Bill Clinton Plant Based Eating

Today my friend Leslie posted an interview with Bill Clinton on her FB page so I'm just totally into thinking about how eating mostly plants is the best way to prevent diabetes.

I ran into this article while I was reading Bill Clinton's article.  Check it out: Food Addictions Could Explain Why 70% of Americans are Fat.  There is no way this huge number of overweight people (70% of the population) could be each individual overeaters fault.  It's the food environment. 

The food available to us today is causing obesity.  Our great grandmas cooked healthy food because that's what was available.  Vending machines were not available and neither were frozen dinners.  It's not that the great grandma knew something we don't about good nutrition.  Healthy foods were all that were available.  They didn't have frozen dinners and peanut butter did not have sugar in it.  Currently the food available to us is not healthy.  If great grandma cooked for us today she's make tatertots.  I don't think the legislators in bygone times realized when they voted that the government subsidies on CORN and soy could hurt us so much.  I think they are causing diabetes.  80 million people in the US have pre-diabetes or diabetes and that's directly related to being overweight which is related to high fructose corn syrup consumption, salt, fatty fast foods, etc.  The food industry uses subsidized farm products to make "secret hyper-palatable" food.  These are diabolically formulated foods that you can't resist.  Hyper-palatable means these foods are addictive. When are we going to revamp and rethink government subsidies?  Subsidize the healthy stuff -- like farms that grow fruits and veggies.  I vote for that.

When Douglass and I eat at home we eat plant-based -- lots of vegetables and vegetable oils and sprouted beans and grains.  I pack lunches because it's impossible to resist crunchy, salty, creamy, buttery, rich, meaty, sweet foods on the menus at lunch.  It even sounds irresistible.  I'm an addict.  Taking a really delicious fresh cooked packed lunch means you don't even have to deal with the temptations.  But I don't think most people spend an hour each morning cooking like I do.  How can we fix the food environment for the rest of us?

This is Bill Clinton on eating a plant-based diet:

I went on essentially a plant-based diet. I live on beans, legumes, vegetables, fruit. I drink a protein supplement every morning—no dairy—I drink almond milk mixed in with fruit and a protein powder so I get the protein for the day when I start the day up. And it changed my whole metabolism and I lost 24 pounds and I got back to basically what I weighed in high school.
But I did it for a different reason, I mean I wanted to lose a little weight but I didn’t dream this would happen. I did it because after I had this stent put in I realized that even though it happens quite often that after you have bypasses, you lose the veins because they’re thinner and weaker than arteries the truth is that it clogged up, which means that the cholesterol was still causing buildup in my vein that was part of my bypass, and thank God I could take the stents. I didn’t want it to happen again.
So I did all his research and I saw that 82 percent of the people since 1986 who have gone on a plant-based, no dairy or meat of any kind, no chicken, turkey—I eat very little fish, once in a while I’ll have a little fish; not often—if you can do it, 82 percent of the people who have done that have begun to heal themselves. Their arterial blockage cleans up, the calcium deposit around their heart breaks up. This movement has been led by a doctor named Caldwell Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic, Dean Ornish who you know out in California, the doctors Campbell (father and son) who wrote The China Study, and a handful of others. But we now have 25 years of evidence and I thought that, well, since I needed to lose a little weight for Chelsea’s wedding, I’ll become part of this experiment. I’ll see if I can be one of those that can have a self-clearing mechanism—we’ll see…

The big food news in our house today is that we made wheat grass juice this morning. Self-congratulations are in order. This is a long process because we won't buy wheat grass around here and this is Boulder County, Colorado.  You CAN get freshly made wheat grass juice at a few juice bars in Boulder (25 minute drive) and at Tullies in Boulder and you can get the wheat grass in the market close to home but the grass for two tiny two ounce glasses of juice would end up costing about $15 to make at home.  If you grow your own it's less than $1 for two glasses.  I started a few weeks ago trying to grow enough wheat grass to make two little glasses of it every day.  That's an ongoing project.  We got a hand crank juicer on Craig's list for $35.00.  Alas, while we were gone for a weekend a couple of weeks ago in Calif., my wheat grass farm hit the skids.  Mostly because when we got back I neglected it totally for over a week.  I'm starting over today.  I put several trays that look kinda tired and dry down for the cats to enjoy.  They like to sleep on it and nibble a little.   I'm starting fresh tonight -- sprouting the wheat berries is first and then I'll put it in the trays to grow into grass.