Have you heard of the wildevore diet? Concerns about climate change, environmental stress and animal welfare mean that what we eat is an ethical as well as a health issue.
According to the founders of this new diet, the new approach will help people to show how they can eat to benefit their own health while making planet-friendly choices at the same time. The Wildevore diet incorporates some of the philosophies of veganism, vegetarianism, flexitarianism, ethical omnivorism, and clean eating, but it looks more closely at the pressures on the environment and the impact that has on human health.
Say the founders, The new eating diet is not for the faint-hearted, requiring some serious homework and a desire to change habits. The system can work for vegans and meat-eaters, but there is an underlying need to understand the consequences of food choices. In the Wildevore diet, meat reared on regenerative farms and fed on natural diets is allowed for its human health benefits. A vegan diet does not always provide the best results. From a health perspective a vegan diet, in the short term is an amazing way to cleanse the body and this feels great. However, long-term it can create serious health problems. Soya, the main protein source for many vegans, is a hormone-disrupting food and can cause our own reproductive systems to stop working correctly. Other issues with not eating animals are the omega-3 deficiency, and certain vitamin and mineral deficiencies, all combined with the problems created by soya can cause premature degradation of bone tissue. Relying on our supermarket staples has led to a decrease in nutrition levels. The minerals in food have reduced by up to 60 percent. These deficiencies compound our craving for the taste of nutrient-dense foods. But if we don`t understand this we end up eating all the wrong things. The new diet can help with health and imbalances in weight. We want everyone to realise they eat life forms from a cycle of birth, life, death and decay. You can make local and sustainable choices when eating meat and you can make local and sustainable choices when eating plants - we all need to take responsibility for doing better.
If you choose to eat meat using the Wildevore approach, then you have to be incredibly choosy. Intensive farming, GMOs (genetically modified organisms), antibiotics and mistreatment of animals have absolutely no place in the new eating approach. Say the experts, Meat that is allowed on the diet is from farms that helps to restore ecology. Animals can be used to regenerate land or degrade it. And in fact much land requires herbivores to help regenerate the ecosystem, it`s just most farming systems don`t function this way and the animals are degrading the land. The process of degrading our soils through ploughing and fencing in livestock has depleted the nutrients in our food and reduced the variety and quality of our diet with disastrous effects. Our food is a shadow of what true hunter-gathers eat. There`s, of course, no way we can all live or eat from the `wild` anymore - we`ve destroyed most of it. But we can take steps to build healthy ecosystems in all the land that grows food for humans. This is the only sustainable way we can live on this planet.