Meredith McCarty
Your Personal Food Coach for a Healthy Plant-Based Diet
Meredith McCarty is a Nutrition Educator, NE (holistic nutritionist) and a plant-based/vegan/macrobiotic consultant, speaker, chef and cooking instructor.
She has authored three cookbooks and a DVD. Her book, Sweet and Natural—More than 120 Naturally Sweet and Dairy Free Desserts, won the international Versailles World Cookbook Fair Award. She is a leadership-member of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and has worked in programs with Drs. Benjamin Spock, Dean Ornish, John McDougall and Neal Barnard. She is a former associate editor of East West/Natural Health magazine and former co-director of the East West Holistic Health Center for 19 years, during which time she taught cooking classes and catered weekly dinner parties and annual residential seminars for up to 150 people. Meredith studied Macrobiotics in the 1970s with Michio and Aveline Kushi, Herman and Cornellia Aihara, and Shizuko Yamamoto. She has a Senior Certificate in the Art of Cooking from the Kushi Foundation, and a Nutrition Educator certificate from Bauman College. She currently resides in Marin County in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Meredith changed her own diet in the early 1970s.
She was feeling a sense of malaise and exhaustion, and was diagnosed with mononucleosis (chronic fatigue), hypoglycemia, and a spot on her right lung. She met two men in a ski lodge bar in New Hampshire who changed the course of her life by recommending that she move to Boston and begin a study of Macrobiotics. She did and within a year the spot on her lung was gone, and within a couple more years her energy and clarity returned. Lectures and cooking classes provided the inspiration and support she needed to embrace change and experience the positive transformation that she loves inspiring in others.
Healing Cuisine
Healing cuisines are the traditional culinary practices of the longest-lived, healthiest cultures on the planet.
They celebrate the extraordinary qualities inherent in whole grains, beans and soyfoods, vegetables from land and sea, and fermented foods, along with smaller portions of fruits, nuts and seeds, and even smaller amounts of organic animal foods for those who want them.
The evidence amassed from researchers around the world shows that the same diet that is good for the prevention of cancer is also good for the prevention of other diseases.
This diet can benefit everyone, regardless of his or her genes or personal dispositions. As Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Nutritional Biochemist, concludes in The China Study, the largest study ever done on diet, lifestyle and disease: “The finding that made this project especially remarkable is that people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease. A whole foods plant-based diet has been shown to reverse and/or prevent disease.”
Plant foods are naturally low in fat and free of cholesterol and the strong hormones that are both naturally-occurring and added to animals’ diets.
Plant foods are composed of complex carbohydrates, the kind that supply sustained energy, and are rich in fiber (animal foods have none) and phytochemicals including antioxidants. Vegetables from land and sea are plant foods that contain all the vitamins, minerals and trace elements that exist in Nature, and in our blood.
Healing Cuisine benefits visitors in another way: Founder Meredith McCarty’s introduction to whole food plant-based nutrition was through the practice of Macrobiotics.
As it applies to lifestyle, “Macrobiotic” means “large view of life” or living our lives “in harmony with the order of the universe,” as ecologically and economically as possible. The practical ideal of sourcing “seasonal, local and organic” food was first brought to America’s attention by Macrobiotic teachers in the late 1960s. Applied to diet, the philosophy suggests choosing foods that grow with the least negative impacts on the planet, plant foods.
In the early 1970s, the Boston-based Kushi Institute sponsored seminars on diet and cancer where Meredith met many people who had reversed their heart disease, cancer and diabetes by following a plant-based diet. Macrobiotic teachers introduced into the marketplace brown rice, sea vegetables, and high-quality soy foods (natural soy sauce, tamari, miso and tofu) through the first natural food store, Erewhon.
Did you know? Meat and dairy have surpassed oil companies as the largest polluters.
“The world’s five biggest meat and dairy producers emit more combined greenhouse gases than ExxonMobil, Shell, or BP, the top three oil production companies, according to a new report by GRAIN and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP)…If production remains unregulated, by 2050, meat and dairy farms will account for 80% of the budgeted greenhouse gas emissions. “—“Emissions impossible: How big meat and dairy are heating up the planet,” https://www.grain.org/article/entries/5976 Breaking Medical News, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, pcrm.org, July 18, 2018
