Being a certified nutritional consultant and physical therapist, I am fully aware of disadvantages of animal-based food. Several years ago I turned vegetarian mainly due to my ethic considerations, even prior to my nutritional education. A a student I fought my fights with the teachers who were trying to persuade me to start eating fish oil, red meat and other unessesary and potentially dangerous stuff...
Because of my vegetarian life style my blood profile is as I were in my teens, not in my forties. My blood cholesterol is 3,7, sugar 4,4. I personally know nobody my age who eat meat and have blood values as good as mine. I believe this is only due to my life style, not my genes.
My mom unfortunately has cardiovascular diseases, overweight since her early thirties and diabetes in her seventies. She has been a real meat-lover all of her life. Now she takes many prescription meds every day, like all of her friends.
At home we cook only vegetarian food but when we visit our non-vegetarian friends or go to fancy restaurants, we eat whatever is served.
Unfortunately I still am a milk-a-holic. I love milk and diary products and usually drink several cups of caffe latte daily. So does my fiancé. But the movie "Forks over knives" made us think really hard about abandoning milk and eat even less processed foods than we do.
I have been reading critics about this movie, the diet they advocate is really extreme: no nuts, no oils or oily foods like avocado and olives, no sauces of any kind... But there is no doubt this diet plan works in preventing and reversing cancers and cardiovascular disease. The research included millions of subjects over several decades.
So instead of finding arguments NOT TO, I would rather consider to make changes to my diet to make it healthier.
So today we went to our nearest veggie produce shop and bought lots of fruits and veggies. And we bought two types of veggie milk - organic rice milk and non-organic soy milk (too bad they did not have organic).
As you can see, rice and soy milk have different colour and density. And the taste is quite different, too.
I did not like the rice milk, it was too sweet and too little dense. The soy milk tasted not too good as well. But by mixing these two milks in different proportions I finally achieved a rather drinkable taste. In the end it was actually not too bad.
Later we did some experimenting on frothing this soy/rice mixture for cappuccinos. Wow, the froth looked amazing!
Worse was the taste. No, I could not drink THIS.
Better stick to smoothies in the morning and indulge myself with one proper caffe latte in the weekend.
Today's dinner was as close as possible to the principles of whole non-processed foods as we could achieve: fresh baby potatoes with dill and sprinkle of the best quality Spanish olive oil (no-no, olive oil will not be abandoned here!) , marinated wild cucumbers, mushrooms and onion stew, and veggie salad with lemon juice and olive oil.
No animal proteins and almost no salt. And this simple food tasted just heavenly. A good start for a better life style.
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