Simple Health Cures

   It must have felt unnatural at first, to eat animal flesh. After all, we’re not so far removed from animals ourselves. Perhaps it even felt cannibalistic. There might not have been that much intellectual distinction between humans and other animals. When humans were pure vegetarains, they were living in harmony with the earth and with the other creatures co-habiting the planet with them. Their closest animal relatives, apes, were vegetarians. Eating the products of the earth, like plants, grains and fruits that they could gather and eat would have seemed the natural order of things.

   But necessity is the mother of invention. Perhistoric men who lived in frozen geographies, or who lived in an area that became devastated by fire, would have eaten anything to survive. Just like the soccer players whose plane crashed in the mountains of Chile, and were forced to eat the flesh of other players who died in the crash, earliest man some point had to make the choice for survival, and that could have consuming meat for the first time and changing human history, and health forever.

   We can imagine that men first ate meat that had been charred or cooked by virtue of being caught in a natural forest fire. They might have subsequently eaten raw meat, if neccessary, but we can also imagine that our earliest digestive systems rebelled against eating raw meat.

   Imagine having eaten raw foods and vegetables for one, and all of a sudden, incorporating meat products into your system. You may have heard friends who were vegetarians tell stories of trying eat meat and becoming violently ill afterwards.

   Biologists will tell you we’re really not designed to eat meat, but we adapted to it. However, in the timeline of human history, eating meat is a relatively recent evolutionary development.

   Do you ever think about how far we’ve diverted from the path of our pre-historic ancestors and they’re eating pattern? Consider how the earliest humans evolved, and what they ate. They were hunter-gatherers and did not evolve with the characteristics of carnivores. Human aren’t made to tear animals apart and eat their flesh. When you look at carnivorous animals, such as wild cats, you can see their teeth are designed to rip and tear, not chew.

   Human evolved from vegetarian creatures. Even our digestive systems are not particularly suited to eating meat. Eating meat is relatively recent development in human history, most likely born of opportunity and necessity. Perhaps earliest man observed carivores eating meat, and if they couldn’t find any of the natural foods they were used to eating, such as vegetables, berries, nuts and grains, then they might have assumed that eating meat would at least sustain life.

   But initially we emulated the creatures we evolved from, herbivores like apes. Even to a prehistoric mind, apes would have looked similar to man, walking primarily upright, with arms and hands. We naturally would have foraged for our food, eating roots and berries, fruits and nuts. We would have watched the apes peeling bananas, or crushing nuts on stones to get at the meat of the nut.

   We would have been living more moment-to-moment, constantly foraging for food. Hunting, after all, requires thought and planning. Eating meat requires preparastion and most importantly, fire. Until man discovered fire, he was primarily vegetarian, living in what was the natural order of things. Vegetarian eating is a more natural way of eating, in addition to being healthier. It’s a way that’s in balance with the planet, and doesn’t seek to dominate it and conquer it.

   Many people think of vegetarians as one homogeneous group that just doesn’t eat meat. But nothing could be further from the truth. There are different categories of vegetarians as diverse as the reasons for going vegetarian in the first place.

   A vegetarian is generally defined as someone who doesn’t eat meat. But someone who is vegetarian could conceivably eat dairy products such as milk, eggs and cheese. A lacto ovo vegetarian doesn’t eat meat, fish or poultry, but does consume eggs, milk or cheese. a lacto vegetarian consumes milk and cheese products, but doesn’t consume eggs.

    A vegetarian is someone who doesn’t consume any animal product or by product, including dairy food. They eat only vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains and legumes. They also don’t use animal products, such as leather. Vegetarians also don’t use white sugar because it’s often processed with a substance derived from animal bones that whitens the sugar.

   There are other categories within the vegetarian community. Fruitarians, for example, eat only fruit. Their rationale is that fruits, including fruits such as tomatoes, are self-perpetuating and don’t need to be planted to create food source. They consider it a way of eating that’s most in bsalance and harmony with the earth, the most natural.

   All of the above will eat cooked vegetables, fruit and legumes. There is also a growing movement towards eating only raw or living foods. This based on the assumption that cooking food processes most of the nutrients out of it, and to get all the nutritional value, vitamins and amino acids from food, it’s best consumed raw, or juiced. If cooked at all, it should only be cooked to slightly over 100 degrees, so the nutrients are still retained.

   The more restrictive you become with your diet, however, the more educated you need to became to be sure you’re getting all the necessary proteins and vitamins that you need to maintain good health, especially muscle and heart health.

   If you’ve eaten meat and animal products your whole life, you might think, why switch to a vegetarian diet? You’ve lived your whole life eating eggs, hamburgers, hot dogs, poultry, so why switch now?

   There could be many reasons to switch. Start by looking in the mirror. Are you at a healthly weight? Do you look and feel good most of the time? Do you wake up energized? Or do you wake up tired and sluggish?

   How is your general health? Is your blood pressure within healthy range? Are your cholesterol and blood sugar ranges normal? If they’re not, consider what you’re eating on a daily basis.

   How do you feel after eating? Do you feel energized, as if you’ve fed your body what it needs? Or are you tired and dragged out? Do you often need a nap after eating? Is that what food is supposed to do for us, make us tired and sleepy?

   Not really. Food should nourish and feed the body and leave us energized and refreshed. The human body is a machine and needs fuel that keeps it running in peak condition. When we’re fat, with high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, and other unhealthly conditions, it’s like a car engine that hasn’t been tuned or isn’t running on the optimal type of gasoline it needs to run efficienyly. Your body is the same way. It needs the right kind of fuel to run at peak efficiency, and when you’re eating high-fat- meat, ormeat that’s been fed antibiotics throughtout it’s life, that’s not the kind of fuel the human body evolved to run on.

   Try eating vegetarian for a week or a month. See if you don’t feel different, more mentally acute and more physically fit and energized. At least reverse the protion sizes you’ve been eating, and make meat more of a side dish, if you can’t stop eating meat altogether. Even change can make a big difference in your overall health and well being.

   You’ve certainly heard the expression many times, “You are what you eat.” Have you ever really thought about what that means? And do you think about it when you’re making food choices?

   In some ways, we do became what we eat, literally. Have you ever seen an example of your blood plasma after eating a fast food hamburger? What was previously a clear liquid becomes cloudy with the fats and cholesterol that’s absorbed from eating a high-fat hamburger.

   And when you think about it, we also became what we don’t eat. When we switch from eating meat to a vegetarian-based diet, we becane less fat, less prone to many tpes of cancers. Our cholesterol can improve. When we’er leaner and eating fewer animal products, then many other health and fitness issues are reduced. The incidence of Type 2 diabetes is reduced. Blood presure falls into normal ranges. When you’re healthier, you’re taking fewer medications. Even if you have a prescription drug benefit in your health plan, you’re still saving money with fewer co-payments on medications.

   If you have a family history of high cholesterol or high blood pressure, then it’s particularly incumbent on you to revise your eating habits. Moving towards a more vegetarian diet has been shown statistically to reduce the incidence of so many of the diseases of industrialized countries. Vegetarians are statistically healthier than omnivorous persons, they’re leaner and live longer.

   Isn’t it time to think about what you want to be and to eat accordingly? Do you want to be sluggish and fat? Do you want the risk that goes with eating animal products, with their high fat content? Or do you want to look like and be what vegetarians are ? Leaner and fitter with a longer anticipated lifespan. It’s never too late to change what you’re doing and increase your chances for a longer, fitter life.

   When people talk about detoification and cleansing the body of harmful toxins, it’s often seen as a fringe element of vegetarians. People really don’t like to think about harmful toxins building up in their colon or in their arteries, but it’s often a by-product of a carnivorous diet. A diet that’s high in fat and processed foods tends to slow down our digestive systems, and our elimination processes are also interrupted.

   This can allow harmful bacteria and toxins to accumulate and can create a general feeling of sluggishness, as well as a host of digestive disorders, such as irritable bowel syndrome or colitis. When we begin eating a more healthy vegetarian diet, we start to get more dietary fiber into our system, and all of a sudden, our digestive systems start to work better.

   When you eliminate high-fat meat and processed foods from your diet, then much of your body’s energy is freed from the intense work of digesting these foods. Everything becomes clearer your blood, your organs, your mind. You start to became more aware of the toxic nature of the food you been eating before.

   Toxicity is of much greater concern in the twentieth century than ever before. There are many new and stronger chemicals, air and water pollution, radiation and nuclear power. We ingest new chemicals, use more drugs of all kinds, eat more sugar and refined foods, and daily abuse ourselves with various stimulants and sedatives. The incidence of many toxicity diseases has increased as well. Cancer and cardiovascular disease are two of the main ones. Arthritis, allergies, obesity, and many skin problems are others. In addition, a wide range of symptom’s such as headaches, fatigue, pains, coughs, gastrointestinal problems, and problems from immune weakness, can all be related to toxicity. When you start a vegetarian eating plan, your body eventually cleanses itself of the harmfull effects of these toxic foods.

   Vegetarian cheese is cheese that is not curdled with rennet, an enzyme that occurs naturally in animal stomachs. Most vegetarian cheese are curdled with either plants, fungi, or bacteria.

   Vegetarians who do not consume cheese with rennet generally choose not to because it involves slaughtering animals to extract the enzymes.

   Vegetarian cheese is hard to distinguish from cheese made with rennet. This lack of distinguisability often forces vegetarians who are ethically opposed to harming animals to consume cheeses that contain rennet.

   Even though more cheese are being made with vegetable rennet, it is usually impossible to spot the difference, unless the package is clearly labeled “vegetarian cheese”. Recently, some grocery stores have started doing this to aid vegetarian shoppers, who would not otherwise be able to distinguish the difference between the vegetable and animal rennet cheeses.

   In addition to eating cheeses made with vegetable rennet, there are more alternatives to eating regular cheese.

   Vegetarians, for instance, do not consume cheese at all because it is an animal byproduct and subsequently requires animals to be caged and suffer. Many vegetarians, however do consume cheese substitutes.

   Chreese ( www.chreese.com) is one of these substitutes. Chreese is an all natural, non-soy, cheese replacement that requires substantially less natural resources and energy to create than cheese with rennet.

   And chreese is just one substitute. There are a number of other all natural alternatives you can find at local organic  and health food stores.

   If you are a vegetarian and you don’t support animal suffering on your behalf in any capacity, you may also want to consider adjusting your dietary habits if you consume cheese made with animal rennet.

   Some vegetarians usually strict vegans will not consume sugar. This is because sugar is often whitened with bone char from cows.

   If you are a vegetarian and you want to continue eating products that contain sugar, but do not want to cause suffering in the process, you have a number of options.

   Your first option is to only consume products made with beet sugar. There are two major sources of sugar in the United States, beet sugar and cane sugar. Cane sugar is often whitened with bone char from cows, in constract, beet sugar is never whitened with bone char.

   So, if you want to completely avoid the bone char, you can do so by eating only beet sugar. The only challenge and it is a big one is finding out which foods contains beet sugar and which foods contain cane sugar.

   To make things more complex, you can also consume a number of types of cane sugars, as long as you are willing to find out what the source of the sugar is.

   You can do this in a lot of cases by looking at the nutritional panel on food before you buy it. If it says fructose or dextrose, the sugar is from a plant source (either beet or corn). If it says sucrose, it could be from a number of sources, which could include bome char whitened cane sugar.

   Now, if you are cooking with sugar, you can personally verify that is bone char free by purchasing from the following companies, which have publicly stated that they do not use bone char: Florida Crystals Refinery, Imperial Sugar Company, Irish Sugar Ltd, Sugar in the Raw ( which is refined), and American Crystal Sugar Company.

   If you can’t find these brands, but want to avoid consuming bone char sugar if possible, you can avoid these brands, which have publicly stated that they do use bone char: Domino, Savannah Foods, and C&H Sugar Company.

   Both vegetarian and non-vegetarian diets have advantages. Vegetarain diets tend to be rich in antioxidants, certain vitamins, and healthy fats. Non-vegetarian diets, by contrast, tend to contain more protein, iron, zinc, calcium, and vitamin B12.

   If you already decided to adopt a vegetarian diet, it is essential you learn how to increase your intake and absorption of these nutrients to avoid short-term and long-term health complications.

   In the next few paragraphs, I will explain how you can regularly assimilate larger portions of these nutrients into your regular diet.

1. Protein. Different types of protein are made up of different permutations of amino acid chains.In order to create a “complete protein” or a protein that can be assimilated into the human body tissue, you must consume foods that contain  complementary chains of amino acids.

   Wheats, nuts, and beans are three types of vegan friendly incomplete proteins: however, wheat is hard to digest and up to 50% of it’s protein is lost during the process.

   Isolated soy protein, which you can get from a number of sources ( including soy milk), can be digested efficiently enough to match the animal protein yields.

2. Iron. Plant sources contian a significant amount of iron, but in nonheme form, which is more sensitive to inhibitors than iron that comes from animal products. You should do two things to increase your blood iron levels 1) Consume more plant iron, 2) avoid absorption inhibitors, such as tea, coffee, and fiber.

3. Zinc. Where as non-vegetarian diets seem to enhance the absorption of zinc: vegetarain and vegan diets do the exact opposite they inhibit it.

   Nutrients suggest that you can overcome this by consuming more foods that contain zinc, such as soy beans, cashew, and sunflower seeds while reducing your intake of hibitors by washing vegetables and grains.

4. Calcium. While vegetarians can easily consume an adequate amount of calcium without any dietary additions, it is important that vegetarains avoid consuming certain foods that are high in oxalates, which inhibit calcium absorption.

   Dietitions suggest that vegetarians do not consume spinach, beet, greens and swiss chard as the calcium component of a meal plan. While they are rich in calcium, they also contain high amounts of oxalates.

   Rather than consuming those foods for calcium,vegetarians should consider other options, such as soy yogurt, tofu, beans, almonds, and calcium fortified foods.

5. VitaminB12. Many vegetarians lack vitamin B12 simply because it does not exist naturally in any non-animal forms. Vegetarians should seek out Vitamin B12 fortified foods, such as certain soy milk and cereals to supplement what they lack.

   As I outlined, there are a number of nutrients vegetarians can lack of they do not research and plan. This is not meant to discourage people from becaming vegetarians, but instead to encourage them to spend time planning a health approach to their vegetarian diet before starting it.

   When planned adequately, a vegetarain diet can not only make up for what it lacks from animal products, but it can for exceed the healthfulness of most non-vegetarian diets.

   Many nonvegetarians and some vegetarians alike question whether being a vegetarian really makes any difference at all. Some bring up blurry ethical situations to make it impossible to see a vegetarian lifestyle as ethical.

   If you are a prospective vegetarian for ethical reasons, but aren’t sure whether or not a vegetarian lifestyle is truly a more ethical choice, here are some statistics from EarthSave to help you make your choice ( for or against)

1. Over 1.3 billion human beings could be fed each year from the grain and soybeans that go to livestock in the United States.

   This means that the entire population of the United States could be fed ( without losing any nutritional value) and there would still be enough food left over to feed one billion people.

   In a world where millions of people die each year of starvation, that type of food excess and inefficiency could be considered unethical.

2. Livestock in the US produces roughly 30 times more excrement than human beings. While humans in the US have complex sewage systems to collect and treat human waste, there are no such systems on feedlots. As a result, most of this waste leeches into water.

   This means that large scale, massive production and slaughter of animals is not only unethical, but it also causes serious environmental degradation.

3. It takes 7.5 pounds of protein feed to create 1 pound of consumable hog protein, and it takes 5 pounds of protein feed to create 1 pound of consumable chicken protein. Close to 90% of protein from wheat and beans is lost to feed cycling.

   This means that an enormous amount of resources are dedicated to producing wheat and soy just for the purpose of feeding it to animals, which will be slaughtered as “a source of protein” even though they only provide about 1/5 of the amount they consume.

   Not only can the production of meat be considered an injustice against animals, but it can also be considered an injustice against human beings, as well as the environment in general.