The Plant-Based Lifestyle.

Over the past year and a half as a plant-based vegan, I have learnt a lot about health and the human body. I have read a lot of articles, research papers and watched tons of documentaries. And I have realised that despite there being many different names for various diseases and illnesses they're basically the same issue but merely located in different parts of the body. Heart disease, cancer, arthritis, diabetes, they’re all just fancy names for the same issue, all which are caused from either cell damage, or arterial damage due to inflammation. All caused by WHAT WE PUT INTO OUR MOUTHS.

By now I have probably lost your attention all the way at the start of this post just by having mentioned the word vegan. Or maybe, that very same word stirred something deep within you and you are hurriedly trying to skim through attempting to find something to poke a whole into in order to unleash your anger within the comments section below. But bare with me and keep an open mind.

Something I struggle to understand is the idea that fruits and vegetables, which are freely given to us in abundance by mother nature, can be seen as extreme when it is proclaimed by vegetarians and vegans to be a source of prevention for major diseases. And yet, people believe that things created by mankind such as medicine and surgeries to be less extreme. I understand that at times medicine and surgeries are necessary but if we are doing the correct things to prevent us from causing those diseases and illnesses in the first place, then surgery and medicinal drugs become unnecessary. What I'm trying to say is how can eating an abundance of fruits and vegetables be considered more extreme, than having to be sliced through your chest cavity in order to attempt to reverse major self-caused damage. Yes, I said self-caused.

Having been a meat and dairy consumer before, I understand the struggle of accepting the idea that meat and dairy may cause us harm. I myself didn't even care about health and ate whatever I wanted. But consider this, when it comes to plant-based research there is no such thing as hypocrisy or cherry picking. There is no such thing as providing "evidence" in order to increase purchases. Plan-based research is done purely out of need for realistic information due to some much back-and-forth lunacy, and for the care of the human race. Have you ever heard of a kale farmer funding his own research so that more people purchase more kale? No! Because it just doesn't make any sense. But, the majority of papers and "scientific" articles that roam the web and academic books is based mostly upon animal industry funded research. Surely you can see some issue in that?

Furthermore, I find it rather interesting how the increase of disease seems to correlate with the increase intake of animal protein and diary products. "After peaking in the mid-1960s, the number of heart disease deaths began a marked decline that has persisted to the present. The increase in heart disease deaths from the early 20th century until the 1960s was due to an increase in the prevalence of coronary atherosclerosis with resultant coronary heart disease, as documented by autopsy studies. This increase was associated with an increase in smoking and dietary changes leading to an increase in serum cholesterol levels" I just pulled this straight of the American Journal of Medicine (https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(14)00354-4/pdf).

IT'S WHAT WE EAT!

The 20th century also happens to be the time when people began to consume more dairy products than they ever have before, and now, it's just getting worse. In the twenty century cheese consumption spiked (https://grist.org/…/we-eat-three-times-as-much-cheese-now-…/). But, "all things good in moderation", right?! Wrong.

The China Study, published in 2004 by Dr Campbell (previously a dairy farm owner himself) proved what many other fruit and vegetable research has shown, that plants are the healthiest and best things for us to eat. However, one thing that his research showed that others have never shown, is the way that dairy causes cancer. You see, Campbell set out to search for himself the benefits of dairy in order to help boost his business, however, what he found was that when he fed rats dairy products, their cancer cells began to multiply and grow. Dr Campbell then removed the dairy and their cancer cells shrunk entirely. Now, you'll probably be thinking "but we're not rats". And you're totally right, we're not rats, and neither are the people of rural China. Dr Campbell found that in China those that lived in the mainlands tended to die of chronic diseases such as cancer and heart attacks. However, within the rural places of China heart disease was unheard of. The study revealed that in the majority of these rural cities there were 0 reports of coronary heart disease, this was because their diet was based predominantly around wholegrains, fruits, vegetables and even soy. You can read the study for yourself or watch the documentary about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJH50ifMxs

Now, I bring this up not to shame those who eat meat and dairy, or to start an argument, or to try to show myself as being better than anyone else, although that may be what is coming across. I assure you it is not. I am sharing this information with you as over the past year and a half having eaten plant-based myself I have felt more energetic, more active, and a million times healthier than I ever have. As a kid, and even more so as a teen I didn't give two shits about my health, I drank 400 ML of caffeine every single day from Red Bull and Relentless. Once an adult, I began smoking a packed of 20 cigarettes every day for almost 6 years. I spent my first year of uni living entirely off Domino's pizza (bye bye Student Loan). I had extremely bad Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which was then made worse by these lifestyle choices, and then it escalated in 2016 when I became anorexic and lived off nothing but tobacco and coffee. And as cheesy at it may sound (is that vegan of me to say?), becoming plant-based changed my life. I quit caffeine and cigarettes in the same week I became vegan. I got scared, I was out smoking, whilst walking Oliver and I felt what is called heart arrhythmia - my heart was beating heavy and fast, and then rather slow, and then fast, all at once, and I could feel it in my chest and my neck. Being the hypochondriac that I am I gave it up and I started eating immediately. You see, something I found, at least when it comes to an eating disorder, was that there was something more powerful than the fear of putting on weight, and to me, that was the fear of dying. I also became vegan in that very same week as I had heard that it would help my IBS which had been aggravated by withdrawal symptoms.

I plunged into the world of veganism back in 2017, and it is here that I will stay. From eating more and more fruits and vegetables and giving up the things that were causing me harm, including meat and dairy, I have not experience that same weird arrhythmia, my bowels cause me majorly less pain than they used to (years of damage takes longer to heal) but my bouts are rarer and less agonizing in comparison to before. I have never been leaner, nor more muscular than now. I get more energy from the ground than I did from a can, and it feels amazing!

This journey has opened my eyes to not only nutrition and health, but to the way that animals are being treated, and to the way that the animal industry is affecting our planet. It has also opened my eyes to how much eating a plant-based lifestyle can save this earth, if only we'd allow mother nature to heal itself and reverse the damage we have caused it. The same way that our body has the ability to heal itself whenever we break a bone or cut our skin, our body can heal internally. And in that very same way mother nature also has the ability to heal herself. But we continue to cause ourselves internal damage by consuming the wrong things and it prevents us from healing. And we keep causing the world unnecessary damage and not allowing it to heal either. Why is it that we are unable to see the correlation between the animal food industry increase, with the increase of harm to both earth and to the human body?

Please, if you care about yourself, and if you want to live a longer, happier life, then reduce your consumption of animal products. You don't even have to quit it, I just ask that you reduce your consumption. This earth is extremely damaged, our bodies are extremely damaged. Let's give both these things a break and allow time for nature to run its course and begin its healing.