Recently we participated in BUCKETFEST 360° to share what we’d like to accomplish before heading off to the big nighty-night. Seeing our colleagues share their wishes and dreams for this amazing journey, we sensed a common theme: The desire to leave the campsite better for our progeny, and for the world community in general. Being part of that tribe is heartwarming, as those are our values as well.
It got us thinking about our stated goal, in our case to create safe spaces for LGBTQI+ youth, places where they can find refuge, safety, and affirmation. That remains our primary goal. But the event forced us to expand our vision a bit.
What if we looked for ways to make the entire world a safe space? Why focus on a house, or a neighborhood, or a city?
We started thinking bigger, thinking outside the bucket you might say.
One of the ideas we came up with, an obvious choice for us as you’ll soon see, is the outrageous goal of a world where we stop eating animals for protein and instead observe a Whole Food Plant Based meal plan. (That explains the WFPB in the title, in case you wondered.)
We’ve eaten WFPB for two years, and though the transition has been difficult at times, and we’ve taken a fair amount of heat for our choice—and it is a choice—we’ve also realized that eating the way we do would facilitate the ‘outrageous’ goal of leaving the world better off for our great, great-grandkids.
SEE BYRON’S PRIOR 2-PART SERIES ON THIS TOPIC ↴
WFPB Part 2: Getting started, in the kitchen, utensils, etc.
Here’s a prediction: One hundred years from now, when all of our buckets have rusted away, and we’re little more than a distant rumor and a faded name on an ancient tombstone, people will look back at our habits, culture, and social activities. One thing will have them scratching their heads in 2121, and that will be our casual killing of animals for food, especially when better and healthier nutrition sources are all around us. I don’t want to be Danny Downer here, and I realize many of you reading this may be skeptical and alarmed at a world free of pork chops and paté, but killing animals to feed ourselves is not just ill-advised and cruel, it’s unsustainable for the planet as well.
Make no mistake, we love our fried chicken, and our juicy hamburgers, and those luscious, butter-charged crab legs, and those ham sandwiches slathered with mayo. Nom Nom, right? But… Eating this way is unsustainable, unhealthy, and wrong on many levels.
We adopted a WFPB meal plan primarily for our health, after my heart attack, and we’ll never go back to the so-called Standard American Diet. The aptly abbreviated SAD is the source of many of our collective ills. Here are just a few of those, and some other things to think about: (BTW, these are not my conclusions; this is based on robust, peer-reviewed scientific research)
- Animal protein contributes to cancers, heart disease, obesity, autoimmune diseases, and many inflammatory illnesses, not to mention the premier health issue of our time, obesity.
- Cow’s milk is unhealthy for human consumption. Cow’s milk is meant for baby cows, and they stop drinking it soon after birth. We’re the only species that drinks the milk of another species.
- Feedlots, factory farms, pork/chicken/turkey confinement operations are riddled with pathogens. They blight the environment, foul our rivers and streams, and they’re centers of cruelty to animals. If you’ve read what we have about factory-raised chickens, for example, you’ll never eat chicken again. Disgusting doesn’t begin to say it.
- Newly-hatched chicks are sexed right away. Since males are useless to an egg producer, male chicks are fed into grinders alive, and pulverized for chicken feed. True story.
- Chickens’ beaks are sawn off to keep them from pecking other chickens, thus damaging the meat, thus reducing its market value.
- Cattle in feedlots release methane that causes 50% of greenhouse gas emissions, and that facilitates anthropogenic climate change.
- It takes 1800 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef, and the equivalent energy of 1 gallon of gasoline.
- One acre of rainforest is cut down every minute to create more land for feedlots.
- Feedlot operations release 1 billion tons of sewage a year, just in the U.S. This waste goes directly into streams and rivers, legal per our own EPA.
- Speaking of legalities, it is illegal to film inside confinement operations. Food giants such as Cargill, General Foods, and Tyson lobbied the U.S. Congress to create this anti-transparency law. And they won.
We eat WFPB for our health. But there are many other reasons to switch to this meal plan. For one, the outrageously delicious meals we’ve prepared, tastes we’ve learned to mix together, recipes that give us beautiful, exquisitely presented meals. Beyond that, the WFPB meal plan is likely the best weight loss plan ever devised. In six months I lost 40 pounds. I keep it off, and I’m never hungry.
As for my cardiac health, nothing but good news. Following my MI, my heart doc put me on the standard drug regimen, blood thinners, beta-blockers, cholesterol meds, and a few others that he said I’d take for life. One year after starting the WFPB plan, I had my lab values taken, and the results were astonishing. I showed them to my cardiologist, and after scanning the numbers he said he saw no reason for me to continue taking my heart meds. I now take a Nexium for GERD, a daily Vitamin B-12 because plants don’t make B-12, and a daily D-3 because several studies show it reduces mortality, and I’m down with that, too. No need to check out early, I always say, you don’t want to miss the credits.
If your bucket list includes leaving the campsite better for your great, great grandkids, or you need to lose a few pounds, have a medical condition that could be addressed, or have concerns about animal cruelty, and if you wish to enjoy gorgeous, wonderfully different tastes and aromas on your table, look into the WFPB meal plan. You’ll be very glad you did.
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Editor’s Note: My wife Ali and I have followed a WFPB meal regiment for almost five years and our health (measured by our vitals) and overall sense of well-being has never been better. While we always take organic nutritional supplements such as those mentioned by Byron above, we are on no prescription medications whatsoever – all a testament to the fact that WFPB simply works.
