Veganist Quotes

“You know you are addicted to a food if despite knowing it is bad for you and despite wanting to change, you still keep eating it. Addiction means that a craving has more control over your behavior than you do.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“      Before that first three weeks I was on over 100 units of insulin per day, and in three weeks I was taking no insulin.       In about a month, I was once again in my doctor’s office, watching as they looked at my numbers in utter amazement. When they asked me what I did, I told them I had adopted a completely plant-based diet. They didn’t seem surprised at all and told me that plant-based diets were helping to reverse diabetes. When I asked why they had not suggested it, they told me “because it is not practical.”       There I was, morbidly obese, taking nine drugs, shooting insulin into myself multiple times per day, suffering nerve damage and severe pain, and yet they thought that changing my diet in a fairly easy way would be less practical?”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“Let me describe a case: A man named Vance joined our study. His father was dead by age thirty, and Vance was thirty-one when he was diagnosed with diabetes. As our study began, he started a low-fat, vegan diet and gradually lost about 60 pounds over a year’s time. His blood sugar control returned to normal, and his doctor discontinued his medications. Imagine what it feels like to see family members assaulted by this disease, but then to realize that you have effectively tackled it by making healthful adjustments to your diet.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“When people who already have diabetes adopt a lowfat vegan diet, their condition often improves dramatically.”—Dr. Neal Barnard”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“KF: Why is type 2 diabetes suddenly so prevalent? NB: Diets are changing, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Diabetes seems to follow the spread of meaty, high-fat, high-calorie diets. In Japan, for example, the traditional rice-based diet kept the population generally healthy and thin for many centuries. Up until 1980, only 1 to 5 percent of Japanese adults over age forty had diabetes. Starting around that time, however, the rapid westernization of the diet meant that meat, milk, cheese, and sodas became fashionable. Waistlines expanded, and, by 1990, diabetes prevalence in Japan had climbed to 11 to 12 percent. The same sort of trend has occurred in the U.S. Over the last century, per capita meat consumption increased from about 125 pounds per year (which was already very high compared with other countries) in the early 1900s to over 200 pounds today. In other words, the average American now eats 75 pounds more meat every year than the average American of a century ago. In the same interval, cheese intake soared from less than 4 pounds per person per year to about 33 pounds today. Sugar intake has gone up, too, by about 30 pounds per person per year. Where are we putting all that extra meat, cheese, and sugar? It contributes to body fat, of course, and diabetes follows. Today, about 13 percent of the U.S. adult population has type 2 diabetes, although many of them are not yet aware they have it.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“KF: This is sounding like it’s something akin to a cure; is that the case? TCC: Yes. The problem in this area of medicine is that traditional doctors are so focused on the use of targeted therapies (chemo, surgery, radiation) that they refuse to even acknowledge the use of therapies like nutrition and are loath to even do proper research in this area. So, in spite of the considerable evidence—theoretical and practical—to support a beneficial nutritional effect, every effort will be made to discredit it. It’s a self-serving motive.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“KF: Are you saying that if one changes their diet from animal-based protein to plant-based food that the disease process of cancer can be halted and reversed? TCC: Yes, this is what our experimental research shows. I also have become aware of many anecdotal claims by people who have said that their switch to a plant-based diet stopped or even reversed their disease. One study on melanoma has been published in the peer-reviewed literature that shows convincing evidence that it is substantially halted with this diet.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“I am very fortunate to know T. Colin Campbell, PhD, professor emeritus of Cornell University and coauthor of the ground-breaking The China Study. I strongly recommend this book; it’s an expansive and hugely informative work on the effects of food on health. Campbell’s work is regarded by many as the definitive epidemiological examination of the relationship between diet and disease. He has received more than seventy grant years of peer-reviewed research funding (the gold standard of research), much of it from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and he has authored more than 300 research papers. Dr. Campbell grew up on a dairy farm and believed wholeheartedly in the health value of eating animal protein. Indeed, he set out in his career to investigate how to produce more and better animal protein. Troublesome to his preconceived opinion about the goodness of dairy, Campbell kept running up against results that pointed to a different truth: that animal protein is disastrous to human health. Through a variety of experimental study designs, epidemiological evidence (studies of what affects the illness and health of populations), and observation of real-life conditions that had rational, biological explanations, Dr. Campbell has made a direct and powerful correlation between cancer and animal protein. For this book I asked Dr. Campbell to explain a little about how and why nutrition (both good and bad) affects cancer in our bodies.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“      It never occurred to me that adopting a vegan diet would cause me to lose fifty pounds in two years, but that’s what happened. I lost the first twenty or so pounds before I left for college. People were beginning to notice that I was slimming down, but I didn’t notice a huge difference that first year until my mom took me shopping the summer before I left for my freshman year of college: I hadn’t worn a size medium shirt or a pair of pants with a 34-inch waist since I started high school.       The rest of the weight came off my freshman year, and that’s when the difference really became apparent. Gradually, over the course of that year, my body completely changed. My face looked slimmer, my waist leveled off at a size 32, and I even lost what my mother had always affectionately referred to as the “baby fat” on my hands.       Since the weight came off so slowly, it wasn’t until I went home for Christmas that year that I fully understood the extent of the changes. My friends and family couldn’t believe their eyes, and my grandmother found it rather unacceptable that I had yet to replace my new baggy clothes.       I didn’t get substantially more exercise or eat any less than I ate before: I just ate differently.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“      Later we went back to Ryan’s house and hung out. He seemed like a cool guy, and we had a lot in common. Nothing about Ryan suggested that his beliefs were fundamentally different from mine. Ryan offered Katie and me something to drink after a while: he had OJ, Coke, bottled water, and rice milk. I’d never heard of rice milk, so I asked if I could give it a try. It wasn’t the best thing I’d ever tasted, but it wasn’t bad either.       Why, I wondered, would this guy my own age deprive himself of a glass of milk, a Big Mac, or a plate of cheese fries? Given how much I enjoyed those things, his decision to abstain based on a set of beliefs actually struck me as rather commendable. He had to feel pretty strongly about it to refuse something so delicious. So I asked him why he chose to be vegan. His answer—that he wasn’t willing to cause suffering to other living creatures, and then his recitation of lots of intense and awful details about that suffering—changed my life.       Effective that day, I was vegan, and have been ever since. It just made sense. Why should I eat something that caused an animal to suffer when I could choose to buy something else? Rice milk wasn’t as good as milk, I thought, but it wasn’t bad enough to justify buying cow’s milk, which, as Ryan explained, came from an animal that was continually impregnated to maximize her dairy production, and her male calves were likely slaughtered for veal.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“Stop Buying the Protein Myth A common myth that persists and persists is that it’s difficult to get enough protein from a vegan diet. Let’s just put that myth to rest. The fact is, people on the standard American diet (SAD) eat nearly twice the recommended daily amount of protein—which can actually be unhealthy. According to the U.S. Food and Nutrition Board, recommended protein intake should be calculated according to your weight and age; it recommends 0.8 grams of protein per kilo of body weight, meaning that the average woman requires approximately 50 grams of protein per day, 56 grams for the average man. These guidelines also indicate that the preferred form of protein is from nonanimal sources, such as beans, legumes, nuts, and seeds. These protein sources are also naturally lower in fat, too, again supporting your weight loss efforts. Most of the fats they do contain are unsaturated and they’re always cholesterol free. To put it more simply, your average daily protein intake should be about 15 to 20 percent of your total daily calories (other sources say it can be even less—more like 10.7 percent)—a number easy to get to on a plant-based diet. There is protein in just about everything. So as long as you are eating a varied diet of whole grains, beans, and legumes, vegetables, fruits, and meat and dairy alternatives, you will be just fine. No, there is absolutely no need to consume animal foods to get enough protein. In fact the American Dietetic Association holds that vegan diets provide more than enough protein, even without any special food combinations. Nutritionists used to think you needed to eat “complementary proteins”— beans and rice, for example—in one sitting to get all the nutrients we needed. We now know that’s not true. As long as you are eating a bit of everything throughout the day, all is well.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“All vegetables, beans, and whole grains are good sources of both fiber and complex carbohydrates, while there isn’t an animal food on the planet that contains any fiber or complex carbohydrate at all. Zero. Zilch.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“A 2005 study by Dr. Barnard and other researchers, which measured the effects of a low-fat vegan diet on body weight, found that people lost significant amounts of weight with no calorie counting. On average, the low-fat vegan diet adopters lost 13 pounds in 14 weeks. This phenomenon can be partly explained by the thermic effects of eating plant-based foods. Vegan diets are higher in complex carbohydrates which cause the body to release some calories as body heat during digestion (the thermic effect) rather than store it as fat. In fact a vegan diet includes a rich variety of foods that have a thermic effect (see list below). We sometimes get a thermic effect with animal protein, but we are also stuck with all the animal fat that comes with it. A whole foods, plant-based diet causes you to burn calories 16 percent faster after meals for about three hours. This revving up of your metabolism causes gradual and healthy weight loss. The thermic effect alone does not cause the weight loss. What it does is help decrease the number of calories that are automatically converted into fat—stopping some fat before it starts. It’s a natural process that is aided significantly by choosing a plant-based diet and hampered by a diet high in animal fats.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“And how about this interesting tidbit from Dr. Barnard: meat stimulates insulin release. Whereas it is common knowledge that refined carbohydrates cause the body to release a lot of insulin, recent studies show that meat also causes a “distinct, sometimes surprising, insulin spike. In fact, beef and cheese cause a bigger insulin release than pasta, and fish produces a bigger insulin release than popcorn.” Personally, I was thrilled to hear this, because I love nothing more than a bowl of whole grain pasta with veggie sausage, peppers, and onions!”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“Eat fiber rich food! Fiber not only reduces cholesterol and keeps you regular, but it also fools your brain into thinking you are full. It holds water so your stomach feels full. You won’t go overboard with too many calories because you feel satisfied—thus, no weight gain. And fiber is only found in plant-based foods like whole grains, beans, veggies, and fruits.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“No matter how many calories you are ingesting, if you aren’t getting what you need nutritionally, your body sends you out for more in the form of cravings or a yearning to eat something else. It’s a primal urge, and hard to ignore. It’s literally a survival mechanism that kicks in. The body is saying (sometimes rather urgently), “I haven’t gotten enough nutrients, go get more food!” The problem is that meat, cheese, and refined carbs don’t have what it takes to satisfy the body’s needs, so the body is never satiated on a diet that is made up mostly of animal protein and junky processed food.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“As a culture we are eating twice as much animal protein as we did in the early part of the twentieth century. At the same time we have grown dangerously overweight, with more life-challenging illnesses plaguing our health-care system than at any other time in history. As I write this, three out of every five Americans is considered overweight or obese, and two out of every three of us will die of a disease that is strongly linked to obesity. And despite the fact that so much attention has been paid to this issue, as a nation our kids are getting more and more obese with each passing year. We should be alarmed by this and looking for every alternative.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“When the American Dietetic Association (ADA) surveyed all the studies on food and health, they concluded not just that a vegetarian or vegan diet is as healthy as one that includes meat, but that “vegetarians have been reported to have lower body mass indices than non-vegetarians, as well as lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease, lower blood cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“The fact is our bodies aren’t meant to ingest meat and dairy and eggs and fish. That’s right, our bodies aren’t meant to eat animals; they’re made for whole grains, vegetarian proteins like beans and legumes, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds. We may be omnivores in that our bodies are capable of living on just about anything—flesh included—in times of scarcity. But unless you are living in sub-Saharan Africa or some isolated part of the North Pole, scarcity is, fortunately, not a problem. In fact we are blessed with abundance. Our modern problem is obesity and all the degenerative diseases that are linked to obesity, like cancer, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“A moment of truth here: If you continue to eat processed foods full of sugar and fat, you won’t lose weight. But you knew that. And that’s not why you’re here. You’re here to discover how good you’ll feel on a diet of vegetarian proteins, whole grains, and all the glorious and diverse vegetables and fruits of the earth. If you look around, you won’t see many fat vegans. Vegans tend to be slim and strong, gorgeous and glowing, and that’s because a healthy, plant-based diet creates vitality and vigor— and weight loss simply happens as a result of not eating fatty animal protein. And lest you think a plant-based diet is for weaklings, consider bulls, elephants, gorillas, orangutans, and stallions. These plant eaters are pure lean and powerful muscle.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“There is a must-see film out called Forks over Knives ( forksoverknives.com), which is a documentary about the work of these two amazing researchers. You’ll hear from them in this book, and also from other leading medical experts on diet and health. You will also find first-person accounts of people who overcame life-threatening and debilitating diseases through their shift to a plant-based diet. But the personal health benefits are just one part of the story, albeit a very important one. What about the social and environmental benefits I mentioned above? It seems clearer every day that the planet thrives for every person who chooses to eat more plant-based fare, because animal agriculture is one of the top culprits in creating a host of very serious environmental problems.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World

“American Dietetic Association (ADA) surveyed all the studies on food and health, they concluded not just that a vegetarian or vegan diet is as healthy as one that includes meat, but that “vegetarians have been reported to have lower body mass indices than non-vegetarians, as well as lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease, lower blood cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer.”
― Kathy Freston, Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World