Rip Esselstyn's Blog, page 2

How Can I Stay PLANTSTRONG When Traveling and Eating Out in Restaurants?

Rip’s Tips for Eating PLANTSTRONG While Traveling

I have heard every argument possible against a plant-based diet, and at the core, most comments fall into this category:

 

“But Rip, it’s just too hard to eat a plant-based diet.”

Come on, now! What’s hard is not being healthy.

 

It’s worth the effort to Eat Strong Food.

 

Breaking News: It’s super easy to eat a PLANTSTRONG diet while traveling.

For most people, eating plants is as easy as shopping at any market in America—not just health food stores, but also places known for their meat and dairy offerings. And restaurants, with some careful planning, can be surprisingly accommodating. You just have to know what to look for and what to avoid.

Air Travel

When I pack for a trip, I never leave home without a couple bags of Rip’s Big Bowl Cereal (make your own here) and a bag of our PLANTSTRONG Granola. I know I can stop at any Starbucks and purchase a cup of plant-based milk and a banana or two. I will also bring unsweetened applesauce pouches (and a bowl and spoon) to mix with the granola for a super fast snack that requires no refrigeration.

On the Road

For day trips with the kids, we always pack a cooler loaded with fruit and cut up vegetables with hummus. We often plan ahead and make these quesadillas the night before. Once cooked and cooled, we wrap in foil and enjoy them the next day.

The new PLANTSTRONG ready-to-eat chilis and stews are also a lifesaver. Don’t forget to pack a bowl with a lid, then you can rip open a box at any truck stop, and use the in-store microwave to heat your meal.

But what about eating out?

Here are some ideas of what to order in different types of restaurants:

Asian restaurants: Ask for brown rice, steamed vegetables, steamed edamame, or tofu, hold the extra sauces, and use low sodium soy sauce sparingly. Another good option for both restaurants and most grocery stores: brown rice vegetable sushi.

Italian: Go for whole grain pasta, tomato sauce (with no cheese added), and ask them to throw in as many grilled/steamed vegetables as they can find!

Steak House/American: Believe it or not, you can get a great meal at a steak house. You can almost always find options like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and lots of steamed vegetables, or you ask your server for a salad with every fresh vegetable they have on hand (and even fruit!), with a side of balsamic vinegar (or sneak in your own PLANTSTRONG dressing).

Breakfast spots: Request oatmeal made with non-dairy milk or water, fruit, and some nuts. You can also ask if they have whole grain bread, a little nut butter or avocado (hold the oil!), and fruit.

Coffee shops: Hot herbal tea is always a great option. If you use coffee creamer, oat milk is quickly becoming a mainstay at coffee shops. Skip the syrups! If you’re having a snack, go for oatmeal or look for bars with ingredients you can pronounce. Look for whole grain bread or bagels. Scan the lunch menu for hummus or avocado and any greens – then swap cream cheese or butter for your bagel and add some spinach and tomato if you’re lucky! Dried fruit and nuts are great grab-and-go snack options to hold you over.

Gas stations: If you’re on the road, you can find fruit at most convenience stores, and sometimes whole-grain pretzels or unsalted nuts as well.

Grocery stores: Don’t forget local grocery stores, where you can find items like oil-free hummus, whole-grain crackers or bread, cut up and washed vegetables/fruit, cans of low sodium beans (just be sure to pick up a cheap can-opener). You can even buy single potatoes, frozen grains and frozen vegetables to microwave later in your hotel room. Or, you can make a great trail mix with whole-grain cereal, raisins, and a few nuts. Many grocery stores also have salad bars where you can make a great PLANTSTRONG meal. Save some money by purchasing a full container of washed spinach or mixed greens in the produce section, then buy your salad bar toppings to assemble a monster meal inside the greens container. If the store doesn’t offer prepared brown rice on the salad bar, be sure to pick up some frozen (and check the cafe area for a microwave!).  For dressings, think outside the bottle. Look for prepared hot soups: vegan chili or minestrone soup make a great salad topper. Or grab salsa or hummus or a bottle of balsamic glaze before you checkout.

The bottom line—if you rethink your meal options and make it an adventure to find what you need, it’s entirely possible to stay PLANTSTRONG wherever you go!

 

We’re here for you!

Remember, if you need convenient, healthy, on-the-go snacks and meals, look no further than our line of PLANTSTRONG Foods – including cereals, granolas, popcorn, soups, broths, and chilis. Our exclusive PLANTSTRONG line of foods is here to simplify the journey to a plant-based lifestyle by providing convenient meal solutions built on a foundation of taste, nutritional integrity, and proven science.

 

 

 

 

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6 Reasons Why Alcohol Is Unhealthy

This is an excerpt from The Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue Diet. 

1. Alcohol is packed with empty calories. Like soda and fruit juice, alcoholic drinks are entirely empty calories. One jigger of whiskey contains 105 calories, a pint of beer can have close to 200 calories, and that after-work gin and tonic is another 200 calories. But the problem with liquor extends beyond the calories.

2. Alcohol inhibits your body’s ability to burn fat by as much as 30 percent, and it’s a known toxin to just about every organ in your body, especially your liver, brain, heart, and kidneys—important organs you want to keep around as long as possible.

3. Alcohol increases your appetite, which leads to overconsumption. Everyone knows about alcohol’s effect on decision-making abilities, but it also leads to some other bad choices aside from drinking and driving. You down lots of booze and suddenly you get the munchies. Why not have a double cheese pizza and a carton of wings and maybe a cupcake or two? Before long, those 300 empty alcohol calories lead to 1,500 empty food calories.

4. There are no nutrition labels on those bottles. Most people have no idea how many calories they’re taking in with each sip, shot, or gulp. The fact is, a bottle of wine a week will add about ten pounds worth of calories a year, as will a bottle of beer every night. And that’s just one bottle!

5. Alcohol causes liver disease. While half of all alcohol-related deaths are related to drunk driving and other accidents, the other half is due to liver disease. Drinking alcohol in excess amounts leads to the inflammation and accumulation of fat in the liver, a condition called fatty liver disease. The CDC notes that excess drinking means more than two drinks a day for men or one drink a day for women, but the Cleveland Clinic points out that up to 40 percent of people with more modest alcohol intake can also develop fatty deposits in their liver. The bottom line is that any amount of alcohol can cause liver inflammation 

So what’s the big deal? We’ve all got some flab in our bellies and thighs, what’s a little more in the liver? Well, heavy drinking can result in a fatty liver in as little as three weeks. Over time, as you continue to drink, repeated inflammation and fat deposits can lead to a condition called alcohol-induced hepatitis, and, eventually, cirrhosis, an irreversible scarring of the liver. Scar tissue cannot do what healthy liver tissue can: make proteins, fight infections, clean the blood. Only by cutting out alcohol entirely can you stop alcohol-induced liver disease before it’s too late. Nothing can make scarred tissue go away, but removing alcohol from the equation can prevent liver scarring from getting worse.

6. Alcohol consumption has been linked to cancer. In fact, in its 2011 “Report on Carcinogens,” the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services listed alcohol as a known human carcinogen, and the World Health Organization upgraded its categorization of alcohol to a definitive human breast carcinogen. When you drink, your body metabolizes the ethanol in drinks into acetaldehyde, a toxic chemical that can damage cell DNA, possibly leading to cancerous mutations. In addition, alcohol intake can give rise to free radicals, those unstable molecules that stampede through your bloodstream, smashing into other cells and causing cancerous mutations by scrambling their DNA.

If you don’t take it from us, take it from the World Heath Association: No amount of alcohol is safe. Or from the CDC: “All alcoholic drinks, including red and white wine, beer, and liquor, are linked with cancer. The more you drink, the higher your cancer risk.”

In the free PLANTSTRONG Seven-Day Challenge, our guidelines eliminate alcohol for the week as part of our “don’t drink your calories” mantra. And in the process, we start to clean up your liver and other vital organs while filling your plate with nutrient dense, whole, plant foods.

We recognize that learning how to replace the effects of a nightly drink is hard. And we also know that pointing out the evidence around alcohol isn’t going to win us any friends. But evidence-based nutrition is our North Star, and we will always let the research be our guide. For more information on alcohol, watch this short video below.

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The Problem with the Paleo—It’s a Devil’s Bargain

 

So what’s wrong with all the Paleo diets being promoted today?

 

For one thing, our early ancestors didn’t eat just meat. Up to 80 percent of their diet was actually plants. And it was these plants and the ability to cook starches and root vegetables that caused the great explosion in human growth and brain size.

 

The reality is the people in the Paleolithic Era ate close to 100 grams of fiber per day, or double that of the average plant-eater today.

Rip Esselstyn, Excerpt from PlantStrong

Next, it’s estimated that the animal that would most resemble those eaten by Paleo types would be the antelope, whose flesh contains about 5 percent fat, hardly any of it saturated fat, and no added hormones or antibiotics—that’s far different from the animals those Paleo-pretenders eat today.

To defend their lifestyle, the Paleo camp will often throw in the side argument that whole grains weren’t part of the human diet in 100,000 B.C. Well, neither were many other wonderful and healthful plants such as broccoli, artichokes, lettuce, grapefruit, and most of the other fruits and vegetables we love today. And since countless studies have shown that increased consumption of whole grains is related to increased longevity and decreased obesity and heart disease, it’s hard to argue against eating grains.

 

Don’t rely on a speculative hypothesis to create your healthy diet. Rely on plants, and you’ll be as strong as a caveman…and live three times as long.

Rip Esselstyn, Excerpt from PlantStrong

 

Want to learn more? Watch and Listen to this important PLANTSTRONG Podcast episode with Dr. Michael Klaper on why the Paleo Diet is “The Devil’s Bargain”

 

Listen HERE: Dr. Michael Klaper "Paleo: The Devil's Bargain"

At PLANTSTRONG Foods, we are dedicated to providing convenient whole foods, plant-based meal solutions built on a foundation of taste, nutritional integrity, and proven science. Check out all our products HERE.

Read More PLANTSTRONG Foods Make The Lifestyle Easier.

Discover How Good It Feels To Eat Strong Food.

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What Should I Look for When I Read Nutrition Labels?

Avoid added sodium, sugars, and oils that may be hidden in certain foods

Rip shares a quick-and-easy method to find items in your grocery store that are ‘on plan.’

When reading labels, we’re going to place our focus on four main areas: sodium, added oils, added sugars, and whether or not something is considered “whole grain.”

This is an excerpt from the Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue Diet. 

Here’s your quick list to determine if the label you’re reading passes the PLANTSTRONG sniff test.

1) Sodium: Your recommended total daily intake should be around 1500-2000mg daily so when reading a label, you want the number of calories per serving to be equal to or lesser than the number of milligrams of sodium per serving. (For example: If the number of calories per serving in your item is 250 calories, then you want the amount of sodium to be 250mg or less). You’re looking for that quick-and-easy 1:1 ratio.

2) Added Oils: During this challenge, you are avoiding all extra oils. This includes those that have erroneously been labeled as “healthy oils” like olive oil, coconut, grapeseed, safflower, and canola oil. If you see a bunch of added oils in the ingredient list, put it down!

3) Added Sugars: It’s shocking and amazing how much extra sugar is hidden in some of our favorite staples like pasta sauce, yogurt, condiments, and even bread. Avoid foods that have sugars in the first three ingredients. Four grams of sugar is equal to about one teaspoon, so if your label says 16g of sugar per serving, that’s almost four teaspoons in one serving!

4) Eating Whole Grains: We want you to look for these keywords when determining if something is truly a whole grain food item: whole grain, cracked, rolled, stone-ground, and sprouted. If you don’t see one of those words, it’s likely not a true whole grain food item. 

If you want to fill your pantry with products that match the evidence-based nutrition guidelines, visit PLANTSTRONGFoods.com to see our growing assortment of meal solutions. We want to make it easy, convenient, and delicious to live your best PLANTSTRONG life!

The post What Should I Look for When I Read Nutrition Labels? first appeared on PLANTSTRONG.

Why is Exercise So Important?

Sitting has become the new smoking. Our sedentary inertia has become a blanket of sticky molasses gluing us to our couches, and it’s slowly killing us. 

Rip Esselstyn

Why is exercise so important?

Well, first of all, it’s embedded in our DNA. Our ancestors routinely trekked, ran, and climbed many miles every day, and today we’re designed to do exactly the same—even if these days the farthest we walk is to the mailbox.

What happens when we spend too much time sitting?

After sitting more than an hour, your body halts production of the fat-burning enzyme lipase by as much as 90 percent! This slows down the rate at which glucose is metabolized and lowers levels of HDL—”the good”— cholesterol. Your blood sugar rises, your muscles tighten, and the muscles in your legs don’t sufficiently contract to send blood back up to your heart.

As a result, excess blood pools in your legs, your cells clump together, and circulation slows. You start feeling tired—that’s because your body is no longer producing enough insulin to ferry glucose to your muscles. Then you feel hungry, even if you just ate—this is because appetite-regulating hormones leptin and ghrelin are completely out of whack. So you eat more, you move less, and a vicious cycle ensues.

Research presented at the 2015 European Society of Cardiology conference in London suggested that just taking a brisk twenty-five-minute walk every day can tack on three to seven years of extra life. Moreover, a Cambridge University research team tracking 300,000 Europeans for twelve years determined that daily walks reduced the death rate of normal-weight people by 25 percent, and by 16 percent among the obese.

This is an excerpt from the Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue Diet. 

Movement Matters!

Besides extending your life, there are plenty of additional reasons to have a nurturing relationship with your body and stay fit. Exercise:

Improves Your MoodImproves Your BrainBoosts Your Immune SystemImproves Your Appetite and Makes You Love Healthy FoodLowers Your Risk of OsteoporosisIncreases Your EnergyBoosts Your Sex LifeMakes it Easier to Get Out of Bed in the MorningPrevents Muscle Loss

We all need to move. That’s what our bodies are built to do. Find that missing joy that resides within all of us. In tandem with eating strong food, exercise will propel your health and happiness to new levels!

Need help establishing a daily exercise habit? The PLANTSTRONG Coaching program helps people create the skills needed to sustain a whole food, plant-based lifestyle—including exercise—for the long haul. If you’re tired of starting and stopping over and over again, let our coaches guide you into a new mindset and hold you accountable to your goals. Learn more HERE.

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Heart Disease Runs in My Family. Do I Really Have Control Of My Destiny?

Make Yourself Heart-Attack Proof – Excerpt from PlantStrong

Genetic susceptibility should definitely be on the list of considerations when you prioritize your lifestyle and daily habits. But with the Standard American Diet, everyone is susceptible to heart disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and certain cancers. If genetics are what keep you up at night, they should be even more of a PLANTSTRONG push for you to change what you eat.

It’s quite possible we all have something coming for us—genetic, environmental, or, God forbid, accidental. Shouldn’t we do everything we can to prepare our bodies to fight back?

Consider this.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute recently completed a ten-year study concluding that nearly ALL males over age 60 and ALL females over age 70 reared on a typical Western, animal-based diets are already suffering from heart disease and should be treated as such. What do you think is the main cause of all that heart disease?

More often than not, it’s not genetic. It’s diet.

Even in the absence of symptoms, if we grew up on Kraft Mac and Cheese and Stouffer’s French Bread Pizzas, we should operate under the assumption that heart disease exists within us. And that sodium-suffering, cheese-choking, deep-fried diet history is more of a risk to us than Grandpa Pete’s pericarditis.

What’s frightening is this: in many heart disease cases, the first symptom is instant death. 

rip esselstyn

What is at the core of this terrible disease? Plaque.

Plaque is a waxy, fatty deposit that can build up in various places in the body, including the inside of the arteries, the blood vessels that carry blood away from the heart. Over time, plaque grows even greasier, more fatty and nastier, and can become so thick that it severely constricts the flow of blood. If left untreated—or worse, if the unhealthy diet that promoted plaque in the first place persists—the arteries may become completely closed off, triggering a heart attack. 

While blood thinners can increase the flow of blood, and medications like nitroglycerin can even temporarily dilate the arteries to prevent death, your fork is the only tool that can actually help reverse the buildup of plaque in your system. 

Surprisingly, artery blockage causes less than 10 percent of heart attacks. The cause of nearly 90 percent of them are gel plaques, similar to small pimples that line the arterial wall. When one decides to pop, your body forms a blood clot. The result, more often than not, is no blood flow downstream to the heart. 

In fact, my father (Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., a surgeon and expert on cardiac disease) is convinced that people have the profound ability to destroy these Darth Vader death-star gel plaques using only their forks—by eating whole, plant-healing foods—in as little as three weeks! Try that one on for size: Three weeks to make yourself heart attack-proof! Considering your health is your most valuable asset, that’s an investment worth making.

To learn more, watch this special presentation of “Rip’s Rescue: Make Yourself Heart-Attack Proof” with Dr. Brian Asbill, a cardiologist, lifestyle medicine physician, and one of medical directors at PLANTSTRONG.

The post Heart Disease Runs in My Family. Do I Really Have Control Of My Destiny? first appeared on PLANTSTRONG.

How to Begin a Whole Food Plant-Based Diet?

This is an excerpt from The Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue Diet by Rip Esselstyn. 

Thinking of trying whole food, plant-based eating plan? We invite you to take a seven-day, all-in test drive to quickly experience the radical benefits of eating strong foods. The body has a remarkable ability to heal when given the proper nutrition. You won’t believe how good you’ll feel in just a few days.

Transitioning from the Standard American Diet to a PLANTSTRONG lifestyle is an absolute game-changer full of abundance and life-giving nutrients. Oh, and it’s also so simple and ridiculously delicious.

Contrary to what you may think, adopting a PLANTSTRONG lifestyle requires a minimum amount of time and expense, but we promise, it will deliver maximum health benefits in as little as seven days!  

Quite simply, you are learning how to Eat Strong Food.

Let’s start the adventure. 

Here’s What You’ll be Consuming: 

Veggies and Plenty of Green Leafy VegetablesPotatoes – Yukon Gold, Sweet Potatoes, Russet – all are welcome here!Legumes – Bring on the Beans, Peas and LentilsFruit – As Much as You Like!In-Tact Whole Grains – Quinoa, Brown Rice, Amaranth, Barley, Millet, etc.Whole Grains – Breads, Pasta, Crackers (just make sure they are whole grain and oil free!)Flavor Sparks – Mustards, Spices, Hot Sauce, BBQ 

Here’s What We’re Saying Good-Bye To: 

All Animal Products, including:

ChickenMeatFishEggsAll Dairy, including YogurtCheeseMilkAll Oils, including:Olive OilCoconut OilFlax, Grapeseed, Canola Oil, and More. 

I know it sounds extraordinary. And it is! But in just seven days, you’ll start to drastically drive down your cholesterol, you’ll regulate your blood pressure and stabilize your blood sugar.

These results ARE typical!

Cholesterol——————– -26mg/dl

LDL Cholesterol————- -25mg/dl

Triglycerides—————— -24.6mg/dl

Blood Pressure—————- -10/5 mmHg

Weight————————– -3.0 lbs.

*average results from more than 1200 people who attended seven-day retreats with before/after biometric screenings

I want you to experience the same joyful results of our retreat participants. I want you to go just seven days without eating any animal protein, animal flesh, or animal by-products. You won’t be eating any processed and refined carbohydrates, either. No trashy calories that are a nutritional black hole. You also won’t be eating a lot of calorie-rich, high-fat, foods like avocados, nuts, and processed oils. You’ll just be eating the best and strongest foods in the world and getting the biggest bang for your calorie buck.

Here’s what I promise you: not only will you feel better than you have in years, you’ll lose weight, your total cholesterol level will be much more attractive, your LDL cholesterol will be much less lethal, your triglycerides will be on the downslide, your energy will be on the upswing, and your poops will be easy and on schedule. 

You’ll be on a path to a life free of medications.

Statins, blood pressure medications, and diabetic drugs address the symptoms of these diseases, but they do nothing to address the underlying causation: the food.

Rip esselstyn, the engine 2 seven-day rescue diet

Just as the slew of chronic Western diseases are the manifestations of our unhealthy food choices day after day, week after week, and year after year, you will see the opposite when you make healthy food choices each day. And after you’ve strung together just seven of these days, your body starts to rapidly detox and remove unwanted cholesterol, inflammation, body fat, and a bunch of other debris that have accumulated at a molecular and cellular level in your body for decades.  

You’ll also discover all kinds of wonderful foods you may never have eaten before—and you’ll find that these foods will fill you up, taste great, and keep your whole body healthy.

But what can you eat? Here’s a quick video on what I eat in a day. But our community is loaded with recipes and resources to help you get started!

Before you start, I absolutely, 100 percent insist you visit the free video library inside our PLANTSTRONG Community or pick up a full copy of my book The Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue Diet. Both contain the core information that is crucial in helping you understand the ins and outs of the program and how it will work for you.

Ready to give it a whirl for seven days to see what rapid improvements you can make? Join our PLANTSTRONG Community with thousands of the friendliest, kale-loving people on earth!

The post How to Begin a Whole Food Plant-Based Diet? first appeared on PLANTSTRONG.

Eat Strong Food to Stop Heart Disease

Genetics loads the gun…..lifestyle pulls the trigger.

Excerpt from Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue by Rip Esselstyn

What is the number one reason to love our strong plants?

Because it’s the only way to cure our number one cause of death: heart disease. 

That’s right—the single biggest reason most Americans are going to die can be cured just by eating the right foods. Back when I was a firefighter in Austin, we had to make sure our equipment was in perfect working order. The first thing we would do at the noon shift change was a complete check of all the equipment on the fire engine, from the axes and Halligan tools we carry on the front bumper to the ventilation fans and the medical equipment we carry in the back compartment.

We have to make sure everything is in perfect working condition. A burst fire hose could mean the difference between saving a house or watching it burn to the ground. If a hose were leaking, we’d never let someone stick his of her finger in the hole or throw some duct tape on it. We’d fix the leak properly and take better care of our hoses so it would never happen again. 

The same is true for heart disease. If you’ve got a ticker at risk of conking out for good, you can throw some duct tape on it with statins and hope for the best. Or you can actually fix the problem by cutting out what caused the problem in the first place: meat, eggs, dairy, fish, processed oils, and processed foods.

This isn’t groundbreaking news. We’ve known for decades how to cure heart disease. In fact, one of the earliest people to figure it out wasn’t even a doctor. He was an engineer named Nathan Pritikin.

More than half a century ago he was diagnosed with heart disease at the ripe old age of forty-one. His doctors weren’t much more helpful than they are today. Avoid strenuous activity, take the elevator, nap often. Be sure to get your affairs in order. Gee, thanks doc.

Pritikin had other ideas. He studied the plant-based eating habits of rural Africans and how they had far fewer instances of heart disease. Pritikin figured that if he stopped eating the junk that made his heart sick, he could make it healthy again. It doesn’t take an engineer to put two and two together. (Well, maybe in this case it did.)

Pritikin completely changed his diet, and within two years his cholesterol dropped from more than 300 to 162. His so-called terminal heart disease vanished. He started to run again, which he hadn’t done for years on doctors orders. He ended up living a normal life. 

More recently, some of the most scientific proof comes from a study at the Cleveland Clinic conducted by my father, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn Jr., who took 18 people who had collectively suffered 49 coronary events over the previous eight years and put them on a plant-based eating plan similar to the Engine 2 Diet.

After a dozen years, all but one of these people were free from any further coronary incidents—and the one who did had strayed from my father’s diet. 

In another more recent study, my dad tracked 198 people who followed similarly plant-based eating plans for four years. A full 89.6 percent of them stuck to their diets, and in that group only one person suffered another cardiac event (a small stroke). However, among those who returned to their old eating habits, two-thirds of them had another stroke, heart attack, or died.

The results were published in The Journal of Family Practice in July 2014: “Though current medical and surgical treatments manage coronary artery disease, they do little to prevent or stop it. Nutritional intervention, as shown in our study and others, has halted and even reversed Coronary Artery Disease.”  

Heart disease is a choice. In other words, it’s self-inflicted.

This may be hard to swallow but it’s true.

These days, though, you’d never know that heart disease was a choice. Let’s say you visit your cardiologist, who confirms that you’ve got a 95 percent blockage in one of the major arteries going to your heart. The first thing he will do is scare you. “We’ll need to perform a bypass surgery immediately,” he might say, “or else you’ll have a heart attack.”

You’ll spend the night in the hospital, and you’ll be wheeled into the OR the next morning.

What your doctor didn’t tell you is that your 95 percent blockage is actually stable. It’s not ideal, and it’s not good for your heart in the long term, but it’s not likely to cause a heart attack tomorrow.

Your amazing body has actually built up corollary bypass vessels around the blockage. A surgeon does essentially the same thing by stealing a vein from your leg and grafting it around your blockage to improve blood flow to the heart. 

What your surgeon won’t tell you, however, is that your interloping vein will probably shut down within 18 months, and she’ll have to do another procedure. Your doctors also won’t tell you that since you have a major blockage in one place, you probably have blockages in dozens of other places in your body.

My father has counseled patients who’ve had up to 47 stents put in their arteries. Forty-seven!

Of course, no amount of drugs or patch-up plumbing jobs, such as bypass operations, stents, or angioplasty, can do anything to address the underlying cause of heart disease. You fix one blockage, and three more will pop up next month.

No degree of surgical whack-a-mole can keep up with heart disease. 

What if there was a second option? One without all the pills and surgeries and expensive gadgets that need to be replaced all the time. It has a near 100 percent success rate at stopping and reversing heart disease. It’s called changing what you eat. Focusing on strong food will give you the keys to a new health kingdom.

Sounds crazy, but just look around the world. In the famous China Study, for example, researchers led by Dr. T. Colin Campbell followed the mortality rates and eating habits of hundreds of thousands of rural Chinese. In one province with over half a million people, not a single death was blamed on heart disease over a period of three years.

Meanwhile, in the state of Mississippi alone heart disease kills more than 8,000 per year. 

But hey, we live in America! We spend more money on medical care than anyone else on the planet. A whopping $3.8 trillion per year! Surely some of that cash must be going to something good. We’ve got all these patented drugs to keep us alive. Why eat healthy when you can just order a Double Quarter Pounder, a shake, and a side of Lipitor? Because we should know better.

Modern medicine is a powerful and appealing distraction that has smart, intelligent people like you falling for it hook line and sinker.

These pills and procedures are like a seductive mistress pulling people in the wrong direction, toward trouble. If you stay true to your food, heart disease doesn’t stand a chance of invading your arteries. That’s something I know you can live with!  

Want to learn more? Join our Free Community. It’s loaded with resources, recipes, live events and more—all designed to help you live your best PLANTSTRONG life!

The post Eat Strong Food to Stop Heart Disease first appeared on PLANTSTRONG.

How to Make Your Own Plant-Based Milk

Making your own plant-based milks is easy! Try something new to serve with your breakfast.

For the whole story behind these alternative milk recipes, be sure to watch this fun episode of Snackables with Rip and Jess!

Evan and Jess’s Corn Milk Recipe

Ingredients:
1/2 cup organic corn (about 2 Corn cobs worth)
1 Medjool date, pitted
4 cups water
pinch of salt

Directions:
Cut corn kernels off of the two cobs (or you can use ½ cup frozen corn).
Add the 4 cups of water to a pot and bring to a boil.
Add corn kernels to pot and boil for 5 minutes. Remove from heat.
Pour the corn and water into a powerful blender with the Medjool date and a pinch of salt.
Blend thoroughly (on high) for one minute. Always start the blender on low and then slowly ramp up to high speed.
Pour blender contents into a container with a lid and place into refrigerator for at least one hour.
Shake before serving.

Banana Milk

Ingredients:
1 frozen banana
1 cup water
Optional, add any of the following:

1 Medjool date (pitted), 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract, or a dash of cinnamon or nutmeg

Directions:
Blend all ingredients in a high-powered blender for one minute. Use right away.

Pumpkin and Hemp Seed Milk (no filter needed) Recipe

Ingredients:
¼ cup raw pumpkin seeds
2 tbsp hemp seeds
1-2 Medjool dates, pitted
6 cups water
pinch of salt

Directions:
Add all ingredients to blender
Blend thoroughly (on high) for one minute. Always start the blender on low, then slowly ramp up to high speed.
Pour blender contents into a container with a lid and place into refrigerator for at least one hour.
Shake before serving.

Want some “cookies” with your milk? Try our all new PLANTSTRONG Granola. Two flavors are inspired by cookies (but they are date-sweetened and guilt-free!).

Try Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookie (Rip’s favorite) or Classic Oatmeal Raisin Cookie (Jess’s favorite) with your homemade plant milk!

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PLANTSTRONG Dressing Guide

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