Now, if you're doing whole food plant-based, then that can act as something of an elimination diet. And yes, you can feel better in the short term because you're no longer eating the junk food and you're no longer eating the horrible quality meats and drinking the horrible quality milk and all that from sick animals. So yes, that can make you feel better in the long term, but that's not because of the plants. because you're no longer eating low quality animals.

One of the main problems is the plant defense systems. Contrary to popular belief, plants don't want to be eaten other than they're in season fruit. And think about it, plants cannot run from predators and they cannot fight them off. So they instead engage in biochemical warfare that aims to kill predators by the use of various chemicals that attack organs. It's quite targeted. In fact, Hormesis is precisely how plant-based medicine works. If you don't know what that is, look it up.

The most common ones are Goitrogens, which attack the thyroid. And fun fact, five years later, and I am still trying to heal my thyroid. Another is oxalates, which target the kidneys. Another is lectins, which target primarily the gut lining, but also destroys a lot of other things. And same with phytates. you can go into any ex-vegan community and look up the thousands different conditions that they're dealing with as a result of being vegan for too long.

And did you know that veganism can cause you to shrink over time? Neither did I, but apparently it can. I thought I was just going crazy. I had no idea why I was two inches shorter, but I entered into these ex-vegan communities. Mind you, this was a long time ago, and a lot of them were dealing with that as well. Now, five years later, I'm back to five-nine, so that's great but it took quite a while for me to get my height back.

The other major problem is that most of our bodies have not adapted to efficiently extract nutrition from plants, which is why the bioavailability of plant nutrients is so freaking low. So what ends up happening is you live off of your liver stores until you crash and burn. Now you might be fortunate enough to have descended from a line of well fed people, so you might be able to to survive for 10 years until you quite suddenly crash and burn. and now you're in the hospital every week.

Now, I think that going whole food plant based for a short period of time can be good and there are some people who can live their entire lives being vegan but understand that they are genetic freaks just like men and women who can put on a crap ton of muscle without performance enhancing drugs are genetic freaks. The likelihood that you are one of those is quite low but you could be one of those. I mean, you could be.

Hey Lisa, so the part that you were saying about the plants and the chemicals, this is the very reason why I only eat vegetables from my garden and I don't put pesticides or anything on my plants. I don't do anything. The most I might do is neem oil you, which is natural, the natural neem oil you and water and I would spray that on them. But most of the time I just put a net on them and I just make sure that I clean them real good and soak them in vinegar before I eat them.

So I'm talking about phytochemicals that are endogenous to the plants, so it doesn't matter how or where they're planted. All cruciferous vegetables are guitrogenic. Spinach is naturally super high in oxalates. And we've known this since the 1800s. Fun fact, there's an episode of Popeye the Sailor called something like Popeye Gets a Kidney Stone, and it's because of how much spinach he eats. All beans and nightshades are naturally high in lectins. This is just what plants produce because they don't want to get eaten.

Now, I'm not one of these anti-plant people. I eat plenty of plants and I acknowledge that our ancestors were so smart for figuring their way around these plant defense chemicals. That's why they ate white rice instead of brown rice. That's why they soaked their corn in lime juice. That's why they deseeded and deskinned tomatoes and peppers. And that's why they soaked beans for 24 hours and changed the water every few hours. But we're no longer doing these things and our health the suffering as a result.