Tarnicus: Increasing plant-based foods is a wise decision for most of us, and my current diet and lifestyle has been far too unhealthy. When I used to work out regularly, I had one friend who had the lowest body fat I had seen (around 5-7% from memory) and looked ripped like a Greek God. It belied his state of health, as he over-consumed animal proteins at the expense of his kidneys. I tried to suggest he get a few greens in but he considered it to be a waste of time. His breath disagreed. "Kidney breath" is a scent I know too well from being with a woman who was diagnosed with stage 4 kidney failure and had an autoimmune kidney disease. She started to increase her plant foods and decreased her meat consumption (was vegetarian for a while) and her kidney function improved. She is far healthier now and had been given a death sentence by her doctors. I was aghast when they wanted to put her on immunosuppressants and told her that her diet didn't matter. Seriously what kind of "specialist" can study medicine and not see how vital nutrition is?!?!
Indeed, but things are changing slowly now. More and more scientific studies are coming out showing the benefits of a whole foods based dietary base, and top doctors are now recommending lifestyle changes in addition to their traditional approach. More importantly though, individual people are seeking out the information themselves and making proactive changes in their dietary lifestyle without being prompted externally. It's happening enough for example that McDonalds is dropping the Big Mac, and other unhealthy food stuff is slowly being de-favoured for healthier choices. There's a long way to go yet, but the ancient dietary advice of the 70s/80s/90s is slowly being replaced by modern science suggesting otherwise and people are making the move for themselves at their own paces and sticking with what seems to work for them.
I don't know about you but I'd say at least 1/3 of my friends/family/contacts have spent some time learning some of this stuff and making changes to their lifestyle and seeing some good results, so we share a lot of info, recipes, reading materials, books, videos, etc. between each other and it's interesting to see how many people have opened up to making such changes these days. 10 years ago discussing such topics was generally highly controversial, and while it still is for many people now, there's a lot more people open to it and to questioning old long held (but false) "wisdom". :) I'll pretty much discuss such things with anyone with an open mind who is interested in learning more about it, although I will pretty much walk away from discussions where people are clearly biased and try to challenge everything and have a highly conflictual nature/bias as it's not worth my time to try to convince anyone of anything they don't have any interest in or desire to learn more about. I'd rather spend whatever time I'd end up wasting doing that further doing more research into next week's meal plan. :) Well, or wasting time on GOG forums LOL