TEDxOKC - Matthew Kenney - "Are You Feeding Your Body or Feeding Dis-ease?"

we have a killer epidemic on the loose in the United States it's affecting 200 million people your friends your family your children your parents and even some of you and guess what you catch it from dinner from your dinner plate Dean Ornish's lecture was just five years ago and already things have gotten much worse the health care crisis caused by obesity and weight related diseases is now the single greatest threat to the citizens of our planet cancer diabetes heart disease almost all preventable by changing the way we live and how we eat the Milken Institute says that will cost our country 100 trillion dollars in reduced gross domestic product in the next several decades he had despite the steady stream of media output related to diet and health related diseases nothing's changing where is the outrage why why is this not headline news every year what do we read about car accidents 33,000 people died in car accidents in the United States last year guess how many from from health and obesity related diseases 300,000 so the dinner plate is 10 times more dangerous than a car so think of this the amount of people we could save with the simplest of intervention by applying intelligent attention to what we and how we live imagine a meal that could prevent you from getting sick prevent wrinkles give you more energy more mental clarity more physical clarity reduces blood pressure and cholesterol levels and all of this just by eating the way nature intended us to without drugs without doctors one thing about dr. Ornish is lecture that I don't 100% agree with is that our children will live a shorter life span than we will I actually believe our children will live quite a long life unfortunately they'll be supported by prescription drugs the of that life maybe horrible onset diabetes rheumatoid arthritis tremendous depression all caused by what we and his in the in his previous lecture dr. Ornish showed charts from the CDC and the obesity rates from 2006 these are the most recent ones we have from 2009 and here we are Oklahoma one of the states with the highest rates of obesity in the nation and that's why I'm here because we have to do something about this crisis now so imagine the power of starting here in the heartland so much of what is great about America begins here in the heartland and we you know we have the opportunity to spread from the inside out to change the way the world eats from the inside out I'm going to explain what raw food is in a moment and I think you'll be surprised what it actually is we might envision it as a carrot stick or an apple but there's a lot more to it than that some people believe that we're actually eating healthier as a society because companies like McDonald's are now making salads the dr. Ornish mentioned the McDonald's Asian salad but unfortunately most restaurant and fast-food salads are wolves dressed in sheep's clothing salads with more sodium fat cooked chicken all things that are not naturally necessarily healthy and as a matter of fact you know case in point dr. Ornish talked about this being introduced in 2006 by 2008 McDonald's just discontinued the Asian salad they were not committed to it and their guests did not understand it they didn't subscribe to it so McDonald's has tried something new in the last couple of weeks they introduced our last couple of months they introduced oatmeal McDonald's describes their oatmeal as whole-grain oats crisp green apple plump raisins and sweet cranberries but Mark Bittman in an article in The New York Times after looking a little more closely into what's in McDonald's oatmeal described it as oats we couldn't call it whole-grain because there are 11 preservatives ingredients in the oats themselves oats cream sugar sweetened dried fruit and 11 weird ingredients you would never have in your home kitchen and the McDonald's oatmeal has more calories than a Snickers bar fast food companies and upscale restaurants it's not just about fast food but many chefs and fine-dining restaurants will use the image of a healthy salad to create the allure of health to bring to bring diners in to enjoy a healthy meal and lose weight most salads and restaurants and specifically in fast food businesses are actually loaded with more calories and fat than a plate of cheese fries and that's before the dressing is poured all over the top with synthetic oils and dyes and chemicals and preservatives and who knows what other types of ingredients so you have to take everything with a grain of salt one thing I do one thing I do totally agree with that dr. Ornish said all of this is tile entirely preventable and reversible by changing what we now I've been telling you these things and you've all heard the phrase never trust a skinny chef so I'm a little a little self-conscious up here on stage in a white coat I want to start by telling you a little bit about my background which may have some similarities to yours and talk about how I would unfix how I would fix this unwellness pandemic and finally how it's affecting people in my world in my life and how it can affect you and your circle 46 years old I'm a professional chef I killed my first deer at the age of 10 and I grew up on the coast of Maine I was part of a family that believed in hunting and fishing and eating meat and potatoes and we bought whole hog into the traditional American diet we were living the farm stable lifestyle well before that was a buzz word for chefs across the nation which is so popular these days I attended the French Culinary Institute where I learned to put endless amounts of butter and salt and sorts of other heavy cream and things like that into my food and if not the chef would certainly let you know that you were doing something wrong and following that I started my career in the restaurant business first is it cook and eventually opening my own restaurant at the age of 28 in New York City and I had a very nice start to my career and over the next ten years opened several restaurants in New York and on the East Coast and here I was killing people every day so intuitively I knew this this food wasn't right for my health I even started to change my own dietary habits and express to friends my desire to one day become a vegetarian which they dismissed and sort of brushed off but I nonetheless I continue to do what I did because I was being rewarded for it I had two nominations for rising star chef in America by the James Beard Foundation was named one of Food & Wine magazine's best new chefs in America and that culinary school the French culinary named me an outstanding graduate but my life changed one day a friend invited me to a raw food restaurant actually my friend dragged me to a raw food restaurant it was the last place I wanted to be but that changed the course of my life and it really opened my eyes in terms of what what we're meant to be eating this food gave me tremendous amount of energy and clarity I walked around Manhattan for hours after this meal there and I really just immersed myself the next several days into learning more about what raw food is and what organic ingredients are all about I really wanted to understand this food and as I got more and more into it it was it struck me like lightning it was my aha moment I knew exactly what I wanted to do and that my mission what as a chef was to teach more people about this cuisine how great it could taste and how great it could be for our health I also wrote a cookbook raw food real world it was one of the first upscale raw food cookbooks and it's becoming a leading lifestyle guidebook for people who are getting into this type of cuisine and over the last several years I've written five more raw food cookbooks and continued to write them as I mentioned earlier one of my most ambitious projects was right here in Oklahoma and we opened a the world's premier raw food restaurant in the most unlikely place and trust me I get asked every day why did you open your first restaurant in Oklahoma although many chefs who don't appreciate the vegetarian diet as you see on menus these days it's hard to find anything vegetarian for any of you vegetarians out there they may not agree but Forbes magazine named us one of the best ten best new restaurants in America this year in 2010 so the difference is that we're healing people every day instead of making them tired and making them sick little by little we're giving them life force through our food we also created the world's four first state licensed culinary school and it's a picture of our school we've graduated students from 18 countries over a hundred students already in their last year and we're sending these plant focused students out onto the culinary battlefield every day and it is a battlefield every food critic will write about the heaviest foods that they can get their hands on so a healthy plant-based diet is so much more than a carrot stick or a red pepper people really don't understand exactly what it can be in the beginning these are some dishes that I've created over the years you know as you can see they're they're more vibrant too colorful than a lot of food dishes and they're they're actually just as much fun to enjoy because you eat these foods and you're loaded with energy and they don't give you the tiredness that flowers and sugars and so forth that's made from a coconut by the way and that's made from jicama it takes a lot of innovation but it's it's you know we use all of our creative resources and I use all of my culinary classical culinary training to develop this kind of food but many people ask well I need meat or is this food for me and will it help me the answer is you bet absolutely I never thought that I would be one of the people who was benefiting from this kind of food in here I am in 30 days or less and in some cases in just a few days for me it was four or five days you could become healthier you're you'll find cellular regeneration you may lose weight effortlessly without having to diet one thing that everybody loves to talk about bowel movements one of the one of the first things I was told when I heard about raw food was it's not just what you're putting in is what you're taking out and that couldn't be more true some some of us some of you haven't haven't been regular since the age of two it's a it's a very debilitating situation for a lot of people and not necessarily what you want to talk discuss right before lunch but it is a conversation we do need to have so meats and animal products and undigested cooked and processed foods stay in our system and create bowel toxemia and the inability to assimilate minerals and vitamins and nutrients that we need to to fight disease and stay healthy raw foods are very clean and natural and processed through our body very quickly and I know it's hard to imagine the direct correlation we think it's just about being uncomfortable but that's not the case at all there have been numerous studies done in 1982 The Saturday Evening Post published an article by physicians at the University of California who studied 5,000 women the study was based on breast cancer and constipation women who were constipated defined as 2 or less bowel movements per week were four times more likely to develop breast cancer than those who were regular at least once a day in another study in the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology a study of men showed that men who were regular or or men who were not regular were four and a half more times likely to develop Parkinson's disease and I can tell you how I feel if if I'm not my system is not moving properly I feel like crap and no pun intended so now that we're comfortable with each other let's talk about sex whoo-hoo what woman wants to have sex when she's constipated and bloated from a huge meal what man after a 40 ounce steak and you know big plate of mashed potatoes really you know think is in the mood and has energy and stamina you'd rather be on the couch admit it so food and processed food is is actually most of our daily diet is a drug and it's it's it's caused an addiction and we it's rewired our brain and to thinking that that's what we want and that's what we need and at the same time it's destroying our health and our energy levels in our sex drive and all these other things in our digestion and there is a you know there's a very simple solution or raw food and and it's if it's raw eat it if it's not don't but with raw food you won't be addicted and you won't have these symptoms you um you you won't ever hear I'm sorry honey tonight I have I have a headache so raw food equals more energy equals more stamina equals more sensuality more sexuality more energy so you must be wondering now how you make these wonderful dishes you are what you eat by the way and as my brother told me I was nuts and he told me I was bananas I thanked him so you you are probably wondering how we make these dishes because they're quite elaborate and beautiful looking and colorful and they look very complicated there's there is a lot going on there's a lot of creativity going on and we're basically the creativity is by losing all these these things that I learned at French Culinary Institute and over the years we're not we're using only natural ingredients unprocessed raw organic whenever possible fruits vegetables nuts and seeds we don't heat anything above 105 degrees that's when enzymes start to become destroyed and we need these enzymes for proper digestion and you all heard what doesn't happen if we don't properly die digest so it's it's a natural way of cooking and a natural way of eating and a lot of people come to me and that happens every day and people will say to me do I have to eat 100% raw will I get any benefit if I incorporate it into my life well the ideal answer is yes you the more you eat raw the better you'll feel I recommend 100% raw but if I were to tell you if you just incorporate five percent of your diet five percent of your diet is raw food you live to a ripe old age and die peacefully in your sleep you'd probably say no problem I'll do it I'll eat an apple every morning but if I told you how to do that a hundred percent of the time you may not you may not even may hesitate but just to give you an idea of how easy it is we three main meals a day typically one meal a day you're already a thirty three percent you'll notice a huge difference right away so here's why it's important because if if you eat this way and you feel good you're going to be happier and the people around you're going to want to eat that way and they'll be happier and healthier as well it's said that the average person Circle is the average person has twenty close friends and the average person will have 200 people at their funeral and less they lose their friends by dragging them to a raw food restaurant that is but this room is a good representation of the average person Circle so some of you were given a ping-pong ball at the beginning of this lecture and if you could just please stand up that would be great anybody has a ping-pong ball so so those those those seated you're very you're very lucky you're one of the ones who hasn't been affected but if you look around this is the percentage of people in your circle that will be affected by health and diet related diseases so everybody is affected by this we're all touched by this and if you um if you want to imagine how raw food and eating healthy can make a difference let's um let's imagine a 50% of the people who have these health prone diseases the diet prone diseases decided to take up a plant-based diet so anybody born between the months of January and June please sit so that's a that's a big difference now if you were born between July and December we have 100% of the people eating raw and please sit down so you all may sit down so we are all touched it's unavoidable in this in this crisis but we did we did some of our own research or our own version of a raw food Gallup poll recently and the results are really quite telling 70 percent of the people we studied didn't understand what their body mass index was a ratio of their body fat percentage according to their their health and their weight and a general indication of overall health most people didn't even know that almost zero percent said that they ate raw food even though many of them actually do eat raw food salads and apples and bananas but what that says is that don't really know what plant-based healthy you know enzyme rich foods are and 65% of those people didn't even realize the benefits of a raw plant-based diet so the important thing is the information if we don't get the information out there people don't know how to make the right choices and we we have been conditioned by advertisement and by restaurants and by fast-food companies and schools and hospitals that we need these processed foods and we've been conditioned in the in the improper way because look at the results so there's here's a picture of me which you can see me here but I wanted to show you also a friend who contacted me recently from I haven't seen him from high school for 25 years he's the same age as me and we graduated together and he is having some health problems he's like one of many millions of Americans likely on a number of prescription drugs cholesterol medication heart medication mood drugs and and one of many people one of millions of people who are literally throwing away their their health of their bodies and their lives and their ability to spend time quality time with their million friends and loved ones because of what they eat by not changing their diet 50% of the people in our study were on prescription medication 50% as dr. Ornish said about the world's killer diet the most frustrating thing about this is that it's almost entirely preventable and reversible by changing the way we eat so together by communicating by taking action we have to fuel the outrage we have to we have to help people understand the benefits of this and get the word out there if we don't by explaining if it's raw eat it otherwise don't if we don't do that this this will constitute the greatest natural and preventable disaster of all time greater than all tsunamis atomic bomb explosions Wars earthquakes combined my mission as a chef is in my passion as a chef is to help the world learn about this cuisine to teach people how to eat better one bite at a time so today when you have a choice instead of that bag of potato chips grab a banana or a handful of blueberries actually they had some in the hallway here today and they were great and help me spread the word if nothing else eat a little bit more raw food it will change the way you feel it will improve your health and if you feel the outrage and the frustration spread the word and together we can change the world thank you you

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Views: 99,975

Rating: 4.909338 out of 5

Keywords: raw, ted x, wellness, TEDxOKC, OKC, tedx talk, chef, degrees Food, tedx, United States, ted talk, ted talks, gourmet, TEDx, English, tedx talks, vegan, 105, ted, health, Oklahoma City

Id: _MT5zE5plno

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 09 2011