Dr. Terry Shintani discusses his book, The Peace Diet. In addition to healing the mind body and spirit, Dr. Shintani also promotes a mostly whole food, mostly plant-based diet.
Eating for peace of mind, body, and spirit. Today we’ll talk to Dr. Terry Shintani about his book, The Peace Diet.
Most doctors have almost no formal education in nutrition. That’s what makes our interview today so special. I talked to Dr. Terry Shintani who is not only an MD but has a master’s in nutrition from Harvard. Dr. Terry Shintani has dedicated his career to helping the people of Hawaii to maintain or regain their health through nutrition. That’s not an easy task in a place where spam sells over seven million cans a year (more than any other place in the country).
Dr. Terry Shintani’s track record is so successful, that he’s won the highest award from the US Secretary of Health and he’s been designated a Living Treasure by the state of Hawaii for his contributions to humanity.
I wanted to find out what Dr. Shintani recommends, so I asked him about his book, The Peace Diet.
“Well, the peace diet came about because I’ve been doing health programs for many years. Turning people’s health around, getting them off their diabetes medicine, turning around their heart disease, reducing their aches and pains, getting rid of rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune disease, for years. Those are health issues. But the reason I wrote the peace diet was that when I first changed my diet, I actually did it for spiritual reasons. And one of the things that I noticed was when I ate really well, I became very peaceful. So the theme of the book is when you actually have inner peace and peace of mind, body, and spirit, the body becomes healthy because you no longer have the battles going on in your body. Because inflammation, for example, is a battle going around in your body — it’s it’s a lack of peace. So the peace diet is a diet that allows you to eat in a way and live your life in a way that brings peace of body, mind, and spirit. And
in so doing, you gradually get rid of many of the diseases that most people suffer from.
A few years ago, they changed the Food Guide Pyramid to the MyPlate and I was never happy with either. So since now, the official guide was a plate, I decided to design a plate that would fit the way that I recommend people to eat. And as I was cutting up the plate to accommodate the proportions that I thought was appropriate, when I set it up in a certain way, it looked like the peace sign. So it kind of just made sense.
The similar thing, of course, is we have lots of vegetables. I have fruit in there in a smaller quantity. And it’s smaller because there’s a lot of sugar in fruit so you don’t want to overdo it and at the same time, fruit is full of antioxidants and nutrients.
One of the big changes is the MyPlate says ‘grain’, but I say ‘whole-grain’ if you just say ‘grain’ (instead of ‘whole grain’), ‘grain’ can be white bread, it can be pastries, it can be muffins, and cakes, and biscuits. I don’t do those kinds of foods.
When I say whole-grain I mean whole-grain. I mean oatmeal (and I don’t mean instant oats — I mean rolled oats), or brown rice, or quinoa, or barley, or wheat berries — that’s what I mean by whole-grain.
And if they do bread products…I don’t I don’t say, ‘no bread products’ but I try to do either stone-ground or sprouted grain. And the reason for that is it changes the glycemic index number. When you look at commercially prepared breads and baked goods, the glycemic index number is high. Even if it’s whole-wheat! In fact, commercial whole-wheat bread has a higher glycemic number than table sugar! So that’s one of the big differences.
What’s actually illogical about the MyPlate is you have a section called ‘protein’. Well, it didn’t make sense because fruit is a type of food, vegetables are a type of food, grain is a type of food, but protein is a component of food. So there wasn’t even parallel construction within the official MyPlate that the government was putting out. And actually, when people think of protein, they think of beef, pork, and chicken, right? The reality is that those three are mostly fat. Because chicken is around 55% fat. Pork is around 60% fat. Beef is 65% to 70% fat. These are all mostly fat foods. If they wanted to pick a macronutrient that represented ‘meat’ (which what they’re implying) that section should have been called ‘fat’ — but of course nobody wants to do that. When you look at beef, pork, and chicken, modern studies say that those three are associated with more diabetes, more heart disease, more cancer.
In the Peace Plate, I call it ‘beans’ and I’m talking about beans, and legumes, and vegetable sources of protein. Those are associated with lower rates of these diseases. So I prefer to choose, as our daily food, foods that are associated with lower rates of these diseases.
So the vegetables and the grains are in larger proportion and the fruit and the beans are smaller. When you make that into a plate, it looks like a peace sign.
And the MyPlate has this little satellite called ‘diary’ — implying that you’re supposed to consume that on a daily basis. Well, I think that’s nonsense. I think dairy should be party food — a once-in-a-while food. In nature, no species on earth drinks the milk of another species, and no species on earth drinks milk when they’re adults. Because milk is, of course, food for babies, right? And that’s nature’s way. Only humans make it out to be a daily food for adults? It doesn’t make sense in nature at all. If you just think about it, you go, ‘oh yeah, that doesn’t make sense’.”
How does Dr. Terry Shintani get people in Hawaii to stick to his program?
Number one, I make sure that the food tastes good. I try to make it simple. We have food demos and we teach them how to do simple things that add flavor and interest and texture to food without spending much time. People think, ‘oh you’re gonna eat health food’ and they’re thinking rabbit food right? No, it’s nothing like that at all. And routinely people say, ‘wow if I knew I could eat like this, I was started doing this long time ago’.
I also say it’s not just diet. It’s lifestyle, it’s exercise, it’s having a clean environment, it’s breathing fresh air. And in my Peace Diet diagram, I have the enhancements around it — physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. I always add these other aspects to it so that people have other reasons to stay with the diet. I try to get people to think about all the things they want to do in their life that they won’t be able to do if the health fails. Or if you want to look at another way, for me, when I changed my diet, my energy was boundless. I had so much energy my thinking was clearer, I felt better. So it might be a way to just feel better.
I don’t mind saying it now. When I was a senior in high school and a freshman in college, I had a problem with depression. I changed my diet and I haven’t had a depressed day in my life since. I think diet has a lot to do with your mood even. So try to find a reason. Whether it’s a health reason, or how you feel, or how you look — by the way, looks might be a good reason, athletic performance… People should know that Carl Lewis, the greatest athlete in the history of the world, was vegan when he was training. That’s got to count for something. And if it’s in terms of spiritual development, you look at how most of the world’s holy people, for spiritual development they would either fast or they’d eat a plant-based diet. You find that in the Bible, you find that among the teachings of Buddha and the Hindus — most of them are vegetarian. There’s got to be a reason for that.
To purchase The Peace Diet click here: http://a.co/d/j3X5KtG
To learn more about Dr. Terry Shintani’s programs: http://www.drshintani.com/
