Last week, I watched a movie called Forks Over Knives, which is a documentary that looks into the question of just how much our diet – we being those adhering to the Western Culture – affects our overall mortality.  The research presented by the film was startling.  Over and over again, scientists could correlate intake of animal proteins and processed foods with incidences of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and early death.  Even more astonishing is that patients who had to take several dozen pills per day just to combat heart disease and diabetes or whom were told they had no more than a year to live were able to reverse their conditions by changing their diet and exercising.  Jaw drops here.

The diet here that seems to be the elixir of life is a whole foods, plant-based diet.  Basically, it calls for people to cut out animal products and processed foods from their diet entirely, and to instead consume only things that are still more-or-less recognizable as something that was grown from the land.  Thus, things like almonds are a yes, whereas Twinkies are a no, destined to live out the rest of their uneaten, preservative-laden immortal lives on the back of a shelf somewhere, just waiting to be found by archaeologists a couple thousand of years from now.

Is this extreme?  Maybe, depending on your personal perspective.  But consider, too, as Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn points out during the film, that slicing the front of someone open to put a part of a vein from their leg in as a bypass route for blood to get through the heart is a bit extreme, too.

It makes a lot of sense to switch to a plant-based diet in North Carolina in particular, considering the grave extent to which obesity has taken hold here.  According to the Center for Disease Control, every one in three adults in the United States is obese, but in North Carolina 57% of adults are either overweight or obese.   Perhaps it is ingrained in our culture to be afraid of getting up and moving; physical inactivity correlates pretty

Comparison of National Physical Inactivity and Obesity Levels in 2008 {Source: Center for Disease Control}

directly with incidences of obesity in the United States.  Certainly people should exercise more, but incorporating that can take more of a lifestyle change than just choosing to eat healthier foods at every meal.  Of course, there’s a part of me that’s shouting “We should just get rid of cars! Then everyone will have to walk to get places and will be healthy again!”, but there’s clearly things wrong with that logic and exercise can be a topic for another time.  If we really want to get people healthier more quickly, we simply need to start living off of the land again. And we as North Carolinians have a verifiable cornucopia of produce at our fingertips!  This chart, published by the NC Department of Agriculture, makes that clear.  It’s so easy to get your hands on some of the most delicious fruits and vegetables I’ve ever tasted, too. NC Farm Fresh is a great resource for finding farmer’s markets nearby, or for finding gardening centers, lest you should be moved to start producing your own bounty.  And there is no shortage of blogs to provide you with some idea of what to do with all of those fresh fruits and vegetables if you don’t fancy chewing on raw onions and peppers daily (although I rather like raw peppers and have eaten them with lunch before, to the disgust of one my co-workers who would never do such a thing).  My favorites are Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, and Doing The Vegan Hipster Thing (I realize how this sounds..).  I promise you’ll make delicious food that will actually make you feel good.  You’ll never miss a Twinkie again.  And if I can manage to eat this way more or less as graduate student who works on average ten hours a day, you probably can, too.  No excuses!

It’s time we take back our bodies with healthy lifestyles, and stop destroying ourselves with our food.  Food is meant to nourish our bodies, to keep us alive – not kill us.