and provide some healthy protein and fat for us to have a normal life. They aren't necessary but they help. In these studies they found that eating only 5% of these types of proteins (primarily animal products whose primary type of protein is casein) was acceptable to not promote the growth of cancer cells. What this means is, we should only be eating about 5% animal products, if any. The typical western diet sports a hefty 20%.
Let's put this in real figures. I did some basic math to figure this out. If we assume two and a half meals a day (many Americans only eat three meals every now and then), that's a total of about 912 meals througout the year. The 20% statistic should hold true that we eat a 100% animal meal about 182 of those 912 meals, or put in more logical terms, we eat a 50% (i.e., meat and sides) type meal about 365 times a year. Interesting, that means that we eat meat every single day. Doesn't that seem about right? However, if we examine the 5% recommended study, that means we should only eat meat about four to eight meals a month MAXIMUM. That definitely doesn't sound like an american diet.
I have decided to try to only eat animal products 8 times in the next month and a half that I have of this diet. The rest will be fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, seeds, and other similar products.
PLEASE watch the documentary. It's incredible!
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