The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet (8 page)

KICKING MEAT

When I gave up meat, I was so committed to the cause of protecting animals that I really didn’t pay much attention to any physical or emotional discomfort I may have experienced, and it was such a long time ago that it’s hard for me even to remember what it feels like to miss meat. Whereas I’ve had a handful of slips with dairy and more than a handful with sugar, I have never slipped on meat, so I’m going to lean on the experiences of my recently vegan friends who report the following challenges when kicking meat:

Cravings for meat’s meatiness:
Flesh has a unique texture, taste, and density. Some people say that, for a couple of months, they have a little difficulty feeling truly satisfied by a meatless meal. It seems to take a while for the body to adjust to a whole new sense of fullness and satisfaction. Thankfully, this simply passes with time. As you make the transition, I recommend eating hearty, satisfying protein dishes, especially those containing tempeh and seitan and prepared with generous amounts of oil and seasoning. This will help your body begin to recognize a new type of fullness and satisfaction that isn’t doing damage to it.

Superheroes: Kenneth Williams and Robert Cheeke

Think skipping meat will make you weak? At 5'11", Kenneth Williams is a professional vegan bodybuilder who knows that grains, beans, and vegetables are the perfect fuel for creating a beautiful, sculpted, and strong body. A passionate activist, Kenneth also hosts
Undercover TV
, which exposes the truth behind factory farms.

Twenty-nine-year-old Robert Cheeke lives in Portland, Oregon, but travels constantly as a bodybuilder, motivational speaker, and model. Thankfully, Robert requires no steak, eggs, or milk to keep up the pace. Robert is 100 percent vegan and looks fantastic.

Feeling weak or experiencing a shift in energy levels:
Meat is intense. As the muscle of another creature, it generates a certain type of warm and aggressive energy in us before it settles in and does its damage. Plant foods are calmer and lighter and fuel us in a very different way. It’s not uncommon to experience a shift from the heaviness of meat to the lighter power of plants that feels a little strange or is misrecognized as weakness. Think of it this way: Your body, which has been accommodating meat its entire life, is now cleaning out and reworking its engine. This takes some time and is a very big deal. Be patient, and you will find that your body definitely prefers the new system and performs even better on plant power—Bruce Lee’s did!

Convincing yourself that you need meat:
The meat-pushers are loud. Using fear, bad science, and nutritional superstition, friends, family, or even your own mind may try to talk you into going back to meat. Don’t listen. It’s just old habits and misinformation creating excuses to indulge. There is absolutely no reason you need meat in order to survive or thrive. In fact, it’s just the opposite: Your old friend flesh is keeping your body tired, weak, and toxic.

And anecdotal evidence from my friends bears this out. It amazes me how often I hear people say, “I stayed away from meat for a month and decided to have a hamburger one day, and I was up all night throwing up” or “I was constipated for days” or “I had horrible cramps.” Some people don’t really recognize how well their body is functioning until they conduct a little experiment. Although I don’t recommend going back to meat for that purpose, the results always show that the body has started to hum along nicely on its plant-based diet and that adding meat back into the picture just screws it all up. When I hear this, I’m always sad that my friend has suffered, but inside I’m yelling, “Yay!” that the meat has shown its true colors.

So whether you decide to go cold turkey on meat or continue to flirt with it for a while, you will see that the body wants to be free of meat’s heaviness and has the capacity to respond in swift and powerful ways. I urge you to give it a chance.

The greatness of a nation . . . can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

—Mahatma Gandhi

3

Nasty Food #2: Dairy

I know what you’re thinking: “Dairy . . . nasty? How could that be? It’s so good for you! Without milk, where am I going to get my calcium?”

I hear you. I grew up on dairy, too. My mother used to throw tea parties for her friends when I was a kid; she’d serve scones with clotted cream, and I’d drink four big cups of English Breakfast tea with milk and sugar. I believed milk was a perfect food without which I would basically collapse into a pile of splintered bones.

Dairy is one of the most difficult foods to discuss with people for two big reasons: First, we have all been hypnotized by the National Dairy Council, which has been pushing milk since 1915. It has presented itself as a protective parent, looking out for the country’s health by encouraging us all to have three servings of milk or milk products per day. Well, the National Dairy Council is just a big, rich, organized group that lobbies Congress to subsidize them, funds research to support their claims, and launches incredibly expensive advertising campaigns. Remember the milk mustache campaign? So cute, right? Well, 190 million cute little dollars were spent on it, convincing us that three servings a day were a virtual guarantee of good health.
¹
And who exactly pays for those 76,000 glasses of milk you drink over a lifetime? And who pockets that money? Hmmm . . .

Farmers have the right to push their products, but I encourage you to reexamine your beliefs about milk and dairy products. Are you afraid of not drinking milk? Do you see milk as a hedge against osteoporosis? A way to build strong teeth? Lose weight? Then try to reconcile those beliefs with the fact that the Chinese, throughout their long and complicated history, have never included milk or cheese in their diets. It’s only in the very recent past that dairy has been introduced as a daily food, and with it has come a rapid rise in health problems like obesity and breast cancer. And how about Japan? Ever seen a glass of milk at a Japanese restaurant? The idea that human beings need milk in order to be strong or to function as a culture is simply not true.

The second reason it’s hard to discuss letting go of dairy food is that it’s addictive. Milk contains a protein called casein, which breaks down in the body to become caso
morphins
, as in “morphine.” Casomorphins have an opiate effect
²
on your body and—like all good opiates—make you feel relaxed and happy. Casein is even more concentrated in cheese, which explains why people are very, very protective of their cheese! I can honestly say that I never think longingly about a glass of milk, but a piece of cheese? Mmmm . . . And that makes biological sense: Casomorphins were designed by nature to make a baby feel wonderful while attached to her mother. . . . How beautiful is that!? But when we get high on it as adults, we basically become milk junkies. And no junkie wants to give up her drug of choice.

So take a deep breath. No one’s asking you to give it up. I’m just asking you to look at it from a different angle, to get past the hocus-pocus of the Dairy Council, and to be open to some new information.

Milk is nasty to your body:
Our bodies are not meant to drink any milk except our own mother’s milk, and only when we are babies! We don’t drink our own mother’s milk when we are 8, or 15, or 30, so why would our bodies accept another creature’s milk? Did you know that we are the only animals that drink another species’ milk? Pandas don’t drink
gorilla
milk . . . dogs don’t drink
goat
milk. . . . Even
cows
don’t drink cow’s milk once they’ve grown up—they wean themselves naturally.

The fact is that many humans can’t drink milk from other animals. In the United States, as many as 80 percent of African Americans, 90 percent of Asian Americans, and 60 percent of Hispanics are lactose-intolerant to some degree.
³
People with lactose intolerance experience gas, discomfort, and sometimes diarrhea upon drinking milk, so they wisely stay away from it. Those of us who can digest cow’s milk are thought to have a genetic mutation that occurred thousands of years ago so we could survive on a herd’s milk under harsh conditions.
⁴

Dairy makes you fat:
Remember, cow’s milk is designed to turn a baby calf into a
400-pound cow
. That, my friend, is big. And how does that happen? Well, cow’s milk is made for babies, and all we really ask babies to do is get nice and fat. We’re not expecting them to think, or run around, or make a living. High in protein and fat, but low in carbs and devoid of fiber, frozen yogurt seems specifically designed to turn you into a fat, slow, docile cow. Even human milk, with its greater proportion of carbohydrates, fuels energy and brain development, making it a better choice. But then, of course,
we don’t drink human milk as adults
!

Eliminate milk, and you will notice your body slimming down nicely. A recent ad campaign featuring hourglass-shaped glasses of milk suggested a connection between drinking milk and weight loss. Well, the study was done by one researcher who happened to be sponsored by—big surprise—the good ol’ Dairy Council, and the weight loss results came about only in conjunction with good ol’
calorie restriction
! Imagine that! Restrict your calories and lose weight! Absolutely revolutionary! Upon being sued by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the Dairy Council was forced to suspend the advertising campaign and redact its claims. Yet we’re still carrying around that hourglass of milk in our minds.

Dairy food has been linked to cancer:
The medical world acknowledges that some of the biggest factors in breast cancer are fat, animal protein, and excess estrogen. Well, since milking cows are pumped full of extra estrogen to make them lactate, dairy is your best and cheapest daily source of all three. Moreover, cows injected with bovine growth hormone have higher levels of a naturally occurring hormone called IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor-1), which is also connected to tumor growth.
⁵

Superhero: Dr. Neal Barnard

Dr. Barnard specializes in helping people change their lives through diet. In 1985, he founded the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a nonprofit organization that promotes preventive medicine, conducts clinical research, and encourages higher standards for ethics and effectiveness in research. PCRM is the loudest voice against the food and drug companies that seek to sell their wares without concern for the truth or the consumer’s highest good. Dr. Barnard has written eight books on diet as it relates to illnesses such as heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and chronic pain.

Superhero: T. Colin Campbell

Growing up on a dairy farm, T. Colin Campbell believed—like most Americans—that milk was the perfect food. To that end, he did graduate research in animal nutrition in order to make bigger, better cows and pigs for us to eat. Like many, he bought into the national belief that protein derived from animal products was superior to all other types and was the key to what made America’s diet the best in the world. He and his colleagues considered it their mission to help struggling nations to get as much animal protein into their diets as possible.

But Campbell’s theory was turned on its head when he stumbled upon an Indian study that showed dairy protein triggering tumor growth. Skeptical of the results, he decided to conduct his own version of the experiments. The conclusions were consistent and stunning: Even when huge doses of cancer-causing toxins were given to study subjects, tumors grew
only
when they were fed casein, the protein in dairy foods. Conversely, wheat and soy protein—combined with the same doses of cancer-causing toxins—triggered no tumors.