Episode 91: 'What's for Dinner?' - Overcoming Decision Fatigue with Brigitte Gemme's Vegan Family Kitchen

Welcome to the Plant-Based Canada Podcast. In this episode we are joined by Brigitte Gemme to chat about her initiative Vegan Family Kitchen as well as plant-based practices and dementia.

Brigitte is passionate about helping more people eat plants, empowering others to take charge of their health and live in alignment with their values. On her website VeganFamilyKitchen.com, she offers a meal planning service and teaches regular workshops about all aspects of healthy vegan cooking and nutrition. Brigitte previously worked in research management in the fields of education, sociology, and clean energy. She completed a Ph.D. in Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia and certificates in Plant-Based Nutrition from the universities of Winchester and Guelph. She lives in Vancouver (Canada) with her husband and two children.

Resources:

Book: Flow in the Kitchen: Practices for Healthy Stress-Free Vegan Cooking (link to Amazon.ca but can be ordered from any bookstore)
Dementia Canada: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/dementia.html 

Brigitte Gemme’s Socials:
Website including a 1-week dinner plan that uses my batch cooking approach: https://veganfamilykitchen.com/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/vegan.family.kitchen
Facebook: https://facebook.com/veganfamilykitchen

Plant-Based Canada’s Socials:
Instagram  (@plantbasedcanadaorg)
Facebook (Plant-Based Canada, https://m.facebook.com/plantbasedcanadaorg/)
Website  (https://www.plantbasedcanada.org/)
X / Twitter @PBC_org

Bonus Promotion

Check out University of Guelph's online Plant-Based Nutrition Certificate. Each 4-week course will guide you through essential plant-based topics including nutritional benefits, disease prevention, and environmental impacts. You can also customize your learning with unique courses such as Plant-Based Diets for Athletes and Implementing a Plant-Based Diet at Home. As the first university-level plant-based certificate in Canada, you’ll explore current research, learn from leading industry experts, and join a community of like-minded people. Use our exclusive discount code PBC2024 to save 10% on all Plant-Based Nutrition Certificate courses. uoguel.ph/pbn.

Thank you for tuning in! Make sure to subscribe to the Plant-Based Canada Podcast so you get notified when new episodes are published. 

This episode was hosted by Stephanie Nishi RD, PhD.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to the Plant-Based Canada podcast. Join us as we talk to experts to explore plant-based practices and how our food choices impact our health and the environment. We sit down with doctors, dietitians, athletes, and various fields to break down the evidence behind a whole foods plant-based diet and discuss the practical steps we can take in the effort to shift towards a healthier lifestyle. My name is Stephanie Nishi, and today I'm joined by Brujem to talk about her initiative, Vegan Family Kitchen, as well as plant-based practices and dementia. Brujid Gem is passionate about helping more people eat plants, empowering others to take charge of their health and live in alignment with their values. On your website, veganfamilykitchen.com, she offers a meal planning service and teaches regular workshops about all aspects of healthy vegan cooking and nutrition. Brugit previously worked in research management in the fields of education, sociology, and clean energy. She completed a PhD in educational studies at the University of British Columbia, as well as certificates in plant-based nutrition from the universities of Winchester and Guelph. She currently lives in Vancouver, Canada with her husband and two children. Appreciate Jen. Thank you so much for joining the Plant-Based Canada podcast today. It's such a pleasure to be able to speak with you.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

It's an honor to be here, and I'm very appreciative of all the work you've been doing to help move the cause of the right direction, help more people understand what plant-based eating is about and how it's good for everybody. It's a win-win-win situation.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

It is a win-win, and you yourself have been a part of that cause. And I was wondering if you could tell us to start things off, how you were first introduced to plant-based practices, and if you would share your story as to when you became plant-based and why.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

And then my father became the operator of the dairy farm. And then after the dairy, they had pigs. When I was born, we had pigs on the farm. So animals were always there for us and never questioned at all any aspect of farming until much later in life. However, at the same time, I very much identified as I was growing up and in my early in my 20s as a very eco-friendly, good citizen. You know, that was a really big part of my identity. And part of that was that I believed in active transportation, especially bike commuting. I was living in Montreal and walking and cycling everywhere. And if anybody here thinks vegans can be self-righteous, you haven't met a bike commuter yet. Especially, I think it's really improving, but definitely it was the case of basically putting your life on the line for what you believed in many times, where you would be in a struggle for space with heavy vehicles. People were not exactly yet watching YouTube on their phones at the time. I've seen that happen now. Quite concerning, but it's still something that brings a really strong sense of identity as a bit of a warrior, right? And somebody who must have been a vegan, perhaps, I'm not sure, I'll never know, told me something along the lines of if you're commuting by bike, but fueling your bike rides with steak, you might as well be driving a hammer. And that hit me really hard. I remember that day extremely vividly and taking my daughter to daycare on my bike that day and thinking, what? What is he talking about? My mind was blown. I was a very curious person. And it was the first time in my whole life that I even thought about the environmental footprint of my food. And I felt embarrassed and ashamed about that. I'm sure I was not, I'm sure I did not tell the online person how I truly felt about it. I must have had some quirky remark. But you know, people we meet online sometimes can have a strong impact on my life, on our lives. And so after I did a lot of research about it, I came to the conclusion that he was not exactly far from the truth. And I, if I wanted to live in line with integrity, in line with my values, I had to do something about the food I was eating. So that's when I first started eating plant-based at home. I would eat vegetarian when I was in restaurants. And if I was visiting someone at their house, I would just, you know, not get into a conflict and just eat whatever they were giving me. And that was back in 2013, 2014. And it was a year later, after bathing and kind of in a soft way, researching all of this and spending more time thinking about it, that I decided to become vegan for the animals because it was kind of the next logical step for me. And then I ate only plant-based all the time. And cooking was a really big part of all this. I had an 18-month-old daughter in 2013. And my husband and I always bonded over food. So, what was I going to do to make plant-based food work in our household was really a top concern from the very beginning. And I became quite dedicated, one might say, obsessed with figuring out what to make for dinner that everybody would eat and enjoy. Because I think I felt a bit of an ambassador duty. You know, if if the food is not good, maybe, you know, these people will be turned off eating this way forever. And then what's going to happen? You know, we need to foster an appreciation of different ways of eating that are more environmentally friendly to the next generation. So yeah, it was a very intense part of my life. I think people who have gone through transition to fully plant-based eating often have that kind of identity struggle and a lot of obsessiveness about it. So I was, I was definitely there for a little while.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

Thank you so much for sharing that. And it sounds like you've been open to having these conversations and researching to see what is actually going on and what statements are backed up by the facts. And it sounds like not only have you made this transition for yourself, but you've opened up these conversations to have with other individuals as well. Because I understand that you have your own company called Vegan Family Kitchen. And you mentioned that you had an 18-month-old daughter back in 2013. So you have yourself a family and going through this transition. Can you tell us a little bit more about Vegan Family Kitchen and how it arose, why it arose, and what your main aims are with it?

SPEAKER_01 7:20

The funny thing is that at the beginning, so my my business was not always called Vegan Family Kitchen, but it always had the vegan word in it. And now that I think back upon it, I think that putting the word vegan in there was a way to help myself be accountable to stick with the habit. Because if I'm going to say publicly that, you know, I'm doing something vegan, then I guess I have to be vegan and, you know, be more mindful of if I go out, you know, and when I buy clothes and make sure that I make choices that are in line. I guess feeling that integrity is a really important value for me. But in 2013, 2014, I was not in the food space at all. I was working for a little while. A little before that, I was working in the clean energy field. Um I have a PhD in sociology of science. So I have a funny, funny academic journey. I was a researcher, and then I went into research management and I helped. I was working in the national research center helping with staffing issues, like kind of strategic HR things in the field of clean energy. And then I went back to work at UBC at the time at the Faculty of Education. So I was back to kind of where I trained. And I was working with many faculty members, researchers, grad students who were doing different research projects in the field of education. And many uh everybody that I worked with ever was very passionate and very dedicated to doing great work. But something that I became very frustrated with was that all the work we were doing seemed like often, not all of it, often but uh much of it felt disconnected from the really big existential problems that the world was facing, namely climate change, biodiversity crisis. And even in education, there was so much in terms of social inequities, but also environmental education. And again, there's lots of people doing the right thing. But it felt like my role and how I was facilitating all this was really hard for me to see how I was having an impact. And even in the clean energy field, where I was so passionate about helping bring on better electrical solutions instead of using fossil fuels and all that. But at the end of the day, it felt like what we needed to do was a drastic reduction, drastic, maybe by 50%, by 80% on our energy consumption. And none of what we were doing there was going in that direction. On the flip side, and that's why I think I hooked so much on the on the plant-based eating aspect, I realized the power and the scale of the change that could be brought about if 25, 40, 50% of the population embraced a primarily plant-based diet. Those would be where we would have massive gains in terms of environmental footprint without changing really our quality of life, because we can get all the nutrients, we can get beautiful food, very enjoyable experience, still have the important things of life, you know, sharing meals with loved ones by doing all of those things plant-based. And it would have a significant impact that I could see on the environment. And that's how I became really motivated to support people in living that way. Because having done that transition, as I was saying, I was so obsessed with the food, and it took so much of my time. And I brought in my project management skills to try to make it easier to decide what's for dinner. Um, I started creating those meal plan templates for myself. And then I was like, oh, I can share this with others, and other people are like, oh, this is really helpful. I would like to have those resources. So that there was on one hand the frustration from working in academia and research and not seeing where we'd make a real change. And at the same time, the appeal of working directly in the food zone where my impact would be small, because I can only work with a few hundreds, a few thousands of people, but I would see it. I would see how I'm supporting people transitioning to plant-based diets or at least predominantly plant-based diets in their daily lives. And that was very appealing to me. And that's how I decided to make this a business rather than just a hobby. And uh after my second child was born, so I did not go back to my full-time job in academia. I decided to see if I could uh make this little tiny business thing happen. So it's been a lot of fun, a lot of learning as well.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

So it sounds like you're helping people figure out that age-old question, what's for dinner? And how do you go about it?

SPEAKER_01 12:19

It's the most important question in life, you know, who am I? What can I do? And what will I have for dinner? Those are the really the three core questions of existence. And what we have for dinner, we have to realize, and many people don't really know that, or they maybe they know it, but they don't realize it deeply. Every cell of our body gets replaced all the time. People tend to think that we have the body that we were born with, but actually, there's very, very few cells in our bodies that were there when we were born, not just because we've grown and built new ones, but also because even like our bone tissues get replaced all the time, every few months. We, you know, out with the old and in with the new, and we we build those. And what do we build those new cells from? We build those new cells from the food we eat. It doesn't come out of thin air. I mean, if there's pollutants in the air, it's not great. But uh, for the most part, we're built from the food. And so eating really good food is so critical to building a better self, right? And so that decision of what's for dinner on the flip side has been, well, historically left to moms. I mean, there's some dads that have been a part of that decision, but mostly it's been left to moms. I know my mom always said the worst thing about dinner is not cooking, it's not cleaning up, it's deciding what to make. And there's so much pressure in today's society on parents to do the best they can to grow healthy children. And we see our kids and we're concerned about their nutrition, their health, will, you know, be they'd be able to show up in the world and be the best they can. So we care so much, and there's so much pressure into that decision of what's for dinner. I really wanted to help in that direction. And what many people do when they decide to dedicate themselves to that path is create recipes. And I have a deep love of food bloggers. We have some amazing Canadian ones, Drina Burton, for example, or Lauren Toyota is another good example of Canadian food bloggers that create just those, you know, wonderful, beautiful plant-based recipes that make people see how wonderful plant-based food can be. But what I discovered in my own reality as a mom, a person trying to cook, bring dinner on the table every day with that, it's exhausting to try to cook from recipes all the time. It's one of my clients told me this week, and I thought it resonated so clearly with what I was trying to achieve. She said, I want to be able to cook things without thinking, without having to look at recipes and trying to figure out what are those ingredients, what steps am I supposed to take this in? I really want now, I've gone from a place where at the beginning I was assembling recipes and trying to put them in an order that made sense for people. And I created all of those meal plans to support people, reduce food waste, and you know, hit all their nutrient bases and things like that. But now I want to move that into a space where I can help people cook without recipes, help understand, see how sometimes I see the grammar of cooking works, how different, you know, soup is soup. Um, you don't need 24 soup recipes for fall. You can make soup based on seasonal produce once you know how a soup is made, once you understand. And and really, when you think about it, it's pretty simple. But we really need to get out of this space where we're dependent on recipes to a space where we become independent cooks, because that is so critical on the path to having plant-based meals cooked at home, more or less from scratch, every day. We need that for good health, it's necessary. But if we constantly rely on recipes, it's just too stressful.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

This ability to support individuals and not only how they plan, prep, cook, but also present the food, I feel like is such it potentially can take such a weight off of people's shoulders, who are those who are the ones that feel the responsibility for providing food, whether it's just for themselves, a partner, family, and so forth. And I just want to shout out on your website, you have within your blog like a number of resources. And one recent one, I believe, is the vegan meal plan template, the fall edition one. So when you were talking about the soup, I was like, oh, this is something that could be very useful for people potentially just so that they feel more comfortable in the kitchen and making those decisions about, okay, I have these ingredients. How do I put them together to make a delicious meal that's is both nourishing as well as delicious?

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Yeah, it's so important. I mean, delicious is really important. Tasty is at least as important as healthy, because if it's just healthy, um, you won't find you, maybe will not eat it quite so often. But also I'm discovering how much we're influenced by our perception of the food. And I was looking recently into the topic of appetite in satiety, and something I found absolutely fascinating was that the perception that people had before starting to eat impacted how they felt physically after eating the meal. And for example, if you look at a salad and you think, oh gosh, a salad, that's not gonna fill me. I'm going to be hungry in an hour, you do feel hungry in an hour. Whereas if you look at the salad and you believe that the salad is going to make you feel full and satiated. And there's been an actual study with two different versions of like the same smoothie, but they told a different story to the people drinking the smoothie. And those that were told the smoothie is going to be filling thought it was a lot more filling and they actually were less hungry later, right? So we have all of this imagery about bunny food, right? Around salads being so being not filling. And so when we change that language, it certainly helps with our perception. And in the same way, when we think of the food as healthy, nourishing, making us stronger, making us better, it also makes the food more tasty, which is kind of weird. But we were human brains are wired in a in a strange way. I have to be very candid. I don't teach good-looking cooking. You know, I mean, I think the presentation is largely in the hands of the cook at the end of the day. My approach is to cook survival cooking, you know, weeknight, make dinner happen. If you want to make it look good, you know, that's on you. I command you. But here, I will bring food to you or inspiration to make food that's tasty and make sure that it's going to be healthy and building you up. We worry a lot about presentation. It's my personality. I don't perceive things visually very much. But when we look at all of these recipes on the internet, I'm sorry to say it's really food borne. Because I took a bunch when I was looking for what I was going to do in this business. I took a bunch of food photography courses and, you know, trying to get up my game to look better on Pinterest and things like that, right? But often, like the food you see in the pictures, it's not even cooked, you know, or or it's been manipulated in one way or another to make it look good in the pictures, but it doesn't mean it's actually good to eat the way it's photographed and everything, but it makes amazing pictures. And I just can't buy into that myself. And I don't want people to think if their food doesn't look like this, then they're a failure, then they're not going to try it. You know, people don't uh like to do things that they're not good at. You know, I'm not good at math, so I'm going to stop doing math. And it works the other way around. Like you have to practice, practice, practice until you get better at something. But always comparing our food output to recipe photos, it doesn't actually help us. Many people think, oh, I have to look at the photos to know what it's supposed to look like. I don't know that it's helping us really. Maybe it's helping us when we want to make a fancy dessert for the office potluck and you know, wow, everybody. Sure, okay. But to bring dinner on the table every single day? I'm afraid not.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

And I don't know about you or anybody who may be listening, but when I find if I make a recipe and it doesn't turn out like the photo, I'm like, oh no, what did I do wrong? Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

But maybe it's delicious and certainly it's nutritious, but you feel bad about yourself and then you don't want to do it again. And next time you're just going to order in. And that is not going to be a better choice.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

Going back to the power of our minds and our perceptions about certain things and how it can make us feel both in appetite and satiety, but also our own self-confidence in approaching being in the kitchen and providing food for ourselves and others. I was wondering if you could speak a little about some of the offerings that you have, because if I understand, you actually do these virtual cook with me type sessions and things like that and different programming. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Thing, the most amazing fun thing I've done in the last three years is start a cooking club. Something we haven't touched on yet is the idea of batch cooking. And now I'm even talking about cascade cooking as the next step up to batch cooking. But the idea is that we need to decouple the act of cooking from the act of eating. Because if we want to eat healthy, wholesome food that is also tasty without relying too much on processed foods, it really helps to spend a bit of time cooking, for example, on the weekend, to prepare some of what I call building blocks that will then be assembled into the final meals on weeknights. And it helps the weeknight prep go faster. I'll give you the example of something simple like brown rice. It takes a while to cook brown rice. It's definitely an asset to eat brown rice compared to white rice. But on a Wednesday night between soccer practice and like my strata council meeting, I do not have the time to cook brown rice. So I need to do that sort of thing previously on the weekend. If I want to enjoy a salad for my lunch, I will not make myself a homemade dressing at seven in the morning when I'm packing my lunch. So I need to do that on the weekend to enjoy it throughout the week. So I've always been with my meal plans and my general approach encouraging people to do batch cooking. And often I was not doing it because I have two kids, there's birthday parties, there's travel, there's events. Oh, let's go berry picking this weekend. Well, we have a lot of berries, but we don't have any lunches for the week, or we haven't, you know, done the batch cooking and things like that. And just like I did, I think, with the vegan name in my business, I decided to make this a public offering so that if I offer this to other people, then I will have to show up to do it. And so I started a cooking club. At the beginning, it was just for my clients and it was a paid program. And now I've made it free for anybody because it's so fun and it's been so transformative. So basically, we get together on Zoom every other Sunday, and I'm not teaching anything. I'm not doing a class. Once a month, I do some kind of class that's free online as well. And people can sign up for my newsletter and find out what those are. But at Cooking Club, I'm doing my cooking and you're doing your cooking, and there is no lurking, no watching. The first rule of cooking club is you have to cook. And at the beginning, we go around the screen and we say, What are you cooking today? And people, some people follow my meal plan, so they have a strict plan of what they're doing. Usually it involves cooking a grain, maybe roasting some vegetables, mixing up a sauce, you know, throwing a soup in the slow cooker to enjoy later in the week, maybe mixing pizza dough. Pizza dough is such an easy thing to do. Uh, you don't need to buy it ready-made, it takes like five minutes. But if you haven't done it on the weekend, probably it's not gonna happen. So we all do that together. And almost every meeting, there's someone who shows up and says, Oh, I'm new, I'm just going to watch today. And I say, No, I'm gonna have to remove you from the meeting, but I'm sure you actually have something you can cook. They're like, Oh, I didn't get groceries. No, no, that's okay. Let's open your pantry. And we find something for them to cook. And I think they do it sometimes kind of because they're a little squeezed into doing it. But at the end, they're so happy that they did because now they have that batch of brown rice that they can eat later in the week, or they've roasted some vegetables, or they've mixed up a bean salad from canned beans. What do I know? Uh, but it's so amazing, so transformative. I have not missed a batch cooking session since I guess it was January 2022 when we started. And I can tell you that I'll be cooking on December 29th this year. It's Sunday. So I'm cooking then, and then every other week again. So that is the best thing ever. I strongly encourage people, if they can come to Cooking Club, uh, to sign up. We meet every other Sunday at 2 p.m. Uh, but if they can't make it, start your own, get together with friends. I don't think historically humans have cooked on their own as much as we do in the 21st century. It used to be much more of a communal activity, and doing it by ourselves is uh really self-defeating. So when we do it with others, and it's also empowering because often um people, many of my clients don't know anybody else who's plant-based, who cares about their health. Some of my clients are cooking to save their lives. People that need to get healthier because they're dealing with heart disease or type 2 diabetes or whatnot. And so showing up with others who are also trying to do that is empowering, and it's also a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Being accountable and it sounds like you're forming this community, as you said, can be so empowering, but also just make it feel like you're not alone in this.

SPEAKER_01 27:02

Yes, totally.

SPEAKER_00 27:04

And you also, so this is a program that's currently going on, and uh you kindly shared the information. So I'll link that in the show notes. But you also have multiple other things on your plate that you've been working on and working towards. And I was wondering if we could dive into that a little bit to learn more about what could be coming up in the future. Specifically, there's a program that you've been developing and uh looking into more about preventing dementia with a plant-based focus. And I was wondering if you could tell us how this came about, why dementia, why is it important to prevent and why from plants in particular?

SPEAKER_01 27:46

Yeah, thank you for bringing that up because it's so near and dear to my heart. I've mentioned that I went plant-based for the planet first, you know, for environmental reasons, and then 2015 embraced you know, veganism for the animals a little more. And the whole time, I have to admit, and I apologize to everybody who may feel hurt by this, that I thought that the health claims were not accurate, or that somehow, you know, vegans were overblowing some kind of random health things just to, you know, bring more support to their cause or something. I I did not think it was really a thing. Until I started paying more attention sometime around 2018, when it became obvious that um my father, who also had suffered from colon cancer, so my my father had a ham sandwich every single day of his life. That's the one thing that was constant for him for over 70 years. And clearly it didn't really help him on the health front. So he did have colon cancer first. And then in 2018, it became obvious that he was dealing with dementia that was getting worse and worse in his early 70s. And it was an extremely difficult journey for him, obviously, and my mother as his primary caregiver during that whole period. And that's when I started looking a lot deeper into the health claims related to plant-based diets. And it may or may not apply to my father. At the end of the day, I think my father had other less healthy behaviors that certainly did not contribute to make him a healthy, to give him a healthy brain towards uh throughout his life. But it's now clear to me from the large-scale studies that eating a predominantly plant-based diet is what we need to improve our health. And when I look, my my husband is a physician and I subscribe on our um, so I basically have I manage his medical practice. He's a pathologist, he doesn't have like day-to-day patients. Anyway, all this to say that he he gets the daily newsletter, right? And there's of the physicians' associations, and there's always news about hospital closures and how we're short on the number of doctors, and we're also short on nurses, and we have to bring so much care personnel from out of country. And I always want to say it's not that we have too few doctors, it's that we have too many sick people. And when you look at the compounding effect of the different chronic diseases, I was mentioning heart disease, diabetes, all the cancers, and all of those NCOs, non communicable diseases and uh the NCDs out there that are affecting people and that make hospital stays a lot more complicated than before. Those are all conditions that we could decrease, improve, to some extent eradicate if everybody ate their vegetables. And I'm not sure about Canada, but I know in the United States, it's less than 10% of the population that eats vegetables, even I think five servings a day, it might be five percent. It's a very low number. And when we have these studies that show that eating blueberries, for example, is so good for you. Yeah, it's the first time the study participants were eating any fruit or vegetables in their lives, right? So when we up the amount of vegetables that we eat, when we up the amount of beans that we eat, when we start eating some whole grains at least part of the time, that is when we see health benefits. And it's not so much as a vegan, I choose not to eat meat, but it's not so much that eating a tiny bit of meat here and there is going to kill anybody. I don't, I don't think that's the problem. Is that when we eat animal products, there's so much that we're not eating that would be so much better for us. So, in light of what happened to my father, that was, you know, my father was the strongest man I knew. And it was such a sad situation to see dementia take away everything he had, and also to see the number of people, because then when you get into the dementia care and you go to the hospitals and you walk on the floors where there's all the dementia patients, the toll that this is taking on our society, that it's taking on caregivers, the weight of the compounded chronic disease with the dementia, with the cancers, with all the things, is mind-boggling. And it's so sad. And it doesn't have to be that way. So, yes, I uh am in the process of creating a program that's called Preventing Dementia with Plants. Sometimes I call it cooking for brain health. That might end up what it is. It might be more attractive to a broader constituency. But clearly it's resonating with. I've started talking about it with my audience and with other people. And there's many people who are not interested in vegan eating from the get-go or they've never really cared about plant-based, but they care about their brains. They are terrified of dealing with dementia at the end of their lives, and they want to know what to do. And it's easy to learn a few recipes, but again, it's about getting into the habit of making that really good food happen all the time. And we know that small efforts lead to small results. Many of the studies that have been done to show, to, to try to assess the impact and prevention of dementia or the recently published Ornish study, that's an intervention to actually reverse the early stages of dementia, show that the more people adhere to the lifestyle changes, the more people go all in and say, yes, I will eat this way, I will, you know, all my meals will be plant-based, and I will also do the exercise, and I will also do the stress reduction strategies and do all the things and get, you know, really dedicated. That gives results. Meatless Monday is a great place to start, but a terrible place to stop, right? So we we need to get into a place where most of our meals can be wholesome. Most of the food we put in our bodies can contribute to healing us, to building us up better, um, to again bring in those new body cells, the nutrients that we need to be more resilient in the face of infections, for example, and reverse, you know, when we have cells in our body that go wrong and start to, you know, maybe build themselves into a tumor. Well, we're not going to help that with cheeseburgers. I know that coming again from a medical family, I don't think vegan, healthy vegan eating is necessarily always going to be the be all end-all of curing anything, but it's definitely making a difference in our ability to heal. So let's embrace it because again, small efforts, small results. So if we put a bigger effort, it's so worth it.

SPEAKER_00 35:19

Firstly, thank you so much for sharing that. I'm so saddened to hear that yourself and others, including my own family, have had to go through these situations. It's so challenging to be in it. So thank you very much for sharing that. I can imagine that many others can relate to your story. And you mentioned, on the other hand, the scientific evidence or the research that has been getting being conducted, such as the Ornish paper that was recently published. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the specific aspects or if there's specific nutrients or foods that have been mentioned and that you may be focusing on within your program in relation to dementia prevention.

SPEAKER_01 36:08

Yeah, but at the end of the day, what we know to be quite, I don't think anybody questions that, the foods that help with heart health help with brain health, right? That's kind of the basic. And what struck me the most in all the studies I've looked at and is that greens make such a difference. And I was thinking the other day, what if people replaced all the dairy they're consuming with greens? It would make such a huge difference because where does the calcium come from? Well, the cows eat the grass, and so the cows eat their greens. And so why don't we just skip the cow and have the greens directly? And it would have fabulous effects for heart health, for brain health, for digestive health, for energy, for all the things, you know, bone health. It would be so spectacular. So greens are indisputably important for health all around. But for there's even this uh Chinese study about uh longevity, I can't remember the acronym, I'm sorry, where people that ate greens every day had a 73% reduced risk of developing dementia, that's significant. In another study, you could see in in older people an 11-year difference in brain age, right? So in terms of or cognitive age. So people who were eating greens every day were so much more youthful than people who didn't. And again, we're talking, you know, black or white, eat greens every day or eat no greens at all. It's not a huge change in people's diet to eat greens every day. Berries are the other ones. So greens, berries, super important, and they're the foods that make the biggest difference, and beans. And those have phytonutrients, they have fiber, they help with brain health, with heart health, with all the things. Avoiding cholesterol, avoiding saturated fat, those are especially unfortunately, um, saturated fat combined with heavy metals seems to be a problem. And I have a very um I'm debating the issue of fish a lot because there's a historic perspective that eating fish is good for brain health. And I think many people, again, I was talking with a physician last week that told me she had read Dr. Gregor's How Not to Age. And she said, Well, you know, I really embrace a lot of what he's saying, but I'm going to keep on eating fish. And there's many rational reasons, I think, why people continue to think that getting those omega trees in particular, long-chain omega trees from fish, makes sense. On the flip side, and again, you know, vegan aside, when we look at the environment and where we're getting the fish in the oceans that are highly polluted with plastics and heavy metals, I don't know that the fish that people that are old today ate is the same fish as the fish that's available to eat today. And then add to that also farmed fish that is often a repository for many more toxic chemicals, PCBs and other things like that. So avoiding heavy metals in our diet is always a good idea, avoiding highly toxic chemicals that accumulate in animal flesh. They don't have very much time to accumulate in carrots and apples. We do know now, I was shocked and sad to see that even carrots and apples do have traces of microplastics in them. And it's it comes from the rain. It's raining plastic. I mean, we've really, humanity has put itself in a in a really dark corner now, but there's a lot more that's accumulating in in animals just because they live longer and they have more fat. So eating greens, eating berries, eating beans, those are the three main things. If you eat, you know, significant amounts of those every day, you're probably not so hungry anymore to have a ton of meat. If everybody is eating one and a half cup of beans every day, they can't also eat huge amounts of steak. It's not possible. You know? So I think that's really the start. And of course, diet is not everything. I don't want anybody to think that it's okay to just eat healthy and then sit in front of their computer or on the couch all day long and never exercise and be super stressed. So those other aspects are also important for both brain and heart health. But the diet, once you eat really healthily, you often get a lot of energy to do other things like exercise. I was mentioning people who cook to save their lives. I have a client, I'm not working with him on the medical side, but he's uh working to lose like almost 200 pounds of body weight. And so he's lost 100 and something pounds so far from cooking. He had never cooked in his life. And now he's cooking and he's enjoying all the vegetables, and he's feeling so much better that he wants to go out for a walk. His knees that were always a problem for the last 10, 15 years, now he's like, oh yeah, I just almost want to go for a run. It never occurred to him before. So I think the food is a great place to start. Some say exercise is another good place to start, but I come from food because that's uh that's the apron I wear, and that's my hat.

SPEAKER_00 41:48

It seems like once people start trying something, then they can realize all the other possibilities that can be out there for them as well. And you mentioned that you had a conversation with the physician regarding the fish question. And I was wondering if there is anything you wish other health professionals or the general public would have more awareness about or just be open to having conversations about, or if there's any topics that we haven't discussed yet that you think it would be important for people just to be aware of.

SPEAKER_01 42:20

I don't like the expression everything in moderation. I think that's a fallacy. We've embraced that as a way, I think, to deal with the overwhelm of information. There is so much that is constantly thrown at us that we don't really have the time to assess, also, right? Sometimes, I mean, there's a lot of studies that are basically meant to confuse us, right? When we it's like that one study about climate change that says it's not human cause, but when, you know, just enough to sow the doubt, you know. Oh, well, there's that one scientist that disagrees, maybe there's, you know, something going on in there. And the same thing with the food. The number of times I've heard things about um eggs being good for children. So that's a wild one that I heard once it was in a BBC program about eggs, you know, are eggs really bad for you or something. And I was like, oh, but eggs prevent stunting in children. I was like, what? Like stunting in children? Is that even a problem? Like in North America or in the UK where they have the BBC, you know? So I looked into the references trying to understand the issue. And there was that one study in somewhere Central America where basically children were starving and not having any food. And then they gave them one egg a day and they grew better. And it was like, well, yeah, they had nothing and now they have something and it's better. Yes. Um, but we have to realize that when we take all of these pieces of information more or less at face value, we get really confused. And so we we deal with the Overwhelm by saying everything in moderation. And I don't know that it's really useful. I was mentioning earlier, yeah, maybe eating one portion, and I think a portion of meat is supposed to be, was it three ounces or yeah, it's a tiny thing, it's a deck of cards, right? So maybe eating one portion of meat a day, a week, is not a big deal for your health. That's probably moderation. But eating meat every single day, that is not moderation. I don't know how that idea came to people that it might be the case, but it is not. And eating dairy every day is not moderation. So there's things we need to do, not in moderation. We need to do it with gusto and with energy and appetite is eat greens. Don't eat greens in moderation. I mean, I don't mean eat only greens. That might not be great. But eating greens should not be something we do in moderation. We should do it every day, twice a day. Eating cruciferous vegetables, eating berries. We should eat berries every day. Don't be shy about those things. Eating beans, don't be shy about eating beans. Don't feel like you have to balance eating beans with eating meat. It makes no sense. So we we have to let go of that idea of moderation and embrace the stuff that's good for us with energy and enthusiasm and put some effort towards making those great foods happen for us.

SPEAKER_00 45:27

Rajay, where can people find out more about you, your work, and stay updated on your latest projects or programs and resources and initiatives?

SPEAKER_01 45:36

The best place to connect with me is at veganfamilykitchen.com. I do exist on social media, but really email has been my uh way to communicate of choice for many years. So people can just sign up for my newsletter when they go to veganfamilykitchen.com and they'll get a friendly message from me every Friday reminding them that Friday is the best day of the week to plan their meals for the next week. Also reflect on the meal that you had in the past week and think, you know, what worked for me and what do I want to do again? And so I send that pretty much every Friday. And um, I've been on a kick. I've really enjoyed making some videos on YouTube as well. So I'm sure you'll you can put that in the show notes. That's a great place to connect and of course, show up to Cooking Club. Come prepared to cook and we get to chat. It's a great place to ask informal questions, not just of me, but also of others in the community and really feel like you're taking steps that support your health, that support the health of the planet, that also help the animals. It's just great to not just learn, but also do take action for ourselves and the greater good. So I welcome anybody who wants to come and cook with us. That would be super fun.

SPEAKER_00 46:59

And we'll share all that information in the show notes. So do check it out there. And Prajit, do you have a take-home message or any final thoughts that you would like listeners to leave this episode with?

SPEAKER_01 47:12

Cooking really good, homemade, plant-based food is the number one thing you can do for your health so that you can show up in the world and make a difference and just embrace it and do it with others and find the joy in it. It is the most powerful action possibly that people can take on a daily basis. So just do it. Just cook it.

SPEAKER_00 47:48

Rujan, thank you so much for being a part of the Plant-Based Canada podcast. It's been wonderful speaking with you, and I can't wait to see what further resources, initiatives, and programs you have in store.

SPEAKER_01 48:01

Thank you, Stephanie. I'll see you at Cooking Club.

SPEAKER_00 48:04

See you there. This episode was hosted by myself, Stephanie Nishi, and Clint Stamantovich is our audio engineer. This podcast featured royalty free music from Freesound.com. A very special thanks to our guest, Brishi Jem, for speaking with us and sharing her insights. And of course, thank you for listening. If you enjoy our podcast, please consider supporting the show. You can do this by clicking on the link at the bottom of the show notes. The Plant Based Canada Podcast is an initiative of the group Plant Based Canada, which aims to educate health professionals and the public on the evidence behind plant-based whole food nutrition for individual and planetary health. To learn more about the show, visit our website at www.plantbased canada.org. And stay up to date by following us on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook at Plantbase Canada ORG, and on X, formerly known as Twitter at PBC underscore ORG. Until next time.