My Vegetarian Journey, Part I

For so many reasons, I previously held dear, we seldom ate a meal that wasn't centered around meat, eggs, or both, and topped with cheese. This was, we understood, all part of our well balanced, organic, grass-fed, free-range, and GMO free diet. We really thought we were on the right track and on our way to the best health of our lives, until a day came (just in time for Thanksgiving!) that I had to humble myself and admit that I had been so wrong.

Hi, my name is Michael Trudeau, and I've been on a health journey with my beautiful wife, Jolene, for about eight years now, ever since she began to have a series of miscarriages and we finally began to be shaken out of our comfortable reliance upon Western Medicine and allopathic doctors. When we began to realize that they didn't really have a clue what was wrong with her, we started out in search of our own answers. After a little while we finally got test results that showed she had been poisoned by severely high amounts of mercury, copper, and lead - due to horrendous dental work - and which we would - years later - only begin to understand the devastating effects this was having on her hormones, (among a host of other issues). This experience would lead us into deeper and deeper research in herbalism and natural medicine, anatomy and physiology, and nutrition and toxicology. Although we are both amazed at how much we have been blessed to learn, it has, in the main, served us best by giving us a taste of how much further we still have to go: becoming one of the principle reasons why I am returning to school in hopes of entering a chiropractic college. After all of the specialists we saw, the tests we paid for out of pocket, the hospital visits and the emergency phone calls we made in the night during her worst years, we've decided that there is no reason and no excuse for us not to take responsibility for our own health. (And financially speaking, there's no better health plan!)

Now previous to our recent dietary conversion, we had been fully convinced, in our own minds, by a number of health books and articles that it is unhealthy to not eat animal protein every single day. (Which is exactly the advice I was just chastened with by relatives who have taken offense at our lifestyle choice.) There are health authors and reference books such as "The Prescription for Nutritional Healing" by Phyllis A. Balk, that will state, as a matter of indisputable fact, that there are a number of essential amino acids that one cannot get on a vegetarian diet. Many seemingly creditable health authors and speakers - who may be otherwise quite sane about such things as GMOs and industrial food processing, or well versed in the latest literature - have written or said that there are other deficiency concerns about a wholly plant-based diet, such as B12, long-chain Omega-3 fatty acids, iron, and some would even blather about an insufficiency of protein itself. And because we loved our meats, we trusted them implicitly, never bothering to look further into the matter, for that would have been an inconvenient waste of time. We took these statements as though they were an indisputable gospel, enjoyed ourselves, and even made some efforts to warn vegetarians that they were going to suffer from nutritional deficiencies. It was easy to take the biased view that vegetarians (especially if they called themselves Vegans) were people of the far political left whose sole concern was animal rights. Our concern was for our health, so we were not listening.

Then one day, while I was doing some research on Intermittent Fasting and pondering the Ketogenic Diet (which I now believe is one of the worst diets you could be on) I stumbled onto a video of one of IF's promoters. And as I was listening to his explanation, he revealed himself to be a lunatic. That mad fellow said that he had been eating only a plant-based diet for a number of years. What a maroon! ... And yet ... he was in such great shape. He was buff. His mind didn't seem to be scattered. On the contrary he seemed to have a concise and orderly way of communicating and a great depth of knowledge and figures at his command. How could this be if he was unable to produce proteins to repair his damaged tissues due to amino acid deficiency? He had to be lying. In personal experience, I had only ever encountered wimpy, out-of-shape, and sickly looking vegetarians. Nevertheless I was intrigued, and could not stop thinking about some of the provocative things that he had said. I decided at last to do some searching.

It took me only about one week of looking back and forth at several materials and lectures given by various doctors before my paradigm had shifted. The evidence against a diet containing animal proteins piled up very quickly, along with the requisite answers to those critical charges laid forth by health conscious omnivores. When the pieces came together for me, I couldn't believe how much I had been missing, and how much more there was yet to understand about the multifarious facets and functions of the human frame.

It may have to be done in a number of installments, but I would like to lay forth in some attempted orderliness the many clues, answers, and arguments that I have garnered on this subject, until all is exhausted. And when this is done, I will share my personal testimony of the changes I have already begun to notice in my own body since we stood our culinary world on its head.

To begin, answering the objections of concerned friends and family...

1. "We were designed to eat meat: see we have canine teeth!" [pointing]
   Well and good, you have two pairs of teeth that stand up a little above the others. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to call them "canine teeth": properly, they are called cuspids, and all primates have them. Have you ever seen a gorilla eating a zebra, or a chimpanzee pull a fish out of the water? Why is it that our closest biological relatives have larger and sharper cuspids than we do, but they don't eat meat? A moot argument in the corner of the omnivore.

2. "Where will you get your protein?" (the question of fame)
   First of all, we have to free ourselves of the popular error, that the body takes up proteins from the diet and uses them as they are. (After all, there are many herbivorous animals, such as the horse or the ox, which never consume any appreciable amount of proteins and yet are very strong.) While previously I had realized that, in fact, the human body must build all of its own proteins from about 20 different amino acids (which are held together in covalent or "peptide" bonds), I too was under the impression that the only way to make this possible was to first consume a large quantity of proteins, especially from animals.
   However, I have a certain physiology textbook that tells me I should be consuming about .8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. Since I weigh a ponderous 140 pounds, I should - according to this textbook - be consuming about 50 grams of protein per day. As it turns out, on a strict vegetarian diet, I'm getting a good amount more protein than that each day without even trying: an estimated 70-75 grams per day.
   And I'm not at all certain that I agree with the recommendations of the textbook, because studies typically tend to report their conclusions and recommendations based on the averages across society. And the average person in western civilization suffers from terrible deficiencies that make what is really sub-optimal health appear to be the normal human condition.

3. "You will be missing key amino acids if you don't eat meat!"
   Some sources say "yea" and other "nay". Who am I going to believe? Well, again are the other herbivores on the planet suffering from chronic, degenerative diseases because they aren't getting all of their aminos? (Well, to be fair, the feedlot animals are pretty darn diseased.) I've never yet seen a wild elephant with multiple sclerosis, but maybe once the chemtrail sprayers have blocked out 90% of the UV light over Africa we will start to see MS on the rise among those lovable pachyderms.
   As it turns out, all twenty of the amino acids used to build our bodies various proteins are present in plant foods; and it is only necessary to make sure that one eats a good variety of plant foods each day in order to get them all.
   There is also some assurance that we will get a large enough quantity of these nutrients to build all of the proteins that we need. The human body is specifically equipped with tools whose job it is to ensure that we get enough amino acids from a fully vegetarian diet. I'm talking, of course, about enzymes. Enzymes have the job of unfolding protein chains and breaking loose the amino acids so that they can be reassembled into new proteins compatible with our bodies. The body spends energy to do this. It doesn't spend any energy to take up other types of nutrients in the gut: minerals, vitamins, and fatty acids must fall by chance into gateways in the lining of the intestines (the microvilli) in order to be absorbed. This fact is itself a clue as to what our proper diet should be. If we were designed to eat a diet that was very high in proteins, one would think that the body would place no special priority on acquiring them. [Special thanks to Doctor Adiel Tel-Oren for this information. Check him out at www.ecopolitan.com]

4. "You will need to take a B-12 supplement."
   I am, actually. Thanks. Although, under ideal circumstances, I wouldn't need to as a vegetarian. B-12 in one of a number of vitamins that are produced by the native flora present throughout our alimentary canal (that's the GI tract). If the microbiome is properly balanced with a healthy population of all four of the main beneficial bacteria that we are supposed to be endowed with at birth - actinobacteria, firmicutes, protiobacteria, and bacteroidetes - then we should be able to get all of the B12 that the body needs. However, since most of us today suffer B12 deficiency due to an imbalanced microbiome or other conditions such as the MTHFR genetic mutation, it is important for almost everyone to supplement with methylcobalamin B12 whether they are a meat eater or not.

5. "But the Bible says that we are to eat meat!"
   Does it though? God did indeed give the children of Israel permission to eat meat, and sent them quail when they complained about the perfect manna bread they were getting directly from Heaven. However, I must make a distinction between permission and instructions. If we look back at Genesis 1:29, we find out that God gave dietary instructions immediately after He had created man and gave him dominion over the earth: "And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of the tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat." [King James Version] Now I understand that some things have changed since the fall of man, and death entered the world, indeed, this used to be my reasoning for eating the meats, supposing that plants must now be an insufficient form of nutrition. (Which of course is absurd, if you just look a little further down the food chain and realize that the animals you are eating can't have any more nutrition than you would, seeing that they get their nutrients out of the plants in the first place). However, I think I would rather err on the side of the original design rather than on the side of supposition and hypothesis. God created me to eat plants, so I think I will be healthier if I just eat plants.

It's not often talked about, but here is another clue.
The lower gastrointestinal tract in the human being is too long for meat foods. It takes too much time to pass them through the body, especially since they lack fiber (which, with bile, is supposed to cause food to be passed along smoothly). As a result, they putrefy before they are removed and become a toxin to the body - especially since the harsh acids produced during the digestion of animal proteins have a detrimental effect on the lining of the gut, contributing to Leaky Gut Syndrome far more than either gluten or lectins. But true carnivores have a much simpler digestive system and pass their food through quite quickly, whereas our tracts are designed to hold onto food longer, so that our microbiota have the time they need to break down the cellulose (found in the cell walls of plants), so that the nutrients within the cells have a chance of being absorbed.

Now there are numerous other clues and reasons why we were designed to eat plants and should avoid consuming any animal products, but they will have to be enumerated in a second installment.

Thank you for reading.