We have all heard of the vegetarian, vegan and flexitarian diets, but have you heard of the wildevore diet?
Concerns about climate change, environmental stress and animal welfare highlight that “what we eat is an ethical as well as a health issue.”
Caroline Grindrod, an environmental conservationist and Wildevore coach, and Georgia Winfield-Hayes, a nutritionist, are promoting the all-new ‘wildevore diet’, that seeks to harmonise the need to eat for good health and the urgency of making eco-friendly choices.
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, according to The Ecologist.
The new eating approach identifies on how to make the best choices both ‘nutritionally and ethically’ and aims at educating the people about where their food originates from.
‘From a health perspective a vegan diet, in the short term, is an amazing way to cleanse the body. 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 reproductive systems to stop working correctly.’
Health impact
Grindrod and Winfield-Hayes say their diet is not for the “faint-hearted” and requires 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.
Georgia, who has written extensively on human nutrition, said that 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,” Georgia said.
“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,” she added.
Sustainable choices
“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%. 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,” Georgia says.
The Wildevore eating approach is about ‘rewilding’ the palate to make healthier food choices and move away from the fast-food nature of most diets. According to Georgia and Caroline, the new diet can help with health and imbalances in weight.
Caroline believes that breaking down categorisation is the key. “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,” she added.
Meat that is allowed on the Wildevore diet is from farms that helps to restore ecology. Intensive farming, GMOs (genetically modified organisms), antibiotics and mistreatment of animals have absolutely no place in the new eating approach.
Harvested and killed
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.
Meat that is allowed on the diet is from farms that helps to restore ecology, according to Georgia.
“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,” she underlined.
The Wildevore approach promotes the restoration of grasslands and preservation of precious soils and forests. In short, it means “eating less, but better foods.”
Ecological diversity
“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,” Caroline stated.
“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, she added.
Most foods that are enjoyed by both vegans and meat-eaters, such as soya, avocados and coconut oil, have led to vast plantations of monocultures which puts more pressure on land.
The felling of rainforests for monocultures, including animal feeds is something we are all responsible for. However, buying from small organic farms reduces the massive environmental pressure, say Grindrod and Winfield-Hayes .
[“source=hindustantimes”]
