Theodora Scarato is the Executive Director of Environmental Health Trust – the world’s leading think tank promoting a healthier environment through research, education, and policy. As a policy analyst Theodora Scarato maintains the comprehensive EHT database on international policy that documents the 20+ nations that have protective policies in place to reduce public exposure to cell phone and wireless radiation. Also, as a practicing clinical psychotherapist, her two decades of work with children and adolescents includes intensive research, not only on the effects from radiation exposures, but also the social emotional effects of technology overuse. Theodora Scarato lives in Maryland, and has long worked on children’s environmental health issues in the schools and was instrumental in the Prince George’s County School System move to address lead contamination in the schools drinking water. She raised the wireless and health issue to the Maryland State Advisory Council on Children’s Environmental Health Protection which moved to issue first ever state advisory recommendations to the Department of Education to reduce radiofrequency exposures in the school setting. Scarato also coordinates scientific programs with scientists and research institutions internationally on the issue of cellphones and health such as the 2017 Conferences at Jackson Hole Wyoming and at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies.
Dr. Pam Popper is a naturopath, an internationally recognized expert on nutrition, medicine and health, the Executive Director of Wellness Forum Health and accomplished author. Her book Food Over Medicine: The Conversation That Could Save Your Life. In Food Over Medicine, Dr Pamela A. Popper, and Glen Merzer invite the reader into a conversation about the dire state of American health—the result of poor nutrition choices stemming from food politics and medical misinformation. But, more important, they share the key to getting and staying healthy for life. Nearly half of Americans take at least one prescription medicine, with almost a quarter taking three or more, as diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and dementia grow more prevalent than ever. The problem with medicating common ailments, such as high blood pressure or elevated cholesterol, is that drugs treat symptoms—and may even improve test results—without addressing the cause: diet.
Overmedicated, overfed, and malnourished, most Americans fail to realize the answer to lower disease rates doesn’t lie in more pills but in the foods we eat. With so much misleading nutritional information regarded as common knowledge, from “everything in moderation” to “avoid carbs,” the average American is ill-equipped to recognize the deadly force of abundant, cheap, unhealthy food options that not only offer no nutritional benefits but actually bring on disease.
Backed by numerous scientific studies, Food Over Medicine details how dietary choices either build health or destroy it. Food Over Medicine reveals the power and practice of optimal nutrition in an accessible way. Dr. Pam Popper’s company Wellness Forum Health, offers educational programs for consumer and healthcare providers that facilitate evidence-base, collaborative and informed decision making for health-related matters.
Dr. Popper serves on the Physician’s Steering Committee and the President’s Board for the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington D.C. She served as part of Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s teaching team at eCornell, teaching part of a certification course on plant-based nutrition. She has been featured in many widely distributed documentaries and appeared in the acclaimed documentary Forks Over Knives, which played in major theaters throughout North America.
Dr. Popper is also a lobbyist and public policy expert, and continually works toward changing laws that interfere with patients’ right to choose their health provider and method of care. She has testified in front of legislative committees on numerous occasions, and has testified twice in front of the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.
What goes around comes around. We are called as a species to stop the violence that is inherent in our meat habit. This should be of paramount importance for all religious movements and teachers. It is the call of spirituality. If our religions don’t hear this call, we must revitalize them or create new ones that do.
The real secret to personal and planetary peace and happiness is veganism rightly understood as the ancient and timeless teaching to include all living beings within the sphere of our kindness and respect, and never to treat any being as a mere object to be used or abused. This is the awakening of our true human heart, not for a self-centered happiness, but for a happiness that includes everyone. This is positive thinking beyond mere positive thinking; it’s living the truth that we are, and being the transformation we long to see in our world.
When we come to this Earth, we find ourselves in a culture that is at its very core organized around confining and killing animals for food. We are forced virtually from birth to look at beings as mere commodities and to treat them as such by eating them in the most powerful daily rituals we engage in: our meals. All cultures naturally propagate themselves through their various institutions, and ours is no different. Our scientific, religious, governmental, educational, and economic institutions all reflect the same underlying mentality and reinforce it, which is why veganism is so strenuously resisted, and also why it is so urgently needed as well. Fortunately, as we awaken and stop disconnecting from the suffering we cause others by our choices, we resensitize ourselves and begin to be a force for kindness and respect that can impact others, and we can work through our culture’s institutions to raise consciousness and spread the light of inclusiveness. The more clearly the inner light shines in us, the more clearly we can shine it into the world.
Looking around, we can see the tremendous urgency in the task required of us: to do all we can to influence our culture to evolve and embrace the vegan ideals of interconnectedness, freedom, and caring. The same urgency is required in our inner lives as well. Going vegan is much more than minimizing the cruelty and suffering we cause others; it is awakening the heart of loving inclusiveness and realizing that there are, ultimately, no separate selves. We are all connected.
Each of us is radically and profoundly interconnected with all other living beings, and by blessing and encouraging and seeing the best in others, we help everyone, and by condemning or turning away from others, we harm everyone, including ourselves. Shining compassion to everyone, even our apparent opponents, is the essence of the benevolent revolution that is veganism.
Veganism is a litmus test of religious teachings and religious teachers. To the degree that religious teachings do not explicitly encourage veganism, which is the practice of nonviolence and lovingkindness, to that same degree these teachings are hypocritical and disconnected from their spiritual source.
We must, if this process is actually happening in us, be drawn toward veganism, and it is in no way a limitation on us, but the harmonious fulfillment of our own inner seeing.
There are strong voices in all religious traditions emphasizing that our kindness to other beings should be based on compassion. This is more than merely being open to the suffering of others; it also explicitly includes the urge to act to relieve their suffering. We are thus responsible not just to refrain from harming animals and humans, but also to do what we can to stop others from harming them, and to create conditions that educate, inspire, and help others to live in ways that show kindness and respect for all life. This is the high purpose to which the core teachings of the world’s wisdom traditions call us. It is an evolutionary imperative, a spiritual imperative, an imperative of compassion, and, in reality, a vegan imperative.
Thursday marked the three year anniversary of the infamous “15 Days To Slow The Spread” campaign.
By March 16, yours truly was already pretty fed up with both the governmental and societal “response” to what was being baselessly categorized as the worst pandemic in 100 years, despite zero statistical data supporting such a serious claim.
I was living in the Washington, D.C. Beltway at the time, and it was pretty much impossible to find a like-minded person within 50 miles who also wasn’t taking the bait. After I read about the news coming out of Wuhan in January, I spent much of the next couple weeks catching up to speed and reading about what a modern pandemic response was supposed to look like.
What surprised me most was that none of “the measures” were mentioned, and that these designated “experts” were nothing more than failed mathematicians, government doctors, and college professors who were more interested in policy via shoddy academic forecasting than observing reality.
Within days of continually hearing their yapping at White House pressers, it quickly became clear that the Deborah Birxes and Anthony Faucis of the world were engaging in nothing more than a giant experiment. There was no evidence-based approach to managing Covid whatsoever. These figures were leaning into the collective hysteria, and brandishing their credentials as Public Health Experts to demand top-down approaches to stamping out the WuFlu.
Dr. Michael Klaper is a gifted clinician, internationally-recognized teacher, and sought-after speaker on diet and health. Dr. Michael Klaper resolutely believes that proper nutrition — through a whole food, plant-based diet — and a balanced lifestyle are essential for health and, in many cases, can make the difference between healing an illness or merely treating its symptoms. In addition to his clinical practice and private consultations with patients, he is a passionate and devoted educator of physicians and other healthcare professionals about the importance of nutrition in clinical practice and integrative medicine.
Dr. Klaper is the author of Vegan Nutrition; Pure & Simple (no longer in print) and has produced numerous health videos, webinars, and dozens of articles for both scientific journals and the popular press. As a source of inspiration advocating plant-based diets and the end of animal cruelty worldwide. Dr. Klaper contributed to the making of two PBS television programs, Food for Thought and the award-winning movie, Diet for a New America (based on the book of the same name).
Dr. Klaper teaches that “Health Comes From Healthy Living” and he is dedicated to the healing and flourishing of all living beings and our planet. “Health is having a body that moves without pain, breathes without distress and allows us to perform the activities of life with complete presence and focused energy. Then, we can love fully and enjoy our lives to the fullest.”
Dr. Michael Klaper graduated from the University of Illinois College of Medicine. He served a medical internship at Vancouver General Hospital in British Columbia, Canada and received training in surgery, anesthesiology and orthopedics at the University of British Columbia Hospital in Vancouver. Additionally, he was trained in obstetrics at the University of California Hospital, San Francisco. As his medical career progressed, Dr. Klaper began to realize (true to what science is bearing out today) that many of the diseases his patients presented – clogged arteries (atherosclerosis), high blood pressure (hypertension), obesity, adult-onset diabetes and even some forms of arthritis, asthma, and other significant illnesses – were made worse or actually caused by the high sugar, high fat, high salt, overly processed, animal product-based, Standard American Diet (S.A.D.).
Dr. Klaper has served as Director of the Institute of Nutrition Education and Research , where he conducted a study that focused on people who ate a completely plant-based or vegan diet. Dr. Klaper practiced acute care medicine in New Zealand for three years and from served on staff at the TrueNorth Health Center, North America’s premier nutritionally-based medical clinic that specializes in therapeutic fasting and health improvement through a whole food, plant-based diet.
A member of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, Dr. Klaper was a member of the American Medical Student Association’s Nutrition Task Force and currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Plantrician Project and the “International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention.”
For over 10 years, Dr. Klaper hosted a popular medical information radio program “Sounds of Healing” on WPFW in Washington, DC and KAOI on Maui, Hawaii. Dr. Michael Klaper is licensed to practice medicine in California and Hawaii.
To Contact Dr Michael Klaper go to doctorklaper.com
Dr. Steve Blake, ScD is a doctor of science specializing in nutritional biochemistry. He is Director of Nutritional Neuroscience at the Maui Memory Clinic. He is lead advisor and author for the Macmillan Reference, Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine.
He has worked as Faculty Nutritional Biochemist at Hawaii Pacific Neuroscience for years. He is a research scientist who just finished a clinical study at the Hawaii Alzheimer’s Disease Center that he designed and ran with a large team.
He is research director at the Neuroscience Nutrition Foundation. He has presented grand rounds at John A. Burns School of Medicine at U.H., Castle Medical Center in Kailua, Hawaii, Hawaii Pacific Neuroscience, St. Francis Liliha, Honolulu, and at Boston University Medical Center.
He is author of Nutrients for Memory, Fats and Oils Demystified, the McGraw-Hill college textbook Vitamins and Minerals Demystified, Stop Strokes Before they Start, Autism: A Spectrum of Improvement, Mastering Migraines: Prevention and Relief, Arthritis Relief, Parkinson’s Disease: Dietary Regulation of Dopamine, Healing Medicine, A Nutritional Approach to Alzheimer’s Disease, No More Heart Attacks, Mosby’s Alternative Remedies, and co-author of Mosby’s Drug Guide for Nurses, 4th edition.
Steve Blake has taught twenty-five classes at the University of Hawaii on Maui. He has taught classes at Stanford University, McLean’s Harvard Teaching Hospital, and at Boston University Medical Center. As a professional, registered medical plant specialist, he is well known for his databases on alternative remedies. The Herb Doctors database has information from 54 countries and regions worldwide and has over 168,000 footnoted facts. This database was also published by Mosby as Alternative Remedies.
Steve Blake programmed the Diet Doctor, software for graphing dietary nutrients. This cutting-edge research software has been instrumental in revealing nutrition information. Steve Blake lectures widely about the role of nutrition in health. He has taught anatomy & physiology and exercise physiology. He was the director of the Maui Holistic Health Center for seven years. He is often heard on radio and seen on television. He attended the University of California at Berkeley. Steve Blake has a doctorate in holistic health specializing in nutritional biochemistry. He also has a doctorate in naturopathic medicine and is a neuromuscular therapist.
He and his wife Catherine live on an organic farm on Maui that is powered by the sun.
Even though people may resist hearing it, spreading the vegan message is the greatest gift we can give, for it is ultimately liberating for everyone. With study and practice, we can articulate it skillfully, passionately, and effectively, and help other people to understand as well!
Every person who authentically goes vegan is a person who is rediscovering the lost chalice of intuitive wisdom, and by refusing to participate in the killing and enslaving of mothers and babies, and honoring the sacred dimension and reclaiming intuitive wisdom, is helping to transform our culture in profound and significant ways. As Goethe said, “To know is not enough. You must apply.” Spiritual teachings emphasize that whatever we deeply desire we must first give to others. To recover the lost chalice, we are called to give the female animals we exploit the opportunity to express their maternal wisdom again.
Veganism is actually a spectrum of psychospiritual development, and the most basic level of veganism is refraining from buying foods and products that cause suffering to animals. As our veganism deepens, we realize that veganism is radical inclusion, and that it calls us to act with respect and kindness in all our relations with everyone, all the time. A tall order! In short, veganism is an ideal that is perhaps ultimately unattainable, but that draws us ever onward to greater love and compassion in every dimension of our lives.
We must, if this process is actually happening in us, be drawn toward veganism, and it is in no way a limitation on us, but the harmonious fulfillment of our own inner seeing.
Veganism is the natural flowering of consciousness freed from the continuous programming of the inherent violence in our culture. The word vegan is precious, inspiring, and demanding, because it questions the core mentality of our culture and it is the key to our culture’s transformation and to its very survival.
So please, let’s love, defend, respect, understand, and propagate this word and what it stands for as if all our lives depended upon it; they very well may.
Corporations were created for one reason: to avoid responsibility; spirituality and veganism, if they are expressions of anything, are expressions of taking responsibility. In the big picture, we are all responsible for our treatment of others, as well as for our failures to act to help others. To finally solve the dilemma we see reflected in political corruption, we must cut the root of the problem, which is the herding mentality that commodifies animals and the weak and gives rise to the corporate worldview. Veganism is the only lasting solution.
Veganism, which is a committed effort to live the ideals of mercy and kindness to others, is indispensable to all spiritual paths, because it emerges from and deepens the understanding that all beings are completely interconnected and interdependent. It is an inclusive movement that advocates a plant-based diet because it includes all sentient creatures within its sphere of concern. The towering spiritual geniuses who have blessed this earth have typically been vegan but have been little concerned whether their foods were cooked or not. For example, when we look at the great Zen masters of China and East Asia of the last 1,500 years, we find people who invariably ate a vegan diet of both cooked and uncooked foods. The desert fathers of the Christian tradition are similar.
Veganism is the essential healing force that our culture desperately needs, because the mentality of domination that starts on our plates reverberates through our various cultural institutions as authoritarianism, oppression, and violence. Healing this mentality requires cultivating vegan values: concern and caring for others weaker than us, and refusing to exploit them. As vegans, the improved health we naturally experience is a side-benefit; it’s not the main focus because we sense there’s a higher purpose in life than just being physically healthy.
We must, if this process is actually happening in us, be drawn toward veganism, and it is in no way a limitation on us, but the harmonious fulfillment of our own inner seeing.
There are strong voices in all religious traditions emphasizing that our kindness to other beings should be based on compassion. This is more than merely being open to the suffering of others; it also explicitly includes the urge to act to relieve their suffering. We are thus responsible not just to refrain from harming animals and humans, but also to do what we can to stop others from harming them, and to create conditions that educate, inspire, and help others to live in ways that show kindness and respect for all life. This is the high purpose to which the core teachings of the world’s wisdom traditions call us. It is an evolutionary imperative, a spiritual imperative, an imperative of compassion, and, in reality, a vegan imperative.
By Morgan Kelly, Princeton Environmental Institute
As civic leaders and urban planners work to make cities more sustainable and livable by investing in outdoor spaces and recreational activities such as biking and walking, Princeton researchers have identified the benefit of an activity largely overlooked by policymakers—home gardening.
The researchers found that, across the study’s population, the level of emotional well-being, or happiness, reported while gardening was similar to what people reported while biking, walking, or dining out, according to a study published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning. Home gardening was the only activity out of the 15 studied for which women and people with low incomes reported higher emotional well-being than men and medium- and high-income participants, respectively.
“This has implications for equity in food action planning considering that people with lower incomes tend to have less access to healthy food options,” said corresponding author Anu Ramaswami, Princeton’s Sanjay Swani ’87 Professor of India Studies, professor of civil and environmental engineering and the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI). “Gardening could provide the health benefits of fresh fruits and vegetables, promote physical activity, and support emotional well-being, which can reinforce this healthy behavior.”
The Plant Strong Club 