When we think of “preppers” we imagine folks preparing themselves to survive an impending crisis period. They stockpile food, medical supplies, install water purification systems and backup generators, even build bunkers.
None of that stuff is going to help out much with the impending and multi-pronged healthcare crisis we in the USA are facing
I had a big list here about all the things about to make healthcare more expensive, less available, and farther from home. But it was too depressing, and this piece is one of empowerment. So let me just nutshell the bad part to get it out of the way: A bunch of us are about to lose our insurance, old folks on Medicare, poor folks on Medicaid, self-employed folks who buy our insurance through the ACA. That’s going to put a ton of small and rural hospitals and clinics out of business. Help might be over an hour away soon. Heart attacks and strokes won’t have good outcomes with care that distant. Add to that the resistance to vaccines that’s causing upsurges in covid, flu, measles-can polio and whooping cough be far behind?
So for our own safety, we need to do everything we can to get and stay in the best health our bodies can achieve.
You have more power than you think!
In past pieces I’ve pointed out that a whole food plant-based lifestyle can add a decade to your life, a healthy decade, and can get you off most or all your prescriptions (under your doc’s supervision,) and can turn off those “bad genes” you blame for everything. If all that wasn’t enough to convince you—maybe this upcoming shitstorm in our healthcare systems will.
Now, more than ever before, we must take our health into our own hands!
Our culture is so very trained. You get a symptom, you go to the doctor, they give you a pill to fix it.
High blood pressure: They have a pill for that!
High cholesterol: They have a pill for that, too!
Type 2 Diabetes: Lots of pills for that, maybe even shots!
Inflammatory Bowel Disease or Crohn’s: Pills, pills, pills!
Erectile dysfunction: Colorful pills! *Please note that erectile dysfunction is the canary in the coal mine of heart disease. If those arteries are too clogged to allow blood flow, what do you think the coronary arteries look like?
Are you aware that every one of those conditions listed above can be reversed. (Not slowed down, but REVERSED, as in, you’re not a type 2 diabetic anymore within a few weeks) with lifestyle changes alone? It’s true.
In addition, the whole food, plant-base lifestyle reduces risk of cancer and heart disease, and eradicates inflammation which is the source of damn near everything that can go wrong with the human body.
I am telling you in absolute honestly that Lance and I don’t get sick anymore. Every once in a while some bug is running through the extended fam, and we’ll feel a vague symptom, a very slight not-quite-rightness that we notice immediately because it’s so abnormal. We’ll say, “Huh, do you think that bug the kids had is trying to take hold?” But it’s such a mild fluctuation it’s hard to tell, and it never becomes anything.
The only times we actually feel shitty is after a cheat, which for us is when we’ve ingested curly fries or a Beyond burger—each of which we swore off afterward. But we’ll come up some other harebrained way to test our tummies at some future moment, no doubt. Nobody is perfect. Potato chips are my weakness, though I get heartburn every time.
But our bodies are healthy. Our gut microbiomes are Gardens of Eden, and that’s crucial. When we do mess up, we recover quickly, learn a lesson, and move on.
If you want more information with science and cited sources, watch the documentary FORKS OVER KNIVES, which is on Netflix, Prime, Apple, and free on the Roku Channel.
You can also visit NutritionFacts.org. Dr. Greger lists peer-reviewed studies with every video he posts and claim he makes.
Let’s review the basics of WFPB living
Eat the plants, the whole plants, and nothing but the plants, so help you good.
The “whole” part of whole foods means exactly what it says. The whole food. It means we don’t buy things with ingredients like “soy protein” or “wheat gluten.” If we want a soybean, we eat a soybean, or something made from soybeans. Not parts of the soybean. If we want wheat, we eat whole wheat. White flour is wheat’s endosperm with its bran and germ stripped away. The three work together, the fibrous parts causing the endosperm to move more efficiently through the body. Without all the parts, the endosperm just sits there, clogging you up.
This also means no oils. Oils are parts of plants. Take olive oil as an example. Olive oil has a great PR campaign. It’s one of the least harmful oils, but that does not make it healthy. Every positive benefit of olive oil is also found in olives. Generally the benefits of olive oil are given in a per tablespoon manner. That’s approximately 8 olives.
Olive oil is taking the fat from an olive, and tossing everything else. No fiber to take that fat through your system or help you absorb the other nutrients. So it can just sit there, layered onto your ass as fat.
You can cook without any oil or spray or butter at all. You can make golden brown foods without it. I show you how in the first link below, and in the second, a bit more on the dangers of refined oils.
Processed Foods
The all-plants thing, combined with the no-oil thing inherently rules out most processed foods. So now we’re talking about subsisting on plants and whole grains. The processed foods we do include are tofu, canned or frozen veggies without added sauces, reduced-sodium tamari (a mild soy sauce,) nutritional yeast, one-ingredient peanut butter (just peanuts, no salt, no added oil,) and unsweetened soy milk.
If you read ingredients with care you can find a few processed patties (Real Veggies brand,) meat-like filets (Eat Meati brand,) and breakfast cereals (Vitabella or Plantstrong brands.)
Beverages
We’ve ditched the caffeine. I make a pot of decaf a day and usually have some left to pour out at day’s end. I drink about two cups I think.
Carbonated drinks like soda or pop or soda pop, depending on where you live can demolish your gut microbiome and leach calcium from your bones. I recently engaged in a brief illicit affair with my beloved Diet Coke. For about two weeks I had a glass or two a day, in my old-timey Coca-Cola glass. Really enjoyed it, but my body felt it. Tummy was not happy.
Fruit Juice is part of the fruit, right? Not the whole fruit. There’s no meat, no flesh, no skin. The juice alone is a direct shot of sugar straight to the veins with no fiber to balance it out. Not great.
I’m wondering if tomato juice might be an exception to this rule, so I’m going to do more research on that to find out.
Drink mostly water. You can also make unsweetened iced tea, even if it’s not decaf. There’s some weird difference between the caffeine in tea vs. that in coffee, even beyond the tea delivering a far smaller dose. Caffeine in tea doesn’t have the same inflammatory effect as that in coffee.
Salt and Sugar
On the WFPB lifestyle we are adviced to reduce or eliminate added sugar and salt. I have room for improvement on this.
White sugar gets white by being bleached through “cow bone ash.” Not all the time, but a lot of the time. So it’s not vegan. Also, it’s “refined,” which means important parts of the plant have been stripped away.
When I have to use cane sugar at all, I use raw, unrefined sugar. It’s brown, and is sometimes called “Florida Crystals.”
Most of my sweet recipes are sweetened with fruit, maple syrup, or sometimes agave nectar.
I have a very big sweet tooth. I bake a lot and eat a cookie every day, usually two of them. To be fair, I imbibe a lot less sugar than I used to.
As for salt, I’m a saltaholic too. It would be far healthier for me if I wasn’t. So I bought some Salt Sense which has 50% less sodium. I don’t use any salt at all in my cooking, but I usually sprinkle some Salt Sense over my plate at mealtime. Reducing salt in any way we can will make us healthier.
Whole Grains
Use brown rice, not white. Whole grain pasta, not white pasta. Whole grain flours, not white four. This Whole Grain Gluten-Free Flour Blend is the only flour I use these days. It bakes up just like enriched white flour.
By the way do you know why enriched white flour is enriched? Because they stripped away every nutrient in the wheat when they refined the flour, and so it’s empty calories. Big Food wanted to be able to call their new product, sliced white bread, “healthy” to market it to the public, so they added vitamins and minerals artificially back in after stripping away those that occurred naturally. Synthetic vitamins and minerals are poorly absorbed and inefficiently utilized by the body, plus they’re not in sync with the stripped remnants of the plant they’re enriching. It’s best to get our vitamins and minerals directly from nature.
Oatmeal is a whole grain, so is pearled or shelled barley, and quinoa. There are a dozen different types of rice that are whole grain. Here’s a list. Experiment with new grains and find your favorites.
Movement
We cannot be sedentary and also be healthy. As I get older, one of my daily mantras is “How much I CHOOSE to move in my sixties will be how much I’m ABLE to move in my seventies.” And maybe whether I even make it into my eighties at all.
It’s a big challenge for me, because I make my living on a laptop. I write novels. They’re pretty awesome novels if I do say so myself, and I’ve made my living writing them for 31 years now. (I write this food blog because I’m passionate about nutrition. It doesn’t yet even support itself, and it costs me to keep it going, but my beloved paid subscribers are bringing it ever closer to carrying its own weight. Thank you, friends!)
I would far rather write while curled up on my sofa, or outside on a stone patio by a waterfall. The latter is where I began this post. But for the past hour and fifty-eight minutes I’ve been writing it at my stand-up desk while walking on the treadmill underneath. I got in more than 4 miles while composing this.
Walking is a good base-level of exercise. It raises my heart rate a little and keeps it there, which is great for eroding away old arterial plaque. If you can increase the speed and maybe raise the ramp level a little bit, or walk up hills outdoors, you can raise it more.
I have managed to make this daily treadmill time my new normal. I do it every day, no matter what, because I write every day, no matter what, and I do at least an hour and usually two hours of my writing at the treadmill desk.
But there are other areas of movement that are needed on a regular basis too. So we’ll go through them quickly but don’t let it intimidate you, because there are easy cheats.
Aerobic activity that raises the heart rate higher than a brisk walk does. Light jog, jumping jacks, that sort of thing. The old wisdom was get your heart rate up to 80% of your maximum recommended heart rate and keep it there for 20 minutes minimum every day. (Here’s a Mayo Clinic piece telling you how to calculate your max heart rate and how much exercise they feel is needed per week.)
Newer research suggests that short bursts of intense activity multiple times a day can have equal benefits to the heart as keeping it high for 20+ minutes.
Easy cheats to get this: Run up the stairs instead of walking. Every time I run upstairs to use the restroom all day, I add something extra, like running down then back up again so I double the number of flights I climb throughout the day, or popping a few squat thrusts or squat hops at the top and bottom, that kind of thing—just lots of it. I also dance enthusiastically to fast music while I am cooking or cleaning, just to get that heart rate up. You can add extra intensity to every little thing throughout the day, if you set your mind to it.Resistance activity such as pushups, squats, situps, crunches, or working with weights. As we age, we lose muscle mass. Weak muscles cause imbalance, and imbalance causes falls, and falls cause broken hips. We must work our muscles. I leave a set of 5 or 8 pound hand weights on a stand I pass many times per day. I pass it for bathroom breaks, I pass it for water refills, I pass it for food. So I leave the weights there, and whenever I pass by, I grab them and do a few reps. Instead of bending to get things from low places, I squat, and when I rise from the squat, I push up as powerfully as I can and add a hop at the top. I do multiple squat hops every day. Sometimes I just drop and do five pushups here and there during the day.
Stretching and balance work such as yoga is also important. Again, balance prevents falls, and stretching is crucial to balance. We don’t want to stiffen up. When we sit a lot, certain muscles actually get shorter. Then when we surprise them trying to use them more than usual, they are strained, and they ache, and sometimes spasm, which sends us to doctors for more pills. There are like 10 bazillion beginning yoga or gentle stretching exercises on YouTube. Look one up, or if you already know some moves, create your own. It doesn’t have to be Yoga, either. Find some stretching thing you love and do it.
Stretch all day. Reach and bend and twist and squat. Move through your days, don’t sit through them, and you’re there.
Stress Management
Besides diet and exercise, the whole food plant-based lifestyle advocates for healthy relationships, a consistent meditation practice, and plenty of good sleep. Here are some ways to try to improve in those areas.
Try to say YES more often when invited out or when opportunities arise to interact with family, friends, or community. Don’t become a hermit as you age. Participate. Take part. Find a cause you care about, find others working on that cause in your community, and join them.
Develop a daily meditation practice. Don’t let the word scare you. Meditation can be as simple as sitting quietly. I like to count my breaths, 3 beats in, 5 beats out. It distracts my mind into quieting, ends that incessant internal chatter we all have. Oh, it comes back, but I just let it pass on by, and return to my breaths. 15 minutes a day. Anything you can do to quiet your mind and focus on something that doesn’t require thinking,(a droning sound like waterfall or air conditioner, a candle flame, counting breaths, etc.) is meditation.
Meditation has been proven to lower blood pressure and heart rate, reduce high blood pressure and inflammation, and has shown numerous other health benefits. It’s a proven stress-reducer. I believe it also grants us an instant download of information and knowledge, all we need to know for whatever is coming up. I try to meditate every day.
Good sleep becomes easier when the rest of the elements are in place. A healthy diet free of animal products, processed, and refined foods with daily exercise and meditation all help improve sleep. So will having a regular bedtime and wake time and avoiding caffeine. They say turn off phone/computer screens an hour before bed and eat dinner early so your tummy isn’t full at bedtime.
Here’s one I didn’t know before: Remove the clock from your bedroom and just trust your alarm if you have one—I could not believe how much better hubs and I both started sleeping when we got rid of the clock in the bedroom. But have an alarm and a backup alarm, or you’ll worry all night and not sleep anyway.
Supplements & Protein
Take 1000 mg B12 daily, and Vitamin D3 in the winter months in areas with less sun like the northeastern USA where I live. Add a good probiotic if you don’t eat a lot of fermented foods. These suggestions are for everyone, vegan or not. B12 used to come from soil, and we got it from eating animals that grazed. But the nation’s meat animals no longer graze at all, and even if they did, we’ve poisoned the B12 and most other nutrients out of our soil with insecticides, pesticides, rodenticides, and synthetic fertilizer.
Otherwise, a wide variety of plants fills every nutritional need, including protein. Only 8% to 10% of your total daily calories should come from protein. Each gram of protein has 4 calories. So if you eat 2000 calories a day, only 160 to 200 of those calories should come from protein. That’s 40 to 50 grams of protein a day on a 2000 calorie diet, and that would max you out.
Bodybuilders: Just eat more calories. The 8%-10% rule still applies. Maybe lean toward 10%.
Focus on Carbs. The main components of our caloric intake should be complex, plant-based carbs. All the carb-fearing, protein-pushing nonsense you see on TV and the internet is by corporations selling protein supplements, bars, or powders.
GREENS, GREENS, GREENS
Put a heavy emphasis on getting multiple servings of green leafies and/or cruciferous vegetables. A serving is 1/2 cup cooked or 1 cup raw. This group is the healthiest food you can eat and include broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, bok choy, kohlrabi, broccolini, spinach, Swiss chard, kale, turnip greens, beet greens, arugula and many more.
Building our Body Bunkers
When we apply all that we know, even just using the information given to you in this one single post, and we apply it consistently, we can get into the best health of our lives at any age. I repeat, ANY AGE, and we will be far better prepared for the coming healthcare crisis in America.
If you’re on meds for blood pressure or blood sugar and decide to try this, be SURE to monitor yourself, because those are going to drop drastically and you don’t want to let either go too low, as you know. Inform your doc what you’re doing. Take your BP at the same time every day, even twice a day, and record it. Keep careful track of blood sugar levels and record those, too.
Most folks who follow this lifestyle closely do not require blood pressure or blood sugar meds, even if they did before.
Weight loss
You’ll lose more weight faster and more healthfully than if you went on a GLP1. With those, you lose a higher percentage of muscle mass and run the risk of malnutrition. You simply don’t want to eat on GLP1s. And when you do, you’re more likely to eat garbage, because “hey, I never eat anything so when I do, it better be good.” Where “good” means salty, fatty, junk food. You’re likely to be deficient in crucial vitamins and minerals on GLP1s.
With the WFPB lifestyle you’ll add muscle while losing fat, nourish your body, improve your health, drop weight like you won’t believe, and add years to your life.
And you don’t have to buy a book or a pill or a program. You can find all the information you need for free. Start with documentaries, Forks Over Knives, What the Health, and Cowspiracy.
All right, that’s this week’s post. TTYS
Feel Good Again!
