PLANT KINGDOM

 FRUITS  |  VEGETABLES  |  GRAINS  |  LEGUMES  |  NUTS  |  SEEDS  |  HERBS  |  SPICES 

PLANTS ARE NUTRIENT FACTORIES | PLANTS = LIFE

Plants are the base of earth’s food chain, using solar energy and water to fuel nutrient manufacture. These green factories effortlessly put together the carbohydrates (complex & simple), fats, proteins, fibre, antioxidants, vitamins, phytochemicals and much more that animals need to survive and thrive. Plants also absorb minerals from the soil to weave into their own cells.

What Are Plant Based Whole Foods?

Plant based whole foods are Fruits, Vegetables, Grains, Legumes, Nuts, Seeds, Herbs & Spices and are part of enormous Plant Kingdom.

Why Eat Plant Based Whole Foods?

These healthful food groups help you live longer, stay slimmer, and cut your risk of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

Keep The Body Alkaline!

To attain and maintain vibrant health, more than 80% of our daily diet must come from alkaline forming foods and less than 20% may come from acid forming foods. The reason being when the body is acidic over a long period of time immune & healing systems are compromised / damaged severely and we become sick (from common colds/flu to cancer, osteoporosis, arthritis, diabetes & heart disease... just to name a few).

When the body is Alkaline the immune & healing systems perform at the peak and in turn keeps the body in vibrant health.

Alkaline Forming Foods

Fruits, Vegetables and their freshly squeezed juices (note regarding Citrus fruits: Even though citrus fruits are acidic by nature they are Alkaline forming when consumed).

Oxidation, Free Radicals & Antioxidants

Oxidation is the process by which atoms and molecules lose electrons as they come into contact with other atoms and molecules. It’s one of the most basic chemical reactions in the universe. When you cut an apple and it turns brown in contact with air or when your car fender rusts, you’re witnessing oxidation at work.

Oxidation happens within our bodies as well. Some of it is natural and good; oxidation facilitates the transfer of energy within the body. Oxidation also gets rid of potentially harmful foreign substances in the body by making them water soluble and therefore able to be excreted in urine.

Excessive uncontrolled oxidation, however, is the enemy of health and longevity in humans, just as excessive oxidation turns your new car into a junker and your apple slice into compost. Oxidation produces something called free radicals, which we know are responsible for encouraging aging, promoting cancer and rupturing plaques that leads to strokes and heart attacks, among other adverse effects impacting a host of autoimmune and neurologic diseases.

So how might a plant-based diet protect us from the disease causing effects of free radicals? There is evidence that high protein diets enhance free radical production, thus encouraging unwanted tissue damage. But it’s virtually impossible to eat a high-protein diet if you’re mostly consuming a variety of whole, plant-based foods. Even if you munched on legumes, beans and nuts all day, you’d be hard pressed to get more than 15-20 percent or so of your calories from protein.

But there’s much more to whole, plant-based foods than the protein animal foods they replace. It turns out that plants also produce harmful free radicals – in their case, during photosynthesis. To counteract that free radical production, plants have evolved a defence mechanism: a whole battery of compounds capable of preventing damage by binding to and neutralizing the free radicals. These compounds are known as antioxidants.

When we and other mammals consume plants, we also consume the antioxidants in those plants. And they serve us just as faithfully and effectively as they serve the plants, protecting us from free radicals and slowing down the aging process in our cells. Remarkably they have no effect on the useful oxidative processes mentioned earlier. They only neutralize the harmful products of excessive oxidation.

It seems reasonable to assume that our bodies never went to the trouble of making antioxidants because they were so readily available in what, for most of our history, was our primary food source: plants. It’s only when we shifted to a diet rich in animal-based food and processed food fragments that we tilted the game in favour of oxidation. The excess protein in our diet has promoted excess oxidation, and we no longer consume enough plant-produced antioxidants to contain and neutralize the damage.

Source: WHOLE - Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

Animals Are Nutrient Consumers

Animals who eat plants reap the benefits of these nutrients, needed for their own lives. With the exception of vitamin D, which forms in skin when sunlight hits it, animals cannot make the raw materials essential for their survival.

When you eat animal foods, you are consuming highly degraded remnants of the plants the animal lived on. The animal used virtually all the protein, complex carbs, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals from food for his or her own purposes. Plant foods fueled the animal’s growth, reproduction, breathing, digestion, immune system activity, blood circulation, organ and brain functioning, and all the other activities needed to function. In the process, just about all the good stuff in the plants got utilized or burned up, with the waste and excess eliminated in urine and feces.

The remaining nutrients in an animal’s muscles, organs, or milk is tiny when you compare it to the original plant sources. This is why the largest land animals are all plant-eaters. Think elephants, rhinos, bulls, horses, elk, and hippos as examples. Plants are the most efficient foods, nutrient dense and healthy.

Source: http://www.perfectformuladiet.com/plant-based-nutrition/plants-are-nutrient-factories/

Characteristics of Plants

Life in plants is quite different from life in animals. Unlike animals, plants are neither scared of death nor have the desire to live, survive and reproduce; yet they are full of life.