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Environment-Food Waste, TP, Plant-based Pets & Recipes

WulfWorks Wellness News

Environment – Food Waste, TP, Plant-based Pets & Recipes

In This Issue: 

    • Diet and the Environment
    • Plant-Based Pets
    • Preventing Food Waste
    • Sustainable Toilet Paper
    • Healthy Whole Plant Food Recipes – Pumpkin Pie!

You’ll Find More Fascinating Health Posts my Facebook Page –

facebook.com/HealItAll/ – and lots of great recipes in my

Whole Foods Plant-Based, Gluten Free Diet & Recipes Group

Message from Bernadette Wulf

Earth Stewardship and NutritionGreetings!

I find myself on the last day of November with no articles saved for my December newsletter – for the first time ever! Have there really been NO interesting health stories coming out in the past month?

Maybe I’ve just been preoccupied with other things, but whatever the reason, this seems like a good time to do something completely different. I’m going to address the health of our planet this month, because it has by far the biggest impact on our long-term personal health and the health of future generations.

I recently watched David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet on Netflix and I was reminded of how close we are to environmental collapse and mass extinctions. Though beautifully filmed, it was painful to watch, knowing that so many of the amazing animals that evolved along with us may not be with us much longer – and it is entirely due to human destructiveness.

A question I ask myself every single day is, how can I make choices that will lower my personal impact on the environment? Though my impact is still much greater than that of someone living sustainably in a far off jungle, I am making better choices all the time.

In this newsletter, I will share some of the cool ways I’ve found to shrink my personal footprint. I hope you will share what you are doing too. Maybe this could become a regular feature of my newsletter.

Let’s work together to turn the tide toward a sustainable future for all lifeforms on our planet. It may be the eleventh hour, but I believe there is still time to make a positive difference. If you are interested in sharing more about this, join my Sustainable & DIY Alternatives to Pollution & Plastic group on facebook. We’ve posted lots of sustainable product links there too.

Have questions or comments? Email Bernadette <— Please use this link and do not hit reply to this post, because I may never get your message that way.

To your health and happiness!

Bernadette Wulf

HealItAll.com & Plant Based for Life

Diet and the Environment

From all the research I’ve read, the most impactful change we can all make immediately to heal ourselves and our planet is a change in our collective eating habits. It is also the easiest to implement.

Though sustainable cultures all over the world have included small amounts of meat and other animal products in their diets (usually only on special occasions), many scientific studies show that there is absolutely no need for most humans to eat animal products as long as we include a supplemental source of vitamin B12. (Rare individuals my also need other supplements.) In fact, statistics show that the rates of all the top causes of premature death can be drastically lowered by eating a whole foods plant-based diet.

If we CAN thrive without animal products, it seems like the only ethical choice we can make at a time when our planet is threatened by the sheer impact of animal agriculture. This is a subject I have researched for quite a few decades now and the more research I do, the more convinced I am that a whole plant foods diet is the answer to so many of our present-day problems – from our overwhelming health care costs, to rainforest destruction, to ocean dead zones, to climate change.

Here are some statistics on how our food choices impact our environment – https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

Wondering How to Switch to a Healthy Whole Plant Foods Diet?

I created a website packed with information on how to get and stay healthy on a whole plant foods diet, including statistics about the destructive impact of animal agriculture, so I will send you over there rather than rehash over 20 pages of information here. Visit my Eat Plants for Life! website – https://www.plantbasedvegancoach.com/

HealItAll WulfWorks NewsletterPlant-Based Pets

Another thing I’ve been researching a lot over the past year or so is sustainable diets for pets. Since the meat industry has such a huge destructive impact on the environment and there are so many millions of dogs and cats eating meat, I wanted to find out if our pets really need to eat meat at all.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that most dogs can thrive quite well on a vegan diet! Thats how I now feed my dogs and the good news is that they shed less and are less smelly than they were when eating meat-based food.

The research is not so clear when it comes to cats. As obligate carnivores they seem to need a little meat to thrive, but there are vegan cat foods on the market and many cats seem to do well on them. In any case, they don’t seem to need as much meat as most people think. This is something I intend to research more, but since I don’t have cats it hasn’t been a priority.

If our pets CAN thrive without animal products, or at least with a lot less than was formerly believed necessary, isn’t our only ethical choice to cut back on or eliminate animal products from their diets?

Don’t worry, your dogs will not be miserable without meat. My dogs jump for joy over fruits and vegetables and eat their mushy lentil and pea recipes with glee. Just make sure you feed them a well designed diet like the recipes in Dr. Pitcairn’s book.

I have dedicated a page on my Eat Plants for Life! website to feeding pets. Check it out here – https://www.plantbasedvegancoach.com/vegan-pets

Preventing Food Waste

preventing food wasteIt may not seem like food waste is a big deal from an environmental perspective, but it actually has a huge impact. One company is tackling the problem head on – Imperfect Foods!

Here’s why we urgently need to change our food production and distribution models. From http://www.fao.org:

  • The global volume of food wastage is estimated at 1.6 billion tonnes of “primary product equivalents.” [ ]
  • Food wastage’s carbon footprint is estimated at 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent of GHG released into the atmosphere per year.
  • The total volume of water used each year to produce food that is lost or wasted (250km3) is equivalent to the annual flow of Russia’s Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva.
  • Similarly, 1.4 billion hectares of land – 28 percent of the world’s agricultural area – is used annually to produce food that is lost or wasted.
  • Agriculture is responsible for a majority of threats to at-risk plant and animal species tracked by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
  • A low percentage of all food wastage is composted: much of it ends up in landfills, and represents a large part of municipal solid waste. Methane emissions from landfills represents one of the largest sources of GHG emissions from the waste sector.
  • Home composting can potentially divert up to 150 kg of food waste per household per year from local collection authorities. [Only about 3% of wasted food is now composted. That is a crime against Nature and our soil! – Ed.]

The mission of Imperfect Foods is to:

Eliminate food waste and build a better food system for everyone.

If food can be saved, we will save it. With every bite into a misshapen apple, short piece of pasta, or oversized egg we can shape our world for the better.  

Imperfect Foods delivers fresh food right to your door once a week in recyclable cardboard boxes (unfortunately they can no longer reuse them due to COVID restrictions) with a minimum of plastic packaging. Most produce comes loose, piled together in the box.

A few items come in plastic clam shells, but they indicate that on the order page so you can choose not to order them if you want. If you order refrigerated items they do come with plastic cold packs and an insulation bag (once COVID restrictions are over they will be able to reuse these, but for now we have to recycle them or find other ways to reuse them).

You can pick and choose what you want each week, including all organic foods. They even offer free shipping for seniors and a substantial discount for low income customers. Their customer service is excellent and they quickly take care of any problems in your order. If they deliver in your area, I highly recommend supporting them. You can save a lot of money on food and a lot of time on shopping trips too.

Use this link to get $10 off on your first order – Imperfect Foods (you and I will both get $10 off if you make your first order with this link).

Who Gives a Crap sustainable TPSustainable Toilet Paper

 Who Gives a Crap? These guys do and they put their money where their butts are. They give 50% of their profits to buy toilets for people who don’t have them.

They also care about protecting the environment. All their products are made from recycled paper or bamboo and bleached with hydrogen peroxide – and they don’t use any plastic packaging.

You can order TP, tissues, paper towels and biodegradable Swedish dish cloths and have them delivered to your door. There is even an automatic shipment option that you can adjust for the amount you use, so you never run out of toilet paper! Opening a new box of multicolored rolls printed with clever sayings always puts a smile on my face.

Here’s a statement from the about-us page on their website:

Sure, we love puppies and sunny days and walks on the beach, but our real love is toilet paper. Why, you might ask?

First of all, it’s funny. Lots of room for toilet jokes, which we love.

But really, we love toilet paper because for us, it’s our way of making a difference. We started Who Gives A Crap when we learnt that 2.4 billion people don’t have access to a toilet (now 2 billion – yay for progress!). That’s roughly 40% of the global population and means that around 289,000 children under five die every year from diarrheal diseases caused by poor water and sanitation. That’s almost 800 children per day, or one child every two minutes.

We thought that was pretty crap. So in July 2012, Simon, Jehan and Danny launched Who Gives A Crap with a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo. Simon sat on a toilet in our draughty warehouse and refused to move until we had raised enough pre-orders to start production. 50 hours and one cold bottom later, we’d raised over $50,000 (see the video here!)

We delivered our first product in March 2013 and have been thrilled to keep growing ever since. Not just because our toilet paper is gracing bathrooms across the country but also because we donate 50% of our profits to help build toilets and improve sanitation in the developing world.

Though we’re still growing, and now make more than just toilet paper, we always want to stay true to our roots: toilet humor and making the world a better place.

What a great model for other companies to emulate!

Use this link to get $10 off on your first order – Who Gives a Crap (you and I will both get $10 off if you make your first order with this link).

Vegan gluten free pumpkin pieHealthy Whole Plant Food Recipes – Pumpkin Pie!

Wondering what to eat on a new (or long time) whole plant foods diet? There are lots of great recipes being developed every day. Here is just one website that I turn to when looking for recipes, with a recipe for pumpkin pie just in time for the holidays – https://www.medicalmedium.com/blog/pumpkin-pie-1

With the https://www.medicalmedium.com/blog website I don’t have to worry about making substitutions, because they are all gluten-free plant-food recipes. Try some of them out and let me know what you think. If you want new healthy recipes every day, join my Whole Foods Plant-Based Gluten Free Recipes group on facebook. We’d love to have you!