What is a VEGAN? And why you shouldn't be afraid of them or afraid of becoming one...

Welcome to a new section of Karen's Kitchen, an area that explains what it means to be a Vegan, and then goes on to give lots and lots and lots and lots of recipes to make the trasition away from meat and dairy and eggs a pleasant and easy one.

I started Karen's Kitchen in 1996 in order to teach people how to follow the Zone Diet. At the time, I believed that the Zone was the final diet, and not really a diet at all, but rather a "lifestyle change" beyond which there needed to be none other.

I still totally endorse the Zone, but along with many of my clients who started the Zone with me back in '96, we have discovered that the Zone is a HEALING diet that corrects the serious imbalances in the way that the body processes food which was brought on by being subjected to a lifetime of high glycemic foods fairly devoid of good nutrition and so processed that they no longer retain the enzymes that are necessary for digestion. Once we had spent a number of years on the Zone, we found that as we slowly added in more and more RAW fruits and vegetables into our diet, particularly vegetables, that we could actually decrease our protein intake and increase our daily caloric intake by increasing our fresh vegetable/carbohydrate intake. We would still retain all the health benefits that we had gained in the Zone without gaining weight. Where we gained weight was when we added the white sugar and white flour products as well as cooked foods to our diets. If we didn't have a fairly high percentage of calories coming in as raw carbohydrates, we would gain weight.

I have been a vegetarian for at least the last 6 years since opening Karen's Kitchen to the public. I had actually been a vegetarian from the time I was 14 until I was 28, and my foray back into the Omnivorous Kitchen was about 20 years. Vegetarianism was a health issue for me, but a moral issue as well. It was the day that I read the article about how the meat inspectors were now inspecting over 93 chicken carcasses a minute on the converyer belts that I decided that the diseases in animals was just far to great, and there was no way that they were going to be catching the cancers, colds and other infections in these birds, so I became a vegetarian that day. And as I said, there was a moral issue. I just could not see myself sitting in heaven at the "wedding of the lamb" and eating meat. If meat is not a part of the heavenly entrees, then why am I indulging in it here on earth if I am longing for heaven?