Healthy Lifestyle Expo
It’s October 2010, and I have been eating whole food, plant-based for almost one year. I’m spending a weekend at the Healthy Lifestyle Expo, which is held at the Warner Center Marriott. It is my first time there and I am glad to meet some people who eat healthy like me, and to hear speakers who have written influential books. The group started at about 250 and dwindled down somewhat as the event progressed. The speakers included medical doctors who presented their own research such as my hero Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and Dr. John McDougall, as well as healthy lifestyle promoters with other credentials, and compassionate vegans.
All agreed we should eat whole grains, beans, vegetables and fruits and basically nothing else. More green leaves are better. Since we don’t eat meat or dairy, we should take vitamin B12 supplements.
A lot of the time was spent on the logistics of how to eat this way. Although I enjoyed it, I did not pick up much new from this, since I already like my own cooking and know how to find and adapt new dishes. Being of a philosophical nature, I tend to focus on disagreements, so I can try to resolve them for myself.
Even among experts who mostly agree, there are some disagreements and open questions. These are generally areas where, I feel, it is okay to partake in small quantities or on rare occasions, treating the item in question as if it were a drug or a condiment. Below I discuss a few of these items and my approach to them.
I was a heavy coffee drinker for most of my adult life, consistent with the stereotype of a computer programmer. I sometimes consumed six mugs a day, and had developed immunity to that level of caffeine. Most of the lifestyle doctors I have studied agree that a cup of coffee each morning is not harmful. When I first switched to whole food, plant-based eating, I still drank coffee at home and at work. After a few months, my energy level was much higher. Coffee seemed less necessary. I had read a Dr. McDougall article about a connection between coffee prepared without a paper filter and high blood cholesterol, and I decided to kick the coffee habit cold turkey.
It was the hardest single thing to give up of any I gave up, including pizza, French fries, and chocolate. I went through about a week of severe withdrawal, during which I felt lethargic and cranky, and craved coffee. After toughing it out and substituting with Good Earth tea and Teeccino herbal beverages, I started to feel better. Now I treat coffee like a drug. I never have more than one cup in day, and only when I really need the alertness boost. I actually get a huge boost, call it a buzz, from a single cup of coffee now that I have re-acclimated myself to going without caffeine. On our recent trip to Hawaii and Kauai, we toured a coffee farm on each island. The small samples I tasted on those tours were delightful.
Most of what we call chocolate is high in sugar and fat, has added milk products, and is of questionable provenance with regard to the way the laborers on the farms are treated. When I started eating whole food, plant-based, I gave up my daily chocolate for I guess about two years. It was hard, because I was still providing chocolates in the office for anyone who came by for a taste. Then I read two articles by John Robbins, Chocolate’s Startling Health Benefits and Is There Child Slavery in Your Chocolate? They inspired me to find some organic, vegan, free trade, very dark (84% cocoa) chocolate that I now buy in bulk. It has no excess packaging at all.
Using a plastic bag to cover my hands, I break the shards of chocolate in to bite-sized pieces. I consume about a half an ounce each afternoon at work, and provide pieces in a covered dish for others. It is more expensive than slave-produced chocolate, but less expensive than some fancy packaged chocolates. I call this “the world’s most politically correct chocolate.” I would like to think that it is good for me. I’m pretty confident that, in such low quantities, it is not bad for me. Now that I am off coffee, a small piece of very dark chocolate gives me a boost in the afternoon.
I have brewed my own beer for a long time, at least twenty-five years before I started eating whole food, plant-based. I make two to three cases a year, and I certainly do not drink it all myself. Homebrew has absolutely ruined most commercial beers for me, not that they ever had much appeal. There are some good microbrews and imports available, but homebrew is satisfying to make, less expensive, and gives me control over what I put in it. The lifestyle doctors I have studied discourage the use of alcohol, but generally admit that an occasional drink (one or two beers a day, one or two days a week) won’t do much damage, for a non-alcoholic on a whole-food, plant-based diet.
The simple but strict program I started with in 2009 is found in Dr. Esselstyn’s Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. It forbids all nuts, avocado, olives and coconut, because they are high in fat. He recommends a tablespoon of ground flax seed daily. His idea is to keep the program simple. Sure, three ounces of meat a week would probably not hurt, and an ounce of nuts a day might be beneficial, but many people cannot stop at those levels. Before 2009, I often ate a soup bowl full of salted in the shell peanuts. How many servings is that? Probably at least three. Likewise, a three ounce serving of meat would just make me want more, and never adjust my attitude towards meat, which I absolutely have no genuine nutritional need for. After a couple of years on the strict program, I started adding limit quantities of nuts and avocados back into my diet. If I ever feel like I am losing my ability to go without them, I will have to drop them entirely and go through withdrawal.
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease recommends a number of nutritional supplements. Other lifestyle doctors, include Dr. John McDougall (author of The Starch Solution) and T. Colin Campbell (author of The China Study and Whole) recommend no nutritional supplements, except for vitamin B12, and as needed for any proven deficiencies. Some otherwise entirely plant-based doctors even recommend fish oil! It is hard for a layman to reconcile these discrepancies, but here is what I do. I take a B12 under my tongue a few times a week. That’s it. I am lucky enough to live in Southern California, where I can expose my skin to the sun. The one time I had my vitamin D level tested it was fine. I think my diet should meet my nutritional needs as much as possible, so I don’t take anything “just in case.” However, if a future test should show me deficient in some nutrient that I cannot get enough of from food, I am open to taking it as a supplement.
Unfortunately, there have been cases of micro-nutrients promoting health and preventing disease when eaten as food, but failing to help or even harming when taking as supplements. Beta-carotene is one. It is very healthy when one gets it in food, but supplements may be risky. Calcium is another example, and there are others.
Getting back to the Healthy Lifestyle Expo, I really liked hearing John Robbins speak. He is the author of Diet for a New America, which I had not read at the time, but now have. He told the story of how he renounced his family’s Baskin-Robbins ice cream fortune for health and ethical reasons. This essentially estranged him from his father. Later, he wrote the book. His uncle, the Baskin in Baskin-Robbins, died young from a heart attack. His father also had many health problems. Eventually, his father’s doctor told him he needed to read John’s book. Amazingly, he did, and got healthy and lived much longer. I decided to read John’s newer book, The New Good Life, which is also very good. Since then, I have read most of his books. I highly recommend Healthy at 100 and No Happy Cows.
Although I’m glad I attended this event, I don’t feel a need to go every year. I don’t think research will discover that much new information that quickly. Also, I tend to learn by reading books and thinking things through, and experimenting on myself. Perhaps I will want to return, just to be with people who eat the same way I do.
Much of the research supporting this lifestyle has been unrefuted for over 30 years. I found an old copy of McDougall’s Medicine in a thrift shop and read it. Published in 1985, it mentions angioplasty as new and somewhat experimental. It predates statin drugs and stents entirely. Yet everything it reveals about how to prevent and reverse heart disease, diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis, and other chronic ailments is still true today. Dr. McDougall signed it for me at “A Healthy Taste of Los Angeles 2014.”
