My Eating
I follow this pattern not because I believe in it but because this represents the official recommendations for nutrition for pre-school children.
In my family there are vegans and a vegetarians.
I personally believe that:
Milk is only good food for babies. No other mammals naturally drink milk beyond their baby phase. In fact be it cows, goats, dogs, cats... the mothers wean the young ones at a young age by pushing them away and not letting them drink milk anymore. Humans are also the only mammals who consume milk from other species. Milk that is made to make a newborn calf grow into a 6 month old calf must be very powerful and cause unnaturally strong cell growth and multiplication. This is in fact exactly what cancer is. Besides, the German Food Safety Authority has officially stated that milk causes cancer, asthma, diabetes, skin conditions and other diseases. I myself get asthma if I consume milk or dairy products. My daughter gets neurodermitis from dairy products. As far as I can see the only advantage that goats milk has over cow's milk is that kids don't grow quite as much (absolutely speaking) as cows during their milk consumption months (about 3 months in their entire lives). By the way, did you know that the large milk factories remove all the fat from the milk (using chemicals of cours) and then re-fatten the milk with oils of non-milk origin? (I found that out from a friend who works for one of those factories in Austria.) So when it says 3.5% fat on your milk carton this is not necessarily the fat you think it is. This is how industrialised food production works.
Dairy products, like all animal products are to be avoided due to the above mentioned factors and due to the high amount of saturated fats and in particular due to their containing trans fatty acids that do not occur naturally in plant food and are a major contributing factor to arteriosclerosis and, therefore, heart disease. Unlike what is normally stated we get ample amounts of calcium from green vegetables that are loaded with it and do not need dairy products to provide us with calcium.
Sugar is officially classified as a harmful substance and I fully agree with this classification. If I consume sugar (outside of fruit etc. where it is not extracted but occurs naturally) I get asthma, arthritis and chronic tiredness as well as regular attacks of cystitis. I do not think that it is recommendable to bring children up to eat sugar because we have a natural affinity to slightly sweet tastes anyway and sugar distorts the system and gives children a sweet tooth, i.e. turns them into sugar addicts. I brought my own children up with no sugar except for on birthdays, Easter and Christmas. I found that when you don't get children used to sugar they will not ask for it. E. g. any child will like natural unsweetened yogurt (which is a dairy product, I know, but it is slighly sour, which is why I am using it as an example) and like it unless they are introduced to these sweets they sell as yogurt or fromage frais these days. Check the labels they usually contain between 30 and 40% sugar. Since our bodies need extra calcium in order to metabolise sugar the calcium in the yogurt is often not even enough to metabolise the sugar in the yogurt/fromage frais. Of course the same goes for various cereals that are advertised as being healthily fortified with calcium. When our bodies don't get enough calcium to metabolise the huge amounts of sugar we take in they will take the calcium that is stored in the bones, teeth, etc. in order to metabolise the sugar. I don't buy or make sugary food for children.
Carbohydrates, i.e. the bottom shelf of the food pyramid. Yes, these foods give us energy but if we eat too many of these they are stored away as body fat. I agree with the raw foodist movement that avoids cereals and potatoes and gets the necessary carbohydrates mainly from fruit. Our so called "nearest relatives", the great apes eat neither cereals nor potatoes, nor dairy products as a matter of fact. Look at a gorilla and tell me that primates cannot gain muscles on fruit and herb food.
I personally believe that cooked food is not good for people. We are the only "animals" (in a biological sense) that eat cooked food. Cooking destroys vitamins (which is why e.g. lemons but not preserved lemon juice worked against the scurvy - vitamin C is killed by cooking). Some foods contain mild poisons or substances that can cause problems, e.g. diarhoea when consumed in excessive amounts, e.g. pulses like beans contain solanin, a mild poison that is neutralised by cooking and elderberries and rhubarb (especially later in the season) contain oxalic acid which is a strong laxative, but that only gets to show how cooking causes an enormous amount of chemical reactions whose consequences cannot even be estimated by us. Our bodies need raw substances to function because our bodies are raw. If you eat raw food your body can take the nutrients and use them straight away. If you denaturalise them (think about how proteins change, which you can see when you cook the clear part of the egg) your body has to work out how to make the substances useful to it again. A lot of it is waste material because it cannot be restored to its original condition. Why are we cooking food? Because we grew up with people who taught us that this was the way things were done. The more of your food you eat raw, the better.