Sometimes life is funny. Like a steamroller, nothing can stand in its way. We were chugging along, minding our own business when we got steamrolled. We didn’t see this change coming…and it’s a big one!
In recent years, we’ve gotten somewhat health conscious. Making sure our kids get enough nutrients and learn to eat healthy foods has been an uphill climb. Like most kids, they love McDonald’s and chicken nuggets and french fries. But looking back, Emerson used to eat mixed veggies like nobody’s business. Just look at his tray in the picture below from February 2018!
Both kids love milk and for a time, we were going through 3-5 gallons a week! We bought eggs by the 60-pack and ate it all in a week. For a majority of our meals, our plates were what most people would consider healthy: a hunk of meat, a potato, and random veggies. We mostly felt good.
And then….
We’d just eaten a “healthy” salad for dinner. Hard boiled eggs. A mix of veggies. It was tasty. We felt like healthy adults.
After we got the kids to bed, we wanted to watch something on TV. We’d heard about a new-ish documentary called “The Game Changers” on Netflix. We decided to give it a try.
Oh, man! We knew it was about athletes who compete at high levels as vegans. While we’ve never had a desire to eliminate meat from our diets, neither of us doubted that athletes could perform well without meat. But the thing that was eye-opening was the health claims made by the movie, not the performance aspects.
For example, there was a test done on Miami Dolphins wide receivers. One day, they all ate burritos – one pork, one chicken, one black bean & avocado. A few hours later, their blood was drawn. The next day, they all were given black bean & avocado burritos and had blood drawn. It was spun around to separate the plasma. The takeaway is that after a meat burrito, there was a lot of fat left in the blood. Even though avocado has more fat than the meat, it didn’t leave fat in the blood. The implication is that blood with less fat would flow easier (as it’s not as thick) and enhance athletic performance.
Athletic performance aside, blood that more easily flows through veins has to be healthier! Less strain on the heart. It was a memorable experiment.
The other big portion that left us in awe was when a group of firefighters went on a plant-based diet. They had their blood tested before the experiment and after a 2-week plant-based diet. At the end of the 2 weeks, their cholesterol had dropped drastically, they’d lost a bunch of weight, and some had been able to get off of medications. In 2 weeks!
Without doing a full review, let’s just say that our brains started spinning on the claims and ideas presented in the movie.
We’re not usually the kind of people to be swayed by documentaries like this. But I sort of decided to give it a try while Karissa wanted to finish her Whole30 before trying it. It’s a low-risk proposition.
The next night, we watched another pro-plant documentary called “Forks Over Knives”.
If we had any leanings about ditching meat and dairy after “The Game Changers”, “Forks Over Knives” put us over the edge.
Where “The Game Changers” is something of a motivational movie that isn’t super science-heavy, “Forks Over Knives” is much different. It starts with scenes of a dairy farm where Dr. T. Colin Campbell grew up. He talked about how he felt he was doing God’s work making the perfect nutrient, cow’s milk. He was so proud of his upbringing that he went to college to study nutritional science and further prove the benefits of wonderful liquid that is cow’s milk. Somewhere along his research, he realized that the miracle nutrient-filled liquid isn’t actually beneficial for humans. In fact, he showed that the protein in milk (casein) caused cancer cells to grow! In his experiment, rats were fed casein at either a level 5 or 20. At level 5, the cancer cells would shrink. At level 20, they’d grow. He said he could literally turn cancer growth on and off by raising or lowering the amount of casein.
If that’s not enough, Dr. Campbell also went on to conduct “The China Study” that looked at disease rates in China compared to diet. It was the largest such study ever done and the data he collected is still being used today. He showed that the different diets in various states/counties of China lead to different disease rates and types. Those that ate a whole-food, plant-based diet had the lowest rates of disease – especially diseases that are extremely common in the USA.
The other main character in the movie is Dr. Caldwell Esseltsyn. He was a heart surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic who did bypass surgeries. After many years doing more and more of them (and seeing repeat customers), he wondered if there was a preventative treatment rather than surgery.
He looked at heart disease rates across the world and noticed that the Western world has much higher rates of the disease than other places. It showed to him that heart disease isn’t hereditary, genetic, or inevitable; but rather, it’s a choice. The diets of those places that don’t get heart disease was whole-food, plant-based. They don’t consume dairy or eat meat. And don’t have heart disease and other Western diseases.
In the late 1980s, he borrowed 24 people who couldn’t have the bypass surgery and were essentially the walking dead. He put them on a whole-foods, plant-based diet. They all had great success on the diet and got healthier than if they’d had the surgery! The diet had worked!
The movie shows pictures of hearts and veins before and after the dietary changes. The fatty deposits in veins is shown to go away, the arteries around the heart that looked small and wimpy got larger and clearly healthier. It’s magical.
Another great piece of data was the story about Norway during WWII. Norwegians had circulatory diseases at the normal rate as the rest of the world. They ate meat and dairy. When the Nazis took over, they brought all of the meat and dairy back to Germany – leaving the Norwegians to eat plants. The rate of diseases DROPPED as they ate the plant-centric diet during the war. At the end of the war, meat and dairy returned to the diet and the rates of disease began to climb again.
After this movie, my desire to try eliminating meat and dairy was in full force. I decided right there to see if I could see any benefits. I’d become a vegan, at least temporarily. (Karissa wanted to finish her Whole30 before joining me.)
We’ve been told our whole lives that meat and dairy are healthy. These two documentaries claimed the exact opposite! To reconcile the two sides, I spent the next week researching as much as possible. Study after study shows that a whole-food, plant-based diet beats any other diet in terms of fighting, preventing, and reversing disease and cancer. There are studies that are pro-meat and pro-dairy, but the way those studies tend to be set up isn’t “fair”. But all of my research that week fortified by position that a whole-food, plant-based diet was the best…and there is zero downside to it!
So I made Karissa quit her Whole30 after 15 days. It might be a good diet vs. the Standard American Diet as it does focus on eating whole foods, but the inclusion of meat and exclusion of legumes and grains is suspect.
Emerson has never really liked meat. He only at chicken nuggets, but we can all agree that they’re hardly comparable to eating a piece of meat. He wouldn’t know the difference between tofu nuggets and chicken nuggets. He loved his dairy – milk and cheese made up well over 1/2 of his calories. But we bought him chocolate almond milk to transition him away from cow milk and he couldn’t be happier. He’s now drinking plain (sweetened) almond milk and loving it.
Adelaide has been asking about foods that are “real foods” for a while. She knows if she eats her “real food” she gets a treat food. So we made her eat cheese sticks, pork, fish, etc. She’s now very confused about nutrition – and we tell her that we are too! But she understands that we’re learning new things and she knows we want her to be big and strong. So after every bite of beans, she flexes her muscles and makes us feel how big they’re becoming. She’s all-in on the diet too!
The evidence to eliminate dairy and meat from our diets is overwhelming! I’ve gotten into learning about nutrients, anti-nutrients, and how our body processes various foods (both meat and plants) and it’s fascinating. Plants are truly magical!
If you’re wondering what we’ve been eating as a whole-food, plant-based family, check out the pictures below! It hasn’t been challenging. We’ve enjoyed it. And best of all, we’re feeling better than ever!
We are officially whole-food vegans. We feel better than ever and are empowered to continue with it as we learn more and more about the topic. We feel that we’ve been duped our entire lives about what’s healthy and what’s not!
Have you seen the documentaries? What was your take? What would it take for you to change your diet to change your health outlook? Why not give plants a shot? There’s no downside to it!