The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

The Intelligence of Human Physiology / 87
and body are basically separate. Though this dualistic view is being
challenged, it still dominates our worldview, making it difficult to
understand that what we believe and how we think and feel have direct
reverberations in our body, and that the state of our body intimately
affects our mind as well. The power of the placebo effect is based on this
unity of mind and body, and it’s amazing how strong it is. There have
been many studies done in which the patients given only sugar pills by
their doctors showed equal or even greater change in their physical/mental
condition than did those who received the actual drugs! 48
Expectations are powerful forces. Some people being told they were put
on a chemotherapy program for cancer even lost their hair, though they
were only given placebos, not drugs. And according to Wayne B. Jonas,
M.D., a leader in placebo research and director of the Samueli Institute
for Information Biology, placebo surgery—telling patients that a surgery
will be performed, but then not performing it when in the operating
room—“is as effective or more effective than real surgery.” 49 Though
our culture’s mechanistic biomedical framework is confused and threatened
by the immense power of the placebo effect and sees it negatively,
it’s helpful to realize that it’s not negative at all, but wonderfully positive.
Understanding this unity of mind and body allows us potentially to
unleash enormous healing and vitalizing forces through our thoughts,
ideas, feelings, and insights.
Most of us switching to plant-based diets feel the positive effects
like a heavy weight lifting off our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual
bodies, but some of us feel worse, especially at the beginning. The
immense and unrecognized power of the placebo effect helps to explain
why this is so, especially if we’re making the switch alone and don’t
have the example of healthy, vibrant vegans around us every day. The
old programming can easily be activated, reinforced by the ubiquitous
advertising and promotion messages of the meat, dairy, egg, and medical
industries. It was pounded into us practically from birth, by those
closest to us and in the positions of highest authority, that we’d be weak
or sick if we didn’t get our “protein”—our cheese, eggs, and meat—and
their voices naturally still live within us. Subconsciously, when we
switch to a plant-based diet, we may expect we’ll feel weak or get sick,