#14 – Diet and Health

This may not be the most exciting subject on the blog, but could have the greatest impact on the rest of your life. And if it sounds like I’m lecturing, let me know, because that’s not my intent.

Almost 10 years ago Beth and I watched a 90 minute documentary entitled “Forks Over Knives”. It’s about a whole food, plant based diet (not to be confused with a vegetarian or vegan diet). I think the documentary can be found on NETFLIX, Amazon Prime, or Youtube. We have the CD since we watch it every six months. Am not going to try to describe the content, other than to tell you it kept our attention from start to finish. Still does. We just watched it tonight.

I had always been a meat/potatoes guy from childhood. OK, and pretzels, lots of them. The two main adjustments we made as a result of watching this documentary were:

  • For dairy, we switched from cow’s milk to almond milk. It was an easy switch. We also eliminated most other dairy products, although I do sneak some cheese on pizza about once a month. And I had cheese on Dotty’s great lasagna back in January.
  • Over the course of a year we cut way back on meat consumption. We’ll still have a meat sandwich, or something like that, about 3-4 times per month when we go out. We’ll also use meat substitutes 1-2 times per month. These products, like Beyond Meat, are becoming more and more mainstream (although still contains a lot of fat). Oh, and Dotty’s great lasagna had some meat (did I tell you how great her lasagna was?).

The main culprit is processed food. Unfortunately that makes up 90% of the standard American diet. Watch the documentary and draw your own conclusions. I’m not going to talk here about what/how it’s changed things health-wise, but will address that in a separate blog if there’s interest.

There are dozens of food documentaries out there, and we’ve watched a bunch of them. We’re glad to recommend others. But this one has minimal political, or other, agenda.

Still no comments in the last five weeks. I REALLY need to market a little more.