"...Mostly Plants..."

Yes, more on my current book. I need notes for myself. You may find it funny to note that Kyra affectionately nicknamed this book, "the lettuce book" before we had even purchased it.

"Mostly Plants: What to eat" "If you manage to just eat food most of the time, whatever that food is, you'll probably be okay. One lesson that can be drawn from the striking diversity of traditional diets that people have lived on around the world is that it is possible to nourish ourselves from an astonishing range of different foods, so lang as they are foods."

"Eat mostly plants, especially leaves." (a lot of good in the leaf- vitamin C, an antioxidant we depend on getting from plants. Did you know our bodies used to be able to produce it? I don't know that I believe that. We need it for a host of reasons including: cell metabolism, anti-inflamatory, stop free radicals, stimulate the liver and so on.) "THere are literally scores of studies demonstrating that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits reduces the risk of dying from all the Western diseases." "So what about eating meat? Unlike plants, which we can't live without, we don't need to eat meat-with the exception of vitamin B12...I haven't found a compelling health reason to exclude it (meat) from the diet... (concerns about too much meat, especially red meat from a highly industrialized food chain increases your risk of heart disease and cancer)...studies of flexitarians suggest that small amounts of meat-less than one serving a day-don't appear to increase one's risk. Thomas JEfferson probably had the right idea when he rocommending using meat more as a flavor principle than as a main course, treatin it as a 'condiment for the vegetables.' " (pg 167)

"You are what what you eat eats too." (go ahead, read it again. I did several times. Pause in the right spots and you'll get it.) "That is, the diet of the animals we eat has a bearing on the nutritional quality, and healthfulness of the food itself, whether is is meat or milk or eggs." (There are just a whole host of ways to buy eggs now, bottom line is the yellower the yolk the better they are. If the animals eat green, you benefit.)

"Eat well grown food from healthy soils. Organic is important, but it's not the last word on how to grow food well...after a few days riding cross-country in a truck the nutritional quality of any kind of produce will deteriorate, so ideally you want to look for food that is both organic and local."

"Eat wild foods when you can." (This makes me smile because I used to go pick dandelions with my dad when I was a kid. It's a Greek thing, and yummy at that. I think we picked them off of Hardy, about where the beer plant is now.)

"Be the kind of person who takes supplements. They're typically more health conscious, better educated, and more affluent. So to the extent you can be the KIND of person who would take supplements, and then save your money."

"Don't look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet." (This is for my mom who is always telling me what the newest study has determined good for us. Healthy Mediterranean diets or Asian diets are because of the WHOLE way that they eat, not just the olive oil, fish, garlic, nuts or whatever.) "When researchers extract a single food from a diet of proven value, it usually fails to adequately explain why the peole living on that diet live longer or have lower rates of diet. The whole dietary pattern is evidently greater than the sum of its parts." (pg 178)