The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet (10 page)

NASTY TO ANIMALS

The dairy industry is, in a word, cruel:
That is why I gave up dairy in the first place. You see, cows don’t produce milk all the time. I thought that, by milking them, we were basically doing them a favor. I assumed they would sort of . . .
explode
if they weren’t milked! Well, they don’t. Just like humans, they only produce milk when they give birth to a baby. So in order to have careers in lactation, cows are kept pregnant almost constantly.

Once she gives birth, her calf is taken away from her; baby boys become veal and girls become milkers. The separation anxiety she feels is as real to her as it would be to us. Cows have been known to escape their farms and go searching for their offspring. A farmer in England found one of his dairy cows a full 7 miles from home, suckling her biological calf.

But if we’re taking the cow’s milk for our use, what does the baby get? Well, for 6 months the baby boy calves are chained to little veal crates, not allowed to stand up, fed synthetic formula, and then slaughtered. And that is how we get veal. So if you use any cow dairy products, you are helping perpetuate the veal industry.

After baby is gone, mom cow is shot up with hormones to make her produce
10 to 20
times more milk than she would need to suckle her calf. This puts tremendous strain on her udders—think of a woman with painful GGG implants hanging to her knees—often causing a horrible infection called mastitis, which makes her udders pus-ridden and bloody. To treat the mastitis, they have to give her antibiotics.

Finally she gets milked—and not by some nice pair of hands gently caressing her udders, but by a machine that is so rough it causes the blood and pus from the mastitis to go
into the milk
!

After 2 to 7 years of this (normal cows should live 20 to 25 years, but dairy cows are burned out by this torture), our cow girlfriend doesn’t get to retire and live on a farm—no, no, no. She is considered a machine that has outlived its warranty, so she is sent to slaughter. Her life is miserable and painful from day one until the very end.

KICKING DAIRY

The trick to kicking dairy is to
replace it
with other yummy things, and I promise, you won’t feel deprived. Okay, maybe if you are at a party and a huge tray of a variety of cheeses goes by you’ll feel a twinge. Once in a blue moon I do succumb and have a bite of cheese, but it just serves to remind me of how bad I feel on dairy; it’s like my body rejects it—I get gassy and fart a lot, my skin breaks out, and I get all phlegmy. And it just doesn’t make me feel good . . . it’s like I plugged up my engine.

Far from the perfect food we’ve been told it is, dairy is actually causing very serious problems, but there is life after dairy. A delicious, healthy, happy life.

I recently threw a tea party in honor of my mother. I served shortbread cookies dipped in chocolate, strawberry shortcake, scones with veggie butter, and English Breakfast tea with soy milk. Not a drop of dairy in anything, and it was scrumptious!

4

More Nasty Stuff: White Sugar and Processed Foods

While white sugar and processed foods don’t do quite the same damage to the earth or to animals as do meat and dairy, they wreak nothing less than havoc on your body and are a million miles from kind. For those reasons, I recommend you do your best to kick them out of your life.

Before you throw up your hands and declare you can’t live without candy bars, let me assure you that your life will remain sweet, scrumptious, and satisfying without white sugar or your favorite microwavable snacks. In fact, natural sweets and desserts will keep you happier than you ever thought possible, and processed foods will naturally start taking a backseat to the good stuff as you fall in love with the new pantry of whole, unprocessed foods you’ll be making on both the Vegan and Superhero programs. So you can relax as we discuss ditching the white stuff.

NASTY FOOD #3: SUGAR

Sugar is crack.

Like crack, white sugar lifts you up, up, up, then smacks your head on the floor, leaving you wasted and useless. And yet within minutes you’re begging for more. Why?

White sugar is highly processed:
Nature grows foods in their whole forms, and for the most part we’re supposed to eat them that way. When we do, we get each plant’s unique combination of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and carbohydrates, and our bodies know how to metabolize them perfectly. Yay, nature! But when we eat foods from which bits and pieces have been removed through processing, our bodies get confused and stressed out trying to make up for the missing elements. Instead of creating natural balance, the processed “food” creates imbalance, which in turn leads to
more
imbalance. This is how a food can affect our body like a drug. And sugar is a great example.

That’s why my crack analogy is so apt. Consider these other examples. Cocaine comes from the South American coca leaf, a leaf that millions of people chew every day without getting high, dancing all night with strippers, or burning through their bank accounts. Heroin comes from the poppy flower—a beautiful red flower whose seeds end up decorating your morning bagel. It’s not the plant but the
processing
that creates the intensity and imbalance, transforming the plant into a drug. So gnawing on a piece of sugar cane is fine—your body can handle it because the sugar cane comes with nature’s mix of vitamins, minerals, and fiber. But eat a frosted donut, and you’ll get a rush and then a crash because your body just can’t handle all that sugar without the other nutrients. This imbalance creates a number of serious problems in the human body and mind.

NASTY TO YOUR BODY

White sugar leaches vitamins and minerals from your blood and bones:
Because refined, white sugar is so un-whole, your body actually offers up the missing bits and pieces to help metabolize it. In other words, your precious body gives up vitamins and minerals in order to process all the sugar! “Food” is by definition something that gives nourishment, but sugar is often called an “antinutrient” because it
takes
nourishment from the body. Eventually we get tooth decay, bone loss, depression, and weak blood. Not so sweet!

White sugar suppresses your immune system:
If you get colds all the time, you might want to look at your sugar consumption. When you bite into that candy bar, your blood sugar soars to abnormal levels. In order to bring it back down, your pancreas releases a hormone called insulin to handle all the excess sugar. But once all the sugar has been metabolized, too much insulin remains, and this excess insulin causes imbalances in the rest of your hormones, particularly those related to your immune system. It’s a great example of one imbalance creating another. This chaotic hormonal dance leaves you weakened and vulnerable to disease. To make matters worse, sugar takes on industrial toxins during processing, and these toxins overwork the liver. When the liver has too much gunk to handle, it deposits the extra toxins in the tissue of your body, leaving a messy toxic situation that weakens your immunity as well.

Sugar puts you on a roller coaster:
Sounds fun, but it’s not. Beyond the sensory pleasure and the initial rush, the roller coaster takes you to extreme peaks in blood sugar, which may include nausea, headaches, and fatigue, while the roller coaster’s lows (blood sugar crashing) bring on irritability, anxiety, dizziness, heart palpitations, crying, and depression. Oh yeah, and cravings for more sugar! Sugar consumption can lead to mood swings and behavior that, over years, we misrecognize as our true selves. I can personally attest that life is much happier and more balanced off the roller coaster.

White sugar is associated with cancer:
As I said before, when your blood sugar soars, too much insulin is produced. This excess insulin promotes the growth of certain kinds of cancer cells, including those that attack the breasts, ovaries, lung, colon, prostate, and stomach.
¹

Sugar makes you fat:
We used to think that it was only eating
fat
that made us fat. Now we know better. Because excess refined sugar converts to fat, every soda, every cupcake, and every candy bar is going
straight
to your thighs.

Sugar contributes to insulin resistance and diabetes:
When you eat refined sugar, your blood sugar skyrockets to abnormal levels. In order to balance the situation, your pancreas releases lots of insulin to help usher the sugar into your cells, where it’s used as fuel. However, if you’re eating a steady diet of candy bars and other sugary foods, your blood is filled with sugar all the time. The insulin, designed to mop up all the sugar, stops working so well. That’s bad. The sugar doesn’t make it to the cells. This is called insulin resistance, and it’s a doozy because your blood sugar remains high, but your cells are starving. So what do you crave? More sugar! This reinforces the horrible cycle. Over time, the pancreas can stop working, resulting in diabetes.

KICKING SUGAR

These days, I do my best to avoid sugar, but it wasn’t always that way. When I first became vegan, I felt so good from giving up meat and dairy that I didn’t notice how sugar was having its way with me. But that’s the problem with extreme foods! You don’t recognize their effects until you eliminate them.

As you change the way you eat, you will become more and more sensitive to what food is doing to you. Ultimately, giving up meat and dairy may be more important—and have a bigger impact on the planet—than giving up sugar, but there will definitely be a time when you recognize that the white stuff is not your friend. I do my best, but I’m no saint; I slip up on the sugar front quite a bit. At least every few weeks a sugary thing pops into my mouth and I really feel it.

When I eat white sugar . . .

• I get a headache. If I have sugar for a few days running, I start to feel a low-grade nausea. Not like I’m gonna throw up, just crappy.
  
• I end up gaining weight. Sugar is high in rapidly absorbed calories that are completely devoid of vitamins or minerals. No nourishment at all. This means extra sugar with no purpose other than to convert to fat. Sugar, like salt, can also cause you to retain water.
  
• After the initial rush, I feel really tired. There’s too much to enjoy in life to feel tired all the time.
  
• The morning after eating sugar, I have bags under my eyes and feel mildly depressed. It’s like a hangover without the fun the night before!
  
• After the sugar wears off, I feel moody and bitchy. I don’t like myself much when I’m coming down from sugar, and that’s no fun.
  
• I crave more sugar. This is how I
  know
  it really is a drug. Real, unprocessed foods nourish the body and make me feel whole, but sugar leaves me aching for more.
  

What Do You Mean by “Sugar”?

White sugar:
Obviously you’re familiar with sugar, but all ingredients ending in “-ose” should be considered white sugar as well: Dextrose, glucose, sucrose, maltose, and fructose are all simple sugars that show up often on food labels.

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS):
Don’t be fooled by the words “corn” and “fructose” here, which sound sort of innocent. Not only is HFCS as addictive as white sugar, it is in
everything
these days because corn is subsidized by the government—making it much cheaper than cane sugar for use in soda and processed foods. Worse, the corn used to make HFCS has been genetically modified (for more on genetically modified foods, go to page
65
). Worst of all, because of its unique formulation, high fructose corn syrup is suspected to cause insulin resistance, believed to be a big contributor to our ever-climbing obesity rates.
²
HFCS may be even nastier than good old white sugar.

Organic evaporated cane juice:
Yes, it’s slightly less processed than white refined sugar, but it makes me feel almost as bad and it’s just as addictive. It has a variety of sexy-sounding cousins, so watch out for Sucanat, Florida Crystals, and milled cane, as well as Turbinado, Muscovado, and Rapadura sugars.

Honey:
Honey’s hard to categorize. In terms of how quickly it raises blood sugar, it’s very similar to the white stuff. I feel a strong sugar rush from honey, and I certainly don’t use it in my cooking nor do I seek it out. From the cruelty angle, honey is an animal product, and mass honey production is not exactly kind to bees. Most vegans stay away from honey because of this. Yes, there are some groovy, kind beekeepers in the world, but they’re not producing enough to make it to your grocery store.

NASTY FOOD #4: PROCESSED FOODS

Stay away from really crappy food. You know what I’m talking about: fast food; neon-colored or sparkly foods; canned, frozen, or boxed foods that have ingredient lists a mile long. Many of these processed foods contain preservatives and additives that are suspected to be carcinogens or that are contributors to obesity and heart disease. It’s called “junk food” for a reason.

When convenience calls, go for healthy processed foods. Most companies who go to the trouble to make cruelty-free or organic processed foods also bother to kick out unnecessary chemicals. You’ll notice on boxes of organic soups or vegan pizzas that the ingredient lists are shorter and more understandable. (See pages
84
–
85
for some of the convenience foods I rely on).