How To Lessen Your Addiction To Animal Based Foods

I'm not the ideal candidate for a cleanse. When not on deadline, (which is practically always), I'm rushing around from one health seminar to the next. Meetings, interviews, causes, trainings, policy sessions, (and the occasional retreat) fill my days. Unless you can do a cleanse on the run, forget about it!

Well, it turns out that you can.

I got motivated when I attended the recent Urban Zen 2009 Speaker Series: A Focus on Nutrition Forum, (two powerful days of talks by leaders like Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. James Gordon, Dr. Frank Lipman, and Dr. Woodson Merrell.) This gathering, hosted by designer/health advocate Donna Karan, revealed that the science was there. For fifty-three years, pioneer Colin Campbell has studied human nutritional requirements, finding that people need only 8 -12% of protein content daily--and much of that content can come from vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, and seeds.

Wow! As a regular consumer of organic dairy, wild fish, and organic chicken, I knew I had to face facts. For two decades, I've avoided foods raised in mass production, because I can't rationalize the way industrial practices treat animals. Nor do I consider foods loaded with hormones and pesticides healthy to humans. Unless our regulatory policies support rigorous organic standards, I'm one of many who will be forced into veganism. With recent regulatory changes that will ultimately require microchips in all livestock, (see my post at: www.health-journalist.com/HufPo/Real-Deal-Food-Safety.htm ) it's not looking good.

Was it finally time to find out how hard it would be to loosen/lessen my addiction to animal based foods? For several weeks I did. Eliminating meat was easy. But dairy--not. That's when I decided that I needed to press the reset button and undergo a cleanse.

Jill Pettijohn of www.jillpettijohn.com offers "the Cleanse," a five day juice fast, providing you with a six pack of raw, living, organic juices to be consumed every two to three hours. Before you could say "green drink," I was on Day One, beginning, yes, with a green drink, followed by a midmorning lemonade, and next a creamy cold vegetable soup at lunch. Mid-afternoon offered a fruit or citrus-y drink, and day's end featured a spiced soup from the orange part of the vegetable spectrum, such as carrot (with Ginger) or butternut (with Thai spices.) The last meal/drink of the day was a creamy nut milk, made with different nuts, including hazelnut, pumpkin seed, or Brazil nut. Each drink was delicious, and to my surprise quite filling. Though I'd worried about food cravings, soon I left juices undrunk--so satisfying was the Cleanse.

As my appetite dimmed and waistline shrunk, my energy increased--not what I expected. I even covered two food events, serenely sipping juice rather than sampling snacks.

To many people the concepts of cleansing and detoxification seem like a no-brainer, even though some doctors pooh-pooh it. But integrative physicians like Dr. Mark Hyman point out that our bodies have natural detoxification/ eliminative systems built in--both on an organ level (kidneys, liver, and gut) and on a cellular level, where biochemical interactions absorb nutrients and discard waste products. Given gallstones, kidney stones, bladder infections, constipation, and leaky guts, it's obvious that the organs responsible for ridding our bodies of waste sometimes get overwhelmed. In Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself, Alejandro Junger, MD offers a user-friendly program for healthy detoxification. Taking in more easy-to-process nutrients (via juices) reduces the work of breaking down foods, allowing greater ease in excreting them. In effect, you get nourishment, while taxing the organs less.

"Green juice is so enlivening," Donna Karan had told the Nutrition Series participants, who included integrative health practitioners training to take the healing out into hospital settings. "The menu for living and vegan foods is "larger than you can imagine--its not so radical as it seems," says Karan. From my limited experience, I agree completely.

I must admit that it's unlikely I could replicate the cleanse at home and live on it from this day forward. But, I have managed to do something like it one day a week, which is what many integrative doctors recommend. Moreover, for anyone with food addictions or allergies, accessing basic nourishment lessens the grip of other food habits, while giving you a baseline of what your body needs. I lost four pounds on the Cleanse, down turned my weight setpoint, and have been subsisting mostly on vegetables, (raw and lightly cooked), nuts, grains, fruit, and beans ever since. While not everyone can take the time/money/effort to undertake a juice cleanse, I highly recommend simplifying your diet as a way to push the reset button. For transformational health wisdom, go to www.health-journalist.com.

Comments

[RMankovitz]

I am not a fan of eating grain-fed caged-animal foods and consider them unhealthy for much of the population. I feel exactly the same way when it comes to vegan and most vegetarian diets. Instead, I eat what my research has shown to be what Nature intended, which is a diet of free-range grass and grub-fed animal products and ripe sweet fruit. The largest "clinical trial" in the history of our species (conducted by Nature over 100,000 generations) has proven to me that this diet is the healthiest and most ecologically sustainable. There are no recent studies based on this diet because virtually nobody eats this way as a result of having been brainwashed by the AgriGiants and feedlot meat production industries.

For those interested in a discussion of the unsustainability of planting annual monocrops such as wheat, corn and soy (all require huge amounts of fossil fuels and manmade chemical processing to produce), and the benefits of raising animals on perennial grass (no planting, no fertilizing, no pesticides), read: "The Vegetarian Myth" by Lierre Keith and "Against the Grain" by Richard Manning (researches the ethical, political, ecological, and nutritional deficits of a vegetarian diet).

For those interested in reading about a fascinating experiment based on Nature to provide a healthy life in harmony with our environment, read "The Original Diet" or "The Wellness Project" by me. Ask your librarian to obtain copies and you can read them for free.

Roy Mankovitz, Director
www.MontecitoWellness.com

[Alison Rose Levy - Huffpost Blogger]

Roy: I agree with your recommendation of grass-fed free range animal products and in fact, I've co-authored books with two early champions of those foods, (The No-Grain Diet by Dr. Joesph Mercola and Eat Fat Lose Fat with Sally Fallon and Mary Enig.)

However, those recommendations may need to be reconsidered if the food industry prevails with the USDA in requiring that microchips be inserted into all livestock animals, a move that some predict will drive out of business small farms that raise livestock in the optimal way.

If you read the post mentioned above and here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alison-rose-levy/having-a-cow-and-eating-i_b_175211.html you can learn more about it. And I invite people to sign up for my ezine, the Health Outlook (free sign up at www.health-journalist.com) because I will be following that issue and sending alerts when there are opportunities to take action.

Having reported on health and been a nutritional maven for many years, I see a disconnect between some recommendations for personal health practices and the societal and environmental policies that are necessary to assure access to what is healthy. We can't have organic foods without organic farms and organic favorable policies -- so people need to vote with both their purchases and with their send buttons and I help them do that at www.health-journalist.com

[RMankovitz]

Hi Alison:
I am certainly familiar with your work. I am on the Advisory Board of the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, and of course intimately familiar with WAPF. My books reference Price's work at length, and I propose ways of interpreting it that are somewhat unique. I do hope you have a chance to evaluate my research in the field, which includes an eating plan based on Nature that has never been in print before, and is based on Price's work. Your feedback would be welcome, and my background information is on my website I agree that NAIS may have a chilling effect on small farmers. I try to stay in contact with my grass-fed suppliers such as John Wood at US Wellness Meats so that I can assess the situation.