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

88 / the world peace diet
and so our bodies may manifest this. Therefore, when we let go of eating
animal foods, it’s important to let go consciously of the ingrained
cultural beliefs that we need animal foods to be healthy. We swim in an
emotionally charged thought-sea created by generations of omnivores,
and this mass consciousness may make it more difficult for some of us
to believe at deep levels that we can and will be more vibrantly healthy
without eating animal foods.
On top of this, researchers have noticed that placebos are more
effective if they are unpleasant. Bitter-tasting and expensive placebos,
for example, like bitter and costly drugs, “work” better—because we
have to go through some trauma and sacrifice to ingest them, we subconsciously
expect their effects to be more powerful. Eating the flesh
and secretions of animals is so fundamentally repulsive to us as humans
that these animal foods make especially powerful placebos. We find vultures
repulsive because they eat carrion, but we eat exactly the same
thing! Sometimes it’s euphemized as aged beef. And yet, because we’ve
been taught to attribute strength and energy to eating animal foods, that
expectation helps our quite miraculous and flexible psychophysiology
to partially overcome the essentially disturbing and toxic nature of these
foods so we can survive and function. As children, we had no other
choice.
There are two other reasons we may experience difficulty switching
to a plant-based diet. One is that when we stop ingesting the saturated
fat, cholesterol, and other toxins in animal foods, our body may take
this as a welcome opportunity to clean house. Fruits and vegetables are
natural blood cleansers and detoxifiers, and as our body switches from a
mode of survival and of storing toxins away in our fat cells to a mode of
cleansing, renewing, and reducing the fat cells, stored toxins begin to
flow into our bloodstream to be eliminated. Instead of feeling better, we
may feel worse for a week or two as drug and toxin residues are cleaned
out. This is actually a cause for rejoicing because those poisons are no
longer lingering in our tissues.
Keep in mind that if we go to a medical practitioner for advice during
this cleansing time, we will probably find that he or she is antago-