A Warm Welcome To Our Human Ecology Diet.

Health, food and our planet alongside my love of animals are at the heart of everything I do on a daily basis. Since I was old enough to remember, my love of food and cooking has brought me the greatest joy. I became interested in food at a very young age. I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, and pleaded with the local fruit and vegetable shop to let me work there. He wouldn’t hire me until I was twelve years old because I wasn’t tall enough to reach all the shelves. I loved to work there among the grains, beans and vegetables. I guess my future was already making itself known to me.

Food brings people together. Food should taste great, provide us with optimal health and satisfy our appetite. I do believe that food can be our best medicine, hence my unfailing desire to teach everyone who crosses my path that health and healing truly start in your own kitchen.

Changing your diet

My passion is to demonstrate that making delicious and nourishing healthy food is achievable. I find it exciting to create new recipes and train chefs and home cooks utilising my seasonal menus and cooking skills, incorporating the five tastes and my understanding of macrobiotics. Changing your diet always means finding replacements for less healthy options. I want to share with you healthier and tastier alternatives to whatever you desire. You will find the recipes on this website are easy and affordable. In fact, all our clients tell us that they have saved upward of 60% on their food bills since eating our Human Ecology Diet. I use an array of plant foods that are whole and natural and prepared with just the right mix of condiments, fresh and dried herbs, and mild spices to create robust, satisfying delicious flavours.

Dieting is out - healthy eating is in

I don’t consider this food to be a ‘diet’. This is simply healthy, tasty cooking. It gives all of us the advantage of creating a harmonious relationship with our environment whilst ending the suffering and death of the animal kingdom – an important focus in my four decades of teaching. As a long-time healthy vegan, my work brings me the greatest joy, and to share this message with as many people as I can is my life’s mission.

Veganism is not new

The ideas that drive the vegan approach to living are not new. For the centuries since the times of Pythagoras, thousands of thoughtful people have questioned the use of animals for food. Those concerns have usually been moral considerations about killing sentient life, but concerns for health and our relationship with nature have been considered as well. As winner of the Nobel Prize Albert Einstein said, “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution of a vegetarian diet.” That evolution has arrived, and it is veganism.

Famous people who stopped eating animals include Leonardo da Vinci, Leo Tolstoy, and two other Nobel Prize winners – George Bernard Shaw and Isaac Bashevis Singer. You don’t have to be a Nobel Prize winner to get the message. In present times the sensibility of a vegan diet has spread out into the arts and athletics. The number of professional athletes who have switched to a vegan approach to eating include swimmers, skiers, weightlifters and those in team sports, and include multiple modern Olympians. There is rumour that the word ‘vegan’ comes from the Latin word vegetus, meaning ‘strength of mind and body’. Who really knows? Based on the evidence, it sounds right to me.

My mentors

No one lives in a vacuum. We are all influenced by our experiences, our study and by the people we meet. The following eight people have been my inspiration – all of them wise and trusted teachers who speak the truth. I could in fact write a book about each of their accomplishments alone. They share intellectual curiosity, enormous energy, perseverance and the ability to see the connections between things.

Let me start with the ‘Scottish connection’ – Dr. Dennis Burkitt, who gave me a huge light-bulb moment about dietary fibre. As a young Scottish lass, a mere teenager and constantly constipated, my doctor told me I had a lazy bowel and would have to take laxatives for the rest of my life, or my appendix would burst. I refused to take the medicine and, consequently, guess what? My appendix burst and nearly killed me with peritonitis. I survived, all the wiser but wanting to know why the condition was there to begin with.

Much to the amusement of my friends I took to the library to start learning about diet and health, and I have never stopped learning over these past forty-five years.

Dennis Burkitt was a surgeon and physician – the ‘Fibreman’ who observed the role of dietary fibre while working in Africa. He was also a distinguished researcher and identified Burkitt’s Lymphoma. ‘The only way we are going to reduce disease’, he said, ‘is to go backward to the diets and lifestyles of our ancestors’. Dr Burkitt’s explanation of why I was sick sparked my interest in studying human ecology.

Colin Campbell is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University and the co-author of The China Study, the most comprehensive study of nutrition ever conducted. Professor Campbell’s research and writing have had the most important single influence on bringing the issues of dietary reform into the public eye. His promotion of a wholefoods plant-based diet added much-needed credibility to the food revolution. He is an inspiration.

John McDougall is the author of The Starch Solution. A physician and nutrition expert who teaches better health through ‘It’s the Food’, he has been studying, writing and speaking out about the effects of nutrition on disease for over fifty years. He is the founder and director of the internationally renowned McDougall Program. Dr McDougall has been one of the trailblazers of the movement away from an animal-based diet, and an outspoken critic of nutritional nonsense for decades. He is the man of truth.

Gary L. Francione is the Distinguished Professor of Law and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University School of Law. He is an author and leader of animal-rights law and ethical theory, and the abolitionist theory of animal rights. Professor Francione’s advocacy for animals has inspired thousands of vegans to move beyond superficial quick fixes and into the heart of our relationship with non-human life. A revolution of the heart.

Anna E. Charlton is an adjunct professor of law who, along with her partner, Gary Francione, founded and operated the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic from 1990 to 2000, making Rutgers the first university in the United States to have animal-rights law as part of the regular academic curriculum.Anna co-authored Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach and Eat Like You Care with Professor Francione.

Neal Barnard is a physician, fellow of the American College of Cardiology, clinical researcher, author and an adjunct associate professor of medicine at the George Washington University. He is the founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. The work of Dr Barnard has provided important inroads to the orthodox medical community and his is a strong voice in defence of animals.

Michael Klaper, known affectionately worldwide as Dr K, is a gifted clinician, internationally recognised teacher, and sought-after speaker on diet and health. As a source of inspiration advocating plant-based diets and the end of animal cruelty worldwide, Dr Klaper contributed to the making of two PBS television programs: Food for Thought and the award-winning movie Diet for a New America(based on the book of the same name). Dr Klaper teaches that ‘health comes from healthy living’, and he is dedicated to the healing and flourishing of all living beings and our planet.

Bill Tara has since 1967 been an active advocate for natural healthcare and macrobiotics. He was a pioneer in the natural-health movement in the 1960s in both America and Europe. His educational work includes being the founder of the Community Health Foundation in London, and co-founder of the Kushi Institute for Macrobiotic Studies in the 1970s. Bill has been invited to over twenty countries to speak on macrobiotic philosophy, health and environmental issues. (Another accomplishment is that he is my husband!)

All of these incredible and dedicated teachers have written numerous books and articles. Their work will change your life forever.

The China Study

I remember reading The China Study in 2005 and thinking, yes! The world will now change with this book. We are getting there slowly, but too slowly. Please share the work from all of these wonderful humans with family, friends, colleagues and, quite frankly, anyone who has a pulse!

When we are driven by passion and not fear, everything falls into place. When nature is in jeopardy, we MUST take action. All living organisms exist as interconnected parts of the natural whole. No element is superfluous, not even the smallest insect or microbe. This entire system is sustained by natural energy of the elements. With climate change impacting our global environment in so many ways, it seems that nature herself is punishing us for the way we live.

"We often speak of ‘producing food’ but farmers do not produce the food of life. Only nature has the power to produce something from nothing. Farmers merely assist nature." Masanobu Fukuoka

In good health

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.