Eat BEANS, Not Beings: carbs = longevity

Hilary Brueck (Business Insider); Jen Bradford, Ashley Well (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

What? You said carbs. Oh, not these kind of processed wheat-gluten white flour carbs?

In the Garden of Eden and "A Buddhist Genesis" (Agganna Sutta) humans were vegetarian.

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Plant-based "meats"

Blue Zones refer to five specific places in California, Italy, Greece, Japan, and Costa Rica. People in these 5 zones tend to live to about 100 years old, while maintaining their good health.

Beans, nuts, whole grains, and greens are staples here, while dead animal flesh and rotted dairy cheese are rarities.

Dan Buettner grew up in Minnesota during the 1960s, where the Midwesterner was fed a high-carb diet of bright yellow macaroni and cheese and sweaty red dyed hot dogs [with their allowable minimum of cockroach limbs and rat feces] wrapped inside flaky croissants.

Greens, whole grains, olives, avocado, hemp-tofu

"We DIDN'T know better," he said. But when the cyclist and storyteller started traveling around the world, and into the homes of people in locations where elders routinely live to see their 100th birthday in good health — the world's Blue Zones, as he calls them — he noticed something distinct about the ways that they were eating.

Soak and rinse them before cooking. Or sprout them. They become very digestible with no gas.

Beautiful elders: A troupe of singers and dancers in Okinawa, Japan, one of the world's five "Blue Zones," where people routinely live past 100 (Toru Yamanaka/AFP via Getty Images).

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Fresh, low sugar shakes are great for health.

The fare was nothing like his childhood diet of processed foods, but Buettner noticed that each Blue Zone kitchen did have a few staple ingredients in common.

Like his own meal plans, they were all fairly high in carbohydrates, but these Blue Zone diets centered on carbs of a different kind.

"The four pillars of every longevity diet in the world are whole grains, greens, nuts, and beans," Buettner told Insider. "When you crunch the numbers, it's very clear that it's a 90% to 100% plant-based, very-high-carbohydrate diet. About 65% carbs, but not simple carbs like muffins and cakes — complex carbs." More

• Dan Buettner on Blue Zones
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• Vegetarians in Paradise | Christianity Today