Merry Christmas and a Happy and Healthy New Year!

Eco-Christmas

Every Christmas we're challenged to pick gifts for friends and loved ones. We wrack our brains for the right items, with the right brand names. Sometimes we consider our finances and decide where to sacrifice and where to splurge. “What can I give that really expresses my love and care?”

This Christmas, consider giving the gift of health. Start by bringing your family and friends to Down to Earth's January "Eating Healthy" program. It is designed to promote and support New Year's resolutions to improve your health with a vegetarian diet. The program will include lectures by Carmela Wolf, Down to Earth Wellness Manager of the Honolulu location, and weekly in-store cooking demos.

In addition, the regularly scheduled cooking classes at all locations will feature special menus. This is Down to Earth's Christmas gift to you and you can pass it forward. It is longer lasting, free and so much more meaningful than a new toy, gadget or tool.

Encourage your friends and family to join you for the Healthy New Year program that will be going for the entire month of January! Read all about it in this edition of the newsletter: Down to Earth To Kick Off New Year with "Eat Healthy" Program. Down to Earth’s 2012 Eat Healthy program is designed to help facilitate and encourage people to incorporate healthy habits into their lifestyle in the coming New Year.

As part of the program, the most important thing you can do is to encourage your loved ones to adopt a wholesome, plant-based diet. Leading health experts agree that going vegetarian is the single-best thing we can do for ourselves and our families. Healthy vegetarian diets support a lifetime of good health and provide protection against numerous diseases, including our country’s three biggest killers: heart disease, cancer, and strokes.

The American Dietetic Association states that vegetarians have “lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease; ... lower blood cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer” and that vegetarians are less likely than meat-eaters to be obese. Well-planned vegetarian diets provide us with all the nutrients that we need, minus all the saturated fat, cholesterol, and contaminants found in animal flesh and eggs.

Plant-based foods--as a key to a healthy lifestyle--are emphasized in guidelines by The American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, American Diabetes Association, The American Institute for Cancer Research, and many other health organizations. In fact, the new USDA MyPlate food guide is more than 75% plant-based. This is because all the research for decades has been pointing to the benefits and protection of plant-based foods for a healthy life.

Plant foods are naturally low in saturated fat and contain zero cholesterol. They possess valuable cancer-fighting phytochemicals, lots of fiber, and are rich in the vitamins and minerals we need to keep our bodies strong and healthy. In contrast, meat-based food lacks sufficient fiber and is laden with cholesterol and saturated fat, as well as a host of other hazardous components including cancer-promoting factors. Learning how to replace meat-based food with whole grains, vegetables, beans, lentils, nuts and seeds is an important step towards achieving good health.

Each year, many people make the resolution to lose weight and get healthy, yet they frequently lose the motivation after a month or so. At Down to Earth, we are invested in making sure you keep your New Years’ resolutions. We know that drastic and aggressive resolutions are hard to keep. It’s better to make a practical and realistic resolution for long-term health.

The best way to stick to a resolution is to be realistic. Take baby steps in the right direction until your new activities become habits. Start small and, as you develop your interest in healthy diets, you will naturally want to incorporate more and more healthy habits into your life. Even if you make small changes one meal at a time, you will feel the benefit. As they say over at the Meatless Mondays campaign, "Once a week, cut out meat."

This Christmas, we hope you’ll accept the gift of health from all of us at Down to Earth, and pass it forward to your friends and family. Together, we can enter the New Year happy, healthy and ready to help others achieve their health goals as well. The gift of health is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

From all of us at Down to Earth, Merry Christmas and a Healthy and Happy New Year and... Mele Kalikimaka!