As a Functional Medicine Practitioner and Nutritional Therapist I wholly believe in personalised nutrition and try to guide my clients towards a dietary approach that is appropriate for them as an individual, and naturally by extension, their family unit. Of course this does sometimes include adapting certain dietary protocols for therapeutic benefit and taking into consideration their personal preferences, financial elasticity and not least their skill set or interest or else ‘support’ in terms of meal preparation, shopping etc. Whilst this is certainly a longer-term process it does help my clients get the best out of the latest trend and make it their own, and I am here to point out the pros and cons of the latest “fad” diet.
As a practitioner the impact that the Netflix Movie The Game Changers has had on my clients’ perspective on going on a WHOLE FOOD (there was a fleeting qualification to this effect which many seem to have missed) plant-based diet has been remarkable and is mostly a welcome echo of what I have been saying all along about having a rainbow on your plate and eating more vegetables daily! So, the upside of the movie is that even my hard-core meat-loving male clients who were previously resistant to going plant-based no longer have selective hearing when I touch on vegetables, phyto-(plant-) nutrients, antioxidants and the like. Thanks to this film, people will be less inclined to make snap judgements and label vegans as ‘weird’.
However, on the other hand going 100% plant-based has been portrayed as a magical switch that you flip and voila, improved health and longevity are automatically granted by the fairy godmother of the plant kingdom. The misconception among athletes seems to be that following this will see performance improvements that fall just short of levitating , across the basketball court or along the race/cycle track.
So all of a sudden I have an onslaught of people, particularly leisure athletes, keen to go 100% plant-based overnight without thinking too much about what is involved. As stated, I am not a practitioner that follows one size fits all protocol and I believe that the best way to find out whether something works for you is usually (with certain exceptions) to trial it short-term.
I am emphasising short-term based on personal experience, as age 14 I decided to go vegetarian; at first to loose weight (which did not happen at all) and then more out of the then trendy conviction that ‘I don’t want to eat animals if I don’t have to’. After all Beanfeast (based on Textured Vegetable Protein) offered a great alternative to Spaghetti Bolognese and Baked Beans on toast (mostly with cheese) or in a jacket potato (as a healthier option) were a cost-effective, almost daily student staple in the UK. Thankfully, I did make the effort to cook real vegetables every so often.
I was happily semi-vegetarian (mostly lacto-ovo* until I hit Japan and went lacto-ovo-pescatarian**) for 10+ years apart from the odd slip toward flexitarian in countries where vegetarianism was not well understood and the locals didn’t consider mince as red meat or else thought it was fine to just remove the meat chunks from the curry!
And whilst I survived university as a vegetarian and graduated with a very respectable class and honours for my first degree, in hindsight I am left wondering whether I might have been nutrient deficient at the time and whether particularly my brain was lacking nutrients . After all, at that time I was susceptible to all of the hype and fads such as jo-jo dieting, low fat/no fat foods etc.
The fortuitous straw that broke the proverbial camels back was a return to a childhood favourite of good quality liver pate on German dark rye bread (Schwarzbrot) – end of vegetarianism, but still the maintenance of a heavily plant-based diet. On top of that, I am very selective (translates into expensive) about red meat (still no pork), chicken and fish, particularly as a certified GAPS (Gut and Psychology Syndrome) practitioner.
So, it is from experience both personal and in clinic that I welcome a discussion with friends and clients around the insights shared in Game Changers, but I am also extremely cognisant that the movie could not possibly touch on all facets of following a 100% plant-based diet including convenience, accessibility affordability. Not to mention, GMO, organic, highly processed plant-based alternatives to meat etc, gluten-free. My concern is that going 100% plant-based overnight is effectively being positioned as a ‘no-brainer’.
As health professional, I would love to engage in an empowering and frank informal discussion with like-minded people wanting to explore this approach around the understanding and commitment it takes for individuals to implement this safely and to the benefit of their long-term health within their own unique circumstances.
Unfortunately in my years of clinical practice I have seen people’s health decline versus benefiting from the latest health craze whether it be ketogenic, intermittent fasting, fermented foods, gluten-free etc with some trying to follow everything and ending up taking it to the extreme of becoming what I would term ‘orthorexic’.
Even professionals like myself can get confused and suffer from temporary paralysis until we have time to think through the implications of new diet-and lifestyle habits on the gut bacteria, brain health, hormones, detoxification, the immune system right down to the social environment and back up to the macro level of the environment at large.
I guess my take-out from this is that it is great to see people excited about diet and life-style changes that they can make to improve their own health and that there is a kind of awakening accompanied by a curiosity to experiment that comes with it and that the ‘market’ is responding with a variety of options and solutions to make it happen – niche is going mainstream. However, ideally such a quantum shift would come with a sense of reality, a ‘healthy’ sense of scepticism, careful consideration of what is involved and without prejudice towards those who do not ‘buy in’ to what could potentially be a polarising shift.
If you are keen to learn more about moving to a plant based diet and would be interested in an information event or more detailed meal planners etc then please request using the form below.
*Lacto-ovo – vegetarian diet that includes eggs and dairy
**Lacto-ovo-pescatarian – vegetarian diet that includes eggs, dairy, fish and seafood