After the birth of her second child in 2019, Keet was motivated to make changes by the thought of what kind of world her children were going to have. “I was totally awake in the middle of the night having climate anxiety,” she said. “I just brought this person into the world—what does her future look like? What does my son’s future look like?”

Keet started the seeds of Planetarian Life based on her experiences doing Meatless Monday, but with fewer restrictions and a larger sense of purpose. “There’s vegetarianism(素食主义), but these things don’t describe my why,” she said. “I’m eating this way for the planet.”

That’s the most basic definition of who a planetarian is, according to Keet: someone who is changing the way they eat and live for the good of the Earth.

With Planetarian Life, Keet decided to take a small-steps approach. Instead of cutting out meat entirely or working with unfamiliar ingredients, planetarian eating works around making small replacements in your usual meals on your own schedule and to your own preferred tastes.

This can be as simple as using chickpeas instead of rotisserie chicken to make chickpea “chicken” salad or cooking a big batch of quinoa to keep on hand for quick skillet vegetable bowls throughout the week.

Like compound interest, the minor changes made to familiar meals add up to a bigger lifestyle change over time—and they are easier to stick with than drastic cuts. Because no foods are banned from the planetarian way of eating, it’s up to every individual to take it as far as they want to go.

A balanced diet comprising of diverse and healthy foods is the key to promoting good health. After all, we are what we eat — research continues to prove that eating healthy food promotes good health and unhealthy food habits lead to a diseased body. Foods contain vital nutrients that aid our body’s metabolic function. However, a lack of consumption of these nutrients or feeding upon the wrong kinds of food leads to an accumulation of toxins within the body, resulting in chronic (慢性的) diseases in the long run.

A nutritious diet while ensuring overall well being, helps to maintain a healthy Body Mass Index (BMI), reduces the risk of several debilitating diseases like cancer, cardiovascular ailments, diabetes, osteoporosis and stroke. Thus a nutritious & healthy diet is important in the prevention and cure of various diseases.

There are several health conditions that can be caused or aggravated (加重) by the food we eat. However, there are also several foods that you can include in your diet to help prevent or treat diseases. It is simplest to draw up a balanced diet chart as this will ensure that you get all the nutrients you require on a regular basis. A nutrition diet chart is a diet chart that helps you to keep a track of your nutritional diet requirements and is a very useful tool when drawing up a personalized diet plan.

However, it must be noted that allopathic medicine treats the symptoms rather than the root cause of the disease, which is usually caused by wrong eating habits leading to an accumulation of toxins within the system. Whereas a nutritious healthy diet can rectify underlying causes of diseases and restore one to wholeness of mind and body. Once we realize the connection between a wholesome balanced diet and good health, our food will be our medicine and maintaining good health will be a matter of making the right food choices and leading a healthy lifestyle.

Technically, many of the healthy foods we eat are processed, but not in the way you might think. For example, if you have a Mason jar full of organic dried beans, you have processed food in your fridge. Frozen vegetables are processed, even if you picked the vegetables from your garden, blanched(焯水)them and put them in the fridge. The moment you blanched them, you processed them. When we say we shouldn’t eat processed foods, what we really mean is ultra-processed foods.

What are ultra-processed foods? If I made flatbread at home, I would make it with materials like flour, yeast, milk, butter and salt. I keep whole-grain flatbread in my freezer because it deteriorates quickly. Healthy meals for sure. But I normally buy them from the grocery store, and while the bread I buy contains almost the same materials as a homemade version, it also includes the dextrose, type of sugar, and some other additives. Then it can be called an ultra-processed one.

If we ate ultra-processed foods only occasionally, it wouldn’t be as big of a problem. However, researchers indicated that almost 58% of the calories Americans consume are from ultra-processed foods. A study found people who increased their daily intake of ultra-processed food by 10% increased their risk of developing overall cancer by 12% and breast cancer by 11%.

While the study didn’t identify the exact reason why ultra-processed foods cause a higher risk of cancer, researchers did have several theories. One theory is that the foods contain high levels of salt, sugar and fat. Those materials have been linked to overweight, which can also lead to a greater risk of cancer. A second theory is that some ultra-processed foods contain certain additives that lead to cancers. Also another theory is high temperatures used to process the food can create newly formed pollutant. Finally, bpa(Bisphenol A)(双酚 A)is commonly used in food packaging and can leak into the food.

While further studies are needed to know the exact reasons why ultra-processed foods can have such an impact on health, it’s safe to say that the consequences of eating them outweigh the benefits.