Nurse Emma 🏃♀️ 🌱
Milk does a body good, it’s nature’s perfect food, right? Milk is nature’s perfect food for turning a 90 pound calf into a 450 pound cow in 1 year. As a registered nurse who knows that a whole food plant-based lifestyle is the only path forward, it is lies/marketing (remember Got Milk?)/confusion/propaganda like this that get me excited about sharing the good news. 🙏 🌱
I’m also an athlete and have always been interested in nutrition and caring for the body. It’s disturbing looking back how little the topic was covered in nursing school. During my transition into going WFPB my eyes were opened - and once your eyes are open to this information it’s hard to consider ever going back - and it’s even harder not to share the information with others.
Caring for people is what I do for a living and it is who I am at my core. That’s why I’m so passionate about sharing what I’ve learned. Books like How Not To Die, The China Study, The Happy Vegan, & The Food Revolution have plentiful data to support a WFPB diet and are a great place to start. In fact, the last 200 pages of Dr. Greger’s book “How Not to Die” are references to peer reviewed sources, articles and studies supporting his information. His publishers requested that he put that all online rather than printing them. Although not as “green” as he would have wanted to be, he knew it was important for readers to see the overwhelming evidence supporting each page.
I’ve also seen the evidence come to life first hand. My girlfriend went vegan this year as well. She happened to get her cholesterol numbers checked prior to the change then again 3 months in. Her cholesterol took a nose dive and she messaged me asking “this is good, right?”... YES! I said...I was over the moon. Heart disease is the leading killer of women and I want all of us, especially those I’m lucky to call my friends, to live long and well.
I know you can go on the internet and find confirmation for any food plan/lifestyle you want. What makes WFPB stand apart is the mountains of peer reviewed, unbiased evidence. Sure, you might be able to find a study that says eggs are healthy and don’t increase your cholesterol. But after just a bit of digging you’ll find that that study was funded by…. you guessed it, the egg industry. Climate change skeptics and the tobacco industry used “confusion” about the science, skewed research, and outlier studies to prevent change as long as they could. The meat and dairy industry is attempting to do the same. However, it feels like the tide is turning, the truth is beginning to rise above the surface and if you really want to be convinced, just give it a try.
I’ve always considered myself “healthy” and active, but going WFPB brought out a vitality and energy that I wasn’t aware I had. We are all quite aware that chronic disease is on the rise...heart disease, cancers, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, Alzheimer’s, depression, etc. (as a pediatric nurse, sadly it is not uncommon for me to see these chronic-lifestyle-diseases in kids). The good news is that most of these chronic health concerns are within your control through diet and lifestyle (see Dr Greger’s book) - the results are astounding.
It’s been said that we’re not living longer, but dying slower. Consider your health and vitality in the next few decades. How do you want to move and feel as you age, for yourself, your family, your kids? For me, I’d like to stay active and capable for as long as possible. Not just to grow old, but to stay healthful as I age. And after going WFPB I feel it already; for me now it’s recovering more quickly after a long run or a hard work out, it’s having more energy and a positive outlook each day. I wonder what it might bring for you? Consider trying it for 21 days to a month and evaluate how you feel. That’s enough time for your gut microbiome to reset and you won’t crave what you once thought you craved (listen to Dr. Greger’s free podcast, episode titled The Microbiome Revolution, it’s only 16 minutes long).
Billions of dollars have been spent to keep us in the dark. So much so that we think of something as wonderful, peaceful and healthful as a WFPB lifestyle as restrictive and impossible to pull off. Know that you have the power to reverse that tide, take control and choose. Do you think you must eat a certain way, move a certain way, feel a certain pain, or that certain activities just aren’t for you? Be open to considering that this may be a false narrative and you can break free from that story and start a new beautiful chapter. It’s never too late to try, we have an immense capacity to heal and adapt. Try it for your own health, vitality and well-being. If that’s not enough to encourage you, then try it for the planet. And if that’s not enough, then yes, of course, try it for the animals 🐄🐂🐃🐓🐇🐟🦆🐥💛. You might surprise yourself.