Forks Over Knives (2 page)
Authors: Gene Stone
The Faces of
Forks Over Knives
: Rip Esselstyn
ECIPES
Blueberry Oat Breakfast Muffins
Joey’s Lifesaving Sweet Potato Chips
Yam and Split Pea Soup with Tarragon
Yellow Split Pea and Leek Soup
Nutrient Rich Smoky Black Bean Soup
Woodstock Peace Salad with Tahini Dressing
Romaine Salad with Fresh Strawberries and Strawberry Tarragon
Raspberry-Hemp Mixed Green Salad
Hummus-Orange Juice Dressing Plus
Raise-the-Roof Sweet Potato–Vegetable Lasagna
Steamed Veggies and Tofu with Brown Rice
Mini Polenta Pies with Spinach Walnut Stuffing Served with Spicy Tomato Sauce
Minty-Lemon Lentils with Spinach
Kale-Lemon Sandwiches, the Ultimate in Health
Incredible Tomatoes and Cucumbers
Kale with Miraculous Walnut Sauce
Rosemary Roasted Root Vegetables with Kale
MVP (Most Valuable Pesto) Stuffed Mushrooms
Lovely Collard Wraps with Red Pepper and Cucumber
Quinoa and Kale Stuffed Tomato
Fruit with Lime, Mint, and Orange Juice
Frozen Chocolate Banana Treats
Fast Cookies for School Lunches
By T. Colin Campbell, PhD, and Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., MD
Leave your drugs in the chemist’s pot
if you can cure the patient with food.
—
HIPPOCRATES
For more than 2,800 years, the concept of eating plants in their whole-food form has struggled to be heard and adopted as a way of life. Although it is usually defended on ideological grounds, recent evidence now proves that this diet produces powerful personal health benefits as well. In fact, eating a plant-based diet has become an urgent matter from several perspectives: Not only can personal health be improved but also health care costs can be dramatically reduced, and various forms of violence to our environment and to other sentient beings can be minimized.
Because this diet has so much to offer, we believe that the means must be found to share this information with as many people as possible, people of all persuasions and backgrounds, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, and geographic location. And one of the best ways to accomplish this is through sharing personal experiences and imagery, as in the film
Forks Over Knives
.
Forks Over Knives
is both a journey and a saga. The journey demonstrates how rapidly health can be restored without drugs, medications, and surgical procedures. The saga presents the individual tales of those whose profound lifestyle changes have halted and even reversed serious diseases.
Our nation’s economic stability has been crumbling because of the burst bubbles in technology and housing. This burden has been compounded by spiraling health costs, with no end in sight. Yet, as a nation we are sicker
and fatter than we have ever been. The epidemics of obesity and diabetes, especially in the young, forecasts an economically unsustainable public health challenge and the gloomy prophecy that today’s children may not outlive their parents.
Figure 1:
Near the beginning of the twentieth century, Americans each ate about 120 pounds of meat yearly; as of 2007, we ate about 222 pounds. In 1913, we consumed about 40 pounds of processed sugar each; by 1999, that number had risen to 147 pounds. And, in 1909, Americans downed 294 pounds of dairy products apiece—by 2006, that figure had more than doubled to 605 pounds per person.
The central protagonist of this dark scenario is the food industry and its profit demands. With billions of advertising and marketing dollars, it annually cajoles and entices us with its dairy, meat, fish, poultry, and eggs, as well as products laden with sugar, salt, and fat. This ceaseless assault achieves its goal of convincing a vulnerable and unprotected public to ingest food that will make them fat and sick: Obesity, hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, strokes, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, gallstones, diverticulitis, osteoporosis, allergies, and asthma are but a few of the diseases of Western nutrition.
Who will protect the public? Not our government: The U.S. Department of Agriculture is the voice of our food industry. Every five years it constructs nutrition guidelines for the public touting food that will guarantee ill health for millions. Not the American Dietetic Association, which is controlled by food corporations. Not the insurance industry, which profits by selling plans to the sick. Not the pharmaceutical industry, which pockets billions annually
from chronic illnesses. Not hospitals, whose livelihood depends on our diseases. Not the medical profession, in which doctors and nurses receive virtually no training in nutrition or behavioral modification, and are handsomely rewarded for administrating drugs and employing technical expertise. And, finally, not our medical research funding institutions: Too often they focus on biological details, such as individual nutrients, that can be exploited commercially for profit.
The primary focus of
Forks Over Knives
is whole-foods, plant-based nutrition. The public needs new avenues to understand this message, and that is why this film is so important. A seismic revolution in health will not come from a pill, procedure, or operation. It will occur only when the public is endowed with nutritional literacy, the kind of knowledge portrayed in
Forks Over Knives
and highlighted by this book.
Once you see the movie, we hope you will make the transition to this dietary lifestyle. It may loom like a challenge. But it’s only because so many of us have become addicted to diets high in fat, salt, and sugar that the adventure of eating foods that contain few of these ingredients seems so difficult. It isn’t. We know from both anecdotal experience and from the scientific literature that such addictions can be resolved in a matter of weeks.
So, stick with it, eat well, and you will soon discover a whole new universe of gustatory pleasure, savoring new tastes never before recognized. Please try some of the recipes in this book to help you make this transition. You will find these foods taste superb and are reasonably easy to prepare. It is with this thought in mind that we entrust to you this idea and these recipes to set you on your path. Bon appétit!
The Plant-Based World of
FORKS OVER KNIVES
GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH
One quarter of what you eat keeps you alive. The other three quarters keep your doctor alive.
—
EGYPTIAN PROVERB
Good health. Throughout recorded history, health has been one of our most common preoccupations and most popular areas of research. In fact, the study of medicine predates written history. In 1991, the discovery of a 5,000-year-old mummified body in Northern Italy revealed that prehistoric societies had greater medical knowledge than once thought: The man, now known as Otzi the Iceman, had among his possessions a fungus that scientists discovered can kill internal parasites—the first palpable evidence of early human pharmacology.
Going back further in time, we know that shamans and healers used various plants and herbs (as well as magical chants and prayers) as medication in the earliest societies on record; every culture had some form of medicinal wisdom, although almost all of that knowledge is lost to us today.
