Master Victor: [00:00:00] the biggest nutritional benefits of eating plants is they have a much denser nutritional content per pound, right? So I can eat, let’s say a pound of plants, let’s say like spinach and quinoa and beans. And I’m going to get a lot more nutrients out of that versus like eating 30 pounds of meat.
And that’s just because they’re denser in its saturation of that nutrient. Eating plants, you have to know what to eat. Getting right into the protein aspect of it because plants don’t offer a complete protein at least most plants do Now some people will say that like quinoa and a few other proteins have a complete protein I haven’t experienced that I like to attack it with at least three different types of protein.
I take a protein shake supplement that has pea protein Pumpkin protein and quinoa protein. And I think there’s also flax seed oil, which has a little bit of protein in it as well. Getting a variety of protein in a plant based diet allows your body to get all the [00:01:00] necessary proteins that can feed your body.
Master Victor: Welcome back to another episode of the unlimited you we took a little break after love burn We did an art installation called the beast’s cage. You can check out a video on it You can also read about it and the representation of the artwork on our website. It is a glass installation We got [00:02:00] an art grant to take it down to Florida.
It’s absolutely beautiful. Definitely check it out In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about a vegan diet, the benefits, the hardships, getting proper nutrition, and why people do it. I myself was a vegan for quite a while. I now eat a vegetarian diet, just because it’s a lot easier to get certain proteins and it’s a lot easier to eat out.
There are some hardships in eating a vegan diet. I try to eat vegan, I would say. You know, maybe 5 out of the 7 days of the week, and often times I do have eggs sometimes on the weekend. One of the biggest benefits for myself, for a vegan diet, is health. That was kind of what got me to start reducing my meat intake.
Now at first, if like, let’s say you’re interested in reducing your meat intake, It’s really hard. The cultural aspects of it the brain connection of, you know, you’re so used to eating meat. Some people don’t even feel full if they [00:03:00] don’t eat meat and that’s totally normal. And it can be very hard to jump into something, a large change in your life.
If you just tackle it head on, some people can do it. Not everybody can. For me, I had to start doing it one day at a time. I picked maybe one day out of the week that I didn’t eat meat. And I started to see differences in my training and I started to feel lighter. I started to have more energy and I just kept on going.
I, you know, then took it to two days. I took it three days and then eventually I was eating a fully vegetarian diet. One of the biggest benefits for me is the reduction of feeling bloated. After a meal, I would eat a vegetarian diet and I would be. It’s much easier for your stomach to process those simpler proteins, the simpler meals.
When you’re eating meat, you’re basically having, you’re eating an animal that ate the source of the nutrients like a plant, right? The plant is getting its source of nutrients from the sun, the water and the soil. And that is its [00:04:00] direct source of nutrition. When the animal, I like to say herbivore, eats the plant, they’re taking and breaking down the plants and taking the minerals from the plants.
A carnivore or an omnivore would then eat that animal, right? There’s now complex proteins that have been created in that animal body. Things like collagen, full proteins that are a little bit more complex. We call them complete proteins that your body can intake. And it essentially like whey protein.
You only need to take whey protein in order to, you know, fully substantiate the body. The problem with eating meat is that normally it’s farmed Right. So, you know, you go to the market and now you have farm salmon, you have beef where you don’t know where it came from. They’re using a lot of hormones.
They’re using a lot of antibiotics. as preventative measures to keep animals sick. Chickens get a lot of antibiotics to keep them from getting sick just because of the environment. [00:05:00] So you’re essentially exposing yourself to, you know, pesticides, to those antibiotics. You’re exposing yourself to these things that you necessarily don’t want in your body all the time.
The addition of the saturated fats, the high fat in the meat. Can also increase heart disease, hypertension, which is high blood pressure and type two diabetes. So going on a plant based diet or at least increasing Your vegetable intake can severely reduce your risk of a heart disease, of high blood pressure, and for some people that completely remove meat, or they’ll see a lower intake in saturated fats, they can see a complete reversal in type 2 diabetes.
There are studies on this. Now, I don’t want to say like a blanket statement that if you do this, you’re gonna see this happen, because everybody’s body’s a little bit different, and I do want to make it clear that I am not saying that everyone here should be vegan. What I’m saying [00:06:00] is, if you’re interested in becoming vegan, in be eating a vegetarian diet, that these are maybe the things that you want to look out for, and these are the things that you should know that there’s going to be hardships in doing so.
I have a lot of my students, they eat meat. I’m completely fine with that. Everybody has their own personal choice. And I’m very against pushing my points of views on other people, but I want to create a community. An episode that is informative so that if you’re interested in pursuing those goals, that you do it correctly and that you don’t end up essentially putting yourself in a deeper hole.
Because one of the biggest downfalls of a vegan diet is not getting the proper nutrition, so you know. You essentially get scurvy and your body will become sick from not getting the proper nutrition and that is really, really important. What one of the biggest things I saw when I stopped eating meat was it was easier to manage my weight because I wasn’t taking in the saturated fats.
I wasn’t taking in the [00:07:00] fats in the meat. I was getting simpler proteins. Sometimes my body essentially was It was allowed to process these calories, this nutrient a lot easier. And I was able to manage my weight better. But let’s say like you go and you eat a vegan or vegetarian diet and you’re like chugging on, you know, Diet Coke all the time, or you’re chugging on, you know, sugar or eating bad, you’re still probably going to have issues with your weight.
So this is one very big, important thing is that. If you’re looking to manage your weight and a vegan or vegetarian diet that you do so by eating actually plants, fruits, nutrients, nuts, and you remove, you know, processed foods, you remove sugar intake, especially liquid sugar. That’s huge. You can drink so much sugar through a liquid and it goes right to your belly, right to your butt where you [00:08:00] don’t want it.
Now, one of the biggest nutritional benefits of eating plants is they have a much denser nutritional content per pound, right? So I can eat, let’s say a pound of plants, let’s say like spinach and quinoa and beans. And I’m going to get a lot more nutrients out of that versus like eating 30 pounds of meat.
And that’s just because they’re denser in its saturation of that nutrient. Eating plants, you have to know what to eat. Getting right into the protein aspect of it because plants don’t offer a complete protein at least most plants do Now some people will say that like quinoa and a few other proteins have a complete protein I haven’t experienced that I like to attack it with at least three different types of protein.
I take a protein shake supplement that has pea protein Pumpkin protein and quinoa protein. And I think there’s also [00:09:00] flax seed oil, which has a little bit of protein in it as well. Getting a variety of protein in a plant based diet allows your body to get all the necessary proteins that can feed your body.
If you don’t do that, if you don’t intake enough food, if you don’t intake enough protein, you’re actually going to see a reduction in your muscle. You won’t, even if you work out all the time. You’re probably going to be full of pain because your body’s not going to be able to rehabilitate itself. And it’s really important when you’re going to a vegan or vegetarian diet that you usually increase the amount of food that you’re taking in.
That’s because you’re going to be consuming less calories. You’re, that’s going to be easier for you to manage your weight. But let’s say for me, for people who usually train martial arts, you’re usually trying to gain a little bit of weight putting on muscle. You’re trying to shed fat. Right? You’re trying to shed the fat weight and you’re trying to put on lean mass, which is muscle.
We want to lose the fat that is [00:10:00] inside of our arteries, that’s in between our gut. That can become real detrimental. That, you know, causes all of these different issues in ourselves. But we want to gain the lean muscle mass. That’s going to give you more strength to move around. That’s going to increase your mobility, your strength.
Hopefully your flexibility if you’re doing it right. And I mean that by like, if you’re stretching and you’re not putting in these nutrients and you’re trying to rebuild those muscles after they stretched, they might not be rebuilding properly. And then you might get severe pain. And I’ve experienced this because when I first went to a vegan diet, I was only taking maybe one kind of protein.
Like if you go to Costco, they have this pack of plant based protein. And their protein shake has only pea protein in it. And it is not sufficient to just drink that protein. Like I drank that, I tried it out for like two weeks. I didn’t see any growth in my muscles. I didn’t see any increase in my strength and I saw a lot more soreness in [00:11:00] my muscles.
I take this, like I was saying earlier, a protein shake that has a blend of different proteins. And I was actually able to gain about 10 pounds of muscle in about two months. That’s insane. Like that’s a considerable amount of muscle that I put on. Now I was exercising a decent bit, so I was putting in the work.
I was eating well, and I saw that return. I went from 165 and now I weigh about 170, 175, 177, depending on the time of day that you weigh me. One of the other benefits of a vegan diet is the reduction of your carbon footprint. So you can grow in your farm, in your backyard, downstairs, in your basement.
Almost a full range of all the foods that you’re required to live a vegan diet in a much smaller footprint. You don’t need a giant field with a whole bunch of cows, which is kind of the problem when you think about what is required to feed the amount of people on this planet [00:12:00] meat, right? There’s a study out there, and you can look this up, that if everybody on the planet was to eat meat, we would need more land than is available to produce that amount.
Master Victor: Now, if you go to uh, western [00:13:00] Kansas, eastern Colorado, the western part of the desert in Texas, what you’re going to find is these large farms, I mean, massive farms, with thousands of cows, shoulder to shoulder, pooping everywhere. And then they take their poop, because there’s nowhere to go, there’s such a massive amount of feces, they put it in, essentially, a lake of poop.
And I’ve driven through that part of the country. It smells so bad when you go outside, you don’t want to be there. I don’t know how people live in that area. And they’re populated. There’s people that work in these fields and there’s serious health hazards from working in those fields. You go to North Carolina, there’s the same issue with hog farms that there’s so much poop produced from the hog farms that they’re literally spraying it onto their fields.
And they have sprinklers, sprinkling poop on fields. Now people are eating that food and there’s been a few lawsuits against those companies. Because they’ve been [00:14:00] essentially spring feces on people. Now this is not only inhumane to the people experiencing this, but to the animals as well. Like you’re putting them in this isolated area where they’re suffering.
And I’ll think about what that’s doing to the quality of the meat. They’re not going to be healthy cows. They’re not going to be getting the right nutrition. They’re going to be sick. They’re probably going to be in, you know, really adding a lot more of those antibiotics so they don’t get sick to prevent.
The meat from becoming bad because sick cows equals dead cow and dead cow. Well, you get where i’m going. So the aggravated method of creating a large source of meat everybody to Get food in a cheap way has created A method that is not safe and not nutritious for you to get your meal So let’s say you go to like a McDonald’s, a Burger King and get that burger.
You don’t know where that burger came from. [00:15:00] Most likely one of these farms because it’s a lot cheaper to stack these animals in a tiny pin rather than letting them roam around. Now, a better method, of course, is, you know, you, get grass fed, but you’re still seeing a lot of these other problems where, you know, they’re not getting the right nutrition.
You’re still going to be getting the fats and the meats and you’re still getting complex proteins. Now, a lot of us in school, hopefully we’re taught this process of plants that break down nutrients from the sun, the soil and water to get their energy. Herbivores eat the plants, right? And then omnivores and carnivores eat those animals and omnivores also eat plants.
Now, if you think about it, the nutrients that are coming from the direct source of these plants is going to be much more potent. So it’s going to be faster for your body to process, meaning you’re not going to be bloated as much. You’re not going to get as much heartburn. You’re not going to have all these stomach issues that a [00:16:00] lot of these people deal with.
Now I’ve actually gone to the hospital for dealing with stomach issues from acidity, from eating and not healthy diet. I haven’t had a single problem since I’ve gone vegan, except for finding out the right nutrients to put in my body. And I’m going to talk about that in a little bit. You know talking more about the reduction of the carbon footprint aside from requiring less land It’s not as aggravating to the soil if you do it in a proper manner in the permaculture manner where we are not trying to extract as much from the soil, but instead we’re trying to create a Sustainable method of growing our food and that is very important Because the method of farming that we’ve created is called agriculture.
We’re aggravating the system to produce the highest yield, to get the most money. That’s an approach that is based on capitalism on economics. And what that does to the soil, as most of you [00:17:00] probably know is it drains the soil of its nutrients. That way, the food that you’re eating, if you’ve ever gone outside the country, they usually have much richer foods because they’re growing food in a different method.
The food here in the United States, it tastes blander. You need to eat more food to get filled. Like I went to Oaxaca this past year in Mexico and I ate about half the amount I did. And I felt full. I felt the nutrients coming into my body. The food tasted better because they’re using a better system of getting their food.
They’re growing their food in a, richer soil. So that soil The sun and the water they’re putting into it is cleaner and the food comes out cleaner. It tastes better. And if you’ve ever grown your food at home, you’ve probably experienced that it tastes a lot better than the stuff at the grocery store.
And that’s simply because of the system we have created. So not only reducing the carbon footprint, but also farming correctly. This is why I always recommend people create their own [00:18:00] gardens, gardening in your backyard, start a garden. If you live in an apartment building, maybe start a little window garden.
You know, and get one of those little window hangers. You can even grow pots and grow food inside. You know, like do what you can. You don’t necessarily have to have a large amount of land to do it. In the Netherlands, there’s people growing food indoors. It gets cold out there and they want to grow food year round.
They have greenhouses as well. Aside from that, we’re talking about also conservation of water and land. The amount of water. that it takes to feed a cow, to feed a chicken, to feed all these different animals, is insane. You use a lot less water to feed a plant, and then you get that return back. In turn, that water could be used for yourself, for running a permaculture farm, that then you can catch your own water, you can filter your own water, and that way you’re not, I personally don’t drink tap water, I want to do eventually a [00:19:00] whole episode on water, and what gets put in our water.
I have an article on our website. If you want to check it out, it talks about fluoride in water and the different, a few different things that they put in our water. I definitely recommend if you can get a reverse osmosis filter, put it in your house, put it under your kitchen sink. That way when you go in there and just fill it up, boom, you have perfectly cleaner water.
One thing to mention is you don’t want perfectly distilled water. That’s going to take the nutrients out of your organs and probably kill you. So if you get distilled water, make sure you put nutrients back in. You can put trace minerals back in macro and micro micronutrients. And in our conservation of water, we can not only save money, we can put better quality water inside of us.
If you think about your body, your muscle mass is mostly water. You, a lot of people will take creatine to increase the saturation of water inside of their muscles, making them look bigger. And oftentimes [00:20:00] if they’re bigger, you can get more exertion out of them and get more strength. We are what, like, I don’t even know the percent, not just the top of my head, but a large percentage of water.
And if you’re putting in diluted water, if you’re drinking chlorinated water, that essentially kills your gut bacteria, it’s not healthy. So. Now talking about a diet, we’re really being conscious about what we put into our bodies, where it comes from, how it’s grown, how it’s prepared, how it’s served, and it all affects us in the end.
Talking about biodiversity, we have a lot of monocultured farms. Mono meaning one plant being grown on a large field. That monoculture, let’s say there’s a disease that comes, it starts wiping out one plant, spreads to the other, next thing half your field’s gone, right? That’s also Creating the instability, that aggravation in the soil that reduces the nutrient that gets put into your food, creating biodiversity is going to [00:21:00] allow us to have different intakes from the soil.
You’re going to have different crops that are going to essentially support each other. Maybe one’s lower, maybe one is taking a different type of nutrient. They’re not going to be competing for themselves like the native Americans. When we first arrived here, they were doing. Squash, beans and corn together in a field.
It was a lot more sustainable. We took over the area. We started cutting down trees and now you’re seeing this, you know, monoculture farm. One of the biggest problems about the meat industry and both fish and cattle is the space required. You have the Amazon in Brazil. I’m Brazilian. I’m from Brazil in Bahia and it is heartbreaking to see.
Then cutting down luscious, rich jungle area to start cattle farms. It is absolutely [00:22:00] backwards. You have some of the richest soil, which has different bacteria that will break down the decomposing matter and create natural fertilizers that feeds plants. You can literally grow almost anything down there and they’re cutting down this The most, the richest jungle in the world to raise cattle.
And they’re also growing soy. So I’m not saying that the plant industry is perfect because we went out to California and they’re growing almond trees, which are extremely extract. They’re very water hungry out in the middle of the freaking desert. It’s 105 degrees outside, the soil is perfectly dry, and they’re just pumping at five o’clock in the day, middle, like the hottest part, and they’re just pumping out water on these fields.
Absolutely unsustainable. So creating a sustainable way of getting our food. Biodiversity, growing our [00:23:00] food in this permaculture format. You can look up at Oregon University, they have a wonderful class in permaculture. Permaculture is an ancient way of growing food that It’s sustainable. It keeps the nutrients in the soil.
It provides a safer way to harmoniously. You can have animals in that system. You can have chickens eating the different parasites, the different bugs that are eating your food. You can, you know, circle, circulate the different crops growing in fields. You can capture water and slow down the process of it moving through the watershed.
To allow it to get into the groundwater that then the plants are going to use to grow. So it’s about creating a system that is sustainable, which right now our food system is absolutely not. We have way more than enough food being grown and a lot of it gets thrown away. Because [00:24:00] people got to make a profit.
So the entire way we’re going about life in general, in our current culture is very backwards. And it’s something I’m very passionate about. I have a lot of friends who feel the same way. And if you, if this is the first time you’re hearing about it, I definitely recommend you looking into it and traveling outside of the country, traveling outside of your state, experiencing something different, opening your eyes to what is out there.
Because once you do. And you see, Oh, Hey, there’s better food here. They grow things different ways here. This food feels richer. It feels nicer. You’re going to open your eyes to what’s out there.
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