Trying to lose weight? Want more energy and the knowledge that you are reducing your risk for heart disease? You can accomplish all this and more with a plant-based diet and cutting meat and high processed foods out of your diet. This lifestyle change from a high processed diet to a plant-based one can cause very healthy changes to your body without having to change other parts of your life. This is only part of what you will need to transform your life to a healthier state. Exercise is still a necessity if you want to be healthy but this change to a plant-based diet is a good start. This change in diet can address many problems to your health but we will only tackle seven in this article. These changes are: Reducing inflammation, reducing your cholesterol levels in your blood, a microbiome makeover, change how your genes function, greatly decrease the change of getting type 2 diabetes, you will still get the right amount and the right type of protein, and it also makes an impact on the environment. Elevated inflammation levels in the body have been linked with increased consumption of meat, cheeses and other processed foods. Inflammation in the body is not a bad thing if it is short-term, such as when you suffer an injury your body gets inflammation in that area to help the healing process. But long term inflammation, lasting for months or even years, is not healthy and has been liked to many conditions such as: Diabetes, atherosclerosis, strokes, heart attacks and autoimmune diseases. Here comes the first change with the plant-based diet and that is its natural anti-inflammatory traits. This is because they are high in fiber, antioxidants and lower in saturated fat and endotoxins, (toxic released by bacteria often found in animal foods), that cause inflammation. Plant-based diets have been shown to drastically reduce the level of C-reactive protein (CRP) in the body. CRP indicates levels of inflammation in the body. This lowering of inflammation is great on its own but its only one benefit of a plant-based diet. Have high cholesterol? This is a problem that is becoming more and more prevalent in the world today and is a risk factor in heart disease and stroke. The major culprit of this increase in cholesterol is saturated fat, which is found in meat, cheese and other animal products. Multiple studies have shown that going to a plant-based diet can reduce your cholesterol levels up to 35%! That is on par with drugs ability to reduce cholesterol and does not require you to purchase and take pills. So why does switching to a plant-based diet lower your cholesterol? It accomplishes this by not only insanely lowering your saturated fat intake but it also is high in fiber. Fiber reduces your cholesterol levels and helps to make you feel full. Did you know that you have trillions of microorganisms living in your body? These amazing organisms are crucial to our health and have many functions that we need. Here is a small sample size of some of the amazing things that these microorganisms do for our bodies:
Help with food digestion
Produce nutrients we cannot live without
Train the immune system
Regulate what genes are on and off
Improve gut tissue health
Protect us from cancer
A plant-based diet helps these microorganisms by fibers ability to promote the growth of these microorganisms. The exact opposite can be said of diets high in dairy eggs and meats, they can promote the growth of disease causing bacteria. Through many studies, it has shown that when people eat choline and or carnitine, which are found in meat, dairy, poultry, eggs and seafood, bacteria in your gut produces trimethylamine which is turned in a toxin called TMAO by the liver. TMAO (Trimethylamineoxide) lowers your body’s ability to remove cholesterol causing increased plaque in our blood vessels and elevating the risk of stroke and heart attacks. Don’t let that scare you away from eating meat if you enjoy it all together. Studies have shown that after a few days of a plant-based diet the microorganisms in your gut change and function differently and do not produce TMAO after a meal containing meat. So, if you like meat and dairy you don’t have to completely cut it out to make these changes stick. There was an amazing discovery that lifestyle factors and exposure to environment can turn genes in your body off or on. Scientist now known that antioxidants and other nutrients found in plants can cause genes to change and optimize the way our cells fix damage done to our DNA. Once such example is that lifestyle changes of a plant based-diet can lower the prominence of cancer genes found in men. Combining a plant-based diet with healthy lifestyle changes have also been shown to grown our telomers, the caps at the end of DNA that increase the stability of our DNA. It is hypothesized that this will cause our cells and tissues to grow more slowly. A plant-based diet can vastly lower your chances of developing type two diabetes. This is an important factor of a plant-based diet because around 38% of Americans have prediabetes which can one day become type 2 diabetes. Multiple studies have shown that eating read, especially red and processed meats, greatly increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Eating meat once a week over 17 years has been shown to increase the risk of diabetes by around 74%! This studied was followed up and the results showed that increasing red meat consumption by only half a serving a day for four years increased the risk of diabetes by 48%. Why does eating meat consistently have such a high change of causing type 2 diabetes? Animal-based iron and nitrate preservatives have been shown to: damage cells in the pancreas, elevate inflammation, weight gain, and hinder the function of insulin. Reducing or keeping meat out of your diet all together will greatly lower your chances of developing type 2 diabetes. Eating a plant-based diet consisting of whole grains is even more beneficial due to the carbs ability to protect you against diabetes. A plant-based diet can even reverse your diabetes not just stop it from happening so it is never too late to start! The average person in the United States consumes more than 1.5 times the amount of recommended protein. This overconsumption will not make you stronger, the excess protein is stored as fat and is one of the reasons why animal protein is a major cause of weight gain. With plant-based protein you are required to keep track and instead of turning to fat it protects us from chronic disease. The people who live the longest only get 10% of their total calories from their protein intake, far less that the 15-20% of average Americans. Changing to a plant-based diet not only will have all these positive effects on your body but will also improve your footprint on the environment. Animal agriculture is the largest culprit of greenhouse gas and is the leading cause of land and water usage. To raise and produce just one pound of meat required around 2,000 gallons of water. The meat and dairy based diets also are a huge factor in the world hunger problem. Most of the crops grown around the world are used to feed livestock instead of people.