Plant-Based Diet

I read a couple of books recently that caused me to take a good look at what I was eating. One was ‘Eat & Run’ by Scott Jurek and the other was ‘Running Ultra’ by Rich Roll. Both of these books are autobiographies and they both talk about how changing their diet made a huge impact on their lives. Scott Jurek is a legend in the ultra-marathon world and Rich Roll changed from couch potato to a dominant force in ultra-triathlons in a matter of months. Both are also vegans.

I researched various diets and read about people who are living on these various diets as well as what the experts are saying about them. There is a lot of conflicting information out there and a lot of people making decisions based on faux science. I came to the conclusion that a plant-based diet might be worth trying out. It’s not an easy diet because it requires you to actually learn about food ingredients and how food is manufactured or prepared. The results that I read about are hard to deny. There are a lot of incredibly healthy people out there who have been living on a plant-based diet for decades. Including some of the greatest athletes on the planet. The plant-based diet is definitely not a fad.

At this point, I was choosing the vegan option for lunch and eating meat a couple of times per week. It wasn’t until I saw the movie “Forks Over Knives” that I made the decision to just go vegan. This movie is a fascinating and alarming documentary about the how diet is the primary cause of the overall decline in the health of modern civilizations. By the time the credits rolled, I was a vegan. I soon found out that going cold-turkey is actually not a good idea. A plant-based diet isn’t just a diet. It’s a lifestyle. This isn’t something that you can easily change overnight. Especially if you don’t live alone but, fortunately, my family is on board with making the gradual conversion with me.

We are going vegan primarily for health and fitness reasons but I have to say, it is comforting to think about the positive ecological effects of eating plants instead of animals or the secretions of animals. I also love that eliminating meat and dairy from your diet also reduces the influence of corporations who devote enormous resources to suppress vital health information from reaching the public, influence food standards and policies and market their unhealthy garbage as healthy. The people who market milk as being healthy are the same people who lace a pint of chocolate milk in your child’s school lunch with almost as much sugar as a can of soda. Why fill it with so much sugar? Simple. So the children will want to drink more and the parents will think that it’s good for them.

Sadly, my generation is the first one in which our kids have a shorter life expectancy than us. This need to change.