Plant Based Diet Adventures

A clip from The China Study, by T.Colin Campbell

“….The slimming effect of physical activity is obvious.  Scientific evidence concurs.  A recent review of all the credible studies compared the relationship between body weight and exercise and showed that people who were more physically active had less body weight.  Another set of studies showed that exercising on a regular basis helped to keep off weight originally lost through exercise programs.

No surprise here either.

Starting and stopping an exercise program is not a good idea.  It is better to build it into your lifestyle so that you will become and continue to be more fit over all, not just burn off calories.  How much exercise is needed to keep the pounds off?  A rough estimate derived from a good review suggested that exercising a mere 15-40 mins/day, every day, will maintain a body weight that is 11-18 lbs lighter than it would otherwise be.

The advantages of combining diet and exercise to control body weight were brought home to me by a very simple study involving our experimental animals.  Recall that our experimental animals were fed diets containing either the traditional 20% casein (cow’s milk protein) or the much lower 5% casein.  The rats consuming the 5% casein diets had strikingly less cancer, lower blood cholesterol levels and live longer lives.  They also consumed slightly more calories but burned them off as body heat.

Some of us had noticed over the course of these experiments that the 5% casein animals seemed to be more active than the 20% casein animals.  To test this idea, we housed rats fed either 5% or 20% casein diets in cages equipped with exercise wheels outfitted with meters to record the number of turns of the wheel.  Within the very 1st day, the 5% casein-fed animals voluntarily “exercised” in the wheel about twice as much as the 20% casein-fed animals.  Exercise remained considerably higher for the 5% casein animals throughout the 2 wks of the study.

Now we can combine some really interesting observations on body weight.  A plant-based diet operates on calorie balance to keep body weight under control in 2 ways.  1st it discharges calories as body heat instead of storing them as body fat, and it doesn’t take many calories to make a big difference over the course of a year.  2nd, a plant-based diet encourages more physical activity.  And, as body weight goes down, it becomes easier to be physically active….”

More China Study clips Here