For Fork’s Sake: A Quick Guide to Healing Yourself and the Planet Through a Plant-Based Diet

By Rachael Brown

Finding meals that fit into your family's busy schedule and budget? An impossible mystery. And convincing your kids to trade ice cream for Swiss chard or something vegan? Yeah, right! When you're searching for a healthy diet to nourish your family, information overload and complicated steps can leave you overwhelmed instead of empowered.

 

Changing your family's food, health, and life for the better doesn't have to be drastic. Transition to healthier, happier Whole Food, Plant-Based, No Oil (WFPBNO) eating with help from a mom who's done it.

 

Rachael J. Brown shares her family's story, along with tried-and-true tips and tricks, to simplify the science of WFPBNO and jump-start the journey to better health for you, your family, and the planet. With this 10-day guide, say goodbye to the Standard American Diet (SAD) and start eating better, feeling better, and saving more money with a HAPPY (healthy and plant-powered—yay!) diet.

 

You'll discover the following:

• A complete 10-day breakdown to WFPBNO eating, with a plan that makes this healthy lifestyle easy.
• Why HAPPY food is your secret weapon to prevent obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and even cancer.
• Simple strategies to help beginners avoid SAD pitfalls, like the fridge and cupboard cleanout.
• Money-saving ideas and recipes, including delicious burger, enchilada, and mac and cheese variations both parents and children will love.
• Tips to get everyone on board with WFPBNO—and how to respond to inevitable questions.

 

Healthier and happier is just 10 days away! Get For Fork's Sake and start a clean-eating journey to plant-power your way to better health for you, your family, and the planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Certain Cabin Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986138008

Book preview

Nutrition is the master key to human health.

—T. Colin Campbell, PhD¹

FROM TEN YEARS TO TEN DAYS

TWELVE YEARS AGO, my then five-year-old nephew was diagnosed with cancer. At the time, his mom was in nursing school, and a professor asked her if she’d looked at the role of nutrition in cancer and suggested a few books. My sister-in-law took this advice to heart, and in a very short period of time went from eating pork and chicken that she’d raised to eating vegan and juicing.

Understand, this was the same woman who’d inspired me to buy a cheese-making kit and taught me how to pull mozzarella a year earlier. Amazed by the changes she’d made in such a short time—and because of her transformation—I began reading the suggested books too.

Next, I started watching documentaries and did other research. The more I found out, the more I realized I needed to change my eating habits. I had personal reasons for wanting to make changes. High cholesterol ran in our family. I’d tried for years to keep it under control with diet and exercise (with varying degrees of success), only to have it creep back up again. I didn’t want to take cholesterol medication if I didn’t have to; I’d watched my dad change cholesterol medication many times after losing his sense of taste or having some other odd side effect. My grandparents had strokes and heart attacks. My paternal grandfather had Alzheimer’s and died of pancreatic cancer, as did my uncle. I had plenty of reasons to make myself as healthy as possible.

Our food is killing us

The top two killers in America, according to the CDC, are heart disease and cancer. Also in the top 10 are stroke, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes²—all of which are diseases affected by the Standard American Diet or appropriately…SAD.³

A book called The China Study provided me the basis for new ways of looking at the role of diet in health. The author, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, found that genetics was not the main factor in whether someone got cancer. Initially, doing work in the Philippines to help feed hungry children, Dr. Campbell started to notice that children of wealthier families who were eating high amounts of animal protein had higher rates of liver cancer. Most importantly, Dr. Campbell later found that by changing the amounts of animal protein fed to rats, he could turn on and turn off cancer growth in tumors.⁴

This was aha moment number one for me. I was thrilled to find out that my genetics weren’t the main determinant of whether or not I would get cancer. Why did I not know this? Why didn’t everybody know this?

I was in my mid-thirties and many people I knew were getting cancer. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was getting older or noticing more, but it seemed like every month someone else was diagnosed with some sort of cancer. If animal protein feeds cancer cells, then what were we supposed to eat?

It was time.

Whole foods. Plant based. No oil. (WFPBNO)

I decided to adopt WFPBNO to guide my food choices. I will go into great detail in later chapters as to what WFPBNO means and how to transition your present eating style to this new way of eating, but in a nutshell, WFPBNO is exactly what it sounds like: Whole Foods, as in foods that are as minimally processed as possible (so, actual corn rather than corn chips, whole potatoes rather than potato chips),⁵ Plant-Based, as in foods that are plants rather than animals,⁶ and No Oil. You eat from a huge assortment of veggies, fruits, nuts, and beans, and you remove oils. Remove animal products like meat and dairy and you’re most of the way there.⁷

This isn’t a diet or a set of complicated meal plans you have to follow. It’s much simpler than that. Together, we’ll find foods and recipes that will become new favorites. Likely many of the things you enjoy now you’ll still be able to enjoy with a few tweaks. Are you gluten-free? No problem. Where I suggest whole wheat pasta feel free to use lentil, chickpea or your favorite gluten-free pasta. Same goes for breads.

When I initially made the switch, the first question people asked me was if my family would be able to get enough protein from plants. This is still the number one question I get from people when they find out we eat only plants. Quick question: who do you personally know who is protein deficient? No one? Me neither. But people still ask.

The short answer is, you’ll be getting plenty of healthy protein since the eight to 10 percent recommended dietary allowance of protein,⁸ is easily and naturally provided by a WFPBNO diet.⁹ For instance, broccoli has more protein than beef per calorie.¹⁰ One cup of green peas provides 17 percent of your daily value of protein;¹¹ a cup of cooked spinach contains 11 percent of the daily value;¹² a cup of cooked large white beans provides 35 percent;¹³ one cup of cooked greens—think kale,¹⁴ Swiss chard,¹⁵ mustard¹⁶ and collard greens—contains between 5 and 10 percent; and 23 almonds contain 12 percent of your daily value of protein.¹⁷

It’s not just your family, it’s everyone’s family

So far I’ve only talked about the benefit of food to you and the health of your family. There is another beneficiary: the Earth.

In her book, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: an Introduction to Carnism, Melanie Joy, PhD talks about the environmental costs of carnism (a term she coined to label the belief system that conditions us to eat certain animals, like pigs, instead of, say, golden retrievers). Even back in 2006, she states, the United Nations declared the livestock sector ‘one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.’ The UN warned, ‘The impact is so significant that it needs to be addressed with urgency.’¹⁸

As the world grapples with how to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising, reducing our meat consumption has been found to be one of the most effective strategies. Melanie Joy continues, In 2019, an international commission of 11,000 scientists proclaimed that people around the world must shift to a plant-focused (largely vegan) diet in order to help avert a global environmental catastrophe. Animal agriculture is one of the top three contributors to water pollution. The main sources of the pollution are antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, animal wastes, sediments from eroded pastures, and fertilizers and pesticides used for feed crops.¹⁹, ²⁰

The runoff from animal agriculture seeps into local creeks and rivers and has led to dead zones in the ocean—places where the oxygen levels are brought so low by pollution that plants and animals cannot survive. And it’s not just the water pollution that is concerning but the amount of water used as well. As Business Insider put it, A whopping 106 gallons of water goes into making just one ounce of beef.²¹, ²²

The Amazon rainforest acts as a sponge and absorbs carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. However, according to Melanie Joy, Over 75 percent of previously forested land in the Amazon has been converted into pastures for feeding farmed animals.²³

You may have heard about antibiotics becoming resistant because of misuse or less effective because of their overuse.²⁴ Antibiotics are added to animal feeds in large factory farms, or CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) to prevent disease in overcrowded conditions, treat infections, and improve growth and production. According to Livestock’s Long Shadow, in the United States…livestock are responsible for an estimated…37 percent of pesticide use [and] 50 percent of antibiotic use.²⁵, ²⁶ You read that right, 50 percent of all antibiotics used in the U.S. are used in animal factory farms.

According to Melanie Joy, Farmed animals must consume 2,000 pounds of grain in order to produce enough carnistic products to feed a person for a year. However, if that person ate the grains directly, it would take only 400 pounds of grain to feed them for a year.²⁷ By skipping the meat, we are also saving water and crops that go into making that meat. In fact, as a comparison, one five-ounce serving of beef uses 36 square miles of land and 570 gallons of water²⁸ and necessitates 10.50 miles driven as compared to one ¼-cup serving beans, which uses 0.15 square miles of land and 21 gallons of water with 0.11 miles driven. And how about cheese? One one-ounce serving of cheese uses 0.17 square miles of land, 37 gallons of water, and 0.60 miles driven as compared to one one-ounce serving of Kite Hill Plant-Based Cheese, which uses 0.09 square miles of land and 16 gallons of water and 0.14 miles driven.²⁹

Surely, you’ve heard that it’s important to reduce the use of fossil fuels by driving less— you know, ride your bike or walk instead or take public transportation. These are all helpful measures, but did you know that by taking animals off your plate you can also help curb emissions? Animal agriculture is responsible for more annual CO2 emissions than that produced by 400 million cars.³⁰ You know those semi-trucks you pass, carrying cattle or pigs to a slaughterhouse? Emitting CO2. That ship or plane transporting meat halfway around the world to be sold? Emitting CO2. Even that grass-fed, organic, cage-free meat had to be transported to wherever it is being sold.

Learning how factory farms work and about their treatment of animals, as well as their effect on the environment around them (with sludge running into waterways and infecting drinking water, or their waste contributing to dead zones in the ocean) makes me think twice about the kinds of food I want to be eating and the kinds of industry I want to be supporting with my money.

So, whether you are changing your diet to avoid heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or a stroke, or you are changing your diet to help ensure planetary health for yourself and generations to come, you can rest assured you are making a difference with each bite you put in your mouth. How much of a difference? According to Stephanie Mantilla, The estimated impact of eating meat every day costs one animal life, 1,100 gallons of water, 40 pounds of grain, 30 square feet of forest, and 20 pounds of CO2. Every day you’re a vegan saves the equivalent.³¹

I soon realized that not only was my body benefitting, but this lifestyle was making a difference in the health of the world. Experts say that eliminating the consumption of animal products is the single greatest thing humans can do to alleviate climate change, says Anna Keeve with the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies.³²

From time to time, our family enjoys eating plant-based No Evil brand’s Italian sausage meat. Their packaging states: Imagine if every American left meat off their plate one day a week for one year. That’d be like taking 7.6 million cars off the road! and Bring back the road trip but don’t forget the plant meat. Switching to a plant-based diet saves more carbon emissions than driving a hybrid. How much more? 50 percent more! I feel good every time I open up one of their packages.

Any time you need motivation and wonder