Thrive: The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life

interest over the past few years. Many health professionals believe children in North America watch too much TV and that this is linked to childhood obesity. This makes sense: Children who come home from school and sit on the couch in front of the TV, rather than playing soccer, for example, are simply not as physically active. To make matters worse, most children snack when they watch TV. But many studies on the TV-watching habits of children stopped there: The sedentary nature of TV viewing was determined to be the culprit for kids’ weight gain. However, I believe the TV itself is largely to blame. Watching TV is stimulating, especially if it’s a violent program.
     
    As you have read, one of the first signs of stress is greater energy, closely followed by fatigue. And when children become tired, what are they likely to do? Usually, they will eat something sugary for an energy boost. By doing this, they further stimulate and in turn tire the adrenals, resulting in greater fatigue. Simply put, they are overstressed by being undernourished and overstimulated.
     
    Violent video games have gained immense popularity in the past decade or two. Is this because children are becoming more naturally violent? Or is it simply because they’re tired, and subconsciously drawn to the “energy” supplied by stimulation? The best way to help children out of the vicious circle created is providing them with proper nutrition. Because of the unstimulating nature of most healthy foods, overstimulated children will likely resist them at first. But once they grow accustomed to their new diet—as with adults, only magnified—the subconscious desire to harness energy by stimulating the adrenals will diminish.
     
    All the recipes in this book are healthy for children; some are especially kid-friendly:
    • Banana Chocolate Pancakes (recipe, page 213)—these are packed with sustainable nutrition to start the day off right.
    • Energy Pudding and Recovery Pudding (recipes in Chapter 5, pages 125 and 126)—a tasty nutrient-packed snack, these puddings are easy to pack as part of a school lunch. For children, I recommend the non-yerba maté version.
    • Apple Cinnamon and Banana Bread energy bars (recipes, pages 228 and 229)—these bars are high-quality portable nutrition, perfect for school snacks and lunches.
    • Chocolate Almond and Tropical Pineapple Mango smoothies (recipes, pages 222 and 223)—these are great for breakfast, after school, or after sports practice.
     
     
     
    The less stimulation a person has in everyday life, the greater impact stimuli will have on the body. This is good. It means the person is living a low-stress life, and we know the benefits of that. But there’s more to it. It also means that considerably less stimulation is needed to evoke a stress response from the adrenal glands. One of the body’s most resourceful traits is its ability to adapt. Acclimatizing to stimulation is no exception.
     
    Here’s an example. When you turn on a light in a dark room, it seems very bright, although it really is no brighter than usual. Similarly, when ambient sound levels are low, the body’s sense of hearing is heightened. Have you ever noticed that sometimes the phone’s ring sounds very loud, and at other times it sounds relatively quiet? The key word is relatively . Our body has the ability to adjust to much of what goes on around it. That our system automatically adapts to external stimuli serves us well; but if the adjustment is not in keeping with the stimuli, it can be to our detriment.
     
    To calibrate its sensory system, the body must decide at what level it will sense stimuli. The only gauge the body has is through the information we feed it: sound, sight, touch, smell, and taste. Its decision is based on the level at which we supply that information. If we drink a daily cup of coffee to increase our energy, it won’t take long before its effect is diminished—before one cup of coffee will no longer serve the jolt it once did. It might seem logical, then, to drink a second cup to get the “energy” that a single cup used to deliver. But where does this cycle end?
     
    Our bodies are chronically overstimulated, yet most of us don’t realize it—our bodies have adapted, but at a cost. Constantly having to climb to a new level to remain in the same place is a tough way to live, yet all too common. The way to fix this problem, to remove considerable stress from the body and in doing so