Poetry and Prose By Tami Hay, M.A., RMT from All-Creatures.org

How to be 100% Successful on a Plant-Based Diet

Every human and living being wants to feel relief and ease. This ease-seeking mechanism is deep in our primal brain-- to move away from discomfort. This is why change is sometimes difficult, because in the change process there is often discomfort. This applies to our diets as well. The thing that complicates the matter more, is our diets have been culturally connected to many other things other than nutrition; celebration, tribal ‘norms’, and addictive eating. Food industry has supported the ‘cultural forgetting’ of ancient digestive practices, hence our deeper connection to the earth. Knowing this, how do we go forward, despite all the misinformation about fad diets, and find the individual bio-chemical sweet spot on a plant-based vegan diet that keeps our guts healthy and happy while supporting ALL life?

I am here to share the great news; we all can be 100% successful on a whole food plant-based diet! It does require however we pay really close attention to how we eat and how much, when we eat, and what we are eating, (and what is eating us), in order to fine-tune our way into complete gut health. It also requires us to honour where our food comes from and everything connected to it, the soil, the growers, and the gift of food as medicine. This may sound like a lot of work but giving deep awareness to food has the potential to become one of our greatest teachers. Therefore, let’s take a look at diets.

Newton’s Third Law— “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction”—seems to apply as reliably to cultural change as it does to physics. As plant-based diets gain traction in response to chronic illness, environmental degradation, and ethical concerns about factory farming, meat-based diets have begun to proliferate. The most oppositional of these reactions is the so-called “Carnivore Diet.”

Like the paleo diet, the carnivore diet looks to the past for normative authority, though it seems to gather much of its evidence from more recent history—as recent as the 19th-century, in fact. Such attempts to find a cultural norm among the bewildering variety of human cultures in order to support an argument about what humans naturally eat or should eat have always seemed scientifically and politically suspect to me, but some of the arguments of this sort that have been made in favour of the carnivore diet are especially so. For example, in one article I read, the decline in health of Indigenous populations from the pre-colonial to the colonial period is attributed, not to the introduction of European diseases or genocidal policies or any of the other brutal realities of colonization, but to Indigenous peoples’ abandonment of their meat-based diet and adoption of a supposedly plant-heavy Western diet. Moreover, the plant-based element of the Western diet represented in this scenario consists of white flour, sugar, and processed foods. Who would argue that the latter foods are healthy? No one. This version of a plant-based diet is nothing but a straw man, set up so that it can be knocked down by a breath.

While such claims are easily dismissed, what requires a more serious response is the fact that some people who adopt the carnivore diet experience temporary relief from their digestive disorders. And, on the other side of the ledger, some people who go plant-based experience digestive discomfort. Indeed, some adopters of the carnivore diet are recent vegans who have concluded that a plant-based diet, however ethically laudable, is not for them. These experiences cannot be dismissed. They can, however, be explained and put into perspective.

Although it is true that some sufferers of leaky gut and other digestive disorders have experienced at least short-term relief after adopting the carnivore diet, it is important to recognize that these effects, in addition to being short-lived, cannot be wholly credited to the diet itself. The main reason the carnivore diet may produce short-term relief in the guts of those who adopt it is simply this: switching to an all-meat diet means that you STOP eating any other foods that you may be sensitive or allergic to. The same benefits can be achieved through an elimination diet combined with a five-day fast.

Elimination diets vary, but the basic principle is to re-introduce foods one at a time after your fast and monitor your body for a few days to see how it responds. I personally discovered that I am sensitive to almonds but not organic almonds. I was also unable to eat any ginger when I had intestinal hyper-permeability (a.k.a. leaky gut). You can eliminate foods based on any sensitivities you already suspect, but if you don’t have any theories on the matter, you can eliminate (and perhaps reintroduce) the most commonly problematic food groups:

• Gluten
• Dairy
• Soy
• Corn
• Peanuts
• All animal products, (Heaviest in toxicity and chemicals/herbicides)

You might also consider eliminating:

• Legumes (Just for a while, add sprouts, hemp hearts and spirulina for easier digestion protein)
• Hydrogenated oils
• Added sugars instead of natural sugar from organic dates, fruit
• Alcohol
• Caffeine
• Nightshade Vegetables
• High FODMAP
• Dairy and other animal products
• Conventionally sprayed food

Source: See Vegan Elimination Diet

Nor can the overall and long-term impact of the carnivore diet on human health be properly assessed unless one takes into account the chemical load ingested along with flesh food.

Because the herbivorous animals we consume are higher up on the food chain than plants, their flesh contains much higher levels of pesticides and other toxins. Take glyphosate, for example, the most commonly used pesticide in the world and a known cause of leaky gut:

Glyphosate residues allowed in animal feed can be more than 100 times that allowed on grains consumed directly by humans, and the amount of glyphosate allowed in red meat is more than 20 times that for most plant crops [see Glyphosate in livestock: feed residues and animal health].

The presence of such high glyphosate residues in meat alone should be sufficient reason for anyone who suffers from leaky gut to avoid the carnivore diet. (It’s also worth pointing out that glyphosate wasn’t sprayed on 19th-century prairie land; for this reason and many others, the meat eaten by Indigenous peoples of the time is not a valid proxy for meat consumed today.)

But health is not just a product of what we eat; it relies on clean water, clean air, and a host of other “services” provided by a well-functioning ecosystem. From this perspective, too, the carnivore diet fails, for animal agriculture is the leading cause of the loss of ecosystems globally, as well as the primary cause (contrary to popular wisdom) of runaway climate change [Animal Agriculture is the Leading Cause of Climate Change].

Let me turn now to the challenges that appear to be posed by a plant-based diet. Why is it that some adopters of a plant-based diet experience digestive discomfort?

One simple reason is that the digestive system must adapt to a plant-based diet. If someone has followed the standard Western meat-based diet for their whole lives, they will likely be deficient in beneficial gut bacteria, the microorganisms that help to break down plant material. The adaptation process can be helped along with a probiotic supplement; such supplements have helped many of my clients heal.

Some proponents of the carnivore diet point to the “poisons” in plants in their efforts to discredit a plant-based diet [See Evidence for a Meat-Based Diet and Health Dangers of a Plant-Based Diet].

While there is no doubt that certain plant molecules such as lectins and phytic acid can interfere with digestion—lectins by resisting breakdown by digestive acids; phytic acid by inhibiting digestive enzymes—these substances can be easily broken down before consumption. Lectin-containing legumes, for instance, can be soaked for at least six hours before cooking, or sprouted over the course of a couple of days and eaten raw. Soaking and sprouting also work to dissolve the phytic acids in legumes, seeds, and grains, as do fermenting and pickling. After our long dark night of reliance on preservatives and convenience foods, these ancient processes are happily being rediscovered and revaluated.

For those lapsed vegans who go back to meat based on the assumption that a plant-based diet simply doesn’t suit their physiology, I have good news. Yes, biochemical individuality is real—it’s largely determined by genes, lifestyle, and time of life—but it doesn’t doom some of us to eating meat in opposition to our moral principles. Our dietary uniqueness, which to a great extent means the particular balance of protein, fat, and carbs we thrive on, is something that can be addressed on a plant-based diet. My partner can personally attest to the importance of fat to his 20-something self. When he adopted a vegan diet in the 80s, low-fat, “heart-healthy” diets were all the rage, and his vegan experiment was unduly influenced by that trend. He didn’t eat enough vegetable fats, such as seeds, nuts, and oils, and he consequently lost too much weight and found himself mentally fuzzy to boot. Dietary tweaks can be made independently, but a consultation may prove helpful.

So much for the respective impacts of the carnivore and plant-based diets on human health. I would be remiss if I did not say a final word on the well-being of the food animals themselves. The sentient beings raised for our consumption—even the organic, grass-fed ones, I’m afraid—live and die under horrendous conditions. As we seek to heal our guts, therefore, we must also heal our hearts. This is a dire time in the history of our planet, and a spiritual (r)evolution in our relationship to the non-human world is required if we are to survive. We must recognize that eating animals is no longer a viable way forward; animal agriculture cannot support us in the long run, neither as individuals nor as a species.

In the end, we must see the carnivore diet for what it is: another economically motivated fad, a reactive and dangerous misinformation campaign led by the animal-agriculture industry to preserve an outdated, exploitative, and profitable narrowest sense) relationship to the natural world.

I hope I’ve succeeded here in indicating, at least, that true health lies in a very different direction. We are here to support. I have a master's in plant-based nutrition and healed Crohn’s and colitis and know how sensitive the gut can be, therefore I have learned many techniques to work with this. Please feel free to reach out!

Tami Hay's painting for Million Vegan Grandmothers

© Tami Hay 2023

 

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