By John Mackey
My Personal Takeaways →This book presents the case for a whole-foods, mostly plant-based way of eating as a practical path to better health, longevity, and disease prevention. It combines evidence, implementation strategies, and meal-planning guidance so the approach is sustainable in everyday life.
By John Mackey, Alona Pulde, and Matthew Lederman
The evidence is overwhelming at this point. You eat more plants, you eat less other stuff, you live longer.”
We devote more time to procuring food and eating than we do to any other life-sustaining activity except breathing and sleeping. Food is one of our greatest sources of pleasure, and it is one we share with those we love. We eat as a family, a community, a tribe, nourishing our bodies at the same time that we nourish our relationships. Indeed, dining together releases oxytocin, the “love hormone” that stimulates greater human connectivity. While every species must eat, the human imagination has imbued the simple acts of preparing and consuming food with a whole world of emotion and meaning. Food can express love, gratitude, compassion, creativity, and identity. Historically it has formed a building block of culture—cementing alliances, capturing the unique character of a people, marking significant events. Food is celebration. Food is connection.
Yet for millions of people, food is also synonymous with stress, weight gain, neurosis, confusion, and even disease. Americans today have the potential to be the healthiest human beings ever to have walked this earth, but we are quite the opposite. 69% of US adults are overweight and 36% are obese, and these numbers have been steadily rising over the past fifty years.
According to a 2015 survey, 77% of Americans are actively trying to eat healthier and researchers estimate that more than 50% of the population is “on a diet” at any given time. We are eating fewer calories and drinking fewer sugary sodas, and obesity rates may have finally peaked.
You wouldn’t expect to be able to play a sport or a musical instrument very skillfully without dedicated study and practice. The same applies to eating. Just because you’ve been doing it all your life doesn’t mean you’ve mastered the art of self-nourishment. You may just be eating the way your parents brought you up to eat, or the way your friends eat, without deeply thinking about whether it will help you to achieve your own health and life goals.
A skillful eater is one who has studied the best of what nutritional science can teach us about food and the way it affects our bodies. She knows how to see past the fog of confusion created by the media and the latest diet fads. A skillful eater makes informed decisions every day about what he puts in his mouth. And his tastes have evolved, along with his understanding, so that what he loves to eat and what’s good for him to eat are one and the same.
As Walter Willett, MD, chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, and Patrick J. Skerrett, MA, confirm, there are “enough solid strands of evidence from reliable sources to weave simple but compelling recommendations about diet.”
A whole foods, mostly plant-based diet is the optimum diet for health, vitality, and longevity. What is a whole foods, plant-based diet? Put simply, it is a diet that prioritizes eating whole or unprocessed plant foods; minimizes meat, fish, dairy products, and eggs; and eliminates highly processed foods. As you’ll see, this is not necessarily a vegetarian or vegan diet. We suggest that you eat a whole foods, ninety-plus percent (90+%) plant-based diet, which means keeping animal foods (meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products) to 10% or less of your calories. Most importantly, the Whole Foods Diet is not about deprivation, limitation, and loss of pleasure. This is a dietary approach that is inclusive and can be customized for individual needs and preferences. Do you feel attracted to the Mediterranean diet, the Paleo approach, the gluten-free lifestyle, or the vegan ethos? All of these dietary philosophies can be adapted to fit into a Whole Foods Diet framework. Within the parameters of a whole foods, 90+% plant-based diet there is tremendous flexibility to create meal after meal that satisfies your needs, nourishes your body, and delights your senses.
In fact, when Dr. David Katz, a respected researcher in the field and founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, was asked to compare the medical evidence for and against each of the major dietary trends in the West today—including Paleo, Mediterranean, low fat, low carb, low glycemic, vegetarian, and vegan—his conclusion was this: “A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention.” In 2015, together with the nonprofit Oldways, Katz convened twenty-one leading nutritionists of varying persuasions—from plant-based advocates such as Dr. Dean Ornish to the father of the Paleo movement, S. Boyd Eaton—to seek “common ground” on dietary best practices. While the assembled experts didn’t take it quite as far as Katz’s own review, their recommendations pointed in the same direction: “A healthy dietary pattern is higher in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, low- or nonfat dairy, seafood, legumes, and nuts; moderate in alcohol (among adults); lower in red and processed meats; and low in sugar-sweetened foods and drinks and refined grains.” Despite some inherent differences, the experts were not so far apart after all. Almost no one argues, for example, that we should eat highly processed foods, and just about everyone agrees that fruits and vegetables are vital to human health, and we should consume a great deal more of them.
The science may still be limited, incomplete, even deficient in a few ways, but it is our contention that, approached with an unbiased mind, it speaks with a clear and consistent voice, telling us that the best diet for health and longevity is a whole foods, plant-based diet.
“Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”
But the beautiful thing about a whole foods, plant-based diet is that if you really follow those first two instructions and eat food, mostly plants, it’s hard to eat too much. You’ll naturally find yourself satisfied and nourished without over-consuming calories, and you’ll experience the joy of no longer having to worry about portion control.
A whole food means an unprocessed food—a food that is still close to the form in which it grew. It has not been broken down into its component parts and refined into a different form. It’s real food. As Pollan puts it, “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”
A good definition of a whole food, then, might be a food that retains all its original edible parts, and has not been altered by the addition of other processed ingredients. Once again, Greger offers a succinct summation: “I like to think of ‘unprocessed’ as nothing bad added, nothing good taken away.” This is by far the best definition we’ve come across, so with thanks to Greger, we will adopt it for the course of this book. By this measure you can throw your bag of steel-cut oats or rolled oats in the cart with no further thought, but we hope you will pass by the sugary oatmeal cookies without a second glance.
Whole Foods: are close to their original state spoil faster are things your great-grandparents would have recognized as food don’t usually have ingredient lists, or, if they do, have short ones are often sold without packaging are often found around the perimeter of the grocery store Highly Processed Foods: bear little resemblance to their original state do not spoil easily are things your great-grandparents probably wouldn’t recognize have (often long) ingredient lists are packaged or boxed are often found in the center of the grocery store
To be clear, cooking is a form of processing, but it’s also a minimal one. We’re not advocating a raw-foods diet. Cooking is a wonderful human invention that often enhances the benefits of foods, makes them easier to digest, and in some cases releases more nutrients. As a general rule, the foods we choose to eat, whether raw or cooked, should be as close as possible to the way they came off the tree, vine, or root.
“We should all be eating fruits and vegetables as if our lives depended on it—because they do.”
Contributions: Dr. Greger claims to read every issue of every English-language nutrition journal in the world “so busy folks like you don’t have to.” What’s more, he distills the information into easy-to-understand daily blogs and videos on his website NutritionFacts.org, a paragon of trustworthy information about health and diet. Fun facts: Dr. Greger’s grandmother was a patient at the Pritikin Longevity Center in the late 1970s. After multiple heart surgeries, she’d been declared beyond medical help at age sixty-five, but after switching to a plant-based diet, she lived another thirty-one years, inspiring her grandson’s passion for food as medicine.
As you’ll see, observations of the world’s longest-lived populations, along with various other compelling studies, make a persuasive argument for significantly reducing one’s animal food intake, particularly when coupled with the growing evidence for the link between high levels of animal foods and chronic disease. Plant-based diets have been shown to prevent and reverse many of the chronic conditions that afflict millions of Americans, including diabetes and heart disease.
To someone who is just trying to “get my protein,” there’s no difference between a highly processed protein powder made from an isolated part of a soybean and the same amount of protein eaten in the form of whole beans. The all-important distinction between whole foods and processed foods is lost when we look at foods only as their nutrient components.
You could attempt to identify all the nutrients within a given food, a blueberry, for example, and put them into a pill, but it would never have the same healthy effects on your body as eating a bowl of blueberries.
“Even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study,” writes Pollan, “a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another.” The good news, however, is that you don’t necessarily need to understand it all if you simply eat real food. Your body will break it down into nutrients in the way it has evolved to do.
Imagine finding a way to eat that made you feel fantastic—nourished, vital, and satisfied. Ideally, it would be flexible enough to allow for your particular preferences but clear in its basic parameters. This diet would be simple enough to appeal to your common sense, and be backed by irrefutable science. You could just as easily explain it to your kids as you could defend it to your friends (even the most opinionated). Now imagine being able to maintain a healthy weight without having to worry about portion sizes and never having to go on another crash diet. What if this way of eating could actually prevent common ailments; protect you from heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes; and even reverse existing chronic conditions? The Whole Foods Diet offers all of this and more. It’s a sustainable, healthy way to eat and live. All of us authors and the many doctors, researchers, and dietitians featured in this book love food. We are foodies at heart, but not just any kind of foodie. We are Whole Foodies. A Whole Foodie loves great-tasting, life-enhancing food.
“It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears.”
Unfortunately, food processing has wreaked havoc with these instincts so that many of us can no longer trust the signals our bodies are giving us. As long as we are eating highly processed, refined foods, we are likely to feel hungry even when we’ve eaten more calories than we need, and we won’t experience satiety until we’ve overeaten.
Here’s what we know about how satiety works. There are “receptors” in the stomach and digestive tract that measure the food we ingest in several ways. One thing they measure is the weight and bulk of the food, or the amount of “stretch” that occurs in the stomach to make room for the food. This is why foods containing a lot of fiber fill us up more—they take up more space and trigger a signal to the brain that says enough has been eaten. Foods that have been refined and processed (with fiber and water removed) take up less space, so even though they contain more calories, the message does not get back to your brain that you’ve had enough. You also have “receptors” that ensure you are consuming calories and not just getting stretch without caloric content. When you’re eating whole plant foods, these tend to work quite accurately, together with the stretch receptors, to ensure that you get the right amount of food and not too much. Over the last few decades, however, the rise of processed food has fundamentally altered this algorithm. Processing tends to increase the calorie density of any given food by: removing water, reducing or removing fiber, or adding sugar and/or fat.
For example, corn, which contains 500 calories per pound, becomes corn oil, at 4,000 calories per pound. A sweet potato, which weighs in at 389 calories per pound, gets cut up and deep-fried in that oil to become sweet potato chips, at 2,400 calories per pound. Beets, at just 200 calories per pound, become refined sugar, at 1,800 calories per pound.
This is why one of the most important pieces of weight-loss advice you’ll ever hear is, Don’t drink your calories! Those extra calories accumulate over time. Three thousand five hundred additional calories equals one additional pound of fat, so if you overshoot your needs by as little as one hundred calories a meal (two chicken nuggets) and you do this three times a day, you will gain a pound of fat every two weeks, which adds up to more than twenty-five pounds in a year.
It’s not only processed foods that mess with our satiety signals. Animal foods also lack fiber while being calorie dense. Today’s factory-farmed, grain-fed animals bear little resemblance to the lean wild game that our ancestors might have feasted on after an occasional hunt. When we eat their meats, cooked in oil, alongside other calorie-dense, fiber-deficient foods like white bread, fries, ketchup, and so on, it’s a recipe for obesity.
It also clarifies why dieting, which relies on portion control and calorie restriction, rarely works. It’s not because you lack self-control or willpower; it’s because the environment in which you live is making foods available to you that subvert your body’s natural instincts and trick you into feeling hungry when you’ve already consumed more calories than you need. Hunger is a powerful survival mechanism, and it is very hard to defeat it through willpower alone. After all, your brain thinks that the lack of stretch means you are actually calorie deficient and starving, so it continues sending hunger signals in an attempt to keep you alive. Sooner or later you’re likely to respond to it by eating more.
Would you like to know how to lose weight without having to give up anything? Here’s the secret: Eat more vegetables! Add at least one extra serving of veggies (or fruits) to what you would normally eat at each meal, and be sure to eat those before anything else, and you’ll discover the veggie paradox—the more veggies you eat, the more weight you lose (assuming you don’t cover those veggies in fatty dressings or sauces or cook them in oils). When you eat whole fruits and veggies, you fill yourself up with low-calorie, fiber-rich, nutrient-rich foods that will leave you less hungry for processed foods or animal foods. A good strategy is to start every meal with a big salad or a bowl of vegetable soup (or a bowl of fruit, if you prefer, at breakfast).
And if you want to lose fat weight safely, you must eat a diet of predominantly unrefined foods that are nutrient- and fiber-rich.
Have you ever wondered why kale suddenly became such a popular health food a few years back? It was partly due to Fuhrman, who awarded this rather tough leafy green the top score in his ANDI (Aggregate Nutrient Density Index) system for measuring nutrient density, a perfect 1,000. When Whole Foods Market started using his system in stores, sales of kale skyrocketed. Kale (like other dark green leafy cruciferous vegetables) is packed with phytochemicals and fiber but low in calories; hence it has an extraordinarily high ratio of nutrients to calories.
“Don’t call it a diet. Just change what you eat.”
“And yet people all over America are trying to use fads and tricks to speed up their metabolic rates so they can eat more calories without getting fat. That doesn’t make any sense! By speeding up your metabolism, you’re aging yourself!”
Fuhrman’s concept of nutrient density is a powerful tool for shifting your focus away from what you shouldn’t eat and toward all the wonderful foods you should eat in order to maximize your nutrients.
Exercise has been shown to improve cardiovascular health, reduce blood sugar, improve bone health, and increase one’s overall sense of well-being, and it may even increase satiety and suppress the desire to overeat.
One of the hallmarks of the longest-lived cultures in the world is that they all engage in “natural movement”—walking, gardening, getting up and down from the floor, herding goats in hilly terrain. They are not necessarily lifting weights at the gym, but they are keeping their bodies strong and flexible.
A whole foods, plant-based diet improves your cardiovascular system, boosts your power, and speeds up your recovery rate. Some people fear that they’ll lose strength without large amounts of animal protein, but the many plant-based athletes out there—from Olympian track and field medalist Carl Lewis to tennis superstars Venus Williams and Novak Djokovic to ultra-athletes Rich Roll and Scott Jurek—are testimony that this is not the case.
Consider this scenario for a moment. If someone offered you a pill that had been shown to prevent and reverse heart disease and type 2 diabetes; lower cholesterol, blood pressure, and body weight; significantly reduce your risk of getting multiple types of cancer; extend your life span; and make you look and feel great, would you hesitate to take it? It may not come in a bottle, but, as you will see in this book, a whole foods, plant-based diet has been shown to do all these things.
On the other hand, consider the following scientific findings. High consumption of red meat and processed meats has been connected with greater risk of death from all causes, including chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Eating large amounts of animal protein has been correlated with higher incidences of cancer and mortality. More than a thousand studies on bowel cancer risk have confirmed that red meat increases risk while high-fiber plant foods decrease it. Processed meats are particularly scary, with significant studies linking them to stomach cancer, breast cancer, and colon cancer, and the World Health Organization classifying them as a carcinogen.
Career-defining work was known as The China Study (or The China-Cornell-Oxford Project, to give it its full title)—a massive twenty-year epidemiological study that examined the eating habits and diseases of 6,500 people in sixty-five Chinese provinces. A 1990 New York Times article called it “the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease” and reported that even its early findings were “challenging much of American dietary dogma.”
“People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease.… People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease.” Campbell would once have seemed an unlikely candidate to become an advocate for plant-based eating. Growing up on a dairy farm in the beautiful Virginia countryside, the young Campbell believed that “the good old American diet is the best there is. The more dairy, meat, and eggs we consumed, the better.”
The survey—which had collected data from 880 million Chinese citizens, or 96% of the population—showed fascinating patterns. Cancer rates, it revealed, were often geographic in nature. In some rural areas there was little or no evidence of the disease, while other regions, particularly urban ones, showed dramatic increases. Inspired by the breadth of this data, Campbell and Junshi proposed an extensive survey of dietary and lifestyle habits.
“When we were done,” Campbell writes, “we had more than 8,000 statistically significant associations between lifestyle, diet, and disease variables.”
One key finding of The China Study is the association of a high-fiber diet with a decrease in certain cancers, including colon cancer. Chinese consumption of dietary fiber averaged three times what is typically found in American diets. Fiber is a critical component of a whole foods, plant-based diet. It is the substance that gives structure to the cell walls of plants in the same way that bones give structure to the bodies of animals. Because of this, high fiber intake is one of the markers of a plant-heavy diet.
It turns out that fiber plays a critical role in feeding our good gut bacteria. We may not digest it, but they do! It also performs a cleansing, or “scrubbing,” function. Fiber makes everything work better and move better as well. It improves digestion, stabilizes blood sugar levels, detoxifies, keeps our pH low, and helps with the excretion of unwanted substances from the body.
And put down the Metamucil—there is good evidence that merely adding fiber as a supplement does not bring with it the same health benefits. Your body needs the real thing—which only comes in whole plant foods such as fruits, vegetables, legumes, beans, and whole grains.
Many of the Adventists are inspired by the biblical verse Genesis 1:29: “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”
In the first Adventist study, conducted in the 1970s and ’80s in California, more than thirty-four thousand people were followed for fourteen years. The first thing that jumps out about the data is that the Adventists who ate a primarily plant-based diet—the vegans, lacto-ovo vegetarians, and pesco-vegetarians (collectively referred to by researchers as “the vegetarians”)—were the longest-lived populations, not just among their fellow Adventists, but among all Californians, and possibly in the world! In fact, Loma Linda, California—where there is a large community of Adventists—has been identified as one of the world’s five longevity hot spots, the “Blue Zones,” which we will discuss in chapter 4. For now, let us just say that the Adventists have a life span worth studying—the vegetarian men and women live to be about eighty-three and eighty-six, respectively (compared to seventy-six and eighty-one for the average American). And if you just look at those who also had healthy lifestyles, meaning no smoking, regular exercising, and so on, the average life span jumps to eighty-seven and ninety. That is an extra eleven years of life for men and nine for women!
Part of what make the Adventist Health Studies so remarkable is the geographical context of the population. For example, Loma Linda, California, is hardly tucked away on an isolated island, cut off from contemporary society’s dietary habits. No, it is right in the middle of southern California’s cultural melting pot, just south of the San Bernardino freeway. In other words, they live among us. And yet, healthwise, they might as well exist on a different planet. Indeed, their health outcomes are like a bright shining vision of possibility in the midst of America’s chronic disease dystopia.
The results from that study showed that Adventist meat-eaters had the biggest waistlines, and had a higher death rate than their vegetarian Adventist counterparts. They also tended to have worse overall dietary habits, including greater consumption of highly processed foods such as sugar, soda, and refined grains. This raises the question of whether it was the animal foods or the processed foods or both that led to shorter lives in this cohort. Although we cannot tease that out with this study, what we can tell is that the lacto-ovo vegetarians, the pesco-vegetarians, and the vegans all had significantly lower mortality rates compared to the meat-eaters.
It’s important to understand that one can adopt a vegan or vegetarian diet (perhaps for ethical reasons) and still end up eating very unhealthy foods. Merely avoiding animal foods is not the answer to good health. Remember our first dietary principle: choose whole foods over processed foods. Don’t be a junk-food vegan or vegetarian!
“Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.” Human beings want to live long lives, but they also want to live healthy lives—to be vital, able-bodied, and relatively free of chronic disease. The lure of longevity is certainly less sweet if it only means extending the pain and suffering of a growing list of physical ailments. The power of a whole foods, plant-based diet lies in its capacity to fulfill our twin aspirations to extend our life span and our health span.
“The longest-lived people eat a plant-based diet. They eat meat but only as a condiment or a celebration. Nothing they eat has a plastic wrapper.”
Research into genetics and longevity, including the well-known Longitudinal Study of Aging Danish Twins, had suggested that genetics account for only 20% to 30% of life span, with the rest due to environmental and lifestyle factors.
Japan as a nation boasts the world’s longest life spans, but Okinawans leave their mainland compatriots in the dust. This relatively small tropical island region southwest of mainland Japan has one of the highest ratios of centenarians—6.5 in 10,000 live to be 100. The islanders over sixty-five enjoy the world’s highest life expectancy. They have lower rates of disease than Americans in just about every category, with only half the dementia of those of a similar age. The next Blue Zone that Buettner identified was on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. If you picture easy-living centenarians taking long naps in hammocks near the turquoise sea, think again—the Blue Zone is specifically an inland region known as Ogliastra, the most mountainous area of the island. The pastoral people of these highlands tend sheep and eke out a simple living amid an unforgiving terrain. It’s not exactly an easy life, but it is a long and rewarding one, particularly for men—the longest-lived males on earth are those who tread the rugged paths of Sardinia’s mountains.
Among all the lifestyle factors that distinguish the Blue Zones, one of the most significant is diet.
While at first glance the plates of these different peoples might look quite different, a closer look reveals many common patterns. As one example, Buettner points to “Greens and beans. No matter where you go in the Blue Zones, they are eating a lot of green vegetables and about a cup of beans a day.” In one extended study in Ikaria, a cohort was followed for several years, and the researchers found that those who were doing the best at surviving were eating about a half cup of greens and a cup of beans every day. The types of beans and greens vary, as do the foods that accompany them.
The Sardinians love fava beans, chickpeas, fennel, and zucchini.
In the neighboring Mediterranean Blue Zone of Ikaria, the traditional diet includes a variety of wild mountain greens found on the island, along with chickpeas and black-eyed peas.
The Nicoyans feast on black beans and locally available green vegetables, as part of a diet rich in maize (corn), squash, yams, rice, and tropical fruits.
The Adventists, as discussed in chapter 3, eat a wide variety of beans, lentils, green vegetables, some nuts, and a variety of other vegetables.
Among these longest-lived people, only a small percentage of the Adventists cut out animal foods completely. Every other Blue Zone diet includes meat or fish of various kinds, but in very limited amounts. The longest-lived women in the world, in Okinawa, ate a little fish and pork. The longest-lived men in the world, in Sardinia, ate pork, goat, and lamb, but traditionally only on special occasions. And perhaps the overall longest-lived people in the entire world that we know of are the “vegetarians” of Loma Linda, eating mostly fruits, vegetables, unprocessed starch foods, beans, and nuts, with small amounts of animal products added by some as well.
Olive oil is one of the most calorie-dense foods that exists (four thousand calories per pound), and has lost all the healthy fiber and nearly all the nutrients of the olive in the extraction process.
It is also worth noting that the Blue Zones consume very little milk or milk products, and when they do it tends to come from sheep and goats. Cow’s milk and cheese are almost entirely absent, with the exception of the vegetarians and meat-eaters among the Loma Linda Adventists.
Another notable feature of the Blue Zones diets is not what they eat, but what they drink. Most Blue Zones keep it simple—water, coffee, tea, and a little wine. They rarely drink fruit juices, and completely avoid the sodas, sports drinks, energy drinks, sugary cocktails, Frappuccinos, and other calorie-laden beverages common in the United States. Adventists recommend seven glasses of water a day, and are the only Blue Zone population that abstains from alcohol. Okinawans tend to have a glass of tea near them constantly, often green tea, which has been shown to have all kinds of health benefits. Ikarians, Sardinians, and Nicoyans all love to drink coffee.
They were not deliberately following a “longevity diet” or restricting certain foods because they perceived them as “bad.” “Longevity happened to these people,” Buettner explains. “They didn’t seek it out.” They were certainly not reading the latest nutritional science and trying to apply it in their kitchens, gardens, and dining rooms. In these often-remote regions of the world, whole healthy plant foods were simply the cheapest and easiest to get. These people valued convenience in their lives as much as we do, and their unusual health outcomes are largely due to lifestyles that were traditional and easy to maintain. From walking to gardening to eating to cooking to socializing to living with a strong sense of faith and purpose, they followed the patterns that fit conveniently into their community and culture. Their way of life, from dawn to dusk, just happened to also support healthy, positive, life-enhancing behaviors. And they lived in tight-knit social networks that consistently reinforced the same.
The Blue Zones represent a rare combination of cultural, geographical, and historical conditions. They were lucky enough to benefit from the medical breakthroughs of modernity, but remote enough to escape its nutritional downsides.
There are unlikely to be more Blue Zones discovered, Buettner says, although he continues to search. And the existing five are already under pressure—from globalization, development, Western eating habits, and the “diseases of affluence” that come with them. In Okinawa, people under sixty now have higher rates of chronic disease than Americans!
As the Adventists demonstrate, the average person’s life expectancy could increase by ten to twelve years by adopting a Blue Zones lifestyle.
The key lesson from the Blue Zones that underlies these efforts is this: deep and lasting change happens through what Buettner calls “nudges and defaults” rather than organized, top-down intervention. What the Blue Zones show us is that there are a thousand small ways in which our lives can be set up to nudge us in the direction of healthy decisions. They also show that convenience matters—we need to ensure that our defaults become the healthy options, not the disease-promoting ones.
With this in mind, Buettner and his team focus on improving the options on the menu in local restaurants, increasing access to community gardens, installing new walking and biking paths, encouraging grocery stores to put healthy foods right near the checkouts, enrolling local schools in Blue Zone projects, making it possible for more kids to walk to school, setting up social support networks for friends and families, banning smoking in public places, encouraging volunteering and other purposeful activities, and setting up workshops, social events, potlucks, and so on. All of these changes create what Buettner calls “a healthy swarm of nudges and defaults” that inspire better eating and better living.
“When diet is wrong, medicine is of no use. When diet is correct, medicine is of no need.”
Killing more than 375,000 Americans a year, heart disease remains the number-one cause of death in the United States. It is also the leading cause of death worldwide, taking more than 17.3 million lives annually.
Heart disease, or coronary heart disease, is an umbrella term for a number of distinct but often-related conditions, including high blood pressure or hypertension, heart attack, stroke, and heart failure. Many of these conditions stem from a hardening and/or narrowing of the arteries and their endothelial cells (arteriosclerosis or atherosclerosis), caused by a buildup on the artery walls of plaques, which are made up of fats, cholesterol, and other substances. When these plaques rupture or burst, they can trigger a blood clot, blocking the artery and causing a heart attack or stroke. The narrowing of the arteries also contributes to an increase in blood pressure.
Genetics may load the gun, as they say, but diet pulls the trigger.
“I don’t understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open.”
They showed that heart disease is reversible. And they did it with lifestyle interventions that had no negative side effects. Simply by stopping eating foods that were clogging up their arteries and instead eating healthy plant-based fare (and in Ornish’s program, practicing relaxation techniques, exercising, and participating in a support group), their patients began to heal—at any age. Their remarkable turnarounds show that it’s never too late when it comes to heart disease.
“The fact is, there’s only one diet ever that has been proven to reverse the number-one killer of men and women in this country—a whole foods, plant-based diet. So shouldn’t that be the default recommended diet until proven otherwise? Even if that’s all it could do—reverse heart disease—the whole debate should be over!”
A whole foods, plant-based diet has been shown to significantly affect a whole host of other chronic conditions, including type 2 diabetes, colon cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and Parkinson’s disease.
When you go to your doctor and are told that your cholesterol is elevated, or that your blood pressure is too high, you’re likely to be prescribed medications to bring those numbers down. It’s important to understand that those numbers are indicators of the disease, not the disease itself. The medications will adjust the indicators, rather than addressing the underlying causes of the problems. This is a common practice in modern medicine. Many doctors and drug companies speak about high cholesterol as if it’s a disease in and of itself, when in fact, it is not. The disease is damaged arteries; high cholesterol is just a warning sign.
Imagine that you have a leaky pipe in your roof. You can’t see the pipe, but one day you notice a water mark on the ceiling—an ugly stain spreading across your paintwork. That mark is not your real problem—the leaky pipe is. If all you do is repaint the ceiling, you don’t fix the problem, you just remove the evidence. You may even forget, for a while, that there’s anything wrong, until you wake up one morning to a flooded living room. In the same way, “improving your numbers” through medication alone can lead to a false sense of security about the underlying condition.
Currently the best scientific evidence we have tells us that meat, eggs, cheese, dairy, and yes, the saturated fats and animal proteins that go along with them should be minimized in a healthy diet—along with highly processed food and added sugars. Our recommendation is to limit animal products to 10% or less of your calories.
“No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.”
Diabetes refers to a condition in which blood sugar (glucose) cannot get into the cells and as a result starts to build up in the bloodstream.
My road to health hasn’t been easy, and to be totally honest, I hated the food for about two months until my taste buds changed. People told me that would happen, but I didn’t really believe it until one day suddenly the food started to taste amazing. Meals with no salt, no oil, and no processed foods can and will taste good if you give them a chance.
Never underestimate the body’s ability to heal, given the right foods.
Unfortunately, the picture painted by the glycemic index can be misleading when it comes to health, and its utility has been called into question by the American Diabetes Association, the American Heart Association, and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. A low glycemic index rating for a food does not mean that that food is a healthy choice.
It’s also important to remember that we usually eat foods in combinations, and one food can change or balance out the glycemic effect of another.
“The best lies contain a kernel of truth.”
“Throughout civilization and around the world, six foods have provided our primary fuel—barley, corn, millet, potatoes, rice, and wheat.” Beans, sweet potatoes, and oats could probably be made honorary members of this list.
Perhaps most importantly, starch foods can be very satiating. As a result we tend to consume fewer calories when we adopt a whole foods diet that is rich in starches. These foods also provide us with a particular type of fiber, resistant starch that has all kinds of intestinal benefits. They are full of vitamins and minerals, a source of both nutrients and energy.
McDougall has little patience for vegan or plant-based diets that emphasize other vegetables at the expense of starches. “People try to eat diets centered around kale, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, and so on,” he declares, “and it doesn’t work! You must have starch as the center of your meal plan. Once you get the starch foods as the centerpiece, then everything works.”
In a whole grain food, the entire wheat kernel is used. If it is whole grain flour, the entire kernel is milled, so it still has the nutrients and fiber. That is far preferable to a refined grain or white flour, where only the endosperm is ground, leaving a starchy carbohydrate with some nutrients, but without many of the other nutritional elements that make a whole grain a nutritional powerhouse.
There is evidence that while whole grain consumption is associated with less abdominal fat in adults, refined grain consumption is just the opposite.
Some foods are labeled as containing whole grains, but check the percentage before you put them in your shopping basket—they may not be 100% whole grain. Others use terms like multigrain, which simply means that they contain more than one type of flour—and they can all be refined. Even those that do actually use whole wheat or whole grain ingredients too often add plenty of other questionable substances—enough to make the whole package a nutritional no-no. This brings us back, once again, to our first rule: choose whole foods instead of highly processed foods. For example, choose brown rice over white, or whole wheat pasta over refined alternatives. Choose whole grain breads, ideally made with coarse-ground flour and with a high ratio of fiber to carbohydrates
Unless you are one of the 2% to 3% with celiac disease, wheat allergy, or gluten sensitivity, you can embrace glutenous whole grains and whole grain products, including wheat, and enjoy all their benefits.
Carbs do not make you fat or sick, so long as they are whole foods
Whole grains, starchy vegetables, and legumes should be the base of your diet. These foods are consistently associated with better health and greater satiety.
Throughout these pages we have been recommending a 90+% plant-based diet, which means up to 10% of calories can come from animal foods—meat, fish, dairy products, eggs, and so on. We do this not as a concession or a compromise, but because we feel that the evidence, from a health perspective, does not clearly show that a 100% plant-based (or vegan) diet is a better choice. Yes, there are studies showing that people on a vegan or vegetarian diet fare far better than people on the Standard American Diet, with its emphasis on highly processed foods and animal foods. We know that heavy animal product consumption is associated with higher rates of mortality. And, as we shared in chapters 5 and 6, diets with little or no animal products have been shown to reverse heart disease and diabetes. But no study has yet compared people who eat a 100% plant-based whole foods diet with those who include up to 10% animal products.
To more skillfully optimize your health potential, we recommend that you make the Essential Eight whole food groups part of your regular diet as well as consider our supplementation recommendations.
To change the way you eat for the long haul, you need to decide how dramatic you want the changes to be and then you need to feel empowered to make those changes.
The optimal human diet for health and longevity is 100% whole foods, 90+% plant-based. Eat lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes, plus some nuts and seeds. Cut out the highly processed foods, especially refined flours, sugars, and oils. And if you choose to eat animal foods, keep them to less than 10% of your calories.
The only time we recommend caution in the category of whole plant foods is with calorie-dense varieties like nuts, seeds, olives, avocados, and dried fruits. While these play a part in a healthy diet, they contain a much higher ratio of calories to weight.
Limit added fats. Keep the “calories from fat” to 20% or less of total calories, and avoid foods high in saturated fat or containing partially hydrogenated oils. Limit added salt. Look for a 1:1 ratio or less of sodium (milligrams) to calories. Limit added sugars. Make sure they don’t appear in the first five ingredients. Avoid refined grains. Choose grain products that are 100% whole grain.
As Dr. Garth Davis writes, “It turns out fruits and vegetables are perfectly packaged. The sugars in fruit are designed to work almost like a time-release pill, due to their relationship and binding with the fiber. When you juice, you uncouple this perfect package by removing the fiber.” He adds that in this light, the idea of a prolonged juice fast for detoxification makes little sense, given that “fiber is the most detoxifying substance we can consume. It literally scrubs your insides. You can’t detox without fiber.” Rather than drink a juice, consider blending fruits and vegetables into a smoothie, or, better still, eat them whole.
We recommend, if you choose to eat animal foods, that you follow these guidelines: Choose grass-fed, organic, antibiotic-free meat and dairy products, and pasture-raised chickens and eggs. Choose wild-caught fish and seafood where possible, and avoid those more likely to contain toxins such as mercury—Species to avoid tend to be those that are longer lived and higher up on the food chain, including tuna, swordfish, and king mackerel. Avoid processed meats. The World Health Organization recently categorized processed meats as a Group 1 carcinogen, alongside cigarettes and asbestos. If you decide to eat meat, choose unprocessed forms and stay away from hot dogs, salami, bologna, bacon, ham, and the like.
Bittman created the VB6 (“vegan before six”) movement, encouraging people to eat only plants until their evening meal as a means to better health and weight loss.
First, plants contain protein. After all, how do you think the elephants and giraffes live off of them? Beans and other legumes, whole grains, seeds, nuts, and even green vegetables are all wonderful sources of protein.
Government recommendations are forty-six grams of protein per day for the average woman and fifty-six grams of protein per day for the average man, but the average American woman aged twenty to forty-nine gets more than seventy, and the average man age twenty to forty-nine gets well over one hundred. We may in fact get too much protein, which is not necessarily a good thing. Excess protein can stress systems and make kidneys and liver work too hard, among other things. It’s virtually impossible to be protein deficient if you eat enough whole food calories. Yes, that’s right. If you eat enough whole foods (even just plant foods), you don’t need to worry about protein.
“Our obsessive and mindless overconsumption of protein fits the pattern of addiction, and its health consequences—for individuals and society as a whole—are no less serious in the long term.” We promise you that a whole foods, plant-based diet will not be protein deficient. Plant sources of protein are perfectly adequate. Forget the common myth that while meat is a complete source of protein, rice and beans need to be combined to deliver all the essential amino acids. It doesn’t work like that. Rice or beans, like almost any other whole plant food, are complete in and of themselves. (Check for yourself on any nutrition calculator). Eating lots of whole plant foods not only provides enough protein, it also protects from getting too much, which should be your bigger concern.
The Whole Foods Diet recommends staying away from all refined, extracted oils. That includes canola oil, olive oil, sunflower oil, corn oil, coconut oil, and anything you find beside them on the shelf. For many Americans, that may come as a surprise. Of all the highly processed foods that we tend to eat daily, vegetable oils are not on most people’s list of concerns. We use them for cooking, we douse our salads in them, and these days some people even blend them into their coffee. Many consider certain oils—olive oil and coconut oil in particular—to be health foods, even superfoods. However, there are several problems with oils, starting with them being largely devoid of any nutritional value beyond fat. Oils are nutrient poor. Olives, corn, coconuts, and sunflower seeds all contain nutrients, in their whole food forms. Olive oil, corn oil, coconut oil, and sunflower oil have been extracted in such a way that removes these beneficial nutrients, along with fiber, leaving only empty calories. Extra virgin olive oil and coconut oil barely contain more nutrients than sugar, yet deliver more than double the calories.
Oils are among the most calorie-dense foods on the planet. A single tablespoon of oil contains 120 calories. Because oils contain no fiber, they deliver concentrated energy but no bulk, driving up calorie count without filling the stomach or meeting a nutrient need.
For all these reasons, we recommend for optimum health to avoid all oils. This means being aware of foods that have added oils in the ingredient list, steering clear of fried and sautéed foods, and learning to love oil-free salads. See here for an easy way to make oil-free salad dressing and see here for tips on how to cook easily and efficiently without oil.
If you’re trying to eat a whole foods, plant-based diet, we recommend sticking to fruit to satisfy your sweet tooth. If you want to experiment with whole food desserts, dates make a good sweetener.
There is nothing health-promoting about added sodium other than when it helps get whole plant foods into your body. That being the case, we recommend using as little added sodium as necessary. When you use it, aim to add it to your plate rather than cook with it in a recipe; you’ll get a better bang for your buck because you can taste more and use less.
You may have read recent headlines claiming a glass of wine is better for you than an hour at the gym, tequila is good for your bones, and alcohol can protect against diabetes. While much is made of studies showing possible benefits of alcoholic drinks, wine in particular, we’ve yet to see convincing evidence that they should be considered a health food. And we all know the dangers of alcohol, its addictive properties and the role it plays in too many accidents.
Whatever choices you make around alcohol, keep in mind that it is also high in calories, and may deter efforts at weight loss.
One study estimated that if just half the US population increased fruit and vegetable consumption, approximately 20,000 cancer cases per year could be prevented, while only up to ten cancer cases per year could be caused by the added pesticide consumption.
Many Americans have grown up associating calcium exclusively with dairy products, milk in particular. If you’re concerned that reducing your animal food intake will lead to calcium deficiency, don’t worry. In fact, the body actually absorbs calcium from many plant foods, like kale and broccoli, for instance, more easily than from milk. Even nuts, seeds, and legumes are significant plant sources of calcium that may not be commonly considered.
The one nutrient that is indisputably lacking in a vegan or mostly plant-based diet is vitamin B12. We believe that B12 supplementation should be nonnegotiable for pure vegans and is also likely to be beneficial for those eating 10% or less of their calories from animal foods.
Sweet and earthy yams, hearty winter squashes, tender juicy corn, and even the much-loved potato, as well as all the varieties of tasty, satisfying whole grains can find a regular place on the Whole Foodie plate. In this category we also include grainlike seeds—such as quinoa, millet, amaranth, buckwheat, and teff—which are nutritionally similar to grains.
In fact, not only should you be sure to eat whole grains and starchy vegetables, but they also should make up the bulk of your calorie intake.
Eating whole grains also improves bowel health, helping to maintain regular bowel movements and promote growth of healthy gut bacteria.
Contrary to popular opinion, carbs in the form of whole grains can actually help you lose weight. Whole grains and starchy vegetables leave you feeling full and satisfied, and therefore combat snacking and overeating, preventing you from becoming or remaining overweight.
The legume family includes all the varieties of dried or cooked beans you can find at grocery stores: black, pinto, navy, cannellini, kidney, garbanzo (also known as chickpeas), black-eyed peas, and so on.
Legumes also include soybeans and the foods made from them. Peas and lentils in all their many colors are also legumes. Some varieties, like fava beans, lima beans, English peas, and soybeans (edamame), are eaten fresh.
Most legumes also contain significant amounts of fiber and resistant starch, which helps to regulate bowels, remove toxins, and keep blood sugar levels in check. Beans lower blood pressure and reduce cholesterol.
Scientists agree, having identified legume consumption as “the most important dietary predictor of survival in older people of different ethnicities.”
We recommend that you eat berries regularly—perhaps every day if you enjoy them.
Choose organic berries when possible because conventional varieties often receive an unhealthy dose of pesticides. Frozen berries are a good choice, retaining all the health benefits of the fresh fruit. Be careful with dried berries, such as raisins, dried currants, goji berries, or dried cranberries—although still a healthy choice, the loss of water concentrates them, making them more calorie-dense. Eat them in limited quantities, especially if weight loss is a goal.
Crunchy apples, creamy bananas, juicy peaches, exotic mangoes and papayas, zesty citrus, thirst-quenching melons—the list goes on and on. The only exceptions to our wholehearted encouragement to eat fruit are avocados and olives—both technically fruits but also high in fat, so best consumed in limited quantities when trying to lose weight.
You can have fruit salad for breakfast, snack on an apple, add a peach to a green smoothie, make a mango salsa for tacos, toss orange slices in a salad, bake apples or apricots for a delicious dessert, grill nectarines, and even blend a frozen banana with soy milk for a whole foods, plant-based alternative to ice cream. Frozen banana slices with nut butter are a delicious dessert too.
Zucchini, carrots, peppers, mushrooms, green beans, onions, eggplants, celery, asparagus, and many, many more.
Mary McDougall—best-selling author, teacher, coach, and partner at Dr. McDougall’s Health and Medical Center—has been a leader and pioneer in this regard, creating over three thousand recipes and influencing people around the world with optimum lifestyle practices. Read this: The New McDougall Cookbook.
Many people will do anything—exercise intensely, take pills, even go under the surgeon’s knife—before they will consider changing what’s on their plates. We guard our relationship with food like a jealous lover. Science may convince us that change is a good idea, but science alone won’t persuade us to actually transform what we’re eating, because when it comes to food, we tend to be more emotional than rational. Food is a significant source of happiness in life, and no diet that deprives us of that pleasure for too long is ultimately sustainable.
Whatever diet we consume regularly will begin to taste better to us and provide a similar level of arousal. Once those higher levels of stimulation begin to feel normal (through the process of neuroadaptation), when we go back to eating healthier foods with a lower dopamine surge, we may feel exceptionally “low.” Like drug addicts who can no longer experience the simple joys of life without the artificial stimulation of a cocktail of chemicals, food addicts cannot appreciate the delights of nature’s bounty until the food has been unnaturally concentrated or adulterated with fat, salt, and sugar. They are caught in the “pleasure trap,” and convinced that they will never enjoy eating again if they give up highly processed favorites and replace them with whole foods. So can we escape the pleasure trap? Yes, we can. Our bodies can acclimate back to our normal baseline—it just takes a little time and the right food choices.
The key is to give our palates time to readapt. Lisle and Goldhamer recommend allowing thirty to ninety days for that neuroadaptation to take place and for the palate to become resensitized to the more subtle pleasures of eating whole, natural foods.
Most diets rely on portion control, achieved through willpower. Not only is this a very unpleasant way to live, it’s also quite ineffective. The feeling of deprivation that comes with portion control often makes people more likely to binge on calorie-dense foods.
In fact, you’ll feel even stronger cravings for calorie-dense food because your body feels it needs to make up for a deficit. When you deprive yourself of adequate nourishment, you’re working against your body’s natural instincts. And eventually your starving body will overcome your best intentions to “be good” through willpower, resulting in the binge cycle that dieters know all too well.
Remember, you should feel full and satisfied after you eat, and because you’re eating foods that are less calorie dense, you’ll be able to eat more, not less. Don’t make the mistake of going hungry and increasing the likelihood you’ll experience feelings of deprivation. If you eat whole foods, plant-based meals that include plenty of satiating foods like whole grains, starchy vegetables, and beans and other legumes, you should be able to mitigate the unpleasant experience of “dieting” to a significant degree.
This is why it’s so important to be mindful of what’s driving your cravings. If it’s not hunger, food won’t fill the hole. Just pausing to drink a full glass of water and assess what you really need can make a big difference in the decision you make next. And if you do decide to reach for a comfort food, which we all do once in a while, try to make it a healthier, whole food version. If you find yourself “comfort eating” regularly, it may be an indicator that some unacknowledged emotion or unmet need is lurking below the surface. Imagine you are wearing a pair of shoes that you love, but they are tight and hurting your feet. Instead of changing your shoes, you go get a back massage, which makes you temporarily feel good, but doesn’t do anything to address the underlying issue, the tight shoes. It may distract you momentarily from your discomfort, but you’ll continue to feel worse over the long term.
Taste is influenced by familiarity, so as you get to know a new food you may find your affection for it growing. Don’t overwhelm yourself with new and unfamiliar foods when you’re just beginning to make a change—start slowly, with the most familiar. Skillful eating is about giving health-promoting foods a chance; find out which ones you love, then focus on those, making those meals your easiest options.
“You can’t go back and make a new start, but you can start right now and make a brand-new ending.”
If you decide to stage your transition, consider a strategy like changing one daily meal each week to a whole foods, plant-based one—starting with breakfast, then lunch, then dinner. This is the strategy Alona and Matt use in The Forks over Knives Plan: How to Transition to the Life-Saving, Whole-Food, Plant-Based Diet, and it’s worked very well for many people. Or you might focus your first week or two on eliminating processed foods and then scale down or phase out your consumption of animal foods over several weeks. If you decide to go all in, the 28-Day Eat Real Food Plan in chapter 14 has been designed to guide and support you through four weeks of whole foods, plant-based eating.
“When you’re thinking of radically revising something as significant as your daily eating habits, it’s worth taking stock of your head and heart before jumping into the kitchen.” That taking stock starts with your why.
Maybe you are trying to lose weight and improve your general sense of vitality and well-being. Maybe you are thinking of it as upping the odds that you will be active and thriving well into your old age. A friend, a book, or a movie may have convinced you to give it a go. You may already be suffering from a chronic condition like heart disease or diabetes and want to reverse it and get off your medications. Or perhaps someone you love needs to make this transition and you’ve decided to support him or her on this journey. You could have decided for ethical reasons that you no longer want to eat animal foods. All of these are worthy reasons to make the shift. Embrace your reason for doing so and take full responsibility for it.
Take time to think about the outcomes you’d like to see—not just the bad things you want to avoid, like a heart attack, but the positive things you’ll gain. Envision what you’ll do with your longer, healthier life—the grandchildren you’ll see grow up, the retirement you’ll be able to enjoy, the places in the world you may travel if you’re fit and vital into old age. Think of the athletic goals that may be in reach if you’re able to reach an ideal weight.
“There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.” Don’t panic when cravings hit. Take a deep breath, then be mindful of your cravings in order to learn what particular flavors you need to include in your new diet. Challenge yourself to include them in a healthy way!
A healthier version exists for almost all foods. Longing for corn chips and guacamole? Make some easy, oil-free tortilla chips or replace the chips with some crunchy raw vegetables. Missing your favorite ice cream? Blend up frozen fruits with cashews or unsweetened plant milk, and add unsweetened cocoa if you crave chocolate. Wishing you could grab a soda on a hot day? Blend some frozen berries into a puree, then add sparkling water. It’s perfectly natural to crave the foods you’ve been accustomed to eating all your life, especially at first. This is why it’s important to build your transition around the foods you love—but in new, healthier versions.
One of our favorite terms from the world of nutrition is “crowd out.” It simply means this: fill up your plate, and your stomach, with the good stuff and there won’t be much space left for anything else. Again the focus is shifted from what you shouldn’t eat—“cutting out”—to what you should eat.
A simple strategy for crowding out is to eat a big salad as your first course, or a big bowl of fruit at breakfast. Fill up on greens, veggies, or fruit before you move on to more calorie-dense foods.
Another important piece of advice is to make these healthier foods in advance. Don’t wait for the craving to come on—that’s not the time to start fixing things in the kitchen. Have these foods readily available whenever cravings hit. You may not know exactly what you will crave, but you can probably predict your patterns.
A really helpful way to practice the crowding-out principle is to eat your meal in three courses. Courses one and two are mandatory, course three is optional. First course: Fruits or vegetables. This is your “weight-loss medicine and multivitamin.” Whether it’s a bowl of berries or other fruit before breakfast, a salad with steamed veggies before lunch, or a vegetable soup before dinner, make sure you eat a big portion. Second course: Highly satiating whole foods like whole grains, starchy vegetables, and beans. Think of this one as your “filler” and eat a large portion. Third course: More rich or calorie-dense foods (nuts, seeds, avocados, olives, dried fruit), minimally processed foods (whole grain pastas or bread, nut milks, tofu), animal foods (if you are including these in your diet), and so on. This course is optional—if you’re already full and don’t need this, that’s great! If you do eat it, keep the portion smaller. And before having seconds of course three, be sure to have seconds of one and two. Once eating this way becomes second nature, you can put all the food on one plate, but the three-course system is a great way to train yourself to be mindful and get your priorities right.
We all have certain foods or drinks that we love above all else, and these are often the ones that come to mind the moment someone suggests a diet change. “You mean I’ll never be able to have X again?” we ask. Too often, the idea of never having X again becomes a dietary deal breaker—a reason not to change at all. For this reason, we follow the old saying “Never say never.” Sure, if your favorite food is a highly processed, calorie-dense snack, or some form of processed meat, we don’t recommend that you include it in your diet regularly. But it’s also not worth derailing your entire transition. Turn deal breakers into allies by allowing yourself an occasional indulgence. The key is not to let them become a slippery slope back to old eating habits.
If you want to make the transition but you’re worried about never having that favorite food again, take the never out of the equation and see whether it helps you move ahead. It’s far better to change your diet while making room for your deal breaker than not make the change at all. We encourage people to write their deal breakers on a piece of paper and then take them off the table. Don’t worry about it anymore. Focus on all the other meals and occasions, and after some time you may be surprised to discover that your deal breaker is not nearly as important as it used to be. In the end, what matters is what you do most of the time, not the small exceptions you might make for a special moment.
The next frontier, for many people, is eating out. It’s not always easy to eat well at restaurants, but it can be done, especially if you plan. Here are some tips to navigate meals away from home: Choose the restaurant. Make sure you have a say in the decision if at all possible. If you’ve done your homework on local restaurants, you should be able to suggest several options for your dining companions to choose among.
Crowd out before you leave the house. If you’re not choosing the restaurant—for example, if a friend invites you for a birthday dinner at a place you know has very few options—fill up first with a green smoothie, some leftovers, or a quick and easy whole foods, plant-based meal, then order a salad at the restaurant with balsamic vinegar as dressing. And if you choose to indulge, at least your full stomach will deter you from eating too much.
When traveling, as when eating out, planning is essential. Do your homework on the place where you’ll stay, local restaurant options, and nearby grocery stores. While it may be tough to eat as well as you do at home, you may be pleasantly surprised by the options available when you know where to look.
Here are some things you might consider taking with you on a trip: Instant oatmeal with dried fruit and nuts Whole grain crackers, corn cakes, and brown rice cakes. Trail mix or dried fruit and nuts. Veggies and hummus. Nut butters. Cereal and nondairy milk. Oil-free chips and salsa or guacamole. Whole wheat bread or pita. Fruit.
Almost every one of the doctors and nutritionists we spoke to while writing this book cited support as a factor that is critical to the success or failure of this kind of transition. It makes all the difference when you have other people to talk to about the changes you’re making, the challenges you’re facing, the strategies that work for you, and the new favorite foods you’re discovering. You might get this support from a medical professional, a health coach, or a nutritionist. You might also seek out a support group in your area—through your doctor, community wellness program, church group, vegetarian society, or similar resource. You can also try online support groups, of which there are many. Or you could create your own.
Switching to a whole foods, plant-based diet can have highly positive effects in a short time, so your doctor may need to adjust the dosage of your medications accordingly (especially medications to lower blood pressure and blood sugar) because you could quickly become overmedicated. Request a full blood workup before you begin so you can monitor changes in your cholesterol numbers and other important indicators of success.
For some people, keeping a food journal can be useful during the transition to a new dietary pattern. Its purpose is simply to keep you mindful of what you eat or help you and/or your doctor identify areas that may need tweaking if you do not get the health results you think you should. Write down exactly what you ate, including snacks and beverages, and also write down how you feel before, during, and after. How hungry were you before you ate? How satisfied were you afterward? What other feelings do you notice? You may also want to make a note of how you feel at the beginning and end of the day. Are you exhausted when you fall into bed? How well do you sleep? Do you wake feeling rested and energized, or sluggish and groggy? Lastly, note any physical sensations such as digestive trouble, heartburn, or headaches. Look back over your journal once a week and see what you can learn for the future. If you become stuck with weight loss, you feel constantly hungry, or you have sensitivity to certain foods, your journal can help you decode the problem and come up with a strategy.
Ease is something we could all use more of in the midst of our busy lives. So don’t make your diet overly complicated, especially when it’s new. Get the basics right, learn to cook a few meals you love, and eat plenty of them. Don’t worry about the minutiae of how this or that food should be eaten. If you worry about whether you should eat kale raw or cooked, or whether potatoes should be boiled or baked, you can find plenty of people online who will argue passionately one way or another. Our advice to you is: just eat whole plant foods! Choose the way it tastes best to you and enjoy it. Once you become accustomed to the whole foods, plant-based lifestyle, you may choose to study the details of creative food preparation techniques but when you’re just starting out, keep it simple.
It’s quite possible to be an unhealthy junk-food vegan too, so we shouldn’t equate veganism with health.
The simple truth is that I don’t think there is a single greater act of environmental activism than moving to a plant-based diet.
From climate change to emptying the oceans to land use and forest destruction to habitat loss to water issues to straightforward pollution, our current system of farming, and eating is not doing human health, animal health, or the health of the natural world any favors. It is an inconvenient truth that we cannot ignore any longer.
Currently, even low-end estimates suggest that animal agriculture contributes around 18% of global greenhouse emissions, more than the combined exhaust of all transportation emissions.
Growing feed crops for agriculture consumes 56% of the water in the United States.
You don’t need to eat animals to have excellent health. Indeed, the science shows that a 100% whole foods, plant-based diet can be one of the healthiest diets you could possibly eat in terms of both health and longevity.
In preparation for your twenty-eight days of eating real food, there are two critical steps to take: clean house (to get rid of the foods you’ll no longer eat) and stock up on new, healthy options.
Whole Foodie Basics Shopping List:
Take time to clean house and prepare your kitchen both practically and symbolically for your new lifestyle. If you feel bad about throwing out food, consider donating it to a local food bank or community kitchen.
Plan a week of meals at a time. If you work Monday to Friday, you might do your planning Friday evening or Saturday morning, including making a shopping list, so you can use some time on the weekend to shop and prepare. If you use our plan, look over the recipes we suggest and make shopping lists accordingly. Make your ingredients multitask. Especially if you’re cooking for only one or two people, it makes sense to plan several meals that use similar ingredients. That way you won’t end up with half-used bags of produce, bunches of herbs, cans of beans, or jars of condiments. Batch-cook. If you are able to set aside a couple hours once a week for what’s known as batch-cooking—preparing staples in large quantities for use throughout the week or to be frozen in serving-size bags for reheating—you can save a lot of time on the day-to-day meals. Many people like to do this on Sunday afternoon or evening.
You can also cook extra and freeze in portion-size containers for nights when you just don’t have time to do more than defrost, warm, and serve.