The Next Big Thing In Medicine: Part 2 Last time we discovered that ‘non-communicable’ diseases are the challenge facing modern medicine. We explained that many of these are caused by our modern food choices, and discovered that what most of us are eating nowadays is...

The Best 'Energy' Foods I transitioned myself over to plant-based eating over 7 years ago now. First off I started out by cutting out dairy, eggs, and fish. Last to go was oils. I started out eating plenty of green leafy vegetables (mostly silverbeet and kale...

Making One-Pot Chickpea Biryani from Thug Kitchen 101 Thug Kitchen 101 has a bunch of awesome-sounding recipes that require vegetable stock or ‘broth’ as the Americans seem to call it. So, after making the last couple of recipes I’d amassed enough vegetable scraps to...

Explaining Our Plant-based 'Traffic Light' System One of the greatest strengths of a whole food plant-based way of eating, and why so many of us try to avoid the term ‘diet’, is that it’s a very sustainable lifestyle change. If you’ve ever tried ‘diets’ in the past,...

A Plant-based 'Traffic Light' System Last time we looked at a simple way to start to make some decisions about what kinds of foods to be eating. This categorised foods into 3 groups: animal foods, processed plant foods, and whole plant foods. A whole food plant-based...

Plant-based Milks and Kids' Growth Over the last few days there’s a Canadian study getting quite a bit of media attention, primarily because it found that at age 3, kids who drank the most cow’s milk are on average 1.5cm taller than kids who drank the most plant-based...

The 3 Food Groups As you can probably imagine, I’m often answering questions about what to eat. A whole food plant-based way of eating focuses initially on thinking of foods as belonging to just three groups. This makes it pretty simple to start out with. To make it...

Making Quinoa Taco Mix from Thug Kitchen 101 I’ve loved Mexican food since I can’t remember when. Back in the day in Wellington there was a place called The Mexican Cantina that I have fond memories of eating at when I was a kid. And on the odd occasion we’d have...

The Next Big Thing In Medicine: Part 1 Nowadays it seems as if exciting and important discoveries are made in medicine all of the time. However, just a handful of relatively simple, yet game-changing developments are collectively responsible for almost all of the...

Plant-based and Nutrition 2: Iron and Omega 3 (feat. Selenium and Iodine) Now there were a few nutrients I ran out of space to discuss last time. So without further ado, it’s time to get iron and omega 3 out of the way. Then selenium and iodine will get an honourable...

Time for Turmeric! Turmeric. I have real difficulty spelling it. It’s orangey-yellow as and will stain your cooking implements and meals. It tastes pretty ok, but not wonderful, which seems weirdly predictable for stuff that’s meant to be good for you (I’m looking at...

Plant-based and Nutrition: B12, Calcium, Vitamin D Anyone who chooses to eat a plant-based or ‘vegan’ diet will be used to answering questions about nutrition - usually in the form of where or how they ‘get’ a particular nutrient. In ‘The Pleasure Trap’, Doug Lisle...