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| My Pre Asthma Enlightened Diet |
No, this is NOT a political blog. But every once in a while
I get a bug up my ass. In fact there is one up there now, burrowing further and
further into…uhm, well, you know what I mean. This bug needs to be extracted.
The act of writing this post will serve that purpose.
This is sort of a personal story, so bear with me.
Last year I had a bit of an asthma attack. It wasn’t so bad
that I had to go to the hospital, but the ordeal was a bit of a wake up call. I
couldn’t breathe properly for days. After this episode, I started depending on
antihistamines to quell a lingering wheeze.
The question I’ve been asking myself is, why me and why now?
And, how does one go from having no asthma symptoms for decades, to a regular
bouts of wheezing.
I’ve been determined to get to the bottom of it, and try to
fix it.
This first thing I did was change my diet. I started eating
like a vegan. That’s right. No meat, fish, dairy or eggs. It’s been difficult,
but I’ve made it 5 consecutive weeks. Last week I started eating limited portions of
fish. Since starting the no meat cuisine, I’ve gone from regular bouts of asthma
quelled by antihistamines several times a week, to virtually no asthma or drugs.
I say virtually because I had two asthma incidents since going vegan, once
after eating a Greek salad with feta cheese (I forgot) and another after being
enveloped by pot smoke for several hours at a Steve Miller concert.
Is not eating meat the antidote to my asthma? I’m not totally
sure, but it sure seems like it is. My original plan was to slowly start
introducing various meats – fish, chicken, beef, pork – whatever, back into my
diet, and see what happens.
That was before I read this
book and watched this
movie. To
be honest, after experiencing these documentaries, I felt like a chump that’s been
blind-folded in the middle of the herd while running closer and closer to the edge
of the proverbial cliff.
If you haven’t read
How Not to Die or seen
What the Health,
I suggest you do, and do it fast. Even if you don’t believe the science, or
believe it and choose not to care, it will open your eyes to what you are
putting in your mouth. I can’t help but thinking of the word karma. In other
words, is it possible that we, the great rulers of the earth, who nonchalantly
feast on our fellow creatures, creatures that are slaughtered and processed in
our industrial size plants, is it we who are dying because of it?
Here are a few facts from How Not to Die to chew
on:
-
A person’s risk of colorectal cancer rises by a factor of about 1.1 or
1.2 for every serving of processed
meat consumed per day.
-
Researchers found a
72 percent increased risk of pancreatic cancer for every fifty grams of chicken
consumed daily. And that’s not much meat, under two ounces— just about a
quarter of a chicken breast. The researchers expressed surprise that it was the
consumption of poultry— not red meat— that was more closely tied to
cancer.
-
The single greatest
public health burden in the United States in terms of food poisoning is Salmonella.
It’s the leading cause of food poisoning– related hospitalizations, as well as
the number-one cause of food poisoning-related death. And it’s on the rise.
Over the past decade, the number of cases has increased by 44
percent,
-
An estimated 142,000
Americans are sickened each year by Salmonella-tainted eggs.
-
In a 2014 issue
of Consumer Reports, researchers published a study on the true cost of cheap
chicken. They discovered that 97 percent of chicken breasts found in retail
stores were contaminated with bacteria that could make people sick.
-
As the Mayo
Clinic rather indelicately put it, “Most people are infected with Salmonella by
eating foods that have been contaminated by feces.” How does it get there? In
slaughter plants, birds are typically gutted by a metal hook, which too often
punctures their intestines and can expel feces onto the flesh itself.
-
According to the
latest national FDA retail-meat survey, about 90 percent of retail chicken
showed evidence of contamination with fecal matter.
-
Researchers in
Sweden decided to test out a strictly plant-based diet on a group of severe
asthmatics who weren’t getting better despite the best medical therapies.
Patients who stuck with a plant-based diet, 70 percent improved after four
months, and 90 percent improved within one year. And these were all people who
had experienced no improvement in their conditions at all in the year prior to
switching to a plant-based diet. Within just one year of eating healthier, all
but two patients were able to drop their dose of asthma medication or get off
their steroids and other drugs altogether.
Keep it real runners!
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