You are what you eat, or something like that.

I’m thrilled to tell you that issue 3 of the LUV4All (Love Unity Voice) magazine is out now and free to read here. It’s full of wonderful articles by wonderful people and I’ve been given permission to share it with you. First up is something by Dr Will Tuttle that’s right on the money!

COVID-19: Our Banquet of Consequences, by Dr Will Tuttle.

“Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

The spinning fury at the core of our culture, animal agriculture, not only exploits and destroys the lives and purposes of animals, it does the same to humans as well, and we see this playing out now with this draconian lockdown of healthy people, eroding mental health, human rights, and economic independence, and destroying countless small and medium businesses (including vegan ones).

In my lectures over the years, I’ve described animal agriculture as a Trojan horse: on the surface it appears to be a helpful gift, but on closer examination, and with deeper understanding, we see clearly that it is an utterly harmful force in our individual and collective lives, incessantly damaging the health of our ecosystems and society, as well as our physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being.

Animal agriculture is also the hidden cause of the COVID pandemic, and of the dominant narrative that is imprisoning billions of people in fear and confusion in their homes, and eroding our capacity to speak up and defend our basic freedoms. We are reaping the harvest that we have been sowing for decades and centuries. This is our banquet of consequences. Our culture has created a vast system of animal enslavement that heartlessly condemns billions of sentient beings — whose interests are as significant to them as ours are to us — to lives of misery, terror, and pain. Their purposes are stolen and they are reduced to mere material units of production in a rapacious economic system that sells them by the pound. They are impregnated on rape racks, their offspring immediately stolen, exploited, and killed, and all are forcibly vaccinated and drugged, tracked, microchipped, mercilessly mutilated and oppressed, and brutally killed in an unnecessary, ugly, surreal prison-world devoid of meaning and respect. Animal agriculture defines our society.

Those of us who purchase the flesh and secretions of these unfortunate beings, which is most of humanity worldwide, are the causal forces propelling this system ever onward with the flood of money we spend — votes we cast — driving its ongoing and reckless devastation. Thus, as we persist in engineering and imposing a dystopian future on billions of beings, we now see the gaping maw of a dystopian future looming before our eyes. Mandatory confinement, separation of family members, loss of basic freedoms, forced vaccinations, routine microchipping, mass tracking and surveillance: all these standard factory-farm practices are now being openly discussed and planned by health officials, pharmaceutical representatives, and government agencies. What we relentlessly inflict on farmed animals we see manifesting in our human world, and, ironically, we seem powerless and strangely uninspired to stop it.

Why is this? Why are we so unable to see the obvious and respond with clarity, vitality, and solidarity to these insidious existential dangers to us and to our children? Why are we immobilized by fear and mesmerized by the voices of authority, unable to connect with either our intuitive wisdom or to think critically about our situation? Why the nearly-blind allegiance to mainstream media narratives and medical-pharmaceutical forces that we should by now have learned to question? Why do we find those relative few who dare to speak up and question the dominant COVID narrative to be so threatening?

It is because animal agriculture not only exploits animals, it exploits us. As we exploit and abuse, we will be exploited and abused. Each one of us, as we purchase meat, dairy, or egg products, becomes an invisible killer to the cows, pigs, hens, and fishes we are exploiting. We directly but invisibly cause terror, pain, and death, and we compound it further by eating it and feeding it to our vulnerable and innocent children, ritually indoctrinating them as we were. We are the invisible killers, but we repress this awareness, and project it outward, impulsively terrified of invisible killers, which seem to be everywhere.

We spend billions on military defense to protect ourselves from lurking terrorists, and now are even more frightened by microscopic enemies, the hordes of viruses, pathogens, and other unseen agents of death arising and projected from our unfaced violence.

This is our shadow: our repressed awareness, guilt, and shame, propelling us to give our power away to authorities in the vain hope they will protect us. At war with animals, nature, and each other, we make war on invisible viruses as well, completely failing to understand them in our fear-based materialist delusion. We see and suspect enemies and threats everywhere because we are the enemies and threats, and our fear sends us into the waiting arms of the merciless global conglomerates, who provide both the narrative and the toxic “solution.” They will profit from us more in power even than in dollars. They have purchased both media and government, and we find ourselves, the wounded and programmed dominators of animals, increasingly dominated by impersonal forces beyond our control.

There is but one way to human freedom, and to a world of health and harmony, and that is the way of ahimsa — non-harmfulness to other beings — a vegan world of respect for all. We will be worthy of understanding and appreciating ourselves and everyone on this beautiful and abundant planet when we dismantle the entrenched narrative of human superiority and entitlement. A new story is yearning to be born in our human culture. It has ancient roots, and this current emergency (emerge-and-see), if we respond appropriately, can put us on a higher path of liberation and healing.

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Click here for the conclusion of this article and links to more of Dr Tuttle’s writing.

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Despite the fact that animal farming is the cause of COVID-19 and a myriad of other preventable infectious diseases; despite the fact that animal products weaken the body’s immune system; and that deficiency in the intake of whole grains, fruits, nuts, legumes, seeds and vegetables leads to degenerative diseases, we see daily, evidence that the general public have not been told how to protect themselves against the pandemic. My jaw drops as I pass the long lines of cars – people exercising their right to shop for basic necessities during lockdown – queuing to order ‘food’ at the McDonald’s drive-thru. It’s so long it goes all the way across McDonald’s car park and that of the neighbouring superstore, out onto the road and right up to the roundabout where it causes a traffic jam. It’s like most people are in The Matrix and they don’t want to take the red pill.

The Future is Dairy-Free!

A message from Shireen of Plant-Based Health Professionals UK:

Dear Members and Supporters,

We are delighted to be supporting World Plant Milk Day. It is today, August 22nd.

World Plant Milk Day is an international day that celebrates plant-based alternatives to dairy milk. Founded by Robbie Lockie, Co-founder of Plant Based News, in 2017 and established as a partnership with ProVeg in 2018, the campaign has attracted the attention of millions of people around the world and helped accelerate the transition from dairy milk to the rich variety of plant-based alternatives. In 2020, Switch4Good joined to reach more people and further the idea that ‘The Future Is Dairy-Free’.

We have been working with Eden Green PR  to get the message out to media and the wider public that dairy is not necessary in the diet, can cause adverse health effects, is destructive to the environment and is incredibly cruel to the animals.  Its continued promotion by Government excludes communities of colour who are more likely to to be lactose intolerant.  We have had coverage in the Mirror on Sunday and Plant Based News.

The World Plant Milk Day website has some wonderful resources and articles from myself, team member Dr Leila Dehghan and our International board member Brenda Davis RD. 

You will have read the incredibly misleading stories in the media funded by the dairy industry who are trying to promote cow’s milk as more environmentally friendly than soya milk.  This is of course utter nonsense and based on flawed science.  Plant Based News have published an excellent rebuttal

Please support this excellent initiative by sharing the campaign and the 7 day dairy free challenge on social media, with friends, family and colleagues and let’s get dairy off the plate.

The future is dairy free!

Shireen

Thanks so much Shireen for this brilliant message.  We’d like to add that it’s worth bearing in mind that vegans don’t have to eat soya anyway.  We hardly ever do.  Miranda and I have completely given up any kind of milk (milk is for babies).  We drink water.  We drink fruit smoothies.  That’s it.  We get our protein from green leafies and beans and peas and lentils.  And we love those Linda McCartney pea protein sausages! 😀 And vegetable burgers made out of actual vegetables! 😀 So even when the whole world is vegan, there’s no need to worry about increased demand for soya products 😀

Have a great weekend! xx

Get meat off hospital menus!!!

My dad, who suffers from heart disease, was told to “eat more meat” by his GP as a response to his iron deficiency!  And when he went into hospital last year for stent operations there was not a single vegan option on the Coronary Care Unit menu.  I complained to the hospital but they ignored me.  This is madness!  Support and share Plant Based Health Professionals‘ campaign to get meat off hospital menus:  Give Bacon The Boot!

Thank you 🙂

PLANT-BASED DIETS COULD PREVENT A FUTURE PANDEMIC SAY DOCTORS

[This article is from Euro News]

A group of British doctors has backed a call for the end of factory farming to prevent future pandemics like COVID-19.

Dr Gemma Newman from the non-profit Plant-Based Health Professionals is leading a plea for the public to give up eating meat as part of the ’No Meat May’ campaign.  A record number of people are taking part this year with 33,000 sign-ups compared to 10,000 in 2019.  Of those who have signed up this year, a survey carried out by the campaign found that 38 per cent did so because of concerns surrounding the meat industry and diseases like Covid-19.

Hannah Bradshaw, one of the 23,000 new participants, says these concerns were certainly a part of her decision to give a plant-based diet a go.

”There is more information about the meat industry causing diseases than ever before,” she said, “and stronger links between the impacts on our health compared to a meat-free diet.”

The campaign has seen a big increase in sign-ups this year.

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM WITH MEAT?

Zoonotic diseases, like Covid-19, are those that can spread between animals and humans.  Worldwide they have been the cause of many historic outbreaks including H1N1 and Ebola.  There is little evidence, however, to suggest that eating less meat directly reduces the occurrence of deadly disease outbreaks.

The most important factor, according to the UN Environment Program, is instead an increased amount of close contact between humans and animals like pigs, bats or birds which allows pathogens to jump between species.  In 2016 it identified increasing encroachment of animal agriculture into natural ecosystems as a driving factor of zoonotic diseases warning that the “livestock revolution” could lead to a potential disaster.

“Some politicians and commentators blame China for Covid-19, but they do not mention that all of the recent major disease outbreaks have been caused by tampering with animals and their habitats,” says Dr Newman, “our chicken salad or pepperoni pizza could be the next big health risk.”

“Industrial-scale factory farms are like a ticking time bomb”, she adds, “and shifting our diets away from meat [and all animal products] could help move towards a safer future”.

IMPROVING OUR OVERALL HEALTH

Consultant Haematologist and Director of Plant-Based Health Professionals UK, Doctor Shireen Kassam also believes there is an urgent need to reduce our meat consumption for both human and planetary health.

“More than 90 per cent of the meat we consume is produced in industrial scale factory farms, which provide the perfect conditions for the generation of novel infections with epidemic and pandemic potential.”

“Factory farming also requires the widespread use of antibiotics,” she adds, “which has contributed to a dramatic rise in the number of antibiotic-resistant infections affecting humans.”

“We have now entered an era where it is not uncommon for doctors to find themselves treating patients with bacterial infections for which there are no effective antibiotics.”

Dr Kassam explains that it is also a matter of overall public health. “We have known for decades that a healthy plant-based diet, which minimises or eliminates meat [and animal products], is associated with some of the lowest rates of chronic disease and a longer and healthier life.”

Something unexpected that brightened my day

Recently I returned to my home town to visit family and, compared to where I live now, it’s like stepping back into the 1980s in terms of vegan options.  My dad was in the Coronary Care Unit of the local general hospital and there wasn’t a single vegan option on the hospital menu, for breakfast, lunch or dinner! The Coronary Care Unit!

Well, I’m sure you can imagine how I felt but on my way home my spirits were lifted.  I popped into the local library and look what was on the wall!

So don’t get disheartened, I said to myself – there are vegans everywhere, plugging away.

Whoever put this board up – thank you so much 😀

Vegan Crossword Puzzle: Stuff With Protein In

 Click on the puzzle for a pdf you can download and print

or ‘print screen’ and paste into Paint so you don’t have to print it 😀

Stuff_with_protein_in

The answers are here 😀

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Created at wordmint.com

vegan, nutrition, plant-based, plant food, vegetables, protein, puzzle, crossword, vegetarian, things to make and do,

The Circle of Life

Make your own compost 🙂

Save all your raw fruit and vegetable peelings, apple cores, tea bags, soapnut shells, etc etc

and take them outside to your compost bin (any container will do but make sure it’s got drainage holes in the bottom)

Toss your ‘green waste’ in there, (ie raw fruit & veg waste)

but also add some ‘brown waste’ (such as brown paper, black and white printed paper like newspapers or old paperback pages (no colour print), dead leaves) every so often otherwise you’ll end up with a wet soggy, stinky mess.  You want about 2 parts ‘green’ to 1 part ‘brown’ according to the science 🙂

Then eventually it will rot down to something moist and earthy, just teaming with baby earthworms (I don’t know where they came from) and ready to host your new plants.  Don’t ask me how long this took, I didn’t time it, but it was probably about a year.  We just eventually thought it looked composty and tipped it out of the bin and there you have it.  Click here if you want advice from experts 😀

Now you can pot it …

… sow some seeds in it, …

… and in a few days (this is less than 2 weeks later) your old vegetables will be providing you with new vegetables 🙂

I’d better thin these 😉

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vegan, vegetarian, recycling, home-grown, plant-food, plant-based, health, gardening, growing

Let the trees stand

And the best and most productive way to stand for trees is to adopt a plant-based diet.  These forests are being felled at an alarming rate to provide grazing land or grow fodder crops for farm animals.

If everyone ends their dependency on animal foods, the forests could be left in peace.

It’s that simple 🙂