Eating fewer animal products is good for our kidneys, better for our hearts, and great for our gut. It is even associated with better brain health as we age. Fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains are powerhouses of nutrition.
Your health is priceless. Let a whole-foods plant-based diet be your recipe for healthy living.
Eating fewer animal products is good for our kidneys, better for our hearts, and great for our gut. It is even associated with better brain health as we age. Fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains are powerhouses of nutrition.
So, what is my prescription for good health? In short, it is about the multiple health benefits of consuming plant-based foods, and the largely unappreciated health dangers of consuming animal-based foods, including all types of meat, dairy and eggs.
Dr. T. Colin Campbell
Author, The China Study
Most animal-based products—including chicken, shrimp, dairy and eggs—are high in cholesterol, which is linked to a risk of coronary heart disease. Plant-based foods, on the other hand, don’t contain any cholesterol. Eating a vegan diet—free of meat, milk, and eggs—lowers our blood cholesterol and reduces our likelihood of suffering from heart disease. This is a big win, since heart disease is known as the #1 cause of death in the US.
Eating fiber can help protect you from cardiovascular, circulatory, digestive, and inflammatory diseases and is also associated with a lower risk for obesity and some cancers. Meat and other animal products do not contain any fiber, while a whole-foods plant-based diet makes it really easy to get adequate fiber on the daily.
Adult onset diabetes, which sometimes leads to chronic kidney disease—requiring dialysis or kidney transplants—can be well-managed and even reversed on a plant-based diet. Vegan diets have been shown to help control blood sugar and are associated with a substantially lower incidence of diabetes.
You’ve likely heard that your skin is your largest organ. It’s true. Eating antioxidant-rich foods helps fight skin-damaging free radicals—helping your skin stay healthy, and glowing, from the inside out. And lucky for you, antioxidants are everywhere in plant-based foods—in fruits, vegetables, legumes and nuts, but they are rarely found in animal products.
A Mediterranean-style diet—with a higher emphasis on vegetables and fruits, legumes, grains, and healthy oils, compared to the Standard American Diet (SAD), which is rich in animal-based, refined, and processed foods—has been associated with better brain health as we age. Reducing our consumption of meat can help reduce the risk of cognitive decline.
The vast majority of antibiotics produced in the US are intended for use in the animal farming industries. The current overuse of antibiotics in our factory farms encourages the growth of deadly and drug-resistant superbugs, a lurking threat to our public health. Whether we’re talking about bacterial diseases like E. coli or campylobacter, or pandemic viruses like the swine flu or avian influenza, these zoonotic diseases are inherently linked to animals raised for food.
Phytochemicals are compounds that assist in the smooth functioning of many of our body's systems. Whether it is the anthocyanins in berries, which help protect vision, or the carotenoids in carrots and cantaloupe, which help prevent cell damage, plant-based diets are full of phytochemicals that improve our health and the quality of our daily lives.
Your Overall Health
Processed food companies and pharmaceuticals are not sufficiently vested in our health. Afterall, their job is to make a profit. We are the ultimate guardians of our bodies. It is up to us to make choices to be active, to eat better, and take the single most important yet under-prescribed medicine—a healthful diet.