Vegetarianism

Most of us have come to believe that vegetarian or vegan eating, represent the healthiest approach to diet possible. In the case of the individual trying to recover from CRC, this may not always be the case.

If vegetarianism is appropriate for one's constitution and health condition and is approached with adequate self-education, self awareness and diet diversity, it can definitely be a cleansing, health supporting choice.

While I support vegetarian diets for some people, I have found that some folks ARE actually better off eating some organic animal products than they are sticking to purely vegetable sourced fare.

When we are healing, the most powerful tool we have is the development of the skill of learning to listen to our bodies. Please let your body make this decision for you, not your mind. If you have never experimented with vegetarian eating, by all means do give it a try but consider the pros and cons carefully before you decide to embark on this experiment during your recovery from CRC.

Here's a previous post on vegetarianism

"Some folks with CRC really struggle with their choice to be vegetarian and their choice to starve the candida by limiting carbs. Some folks just can’t work the two choices together and those who do manage may struggle to maintain their weight. I’m not saying it can’t be done but it sure can be a challenge to follow a candida diet, food combining and a four-day rotation diet while keeping healthy weight on. I would like to share the following for those who are ‘tetering’ on the edge of choosing animal products and sticking to vegetarianism. This can be an uncomfortable ‘fence’ to sit on as we may feel very strongly about our desire to eat compassionately.

Please don’t get me wrong, I passionately support vegetarianism for health, environmental, and ethical reasons. I was vegetarian myself for ten years and for five of those I too was vegan. I loved the diversity of foods and flavours that I was exposed to and I really enjoyed the spiritual aspects. I became much more sensitive to life and living creatures. This was a wonderful experience for me. If it is appropriate for one's constitution and health condition and is approached with adequate self-education, self awareness and diet diversity, it can be a cleansing, health supporting choice.

I must say however, that in the past few years I have been forced to accept and even to believe firmly in the fact that some folks ARE in fact better off eating animal products and white meat than they are sticking to vegetable sourced fare. I am well aware of the hundreds of good arguments to eat vegetarian and I do not mean to open up a debate here. However, I would like to save some of you from self-torment if you are struggling in that place where your common sense and or your body are fighting with your belief system. If on some level you feel strongly that for you, for right now, the choice to eat animal products may be the right choice, this may be a source of deep wisdom that you need to listen to even if the idea is difficult to accept on other levels.

Your choice to find health may for some of you demand that you make compromises in other areas. Accepting the choice to eat animal products can be a tough switch for some of us. However, in some cases it may be the best choice for us at least on a temporary basis. I cannot condone the tactics used by the animal agriculture industry but I do support the more humane livestock treatment employed by organic farms. I realize for the most committed vegetarians out there, you may be reacting strongly to what I am saying and even judging me. Please read on.

During candida treatment, we may be forced to turn to animal products to help them adhere to the low carbohydrate, higher protein needs of one who is recovering from this kind of debilitation and a yeast that feeds on carbohydrates.

As a nutritional consultant who used to be adamant about a vegan diet, I have been slowly learning to accept that there may be some types of constitutions that do not suit vegetarianism. There may be some validity to the blood type categorization on this issue (see the book, “Eat Right for Your Type by Dr. D’Adamo). We also have to keep in mind that there are some viruses, severe debilitating illnesses and other health conditions that require high levels of the amino acids lysine and taurine or heme iron. The most easily absorbed sources are found in animal products and meat.

For ten years, as I mentioned, I was avid about meat free choices and stubbornly rejected claims by respected nutritionists who posed admittedly powerful arguments. It finally took a first had experience to wake me up to the fact that indeed, some folks need to have meat in their diet. I myself had to experience the benefit to my own individual health to believe that adding meat into the diet could possibly be a good thing.My own personal -reluctant introduction of organic meat into my diet gave me much greater healing power against a chronic skin virus that had plagued me for years .

As I always say, when we are healing, the most powerful tool we have is the development of the skill of learning to listen to our bodies. Please let your body make this decision for you, not your mind. If you have never experimented with vegetarian eating, by all means do give it a try but perhaps while you are recovering from candida would not make the easiest time to try it out."

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Tarilee,

I just wanted to comment on the meat eating idea for those of you who may choose to eat meat.

Of course we all need to make big choices in this area,about whether to eat meat or not; be our reasons of concern, moral, environmental or health related. Moderation seems a decision that works for most folks who feel they can be healthier with meat. However the decision about what kind of meat is very individual. By what kind I mean both whether to eat fish, fowl or bovine or bison or wild game. Each have their advantages and you will make your choice depending on the nutritional components of each type of meat that suit you best. I will not go into that discussion here but it is easy enough to find nutritional analysis for different kinds of meat. The other important aspect related to this decision is to consider the source of your meat. Some of you who have participated in disucssions related to meat have read my advice to eat organic or free range, medication-free meats. I'll expand a bit below on why I feel these are important considerations for our health.

It's clear that you'll receive better health benefits with fewer health consequences if you choose healthfully-raised animals. Animals raised with hormone and antibiotic free food that are not treated with hormones or anti-biotics is important. Consuming animals treated with drugs means we are treating ourselves second-hand, with drugs. It also means that we are contributing to the uneccessary and rampant overuse of anti-biotics in the animal products food industries that contribute to problems involving 'super-bugs'. There are other elements you may choose to consider when shopping for your meat as well though I warn, they will complicate your life. They may also enrich our lives by helping us become more in touch with our food. When I started to eat meat again and decided that I wanted to connect with the source of my nourishment and the plants, people, elements and spirits that nourished it, I found that a wonderful process of connecting more and more deeply with my food spiraled out of this.

It is personally important to me to insure that an animal that I will consume or goat or chicken that makes milk or eggs that I will consume, was happy when it was living. If it was cared for in the most natural way for it's well being and contentment it would have been a healthier creature. Animals produce unhealthy hormones when they are stressed and afraid just like we do. If they were raised in suffering or killed in an inhumane way, there will surely be increased levels of these hormones in their flesh or their by products (milk/eggs) which are bound to affect us.

By nature of who I am and the sensitivity I was born with and have found to be increasing all the time, I cannot eat an animal that I know to have suffered. I can't even buy it to put it in my cart. I experience terrible images of restrictive and cruel life and end of life experiences of the animals and I feel ill. I feel that if I contribute to the industry by consuming its products, I take in the negative energy and cruelty of the industry that causes the pain to the animals. I also struggle with the chemically intense agricultural practices that raise food for conventionally raised animals and with the irresponsible way waste water from the farms are allowed to run into the water table- rich as it is with disease, pesticides (they dip the cows in pesticides or spray them down with them), and large concentrations of e-coli from massive sized commercial farms. The food for the milk and meat animals is also responsible for large areas of land farmed unsustainably with mono-crops in a chemically intensive way and may involve genetically engineered plants. The animals not only eat conventionally grown, potentially GMO grains but they also eat by products of other crops such as cotton seed. Cotton is one of the most chemically-intensive crops in the world and we feed the seed to our cattle. The vast amounts of land and water resources that go to feeding especially our larger animals is extravagant for the small amount of flesh-food we receive in return. So when you minimize your red meat intake and or choose wild or naturally-raised meat, you can have an important and helpful environmental impact.

This awareness and sensitivity complicates my life considerably given that I will often have to go to great lengths to find healthy, happy meats, leather products, vegetarian options to certain things and sometimes I will go without because I cannot find what I want. I'm sure it's not necessary to go as far as I go. I do it because I have to and because I believe in supporting the changes in the world that I want to see. I think that conventionally-created meat by products such as gelatin and leather and rennet are all going to exist as long as any of us are eating conventionally grown meats so I don't see a need for everyone else to avoid these. However the more of us that demand our food be produced in a humane and ecologically sustainable way, the more

If you have made an effort in the past to shop consciously for certain considerations around your meat choices you may have found it confusing. It is. Here is a Canadian website that offers some 'food for thought' on related issues. In other parts of the world many things are different. There is a section for international labelling issues on this site and at the very least you'll learn a bit more about the issues and you can develop familiarity with what specific questions to ask to get a clear picture about your meat source. I've been shopping this way for some time but when I went to the site I learned quite a bit that was new information to me.

Humane Livestock Practices and Labelling Information


Take good care,

Tari-Lee

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Tarilee,