Day thirtytwo begins

OK, so I was wrong. I reached the one month milestone last night at 12:00 midnight.

Midnight on January 1 to midnight on February 1. One month. Yeah that's it.

So what have I learned in this month?

1. I can definitely lose weight on a vegan diet. Especially if I stick to whole food and stay away from salt, added sugar, refined carbs and refined oils. The essence of the diet is whole, natural, plant based foods as close to their raw state as possible.
   
2. I like to eat this way. I am missing animal food products less and less. There are some very delicious and enjoyable foods that I can eat on this diet.
3. Trying to emulate and replace animal products with phony look-alike vegan products is foolish. The boca burgers, phony vegan hot dogs, cheese, chicken and such are yucky. Simply let that go. Learn to enjoy pineapple, kiwi, eggplant, and the like. There is really nothing to be said for trying to hold on to experience of eating animal products.
   
4. My skin and joints love this stuff. I could not wear my wedding ring when I started on this diet, and now it if falling off of me. My level of pain is vastly reduced. My skin is clearing up in multiple locations in my body. As I continue to work through the program, I have no doubt at this point that I will resolve all of my remaining health issues.
5. Yoga is a nice addition to the program. Especially Bikram yoga. While Bikram is extremely arrogant (he basically thinks his form of yoga is the only "true" yoga), his program is still genius. The folks who are geniuses often turn out to be arrogant as well. The heat of Bikram helps with detox, cleanses the skin, and helps with the itching and scaling of psoriasis.
6. Fasting helps. I have made breakthroughs on both fasts. They were uncomfortable and boring, but worth the effort.
7. The process of overcoming the strongholds of addiction in your life makes you a better and stronger person. You can overcome other areas as well once you have given up unhealthy and addictive food. In the end, you become a better, more loving, and whole person.

The last lesson is perhaps the most surprising. I did not expect that.

I have learned a lot as well about nutrition generally and about the policy and marketing of food in this country. In the process, I have come to know that the issue of diet and nutrition may be the most critical issue we face. Many other issues hinge on that one. Medicare/Medicaid. Rising health care costs, and their resulting impact on the American economy. Exponentially rising rates of cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and the like. Looked at as a single vector of costs to society, the unhealthy standard American diet makes the costs of alcohol, illicit drugs and tobacco look cheap.

And we hear nothing about it. That's the amazing thing. I am closing in on the end of the book The China Study, which explains in graphic terms why we are hearing nothing from the media or politicians on the issue of diet and nutrition. The excuses are:

1. There is a countervailing study for every study showing a link between diet and disease. There is no mistake here. Every time a correctly designed study is performed which shows a relationship between animal products and disease, another poorly designed study is performed which shows no such relationship. The Nurses Study is a good example. 100% of the nurses in this study were daily consumers of animal products. They attempted to isolate a single nutrient, fat, as the source of the relationship between diet and disease. The group which ate a low fat diet did so by replacing high fat animal products (red meat, full fat dairy) with low fat alternatives (white meat chicken, low fat and fat free dairy). It's kind of like trying to correlate the rate of lung cancers among smokers to whether their cigarettes were menthol or not. It's simply nonsense. There were no vegans or vegetarians in the study. Further, $100 million of our tax dollars were spent to conduct this study which "proved that there is no relationship between diet and disease." There's your tax dollars at work for you.
2. In the moments in which the animal products advocates admit that there might actually be a relationship between animal product consumption and disease, they say "But no one would want to do that." In other words, no one would want to change their diet in order to avoid cancer, heart disease, autoimmune diseases and the like. This is an extremely ignorant and misguided position. I was an enthusiastic carnivore. I could consume 30 - 40 ounces of steak at a sitting. But I was also so eaten up with psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis that I seriously contemplated suicide as a way of ending my misery. Would I be "willing" to change my life style to get rid of psoriasis? Hell, yes! Many, many people are as miserable as I was, and would make the same choice if simply given the correct information.
   
3. Some of the resistance is due to the death of a loved one of the scientists involved. They react with the anger phase of grief at the suggestion that a simple lifestyle change could have spared the life of their loved one. They need to get over this. I had the same thing happen to me. I tried to get my mother to change her diet to overcome cancer. She wouldn't do it and I lost her to cancer a few months later. Does this anger me? Yes, it does. Do I resist the message of promoting vegan diet to resolve these issues? Of course not. This is another ignorant and irrational position.
4. Some scientists are simply sold out to special interests. Effectively, they are whores who will say whatever the highest bidder would like. There are not very many of these but they do a great deal of damage. The objective of the industry is to create confusion, in the same manner as the tobacco industry a generation ago. As long as they have a credible expert with many letters after his or her name who can contradict whatever the scientific truth is (assuming the truth is negative to the consumption of their product), then the public gets a confusing contradictory message. In the process, they continue to maintain their current habits. It takes a cohesive, coherent message to cause the public to change. Eventually, we got that with tobacco and the rates of consumption of tobacco have declined as a result
5. There is a lot of money involved. Folks spend a couple of hours a day eating and spend a significant portion of their income doing so. They also die, and in the process of dying, they have enormous health costs. Trillions of dollars are involved. The treatment of cancer alone is a $500 billion per year industry. That's just cancer. Factor in heart disease, autoimmune disease, and so forth, and we are talking trillions of dollars here. These are costs that we could avoid or dramatically reduce. In the process, we would take enormous amounts of revenue out of the hands of companies that have huge lobbying and marketing budgets. They will not give up those revenues willingly.
6. What is called for is a comprehensive reform of nutritional policy. No one in government is talking about this and they should be.
   

My plans for the current month are to continue to diet and fast as I have in January. By the end of February, I will hit 60 days. That was the period Dr. F. prescribed to see significant results. I am already seeing those results, but expect more. I will continue to update this blog as I have been.

More later.