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Dr. Nandita Shah
SHARAN stands for Sanctuary for Health and Reconnection to Animals and Nature.
And the reason we're disconnected is
that we live so far from nature and animals sometimes,
and we have ideas that our culture has given us.
The very first thing our parents give us, often, is milk.
So when I was a kid I thought cow's milk was healthy, I had 3 glasses a day.
And curds and buttermilk and so on.
But certain things changed and my perspective changed.
And I realized that we are doing things
just because we have grown up doing these things.
Instinctive Eating
All animals eat by listening.
They know what to fuel their body with.
If you see fruits or vegetables ripe and hanging there, what do you feel like doing?
Plucking and eating, right?
This is instinct.
Now, if you see a chicken walk by,
does your mouth water?
If you're a dog, you'll have the opposite reaction.
You might chase the chicken
and then the orchards mean nothing to you. Right?
So this means something.
The foods natural to our anatomy are fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds.
Manufacturers know this.
That's why all the soaps and shampoos and body-care products smell of fruits and flowers.
Have you noticed?
You don't find beef or chicken-smelling shampoos, right?
Health
Being a doctor, suddenly the literature came in front of me,
and I realized that milk is not as good as I thought it was.
For example, I understood that osteoporosis
occurs in the countries with the largest consumption of milk.
Actually, meat and milk have the same composition.
High protein, High fat and no fiber.
And people who are vegetarian get the same diseases.
Asthma, obesity, the whole lot as non-vegetarian.
There's a big difference between animal fat and plant fat.
And we're gonna see what it does to our body later.
Animal fat is solid at room temperature.
Plant fat is liquid at room temperature.
And this makes a huge difference in our body.
We're going to see what exactly it does.
If you have all the solid fat going into your bloodstream,
it behaves like Vaseline.
And it really slows down your blood circulation.
Obesity is also, of course, caused by fat without fiber.
But if you're having coconut, you could eat all the coconut you wish.
Because of the fiber, you won't get the obesity.
Because the fiber prevents you from overeating.
Now, let's understand a little bit about protein.
It's a food for growth and repair.
Do you know what is the time of maximum growth of a human being?
When it's just born.
A human baby doubles its weight in 6 months.
Triples its weight in one year.
After that, do we ever double our weight in 6 months?
Hopefully not.
They did a study and they found
that if you consume more protein, you lose more calcium.
The maximum calcium we need in our whole lifespan
is soon after we're born.
Human breastmilk (only source of calcium for the baby) contains 33 mg/100 g.
Cow's milk contains more.
Of course, because the calves have to grow faster.
But all green leafy vegetable, nuts and seeds contain lot more calcium than human milk.
Even potato chips has more calcium than human milk.
A very good book to read is The China Study.
It talks about how excess protein affects every system of our body.
Your respiratory system, circulatory system, your digestive system, reproductive system.
Every system. Your skeletal system, bones and muscles.
Every system is adversely affected by excess protein.
People who are non-vegetarian usually take in a lot of cholesterol every day,
compared to people who are vegan, who take no cholesterol.
Because there's no cholesterol in plants.
Only vegans usually have the amount that we should have, which is 135.
Acidity.
Many people have acidity. That's because the stomach tries to produce acid
to keep in pace with the protein we're eating.
The minute you cut off the protein, acidity is gone.
Kidney diseases.
Whenever we eat acid food, we're taking calcium out of the bones.
This goes through the kidneys and out.
And that causes stones.
That's one thing that high protein or excess protein causes
Excess protein, especially animal protein, is like a toxin for the kidneys.
When people have kidney diseases, need dialysis,
if we cut off all the animal protein, kidney disease becomes much better.
Whenever any foreign protein comes into our body, our body produces antibodies.
The most common cases of Type I Diabetes are in people
who have had cow's milk at too early an age instead of their mother's milk.
So they produce antibodies to the cow's milk.
These antibodies destroy their pancreatic cells
because cow's milk protein and pancreatic cells are very similar.
This causes type I Diabetes
Today we're seeing, all over the world, not just in India,
more cases of thyroid deficiency.
More cases of diabetes.
More cases of problems which are hormonal.
These are because one of the causes can be
hormone disrupters because of plastic everywhere.
Breast cancer is a hormone-dependent cancer.
We're getting hormones in excess with our milk consumption,
every day.
Milk samples in India contain PCBs
that's a breakdown of plastic.
Even 85 kilos of plastics have been found in a live cow.
If you wanna know more about this, there's a beautiful film, the plastic cow.
Whole Food
What is whole food?
Basically it's about eating foods as whole as a monkey would eat.
It's better to have a whole fruit rather than fruit juice, for example.
Why? Because we want to have all the fiber.
So it means peel your bananas, but not your apples.
Because monkey can't peel an apple.
The only peeler the monkey has is his hands.
So we don’t peel any vegetables, except onions and garlic.
Because that's the only thing a monkey could peel.
And it means that monkey cannot eat oil,
because monkey doesn't have machines.
Monkey cannot eat sugar.
Has anyone tried eating sugarcane?
Good. So you know that you can't get much beyond a piece this size. Right?
When I was younger, I could eat a little more, but...
Little more. Fine.
But if you have sugarcane juice, you have 3 long ones going into one glass.
When you make it into jaggery, or sugar, it's even more. Right?
That's why we don't want to have sugar and jaggery.
Because we can have so much more when we take out the fiber.
Actually nature makes everything so well.
For example, some people have coconut. Isn't that heavy?
How much coconut can we have?
But if you sat with an open coconut, how much can you eat?
You wouldn't go beyond one.
Even half might be too much.
So nature has all the stops.
Also the nutrient value is much higher if you have whole food.
This is a chart which shows what happens
when whole wheat is refined to white flour.
You lose 25% of the protein, 95% of the fiber.
And you lose more than 50% of all the other nutrients.
If you eat brown rice, how much do you eat compared to white rice?
Less. How much less?
At least 50% less.
That means you had half the calories, more than double the nutrients.
Just by eating something whole.
Addiction
If I say no more meat, no more eggs, no more milk
-depending on what you're eating-,
can you see it feels like, "Wow, that's tough!"
If I say no more carrots, no problem.
No more peas, no problem. Right?
That's because there are certain foods that are addictive.
Milk has something in it called Casomorphins.
Casomorphins are morphine-like substances.
It's for the calf to get addicted to it's mother.
And we get addicted to milk.
If I were to ask someone to stop smoking,
they're going to have the same problem
as if I were to ask you to stop having dairy.
If you're having dairy.
It's the same feeling. "Oh, my god! How can I live without it?"
But the important thing to realize is that we don't need any milk.
Because milk is a food for infants.
If you want to have some milk on your muesli or coconut milk, okay, fine.
But we don't need any.
Ethics & Environment
The cow, just like any mother, is dying to be with her baby and so is the baby.
But the male calf goes for slaughter - that's where all the calf leather comes from.
The female calf is given a little bit of her mother's milk,
but most of the milk is sold to human beings.
Basically, we are what we eat...
and the feelings of those animals are transmitted to us.
Their insecurity, their forsaken feeling, their fear, their despair.
You know which is the sickest animal on the planet?
-Us. -Human beings.
Close. Sicker than that?
What could be sicker that a human being?
The cow? Sicker than that?
It's the broiler chicken.
And the broiler chicken is raised to grow to double the weight in half the time.
The egg-laying chickens are separated into males and females.
The males are dumped, crushed up and fed to their sisters
because they don't lay eggs.
The females, soon after they're born,
their beak is sliced off with a hot iron.
That's because they're put into these kind of cages,
where they have no space to even lift their wings.
Five to eight in a cage.
So their tendency in that frustration is to peck, or claw.
So their claws are cut off, their beaks are cut off.
These are the most sensitive parts of their body.
And if you want to rescue them from that cage and put them in your backyard,
they will die of a heart attack just by walking
when they're 6 weeks old.
That's their introduction to the world.
But what about their ecological impact?
Animals produce 18% of the greenhouse gases.
It's more than all the vehicles on the planet combined. - United Nations FAO Report, 2006
This has a huge ecological impact
on water, land, energy, air, food availability. Everything.
All these animals need water
All these animals take up a lot of land.
It takes a lot more land, way more, to raise a cow
than it does to raise a tree or fruit,
and get the same amount of food.
All these animals eat food,
which could be going to feed our millions who are starving every day.
Going Vegan
When you're trying to change,
your mind will be saying, "Pizza, pizza," or "Chocolate, chocolate," whatever.
But once you make the switch,
that craving just goes away.
It changes your whole perspective, in a strange way.
Because, as long as we're consuming them, we have to justify this, in our mind.
And suddenly something changes.
People who made the change say
that it was much easier to do than it seemed.
And the results are so amazing
that it helps keep you there.
Of course, if you can't do everything, you can do one thing at a time.
And see what happens.
So, if you were used to eat meat or a lot of dairy,
then the first thing you want to do, is replace it with beans.
Because beans are proteins that will stay in your stomach for a long time
and give you some sense of fullness.
Not as bad as meat, but it gives you a sense of fullness.
Fruits is always a good thing to have as snacks.
You could also have nuts and seeds and dry fruit, and things like that.
If you're getting more energetic, you can have green smoothie.
We have lots of transition foods that help you to make that switch.
For example, today we're making a Shepherd's Pie, with lentils.
But there's a kind of cheese on top.
The cheese has been made with cashew.
By the way, what does cheese smell like?
Anybody smell cheese?
Like the feet. Yes, it smells like old socks. It really does.
How did we get addicted to eating something that smells of old socks?
That's where the vegan cheese is a little better.
So you soak the cashews, then put them in the blender.
Very little or no water, and make it into a thick paste.
And then cover it, put it in a glass container, and cover it with a cloth.
The cashews will ferment and start smelling a little bit sour.
And that means your cheese is ready.
All you have to do is add salt and it's done.
If you look on our website,
under meat and dairy replacements,
there's a whole section on what you can replace for egg.
In the past, before factory farming, nobody ever used eggs in cakes.
Because it's a waste of an egg.
But how do you make the cake rise so nicely without any eggs?
You put a little bit of vinegar and a little bit of baking soda.
And it all effervesces and you get a nice light cake.
So, vegan cakes, no problem at all.
Enjoy!