Cooking Diplomatically

​When I first started cooking for myself after college, I had no idea what I was doing, bought myself Cooking for Dummies, and ridiculously enough, lit my gas stove very time with a match for a year, because I had no idea how to use the electric starter.  At the time, I was living in Washington, DC, and was doing a deep dive reading about Gandhi, and he got me thinking about the ethics of a vegetarian diet.  This led me to a book that inspired Gandhi, an obscure but influential book by Tolstoy, which convinced me that sometime you need to stand up for what you believe, that sometimes everyone in society can be wrong about a critical issue that seems so obvious to you, and so I became fully vegetarian around the year 2000.

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My main reason for going vegetarian was the ethics around animal welfare concerns, but I knew it was a triple win, because not only do you protect animals, but also eat healthier and protect the environment too.  Back then, being vegetarian was quite rare, and it was almost impossible to find someone who went entirely vegan.  When I first made the switch, I lost about 10 pounds, mostly because I stopped eating all the meals I made with meat, and had not yet figured how to cook meals without meat, so I simply did not eat enough and ended up losing weight, which is not the ideal way to do it.

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Eventually, I learned how to cook without meat, and much later gained the insight that everyone has about a dozen meals they make on repeat.  These meals they know how to make, they know they will enjoy, they know where to find it in the grocery store, and just make them over and over because they are safe and easy.  The problem arises when you become vegetarian is that you have *zero* meatless meals in your repertoire, and so you have to start from scratch.​​

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Just recently I turned this insight into a new strategy to improve what people eat for *everyone*, whether you eat meat or not, that I describe in detail in the article titled, Searching for a Better Diet, that you can find in a link on the left.  It starts by laying out the basics of healthy eating, which I approach diplomatically, so that it avoids strict restrictions on carbs, fats, or calories, or by going perfectly meat free.  Instead my approach recommends getting as many antioxidants as possible, eating the best foods you can to get the protein, fats, and carbs that everyone needs, while also avoiding ultra-processed foods when feasible, but to try and do it in a way that is flexible, adaptable, and respectful of everyone's viewpoints.  

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Fortunately for us, research into ways to eat healthier has advanced considerably in recent years.  Now there is more emphasis on avoiding chronic inflammation and reducing the damage to our bodies from oxidative stress.  New insights from research on the microbiome have the potential to be transformative, from finding specific reasons why consuming meat is unhealthy (it feeds bad bacteria that release harmful chemicals like TMAO), to understanding better why eating more fiber is so healthy (it protects the lining of your intestine by giving the bacteria in your gut food for them to eat).  I included a strategy to build on these new insights to create a healthier diet for yourself in an article titled, Oxidative Stress, Fiber, and Fasting.  I also invented an easy way to score your diet, a simple calculation that divides the fiber you eat by the sugar you eat, then multiplying by ten, to give you a sense of how healthy your diet really is. 

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For those who want to go one step further, I offer a series of highly focused meal plans to encourage people to eat those foods research is indicating are the most valuable for us to eat with links again available.  One meal plan provides a series of recipes emphasizing the healthiest fat (olive oil), the healthiest protein (chickpeas), and the healthiest carb (sweet potatoes).  Another meal plan helps you find ways to eat more salmon and fermented foods (kimchi, sauerkraut, and yogurt), which are potentially quite valuable in improving the health of our microbiome.  A third meal plan identifies five healthy ingredients (broccoli, cauliflower, cilantro, spinach, and tofu) and offers seven healthy vegetable bowls to encourage you to eat more of them.

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A great place to start is to simply start looking for new recipes and more information on nutrition.  To this end, there are a number of great resources to get started that I found extremely helpful for myself, many of them vegan, but some that are not, that you can find by clicking among the list of links included on the left.