Marina Olbi: If a Person Wants to Be Healthy, They Should Be Vegetarian

I came up with my own television project about vegetarianism and a healthy lifestyle. I plan to shoot the pilot at my own expense and then take it to television channels for discussions.

I am thinking of making nine episodes, about an hour each. It should be an engaging educational program, and the main goal is to interest young people in my ideas. It is quite difficult to talk about the culture of vegetarianism with adults who have firmly established habits. Perhaps it is simply too late. Young people, by contrast, respond and understand very easily when you begin talking with them about the philosophy of vegetarianism or yoga. For example, when I opened the Botanika café in St Petersburg, everyone told me I would not be able to find cooks and that no professionals in St Petersburg cooked without meat. In the end, my head chef really is Indian, while very young people work in the kitchen and dining room, some without specialized education. They all learned remarkably quickly to cook delicious vegetable dishes from our chef's recipes, and they do it wonderfully - you can hardly tell whether the chef or one of his assistants prepared a dish.

I am now developing ways to present information that will interest an active young audience, while carefully collecting scientific articles about vegetarianism. If I once had doubts about the benefits of a vegetarian diet, I no longer have any. I can feel from my own body that vegetarianism is beneficial, and I have nothing to prove to myself. But of course, facts are needed to speak to a wide audience. The other day I found data from a recent study by Oxford University scientists in the British Journal of Cancer. It has been shown that vegetarians are 45 percent less prone to blood cancer than meat eaters.

These are, frankly, revolutionary results. The study was extensive: it lasted 12 years and involved 61,000 people. During that time, 3,150 people were diagnosed with cancer. Of these, 68% (2,204) ate meat, 24% (800) were vegetarians, and 9.5% (300) ate fish but not meat. Specifically, blood cancer developed in 180 people in the meat-eating group, 49 vegetarians and 28 pescetarians.

“We already knew that people who eat only vegetables and fish have a lower likelihood of developing stomach cancer, and these results did not surprise us. But this is the first serious study to establish a link between blood cancer and meat consumption,” said Naomi Allen, one of the leaders of the Oxford research group, in an interview with The Guardian. She insists that diet was studied separately from smoking, alcohol consumption and excess weight. How can such a significant difference between meat eaters and vegetarians be explained? “That remains to be determined. We have not finished the study yet,” Naomi says. “And for now we do not know for sure: is it the high fiber content of a vegetarian diet that is so beneficial, or is meat itself so harmful?”

Opponents find many reasons to dispute this study and want to discuss the accuracy of its methodology, but personally I need no further proof: I am sure that if a person wants to be healthy, they should be vegetarian.

Unless they are Chukchi or Inuit: unlike us, their bodies cannot do without meat. We are vegetarians by nature: we have intestines like herbivores and teeth like herbivores - what more is there to say? The important thing is that the diet be right. I recommend that everyone eat according to Ayurveda. It has not yet been studied by scientists (which, by the way, would be interesting), but it is an Indian science of the art of living, tested for thousands of years. It describes three different types of food. This is a system that is very simple to use in practice. The first type is sattvic food: it increases vitality, beauty and health, gives you a good mood and a wonderful appetite. This food strengthens the body, its organs and muscles, as well as the soul. It includes almonds, rice, honey, fresh sweet fruit, mung beans and easily digested seasonal vegetables, as well as leafy greens. Milk and honey are included too. Animals give milk and honey willingly, without violence, which is why they are so beneficial. The second type is rajasic foods. These bring passion. They are beneficial for the body but neutral for the mind. Usually they are sour, bitter, very dry, very hot or spicy. This category also includes our favorite stimulants: coffee, tea, sugar, chocolate and cocoa. The third type is tamasic food. This is spoiled or partly processed food; it also includes meat, eggs and sweets, as well as alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Such food contains no energy and must be excluded entirely from the diet if a person wants a deep spiritual life. In addition, the right diet depends to some extent on the season: in winter, one can sometimes eat tamasic products. In summer, there is absolutely no reason to.

Marina Olbi: If a Person Wants to Be Healthy