"Vegan" is more a sociological term, designating people who don't eat (or use) animal products, and that could be for environmental, ethical, animal welfare or health reasons. But, "no meat"is not nutrition. Potato chips and coke might be vegan, it is not nutritious. The Whole Foods Plant-Based diet, without added Sugar, Oil or Salt (SOS), is the nutritionally sound basis for a healthy vegan lifestyle. The focus is on #WFPB without SOS, based on the work of T. Colin Campbell in The China Study.
2 onions, cut fine 4 chilis, cut fine 1 jalapeno, cut fine 3 bay leaves 3 cloves garlic, minced 4 cups dried split peas 1/2 cup barley 1-1/2 tbsp liquid aminos 8-10 cups of vegetable or mushroom bouillon
3 carrots, chopped 3 stalks celery, chopped 3 potatoes, diced 1/2 cup chopped parsley 1/2 teaspoon dried basil 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper optionally other vegetables, such as parsnips, or turnips etc.
Preparation
In
a large pot over medium high heat, sauté the onion, bay leaf and garlic
with a little bit of bouillon for 5 minutes, or until onions are
translucent.
Add the peas, barley, liquid aminos and water.
Bring to a boil and reduce heat to low.
Simmer for 2 hours, stirring occasionally.
Meanwhile, cut up the veggies.
Add more water as needed for the right thickness.
Add the carrots, celery, potatoes, parsley, basil, thyme and ground black pepper.
Simmer for another hour, or until the peas and vegetables are tender.
The way allopathic medicine works is that, when you are stuck at a red light, they will sell you a hammer to knock out the red light and after the accident they will offer to patch you up and send you the bill for that too.
(Reinoud Fentener van Vlissingen, MD, psychiatrist at Rotterdam, Holland, ca. 1965)
[Author's note: A more up-to-date version of this article now appears here.]
Into Pharmageddon
I grew up with often lengthy debates at the dinner table in our home in Rotterdam, Holland between my father and various medical colleagues about the complete bankruptcy of the Western medical model, also known as allopathic medicine. At other times, my father regaled us with stories of the various bribery attempts of the pharmaceutical industry to get him to prescribe their wares, which he steadfastly refused. He was offended by the innate corruption of that industry, often clearly at the expense of the Hippocratic oath: "Do no harm." Nevertheless, big pharma won, for now, but today the blow back is worse than ever.
The overuse of anti-biotics was a frequent topic of conversation, and I can't believe that 50 years later nothing has been done about it, except the concern has now made it to TV. At least it has become part of the public dialogue.
We are now living the apogee of the allopathic model and pharmageddon, where the final concept of medicine is symptom suppression and "a pill for every ill." Not only can it not explain the proven healing of many alternative modalities, it is a failure in dealing with such basic things as heart disease (see Esselstyn), diabetes (see Barnard), and cancer, or, as T. Colin Campbell recently said: The war on cancer simply has failed.
Seen in that light, the opioid crisis is merely the logical end result of the pharmaceutical approach to medicine. In actual fact, the numbers are small: 42,000 deaths in 2016, or about 115 a day. Heart disease, which is completely reversible and preventable with a Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet, killed 630,000 in 2016, or 1,726 people per day, but somehow that is business as usual and not any kind of a national crisis.
The bottom line is that the pharmaceutical industry, ever since drugs have been allowed to be advertised on national TV, has done an end-run around doctors, and makes them into pill pushers and not materially different from the illegal variety of drug pushers. It all revolves around the paradigm of a pill for every ill and symptom suppression. Meanwhile, medical science is hopelessly obsolete as long as it remains stuck in a Newtonian concept which puts the body first, and considers the mind an epiphenomenon of the body, the absurd concept that was ridiculed effectively a long time ago by sci-fi writer Terry Bisson in his piece on "Meat that thinks."
Allopathy is much like the drunk who is searching for the keys he lost under the streetlight and tells the passing policeman he is looking where there is light, and is completely dumbfounded when the policeman asks him logically, but where did you lose them? There is a brilliant documentary on the dysfuncition of the medical system: Escape Fire. Recommended!
Whole Foods Plant-Based Nutrition to the Rescue
Vegetable to the rescue, from fill your plate.org
Dr. Esselstyn talks of "pharmageddon." In 2017, the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) hosted a conference where 700 physicians committed themselves publicly to the new model of "prevention over pills". In Holland, which has a single payer model that definitely does reduce the paperwork for doctors and is generally more efficient, doctors are leaving mainstream medicine in droves to practice "real medicine," in one form or another. Dutch author Jan Willem van Aalst published a fascinating book (In Dutch for now) about a whole new approach to medicine, in which he resolutely puts the patient in charge, which of course they always were, but which tends to get lost in the shuffle in our industrial medical model that is focused on symptom suppression. The book takes the form of an encyclopedia of healing modalities. His work is deeply grounded in the work of quantum physicist Amit Goswami and his book The Quantum Doctor.
Here in the US, a revolutionary change within medicine is taking form in many ways, but perhaps most importantly through the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM). Lifestyle Medicine is becoming the new specialty for any medical professional who understands the implication of the Whole Foods Plant-Based diet, and how it produces a natural nutritional abundance, in which the idea of nutritional supplements is completely moot, and probably 75% of prescription and over-the-counter medicines are furthermore unnecessary (think of a world without ant-acids or statin drugs, baby aspirin and a 75% reduction in insulin needs). The soon-to-be-released documentary Code Blue puts it all in perspective, following on the heels of Forks over Knives and What the Health and PlantPure Nation.
Patient-centric Medicine
There is only one form of patient-centric medicine, and that is the realization that the mind of the patient is the healer, which follows directly from Goswami's work The Quantum Doctor. The health insurance industry has it's own pretend "patient-centered healthcare," which is just a more effective way of delivering care and billing you. In fact, their model sets patients up to keep chasing their tail in a maze of "specialists," all operating within a Newtonian model of our reality that cannot possibly provide he answer. When all else fails, diseases are then called "psychosomatic."
Note: Early Encounters with the Medical Paradigm
At approximately age 13 or 14, I had an interesting conversation with my father, who was musing out loud about psychosomatic illness as if only some illnesses were psychosomatic. (With the benefit of hindsight, I now understand that "psychosomatic," is a typical term that betrays the failure of the mechanistic, Newtonian model of allopathic medicine to grasp the nature of illness and disease.)
Upon his remark about psychosomatic illness, I asked my father a simple question:
"But are there any other?" [than psychosomatic illnesses or diseases]
After a few moments of reflection, he answered:
"You may have a point."
While, needless to say, I had not fully grasped the insights of Amit Goswami of why the quantum model simply implies that the body is in consciousness (the mind) and not the other way around, I was reasonably familiar with the fundamentals of quantum mechanics at that age. In fact, I wrote an essay on nuclear genetics at age twelve that won me a prize, a book by the nuclear physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. It seems that indeed, I intuited the paradigm that is now explained so clearly by Goswami, which implies that it is the mind of the patient that is the healer, and doctors are only incidental to that, at best a help, at worst a hindrance. Reading Goswami today was an Aha! Erlebnis for me, finally connecting the dots on why this is so.
The concepts of The Quantum Doctor hark back on millennia of spiritual tradition saying the same thing. It is simply about who we are, and the realization that it is the mind of the patient that is the healer, quite in line with the work of Mary Baker Eddy. The doctor or other medical professional then plays the role of a subject matter expert who temporarily knows more and helps facilitate the healing. The doctor/patient relationship becomes a growth opportunity for both and doctor and patient are co-equal in that relationship and not codependent, as is the case in the dysfunctional allopathic medicine model. The reason the doctor/patient relationship is so totally dysfunctional today is because it is based on the patient deferring to the expertise of a doctor who operates within a mechanistic, Newtonian paradigm that is of necessity totally hit or miss in explaining or diagnosing his disease.
The experience with Whole Foods Plant-Based (#WFPB) nutrition shows that time and again, people are getting off of sometimes hands full of medications completely, while in other cases they can substantially reduce their dosage of medications. In other words, nutrition is the first step and it firmly puts the patient in the drivers seat: first get your vital stats as healthy as you can get them on your own, and the reversal for many diseases can be quite rapid. Except in acute conditions, any other form of intervention is pointless unless overall health is addressed first and the body is enabled to heal itself.
Amit Goswami on Quantum Physics, Consciousness and Health
The upshot of the #WFPB nutritional regime is simply that the single biggest thing patients can do for themselves is improve their diet, and not just by tinkering in the margin with any number of "diets" that are marginally better than the so-called Standard American Diet (SAD), which is a total nutritional disaster. Most so-called diets amount to little else than somebody's pet theory of what diet should be, with little or no peer-reviewed science to back it up.
The Whole Foods, Plant-Based nutritional paradigm is in fact a radically new paradigm for nutritional science as a whole, and it is solidly rooted in the work of T. Colin Campbell that was first published in his book The China Study, which recently saw an updated, 2017 version. It was followed by his book Whole, which reframes nutritionial science altogether. In the meantime, a whole avalanche of related information has resulted, including the clinical work of a growing list of physicians, including Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr, Neal Barnard, John McDougall, Dean Ornish, Michael Greger, Robert Ostfeld, Saray Stancic, and many others. One after the other will tell you that no drug in the world ever made such order-of-magnitude differences as the Whole Foods Plant-Based diet. Or, as Dr. Robert Ostfeld frequently says, patients frequently come to his office in tears to thank him for how rapidly they are making progress, which never happens for a prescription of statin drugs.
These new insights place the patient central in the healing process, which of course they always were. Step one is the realization that the mind of the patient is the healer and the healing modalities offered are merely a way of empowering the patient. The patient's will now moves center stage, including all our innate self-destructive tendencies that form the blocks to healing. Consequently, the new healing paradigm of true integrative medicine will have to include all viable healing modalities, including psychotherapy. In the process and in-line with what Amit Goswami has developed in the Quantum Doctor, the field of medicine has to move from Newtonian physics, which is the mechanistic paradigm of allopathic medicine to the paradigm of quantum physics, which makes it clear that of necessity the body is in the mind, and the mind is in charge at which point any healing modality that works for you is valid.
In the context of a conversation about these issues, someone asked me why it should take this long for our society to fully accept and embrace the implications of quantum mechanics in medicine. I responded with a question: "How long did it take the Vatican to embrace the heliocentric model?" and I added the observation that what else is the AMA today, but the keeper of socially embedded paradigm, like the Catholic Church was in the Middle Ages? The book on Rockefeller's Medicine Men (see bibliography) should make that much clear.
The New Healthcare Model
Recently, I wrote about the merger of Aetna and CVS under the title of The Worst of Sick-care Under One Roof and used the opportunity to point out that, when seen by the clear light of economic logic, the healthcare system is sinking under its own weight since it creates an economic incentive to provide more treatment and as long as we focus on the treatment of disease and not on health, we are creating the runaway nightmare that is now called the healthcare crisis. In the public dialogue, so far, nobody is addressing the real heart of the crisis.
My main suggestion in that article was that the Personal Care Physician should evolve in to a personal healthcare coach and a subject matter expert who is on retainer to the patient, and organized with their own mutual society. The effect of the solution would be that your personal physician is beholden to you and only to you, and is your go-to expert in terms of any treatment you may ever need, to select appropriate healing modalities. Based on the numbers, a 65% reduction of healthcare costs can eventually be realized based on diet alone, and the remaining 35% should become the domain of catastrophic health insurance that kicks in to complement your #WFPB diet and your supervision by your own PCP. It would be an approximation to the traditional Chinese model where you paid your doctor while you were healthy and stopped paying him when you were sick.
The fundamental assumptions for this back-of-the-envelope calculation of the economics of this paradigm change in health and nutrition are taken from the documentary Code Blue. The fundamental insight is that 86% of healthcare spending is on treatments for diseases of affluence that are all capable, in varying degrees, of being prevented or reversed with a Whole Foods, Plant-based lifestyle. Therefore, over time, as our society begins to implement this transition more and more, it is proposed that we can reduce that 86% of total healthcare spending by 75% as a result of a shift towards a better diet and lifestyle, in line with the precepts of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. If so, we will reduce total healthcare spending by 65% which will solve our healthcare "crisis," and make the American economy competitive once more, all else being equal.
Two Birds with One Stone: the Environment
The transition towards a vegan lifestyle is the biggest single thing we as a society can do for solving our environmental problems. A growing list of official reports speak to this, and generally the conclusion is that vegans are 14 times less resource intensive than meat eaters.
From the cover of the book Meatonomics:
Meatonomics is the first book to add up the huge “externalized”
costs that the animal food system imposes on taxpayers, animals and the
environment, and it finds these costs total about $414 billion yearly.
With yearly retail sales of around $250 billion, that means that for
every $1 of product they sell, meat and dairy producers impose almost $2
in hidden costs on the rest of us. But if producers were forced to
internalize these costs, a $4 Big Mac would cost about $11.
Conclusions: Connecting the dots
Here are the steps to the new paradigm:
#WFPB nutrtion is the largest single thing the patient can do for their own health and wellness, and with it, the annual physical moves towards an assessment of health first, not a mere screening for illness. Most importantly, it empowers the patient to be in charge of their health. The key driver is the first ever evidence based nutritional paradigm being #WFPB, paired up with the clinical experience with a growing number of disease models, some of which were alluded to above.
Taking responsibility for your health also points in the direction that the human will is central, and that realization leads directly to the new paradigm of Quantum Healing and the Quantum Doctor. Ergo, Lifestyle Medicine, which is now focused on diet and exercise alone, must of necessity evolve towards quantum medicine. The role of the primary physician must be first as a health/nutrition coach, and second as a subject matter expert on the full complement of healing modalities where intervention or treatment in any form is called for.
In both areas we now have a fortuitous meeting of theory and practice.
In the case of #WFPB the experience with plant-based nutrition by a number of physicians in different fields, found their theoretical foundation in the research work of T. Colin Campbell.
In the field of alternative medicine and various attempts at a model for integrative medicine, real progress was not possible until these efforts met up with the concepts of the Quantum Doctor to provide the theoretical foundation and the model for a comprehensive understanding of the meaning of integrative medicine.
The Quantum Doctor provides a logical and sound explanation as to why the allopathic model repeatedly falls short - because it is based on an obsolete and simplistic model of the human experience. More importantly, the Quantum Doctor also provides a satisfactory explanation why many alternative healing modalities can work, when the traditional allopathic model has no explanation for them. Obviously, this new paradigm for medicine perfectly complements the implications of the #WFPB model: the patient must take responsibility for their own health and well-being.
The final payoff is that besides simply solving the healthcare crisis, the path to the Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet also solves our environmental crisis at the same time, since vegans provably are 14x less resource intensive than meat-eaters.
Bibliography
Note: The following might be considered the seminal books that can help the reader understand the parallel paradigm changes that are now going on in the areas of medicine and nutrition. I include the book Meatonomics because it provides good documentation of how our mistaken nutritional paradigm of prioritizing (animal) protein is absolutely woven into our society and extracts value because of its seriously distorted economics. Thomas S. Kuhn's classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, even if you once read it, is worth rereading by way of a refresher to understand just how deeply these paradigms are embedded in everything in our society, and how painful the change can be.
Ivan Illych, Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health
E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America
T. Colin Campbell, The China Study, revised and expanded edition (2017)
T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition
Amit Goswami, The Quantum Doctor: A Quantum Physicist Explains The Healing Power of Integral Medicine
David Robinson Simon: Meatonomics: How the Rigged Economics of Meat and Dairy Make You Consume Too Much and How to Eat Better, Live Longer and Spend Smarter
Thomas S. Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
For most of my life, I thought I knew something about nutrition. As a child I loved to help out in the kitchen, and learn cooking. In our household cooking was a serious affair: my mother ran the place like a hotel, for my father was a psychiatrist and had his practice at home, and meals were a major social occasion, both lunch and dinner. Whether it was us kids bringing friends over, or my father's friends and professional contacts, including other doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists from all over Western Europe, authors, economists, ministers of state, and clergy. Lunch and dinner were often social events. Proper meals were being served and conversation was usually in three languages, mostly Dutch and German, but sometimes French or English. Ever since we went vegetarian when I was age two-and-a-half, my mother was always preoccupied with meal planning and nutrition. In those days, there seemed to be a lot of preoccupation with: but how do you get your protein? This being Holland, the answer was of course dairy, although there was some awareness of pulses, peas, beans and certain grains as sources of protein. But we definitely thought cheese was a health food, and eggs weren't bad either. Milk was still nature's perfect food. That was then, this is now.
As an adult, during a 20-year marriage, I was the cook. Cooking was my relaxation when I came home from work. In those years I had become omnivore, but still always had a vegetarian-leaning cooking style. I made pasta sauce completely vegetarian, using mushrooms, and my Italian (now ex-) wife within six months admitted my pasta sauce was better than her mother's. For which my mother-in-law never forgave me. During those years however, I also thought an organic filet mignon was health food, and if it wasn't organic I'd eat it too.
The last 20 years, I was slowly drifting back to a more vegetarian lifestyle, until I decided for health reasons that it was necessary to become a bit more rigorous, and after one false try maybe five years ago, I finally and completely shifted to the Esselstyn diet in May of 2015, and the results were dramatic. These days I am off of all medication and back at my fighting weight of age 22.
Vegan or Whole Foods Plant-Based (WFPB)
Vegan means strictly speaking that you're not eating animal protein: no meat, fish, fowl, dairy or eggs. Strictly speaking the term means little else.
Ever since Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's work gained popularity (which got a big push when Clinton credited him with overcoming his heart disease), a more strict regimen has become more popular, no-oil vegan. No processed oils, and moderation in oily fruit (avocado, coconut), nuts and oil seeds. The biggie for most people is no more cheese. No, cheese is not a healthfood, as Dr. Neal Barnard of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine explains in his tell-all book about cheese, The Cheese Trap. Three months after stopping all dairy, I indulged in cheese at a reception, along with some red wine. The taste still seemed attractive at first, but the after taste was of having eaten window caulking and it felt heavy. Then I read the book and finally it all made sense. No wonder statistically cheese is totally correlated with the American obesity crisis... from 4 lbs per person per year, we are gobbling 33 lbs per person/per year today.
Most people fail to make the transition at first, as did I when I first tried the Esselstyn approach, because the preparation of food became a challenge, but this time around I prepared myself better, got some more vegan cookbooks, and accessed all the information I could find. Meals became fun explorations of new possibilities, and presently, a year and a half later, it feels like I am entering a consolidation phase based on a whole new cooking paradigm and a new ability to improvise with flavors and textures with the excitement of the discovery that everything tastes better and more flavorful if you stop cooking with oil. And your arteries will thank you!
The truth is not in what you don't eat but in what you can and should eat, and that is a very rich and varied plant-based diet, full of veggies, legumes, fruits etc., and it becomes an entirely new journey of discovery, as this blog tries to show. In short, the first time I tried the Esselstyn diet, I made two mistakes. One was to focus on what I could not have and trying to find alternatives, and the other was not to be sufficiently clear on the methods of preparation.
One practical example was about cooking without oil, in the Esselstyn book there is talk about stir-frying with water, but I don't believe it explains it clearly. I am finding that though some pans are more suitable to this than others, in general you can dry-fry onions, garlic and chilis, and then when it starts to brown you can add a half a cup of water, or vegetable broth, or even water from steaming vegetables, and with that base you can cook spinach, or malabar spinach or almost any other vegetable dish, lentils, etc. Once you are handy with this, it is a cinch, and the bottom line is, all vegetables taste endlessly better prepared this way. Oil or butter ruins the taste. Here I was making sautéed spinach all of my life, and I thought I was pretty good at it. I knew nothing until I tried the oil-free method. Spinach prepared this way is heavenly!
And there are tons of resources, such as Forks over Knives, the Engine2 diet, and the 21-day kickstart program from PCRM, and many other places where you can go for support. Here in the Bronx there is the wonderful resource of the Cardiac Wellness Program at Montefiore Hospital, run by Dr. Robert Ostfeld, who offers a half-day course to learn the Whole Foods Plant-Based diet, in the best of the Caldwell Esselstyn tradition, and on a budget. You can even bring your significant other, so that at least you get support at home. I am now registered to go to his next workshop on July 15th. The bottom line is with the growing support options, people who are looking to make the change have an extensive support system at their finger tips. A lot of it is free, and once in a while perhaps you'll buy a book or do a workshop. And the fear that you can't afford it is not well founded, for meat and dairy are expensive both in dollars, and in the toll you pay with your health.
Books
Always first: Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr., Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven, Nutrition-Based Cure and
T. Colin Caldwell, The
China Study: Revised and Expanded Edition: The Most Comprehensive Study
of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet,
Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health
Dr. Neal Barnard,The Cheese Trap: How Breaking a Surprising Addiction Will Help You Lose Weight, Gain Energy, and Get Healthy
Not strictly no-oil vegan, but a helpful little guide: Amy Cramer and Lisa McComsey, The Vegan Cheat Sheet: Your Take-Everywhere Guide to Plant-based Eating
A new life-style
Most surprising for some is the experience that you can eat whatever you want whenever you want once you're on this track, as long as you stay within the bounds of no-oil veganism, and use only whole foods. But there is never a sense of dieting. Eat to your heart's content, and your body will adjust, and weight management is no longer an issue.
The potential for no-oil vegan for the restaurant business
This to me is the most exciting realization that has come to me, and I've begun to discuss it with restaurant owners: Not only does no-oil vegan cooking simply taste better, but it is the most universal choice for a restaurant menu. A vegan won't touch a merely vegetarian meal, but a vegetarian will eat no-oil vegan, a vegan will eat no-oil vegan and a no-oil vegan will obviously eat no-oil vegan. So, when a party of 6 enters your restaurant and one is vega-anything, you can always accommodate them with a no-oil vegan dish. You simply cannot go wrong. This new life is getting interesting.
My hunch that Bangladeshi cuisine is particularly suitable to be adapted to the no-oil vegan lifestyle, is proving to be amply true. And of course, I was lucky enough to get to know Khokon, the owner of Packsun Halal Chicken, where we had our second no-oil vegan dinner yesterday, Tuesday April 4th, 2017. Conveniently, he also owns Neerob Bazaar on Starling Avenue, and he always cooks for the restaurant with ingredients from his store. And it's all home style food, people come from far and wide, and slowly but surely his clientele is expanding beyond the Bangladeshi people.
Our Dinner Last Night
Last night, we had a beautiful salad of chickpeas, tomatoes, cucumber, with purple onion, cilantro, salt and lemon juice. There was also a dish of daikon radish cooked with some water, turmeric, garlic and cilantro. There was another excellent dish of yellow lentils, and a dish of greens (poi greens) as well. Rice and bread were the foundation.
Khokon is taking ownership of this initiative to such a degree that he is not letting his regular chef come close to the food - he prepares it himself, and he is all excited about the fact that without oil everything tastes better. Everyone at the table was complimentary of the food, and only one person of eight even wondered why there was no meat in it, and when he got the explanation he promptly became very interested in the whole idea. One of the diners will probably go to the Cardiac Wellness Program at Montefiore.
On to Forks Over Knives on April 25th
On April 25th, NYPL Parkchester will be showing Forks Over Knives from 5-7, and at 8 PM there will be a free oil-free vegan dinner sampling menu at Packsun. You do need to make a reservation.
Neerob is Mohammed "Khokon" Rahman's favorite symbol, both for his store on Starling Avenue, and for his restaurant, called Packsun on Westchester avenue, where the Neerob label is also prominently displayed.
Last week Packsun was extensively written up in the New York Times. Clearly, Khokon and his team produce quality food for a moderate price in our neighborhood.
I am deeply honored to be working with Khokon on the no-oil vegan project. For now, the plan is to launch with a taste testers dinner on Tuesday 4/4 at 9PM. After that on 4/25, there will be a dinner following the showing of Forks over Knives at NY Public Library at Parkchester, from 5 - 7 PM.
Here are some of the recipes we prepared last week for the first time, which I now made at home over the weekend, and with great success. Here is the list, followed by comments on the preparation.
Sautéed spinach with onions, garlic and green chili peppers.
Yellow lentils, tomato, onion, garlic, green chili peppers, and some turmeric, liquid aminos and pepper
Water squash (this is a light green squash that is popular with the Bangladeshi community), eddo (a delicious tuber, Jamaicans call this white coco), tomato, onion, serrano peppers, garlic, turmeric, a bay leaf and liquid aminos.
Because of timing, the rice should come first. I used Lundbergh Organic Brown Basmati Rice, cooked in my Zojirushi rice cooker on the GABA (germinated) Brown Rice cycle. That takes two and a half hours, but obviously, you can make it ahead of time. I put it on at lunch with a timer for dinner time.
The next dish should be the lentils:
Start with softening the onions without oil or water, but just before they start to brown too fast, add in the crushed and chopped garlic, a half dozen of small green chilis. Finally add a tomato, diced.
Now, add a half a cup of vegetable bouillon (or can be water from steaming vegetables), then add the lentils and more boullion till the lentils are adequately covered, and add turmeric, liquid aminos and pepper to taste.
This needs about 35-45 mins until the lentils are done.
Then comes the squash dish
Peel the water squash and eddo, peel and slice or chop the onion.
Start with the onion, again, dry without oil or water, and when the onions start getting soft, add the crushed/chopped garlic, and the sliced peppers, and now add first the eddo in 1/2" slices, and next chunks of water squash (I quartered it lengthwise and then cut it in 1/4" slices). Add the diced tomato, and again, add some vegetable bouillon before anything starts getting burned, in small amounts.
Add enough bouillon to allow this to simmer and cook nearly dry while you prepare the spinach.
The spinach comes last, because it cooks the quickest:
Stir-fry the onions first, adding the garlic and serrano peppers (halved length-wise), allow to simmer long enough so it starts getting soft.
When the stir-fry gets soft, add the spinach, after a thorough washing and chopped to manageable size.
In this dish there should be no need for any water, as the spinach contains a lot of water and creates a delicious flavor.
The above should take you no more than 45 mins to one hour to prepare. It is a festive dinner, with delicious aroma. Obviously, you can vary the level of "heat," depending on the number of pepper, and salt & pepper can be used to taste.
The plan is to continue replicating these recipes at home every time, before writing them up here. All ingredients are available at Neerob Bazaar, 2085 Starling Avenue.
The United Nations declared 2016 the International Year of the Pulses. As luck would have it, I live in little Bangladesh, on Starling Avenue in the Bronx, and there are some ten stores on my street alone that sell any number of pulses: endless varieties of lentils (red lentils, whole lentils, Urad Dal, Masoor Matki-crimson lentils), green peas, yellow split peas, chick peas, and on and on and on.
In supermarkets around there are many more varieties from Spanish Cuisine, the entire Goya Foods line, either dried, or in cans, and there are even some interesting organic entries here and there, some you can find at Chang-Li supermarket (they stock Braggs Apple Cider and Liquid Amino's) on Benedict avenue, and Pioneer Supermarket on Castle Hill has a small, but growing section of organic produce and some organic dry goods, including excellent organic black beans from a brand called Wild Harvest.
In short, I am in Pulse heaven, and gradually I am learning more and more recipes, and ever since I decided to go 100% vegan a year and half ago, I am having more fun with food than I ever did in my life before.
2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1/2 cup toasted pumpkin seeds
vegetable bouillon, tamari, or liquid aminos to taste
Method:
Heat a large pot over medium-high heat. Add onion and cook, stirring, about 5 minutes or until translucent, adding little water if necessary to prevent sticking. Stir in ginger and cook 1 minute, stirring. Add 8 1/2 cups water, peas and sweet potato and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer, cover and simmer for 1 hour.
Uncover and continue to simmer 15 minutes. Carefully purée soup with a hand held immersion blender or in batches in a blender until smooth and creamy. Garnish with pumpkin seeds.
My personal variation is that I spray the pumpkin seeds (available at Chang Li), with Bragg's Liquid Aminos after toasting them on an oven tray. That just gives them a little extra flavor. You can just snack on them, or use them as suggested here, to spice up certain dishes.
The recipe is simplicity itself, and my routine has become to cook large pans of soup, and freeze two or three portions, so that I always have soup in stock in case I have limited time for cooking. A quick soup and a salad will tide you over.
Veganism is spreading
Lately it seems that veganism is spreading with amazing speed, both the no-oil vegan cuisine promoted by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, also known as the Plant Perfect Diet, and the low fat Engine2 Diet promote by his son, Rip Esselstyn, aka the Plant Strong Diet, and then there is always the hybrid program, Forks Over Knives, based on the movie.
The number of stories is growing, and in many cases people are successfully eliminating a whole list of medications from their lives, and instead of spending the rest of their lives worrying about the side effects of their medications, not to mention drug interactions, eating healthy is becoming more wide spread.
I am devouring these diet and lifestyle documentaries - Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead was the latest one. The more I delve into this, the clearer it becomes that this too is simply another addiction... "comfort food," OMG!
It is amazing to see how many of these testimonials there are, and the success stories are profound, with people who were on ten different medications getting off of all of them. It's one long litany of self-inflicted wounds and the medical profession as the enablers. Let's make a provisional list:
Water, water, water, and almost all antacids are superfluous, remember Dr. Batmanghelidj, and his book Your Body's Many Cries for Water.
The ED epidemic is merely the first warning sign of circulatory illness, but what do we do? We develop Viagra, instead of fixing the underlying health problem.
The allergy epidemic is the another hoax: drinking more water is the answer, and possibly some supplements to support the immune system as you get older, for it is simply true that the production of GSH (Glutathione) goes down above age forty.
Hypertension, high cholesterol and their attendant medications are all for 90% or more simply enabling people continuing an unhealthy lifestyle.
Type 2 diabetes is another self-inflicted wound, but we continue to let the USDA be in charge of nutritional advice, in service of Food, Inc - Oh, and by the way, that was a great documentary also.
In short, as more people are waking up to these possibilities and feeling empowered to take responsibility for their own health, the real change to the medical- industrial complex is only just beginning. Obama care is not the answer. Of course better medical coverage is desirable, but it is absurd to promote unhealthy food in school, and subsidize bad food, and not to be able to afford our medical system. Time to wake up and smell the coffee... or the vegetable juice!
Finally the time came to watch Forks over Knives, the brilliant documentary about the vegan life style, which for me ties it all together. I already have the FOK recipe app on my phone, which is a tremendous inspiration for recipes. Then there is also the Engine2Diet site and book - and there are the excellent books by Dr. Esselstyn, In short, sources of inspiration to learn vegan cooking abound.
What an inspiration to see people who dump a whole regimen of medications, and instead simply commit to eating a healthy, vegan diet. I have now had that same experience myself twice, the first time, almost thirty years ago, I asked my doctor exactly what a certain allergy medication did (it was Claritin), and when he explained it, I said don't even bother writing the prescription - all it does is suppress the symptoms. I was determined to find the cause instead, and, besides drinking more water, after trying numerous supplements that promise to boost glutathione (GSH), which is the core of your immune system, I ended up on the advice of a biochemist friend using Jarrow's NAC Sustain, which is a sustained release N-Acetyl Cysteine, combined with a 500 mg Glycine, at a combined cost of less than $10 per month. Not only did my allergies go away, I have barely had a cold to speak of ever since then, and that was 25 years ago. The poor doctor would have had me on Claritin from then on out. The same thing happened again at my physical in 2014, when the doctor found me 'slightly overweight' at 190 lbs, and marginally hypertensive, I took the BP meds for a while, but by May 2015, I went vegan instead, and without effort I'm down to 166 lbs, and feeling noticeably better and I am sure at my next physical I will pass with flying colors.
Clearly, the economics are that we cannot afford to continue the SAD, Standard American Diet, which by the way was similar to the SDD, the Standard Dutch Diet that I was raised on. Despite being raised a vegetarian, there was a deep conviction that animal proteins in the form of milk were essential. Now it is clear, animal proteins promote cancer growth, plant-based proteins do not, and the over-consumption of fats and sugars feed into diabetes and heart disease. The whole ED-epidemic is just an early warning signal of compromised circulatory systems, and the canary in the coalmine for heart disease. In short, the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries thrive on sick-care, preserving illness and tending to more and more sick people, who follow the USDA dietary guidelines, which serve the agricultural industry, instead of worthwhile nutrition and healthy eating habits. I've looked more deeply into the environmental economics recently, in a parallel post on my green energy blog, here.
I definitely use all of the resources listed above, and more, for inspiration, and recently I also visited a vegan supper club in the Bronx, on Meetup that is hosted at a private home in the Throggs Neck section (still walking distance for me). What an inspiration that was! And the experience of many people is that once they make the change, they make it quickly and lose the urge to go back, because they feel so much better. My own private little vegan joke is that the butcher on my street has a daughter who's vegan, and admits that meat is heavy to digest, but like so many who never seriously tried, he feels like he didn't eat if he did not have meat. He is a very nice man, whose store has been there for 50 years, and even now I stop in for a chat periodically, even if I don't eat meat any more. He's going to retire sooner than later, and who knows, maybe he'll switch to vegan too, that would be hoot.
As part of the further exploration for vegan shopping in the area, I made my regular expedition to Good 'n Natural on Weschester Avenue by Pelham Parkway the other day. It is always a delight to shop there. Their organic produce selection is always great, but yesterday I was hunting for rice cakes, and fortuitously found a whole selection and some were even on sale. Some supermarket rice cakes are made with white rice, but the health food store variety are made with whole grain rice, and nowadays they have many flavors, including with wild rice, etc.
You can make endless variations on this simple salsa, with adding non-GMO corn to the black beans (one can of each), or different kinds of salsa, and adding more peppers, depending on how hot you like it. Chipotle peppers in Adobo sauce, or Jalapeno's (or both, or, eh well, if you're totally no-oil, skip the adobo sauce...). As a light snack on a puffed whole grain rice cake, or with corn chips, you can eat this any time of the day, I love it... I am continuing to have more fun with interesting dishes than ever before, and the weekends become the time to cook some staples of rice, and beans, ahead for the week so I have an easy time putting meals together.
