The Plant-Based Brain
The Plant-Based Brain
An odd event that got me to wondering...
Does living on whole plant foods change your brain?
The other day in the grocery store, my husband noticed the Impossible meats had changed their labels. It caught his attention because the new label literally repulsed him. In hindsight, it looked meaty to him, but in that moment in the store, the first glance knocked him back a little. It pushed him away immediately.
I feel like it would have the same effect on most plant-eaters. How does the red label make you feel?
The color red carries a very different sort of energy than green, doesn’t it? I still love red. It’s a color that denotes high energy, inner strength, an empowered life. But it also has within it, the energy of violence, and domination, and the suggestion of spilled blood.
Green’s energy is more spring than high summer. It’s cooling, where red is hot. It soothes where red burns. Green is youth and innocence, growing and learning, fertility and regeneration.
Why the Impossible Change?
Impossible wants to appeal more to meat-eaters, (Wheless, 2024) proving my point that the value of these foods is to make the transition easier for hardcore meat eaters. They are not meant for existing vegans or vegetarians. The target audience is the omnivore crowd who, though they don’t know it yet, aren’t going to have meat to eat for very much longer.
So with all their resources, Impossible Foods’ effort to appeal to meat-eaters involves turning their packaging blood red. They’ve consulted marketers and probably social psychologists to determine the best way to do that. And they came up with red.
The new design scheme appeals to meat-eaters, but repulses plant-eaters.
The old design scheme appeals to plant-eaters, but repulses meat-eaters.
Is there something different about veggie brains?
When we change to an all-plant diet, there are measurable changes in our DNA. More than 500 genes change. Negative expressions from mutated genes turn off. Positive expressions that have been sitting dormant, turn on. (Ornish Diet Ranked First for Heart Health by U.S. News: Diet Inventor Explains What Makes It so Heart-Healthy, 2012)
Dr. Dean Ornish discusses his multiple studies showing this in a Huffington Post piece I’ll link below in the sources section.
When we change to a plant-exclusive diet, our blood pressure changes. It goes down. Our resting heart rate lowers. Our blood chemistry changes, too, as our cholesterol lowers. The fat clears from our cells, clearing the way so our cells can once again absorb sugars from our blood like they’re supposed to. When that happens, we no longer have type 2 diabetes. Inflammatory markers plummet.
So why on earth wouldn’t eating this way also change our brains?
You feel it, too, don’t you?
When I stopped eating animals, it wasn’t just my health that changed. There were other things that were harder to measure or describe.
A sense of lightness. Its as if there are more open spaces between my cells or something. There’s a sense of less density, a sense of increasing buoyancy. The best way I have come up with to describe it is, it’s as if when I breathe, I can feel the oxygen/carbon exchange happening through every pore, not just my nose and mouth and lungs.
Increased sensitivity. I feel things more since I switched to plants-only. My feelings are hurt more easily, but my joy reaches higher levels, too. My capacity to experience the higher emotions seems to have increased.
Increased empathy. My ability to empathize with other beings has expanded to previously unknown levels. I threw away my fly swatters. I shoo them right out the door. I talk to everything now, birds, plants, bugs, trees. Sometimes they seem to acknowlege me, sometimes they even talk back. Yesterday a squatty green heron flew right over my head, which was a surprise as I’ve only seen them a handful of times in our area. As he passed I said, “Hello, geen heron,” and the heron immediately gave a deep croak of a reply. “Squork!”
Heightened intuition. This has taken a step up recently, and is really just a sign of being aligned with the higher self and aware. But more and more lately, I think of something or someone and later the same day it, or they, show up in some form or another. This is Law of Attraction at work, and is happening all the time, but mostly flies below the radar of our awareness. When we pay attention, it’s amazing how clearly we can see the ripples and connections of our lives.
Clarity of mind. I’m not foggy anymore. I see through bullshit more easily. I’m harder to fool. I know what I want. I make good, timely decisions. I worry less. I get more done. I’m just all around sharper.
More upbeat more often. My default mood setting, has improved. You know how you feel when you’re not really overjoyed about anything but not really sad or angry about anything, either? That’s your average, everyday, baseline mood. Your default setting. Most days, my default, average, everyday mood is close to giddy. Oh, I’ll have a dark-cloud-day now and then, but they’re fewer and farther between.
More relaxed about things. I don’t tend to get all stressed out over things the way I used to. Maybe this is only partly lifestyle, and partly the grace of years. The longer I live, the surer I am that nothing matters all that much other than loving the people you love and being with them for the important events of their lives.
I think the consumption of animal proteins coats us in a layer of confusion. To love animals and at the same time eat them is an extreme psychic conflict. Our minds have to perform acrobatics to justify it to ourselves. (The Vegan Society, 2019) And the methods it uses are, I believe, to dull our empathy, turn down the volume on our emotions, and cloud our minds to numb them to that inner conflict. It’s an opiate effect, really, isn’t it? The casomorphines in milk and triptophan in poultry and whatever chemicals are in other meats, compel us not to think too hard about the harm it causes, and just focus on the pleasure it brings. Much like heroin.
The spiritual energy of meat can’t be good for us, either. 90% of the meat most Americans consume comes from factory farms, where the animals are terrified and brualized during the final hours of their lives. That state causes a rush of stress chemicals through their little bodies. They’re in a state of panic by the time they breathe their last, and all that energy is in their remains. And humans consume it.
Someday science will get into that a bit. It hasn’t yet. But it’s obvious.
What the science does say about the brain on veggies
A recent study suggests that 30% to 50% of Alzheimer’s Disease cases are likely preventable by the very same lifestyle choices that reverse heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Here is a list of those changes.
A whole food, plant based diet that excludes saturated fats, ultra processed foods, refined oils, and reduces sodium and added sugars.
Exercise moderately 2.5 hours per week. Every couple of days, make this intense exercise that raises your heart rate for at least ten minutes at a time. Every couple of days, do some weight-bearing or resistance type exercise, lifting light weights, or doing things like pushups and deep squats that really work the muscles.
Keep your brain active. Take classes or courses, read books, solve puzzles, play games, do jigsaws, create, write, paint!
Stay socially active. You must leave the house to hang out with your friends and family and not stay home and become a hermit.
Reduce stress. A daily 15-minute silent meditation can help with this. The exercise you’re doing will help too. And develop the ability to let go of the things that you can’t change and things it’s not your job to change. Nurture acceptance. When hard times come, explore them for the wisdom they always bring, mine them for their purpose, and then let them go. Know hard times always pass, and good times always return.
Get good sleep. I know from experience this is easier said than done. Things that help are clean sheets, a made bed, a cool room, some white noise. I like to open the bedroom window this time of year so the peepers can sing me to sleep.
Lay off the booze and cigarettes. There’s no point in going to the trouble of eating healthily if we’re poisoning ourselves at the same time. So eliminate the cigs and beer. They’re not worth the years they steal from our lives.
Dr. Dean Ornish adds this final tip. Protect your head, wear a helmet when it’s called for, wear your seatbelt in the car.
What I think
I saw a study where they bred foxes to be more docile. An unintended consequence was that the more docile the foxes became, the more brown their color, and the less red. They also developed a bark. This ocurred within only a few generations.
It’s interesting that the red color of the foxes’ fur is associated with more aggression, the brown with more friendliness and calm. There’s something there. It’s not just our own associations that make red seem like an angrier color. There’s some science behind it, too. And a lot of psychology I don’t have time to look up for you right now, but do a little digging. You’ll find it.
I think our brains change for the better in multiple ways on a plant-based diet. I think one of the many unintended side effects of these changes is that we become more empathic, kinder, clearer headed. Less red, more brown. I think another unintended change is that green labels on food products become more appealing to veggie-powered brains, and red labels on food products become a little more off-putting.
What do you think?
Sources
Ornish diet ranked first for heart health by U.S. news: Diet inventor explains what makes it so heart-healthy. (2012, January 6). HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ornish-diet-heart-health-us-news_n_1188205
The Vegan Society. (2019). History. The Vegan Society. https://www.vegansociety.com/about-us/history
University of Southern California. "Poor diet, plus Alzheimer's gene, may fuel disease." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 13 June 2017. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170613102059
Wheless, E. (2024, May 6). Impossible foods first campaign since rebrand embraces meat culture with plants. Ad Age; Ad Age. https://adage.com/article/marketing-news-strategy/impossible-foods-first-campaign-rebrand-aimed-meat-eaters/2557431