These two comments prompted me to revisit an earlier blog on this subject. While walking home this morning, I explained the focus of that blog to my girlfriend, Ruth — here in Naples, FL. I explained that it’s all about the question that Jean asked above, “Is it better for a very few to eat pure diets or for a lot of people to eat mostly healthy diets?” Without a doubt, it would be the latter.

As more people adopt the wasteful Western diet every day, the problems of water shortage and pollution continue to get worse.

My premise for changing the world. There are a great many things riding on our food choices besides our own health:

• the opportunity to reduce our water footprint by up to 90%
• the opportunity to reduce our carbon footprint by put to 30%
• the opportunity to feed up to twenty times as many people on the same amount of land
• the opportunity to dramatically curtail the suffering of billions of animals in factory farm

How much difference can we make? My premise is that only a very few will quickly go all the way to a near-optimal 4-Leaf kind of plant-based diet. But, the good news is that ten times that number could begin making positive changes if we convey the message properly. Let’s do the math. Two scenarios;

Leveraging the simple concept of maximizing the percent of your calories that are derived from whole, plant-based foods

• One person goes to the 4-Leaf level (80% from whole plants). They go from 10% of their calories from whole plants 80%. In so doing, they earn 70 GIP’s (global improvement points, computed from 80 minus 10 = 70)
• Ten people go halfway, moving from 10% of their calories from whole plants to the low end of the 2-Leaf level, or 40%. They quadruple the amount of whole plants and each of them earn 30 GIP’s (40 minus 10 = 30)
• Who wins? Which group does the planet the most good in the four categories listed above? The Group of Ten of course. They earn 300 GIP’s compared to the Group of One that went all the way and earned 70 points.
• Bottom Line. By influencing modest improvements in a much larger group, we can promote much more global change. How much? Over 300% (329% to be exact) more beneficial change.

Let’s put all of this in perspective by adding our premise to entire Western world — a population of nearly four billion people. Consider this scenario:

• 2.5%, or 100 million people, go all the way to to 4-Leaf (80% whole plants) and earn 7.0 billion GIPs (100 million x 70)
• 25%, or one billion people, go halfway to 2-Leaf (40% whole plants) and earn 30 billion GIP’s (one billion x 30)
• Combined, both groups earn 37 billion GIP’s out of a possible 280 billion GIP’s; which translates to 37/280 or  13.2 percent.
• If we had not reached the much larger 2-Leaf group, the improvement would have been only 2.5% (7/280).

One of the smartest animals, pigs get a bad rap -- most live their complete lives in horrid conditions until they reach their ultimate destiny as part of your breakfast, your pizza topping or your barbecue sandwich.

So what kind of improvements will this action drive? Let’s begin with animal suffering. What about the sixty billion suffering animals in our factory farms? The 4-Leafers only lower it from 60 billion to 58.5 billion — whereas the combined group, including the 2-Leafers, drop the number to 52.1 billion. By adding the 2-Leafers, we eliminate the suffering of an additional 6.4 billion animals.

Similar improvements can also be extrapolated to improvements in water, trees, biodiversity, climate change and world hunger. So, when you consider all of the above, the answer to the title question is like a blinding flash of the obvious:

A tiny few eating a perfect diet? — or truly changing the world? Without a doubt, we must engage greater numbers of people and we’re simply not going to be able to do that with an “all or nothing approach” to the way we should be eating. For more on this concept take a look at this earlier post from October 2011.“All or nothing” doesn’t fly for most people

In Naples, FL this week and enjoying the kind of weather that reminds me of summertime in New England

If you like what you see here, you may wish to join our periodic mailing list. Also, for help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4-Leaf page.

And if you like what 4-Leaf eating is doing for you and your family, you might enjoy visiting our new “4-Leaf Gear” store. From sunny Old Naples, Florida – Be well and have a great day.

If you’d like to order our book on Amazon,  visit our BookStore now.

—J. Morris Hicks…blogging daily at HealthyEatingHealthyWorld.com

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