Forks Over Knives Diet is The Bomb (You've Been Waiting For)

I have really been enjoying autonomy over what I eat. Before I left China, I sat the family down and we watched "Forks Over Knives"--the documentary (available on Netflix) that discusses, among other things, the lives and careers of two inspirational doctors, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, a nutritional biochemist from Cornell University and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, a former top surgeon at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic. A spinoff of their website is a fabulous resource, replete with a menu planner that will allow you to choose dishes by category (e.g., dessert!) and then generate a shopping list by aisle. They also provide breaking nutritional news that underlies their philosophy, such as this week's: New Harvard Review Finds Little Evidence to Support U.S. Dairy Recommendations.

When Harry came home from bicycling around the island of Hainan and a couple weeks of living in the countryside with his dad, we also watched “The Game Changers”, a documentary on Netflix that tells incredible stories of how a vegan diet can improve athletic performance in professional athletes.

In my absence, 丫丫 has been reading Dr. Thomas Campbell's book in Chinese. Thomas M. Campbell II, MD, is the Medical Director of the University of Rochester Weight Management and Lifestyle Center at Highland Hospital where he works with individuals and groups to lose weight and prevent and treat illness through diet and lifestyle. He is also the son of T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., who is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, project director of the acclaimed China-Oxford-Cornell Diet and Health Project, and coauthor (with his son) of The China Study.

The China Study is the most comprehensive epidemiological study of nutrition ever conducted. More than thirty years ago, nutrition researcher T. Colin Campbell and his team at Cornell, in partnership with teams in China and England, embarked upon the China Study, the most comprehensive study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.

Here are an assortment of dishes that I’ve made and devoured over the last three weeks. Not all of them meet the Forks Over Knives standard, but they are all vegan. PornHub is free for Italians; Americans will have to settle for my "food porn":

Cranberry sauce, pickled beets, almonds, and toast with red tea and cider.

Summer squash with quinoa, mixed dried fruit and nuts, and hard cider (with thermometer).

Apple. squash, mixed greens and pickled beets with box o' wine and puerh tea. 

Oatmeal with dried currants, chrysanthemum tea, and orange juice.

Curried quinoa, red peppers and squash with a side of salad greens.

Rice pasta with tomato sauce and salad with raspberries.

Seaweed rice cake sprinkled with pickled beets on mixed greens. Homemade dressing.