It’s the Food!  If we don’t learn from this pandemic and change our diets and our food system, the next one could be far deadlier. As soon as you shift from the Standard American Diet (SAD), to a Whole Foods Plant Based diet, you will not only help reduce the risk of future pandemics, but you will also reduce your chances of developing a chronic disease by about 80%!  And if you are already burdened with disease, a healthy plant based diet has been proven to reverse coronary artery disease, prostate cancer, and a litany of other diseases and ailments as well (including many autoimmune diseases). In addition, you can feel great about reducing the pain and suffering of animals, as a person who adopts a vegan diet saves nearly 200 animal lives per year! And lastly, according to scientists at Oxford University, the biggest thing that anyone can do to help save our planet is, you guessed it, adopt a vegan diet. Mic Drop?  🙂

Some people look at a healthy plant based diet as imposing all kinds of restrictions, and taking the fun out of eating. Think of it instead as an opportunity to explore thousands of different flavors and foods via a new adventure in eating. For real. Food excites me, and I have never enjoyed eating more than I do now. It is not even close. And healthy dietary changes are easier than ever, thanks in part to all of the plant based milks, meats, and eggs that are now on the market. I will always be a work in progress, and none of us are perfect. A transition to healthier eating is about compassion and wellness, not perfection, and even just taking one baby step at a time towards a healthier, plant based diet should be celebrated.

“Our food choices don’t just affect our personal health but our global health. Not just in terms of climate change, but in terms of pandemic risk.” – Dr. Michael Greger

Here is an excerpt from an editorial that was published by the American Public Health Association in 2007 called the “The Chickens Come Home to Roost”:

“It is curious, therefore, given the pandemic threat, that changing the way humans treat animals, most basically ceasing to eat them, or at the very least, radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten—is largely off the radar as a significant preventive measure. Such a change, if sufficiently adopted or imposed, could still reduce the chances of the much-feared influenza epidemic. It would be even more likely to prevent unknown future diseases that, in the absence of this change, may result from farming animals intensively and killing them for food. Yet humanity doesn’t even consider this option.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1963309/

Other source: Dr. Michael Klaper