We're going to now welcome Tabitha Brown, and there she is right now. Great to have you. Hello there. Thank for having me. Great to have you and your book is wonderful, super inspiring. It was inspiring for me. I just have to say, I rode in a bike race and I was a little bit nervous about it because I'm not an athlete and I'm not normally healthy eater and I'm enjoying all the struggles everybody else has. My mantra when I showed up for the race was that I'm good enough. I just heard you talking about that. Thank you for putting that in my head. Absolutely. We're always enough for whatever we show up for. Oh, yeah. That is the truth. That's right. I happened on to your feed on Instagram and I was instantly drawn in by your North Carolina dialect and your enthusiasm and your positive energy and so grateful to follow you. I've been inspired to eat better, eat healthier. I have a daughter that's a vegan. Very good. She loves it. When I told her I was talking to you, she sent me like 57 questions. All right, girl. She wanted to do know. She's like, "I want to know how she is just so brave in the kitchen." I said, "You got to read her book because that will tell you a lot," right? That's right, honey. You've torn down so many walls and it penetrated communities and families and individuals to eat healthier. I've been trying to get that to happen for 20 years and I've seen nobody inspire people the way you have to cook for themselves and put together healthier meals. You've done that for my family, for myself, and we're super inspired by you. Can you tell us what your tipping point was on the vegan piece. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I got sick back in January of 2016. I had this terrible headache in the back of my head and I woke up with it, and uphead chronic pain from an injury that I had in high school from a car accident in my neck. For over 30 years I've always had wake up with a stiff neck and sometimes it would give me a little headache. So I thought it was the same thing. I didn't think anything of it other than the fact that this was really in the back of my head more this time. But that headache rested there everyday for a year and seven months, it never went away. The pain would go up and down, but it was always constant, and I just could not get wailed from it. I started having chronic fatigue in my body, chronic pain throughout my body started to happen. I would start to fall when I walk. I lost my vision for a day. I just was in really bad shape and I would go to the doctor week after week, month after month, blood work, MRIs, and everything will come back normal. They would say to me, we know something is attacking your immune system. We just can't figure it out. I even had this rheumatologist tell me one time. She said, "It's been a long time of us testing you and not getting any results. What we normally tell people when we cannot diagnose them is that they have fibromyalgia." I said, "I won't to just take it because you can't figure it out. I don't want you to just decide I got something because you can't figure out what it is." When you don't know what's wrong with you, you also get depressed. I was depressed. I had major anxiety and I thought I was going to die. I just was in constant panic. I just was like, you know what? I didn't know what to do. But then when my daughter came home from school one day and she had watched the documentary, What the Hail at school. She told me. She said, "Mommy, I think you all should watch it and see." When I watched it, it was a light bulb moment for me when they started talking about not all diseases are hereditary, is that we eat the same thing causing the same disease in our family. I thought, my mum died at 51 of a rare disease, ALS, there's no cause and there is no cure. My daddy just turned 70. He's the first man to ever turn 70 in our family. People get sick and they die at young ages in my family. I thought, "Well, the only common denominator is how we eat, and is also the only thing I have not tried." I told my husband, I was like, "Let's go 30-day vegan challenge." He said, "Okay," we did it. In the first 10 days my headache disappeared. I was like, "Honey Tab on the sun [inaudible] Then after the 29,30 days, I was having so much energy again. It's like pain just started to leave my body. I told my husband, 'I'm never going back, this is going to be my life." Here I am almost four and a half years later. Changed in everybody else's lives too for the good, mine included. I often am inspired by what you're preparing and how you're eating and your conversation. My daughter Meb is like, "Dad, she's just like so brave in the kitchen. How did she do that?" I think one of the things that I love about your tapes on Instagram and following you on YouTube and then other platforms is that you are fearless, you dare to make mistake, which I love. We're only talking about lunch. Just food. It's just food. But I love the way you dare to make a mistake that way. That is inspiring and the fact that people can actually prepare these plant-based diets for not a lot of money and not a lot of time. If anybody has been through drive-through food like we all have, it's to 15-minute way. Then it's probably not doing you any favors just because you're starving to death or you think you are. You have really made elite that has changed the narrative for a lot of people. It's made eating healthier in very approachable on scary way. I love the way that you're doing that. I think it's interesting that you've played family epidemiologist in the sense that you're aware that family members in your family have not lived long lives, and the diet may have something to do with that. Is there a relationship you could share with me about your food relationship before you got into this phase or this vegan cooking? Well, honey, I'm from the South. I'm from North Carolina town. I did eat things that I don't even know what I was eating. You're from the South and I'm a whole black woman. We was frying it up. We were eating pork and chicken, of course, fried fish. Everything was fried. So much was fried. I can't help. Why? I love fried too in moderation, still. But so many things which also calls us to have a lot of different diseases. But I ate all the sudden favorites and comfort food. It just was also eating me alive. I had to a point where I've rethought it and say, I can still have some of my favorites just in a different way. I definitely was not a person who was a terrible eater, but I did grow up eating terrible. I know because I used to, I'm originally from the Midwest, then I moved here a few decades ago. I moved right into the barbecue with the six inches of coleslaw. It's really been a tough journey for me to take my own rains and turn my diet around and make it happen. But the beautiful thing about your segments is that it is okay if you're making a mistake, it's okay. We don't have to be perfect when we start down this road. For myself, I don't eat any pork or beef. I occasionally will eat chicken and fish, but mostly vegetables and mostly plants. A lot of the fish/chicken thing is because I'm traveling and I often, it's sometimes hard to plan solve, jump on board with that. But I did want to ask you, do you use a lot of mushrooms in your food? I do too, but I'm so allergic to them and I'm just wondering, doesn't that seem wrong? If I get allergic to mushroom, the Lord as might as well going to take me now because I love them so much. Is it all mushrooms? No. I had a very bad reaction about 20 years ago and they said stay away from all mushrooms because they couldn't figure it out. I ended up in the hospital for a few days. Yeah, that's given. It wasn't like it, yet she was a big anaphylactic. That's what I am. I'm that way with dairy. A variety, can't have ABP and all that stuff. That's the app which I have. It's crazy, but I'm just wondering about the mushrooms. Is there anything that people like me can do to switch the mushrooms out? Are there things that you would use? I know you love them. I love a mushroom. That when you say the barbecue sound with the coleslaw, I do it with the mushroom barbecue, but I also do a jackfruit barbecue without mushroom. Use jackfruit you can substitute there. I'm trying to think what other things that you could substitute the mushrooms for, because the other thing is that they're so good for us, not for you. That's right. I used to eat them all the time. I just had something bad that went south [inaudible]. It happens you can always have a progressive allergy that progresses as you age. That's how mine happen with dairy and soy. It just came on all of a sudden after I had been eating it forever. But it's brain food which I love because it's a sponge just like the brain. Really good. Exactly. I don't know what I would suggest. I like the jackfruit. I'm going to try the Jackfruit. You just got to cook it right. Cook it well because it not, the jack won't do you right. Jack wow. That's so good. How long do you do you cook that for? When I saute, I saute until it starts to crisp just a little bit because it is soft in texture but you will get like a little bit of crisp on pieces of it, so you're like, okay, I sauted it enough. People asked me about food all the time and I was like, my go-to is, first of all, I love your untuned whole situation. People who are joining us for this broadcast, I hope they're going to check out your book and check out the untuned recipes and the other recipes that come with the book. I often will use chickpeas, use a lot of chickpeas. I love them. Me too and I chop them up, I throw in the apples and the fruit and cashews little vegans and I have like a chicken salad situation going on, but it's delicious and easy. What? Yeah, that sounds so good. It is, have you done it? It's so yummy. I know. I think need to do that and the cashew. It's like apples, cashews, sometimes I throw in walnuts to the chickpeas, the vegan mayonnaise, yummy. Yeah, that sounds amazing. That's still good for the brain because you're adding the walnuts in there. Hearts of palm is another good substitute thing. That's a good idea. I love hearts of palm. I normally throw them in different salads, but I love how I can eat up a whole thing of those, they are good. I add butter, I slice them. You know how you can get the hands of palm in a jar or in a can and they're round. If you slice them in half and you butter it like fish and you fry it, it tastes like fish. Really? Yeah, it's so good. Tartar sauce out of vegan?. Yeah. [inaudible]. You know I love a pickle too. It is my business. I love them. It's great. Now you are speaking everywhere you're going, everywhere and doing great things in impacting people's health. Thank you. Not just inspiring for different decisions, but you're really impacting people's health, and I personally am so grateful for that because I see a lot of disease. I've lived with a lot of disease. I've had a lot of losses around that. The real miracle and all of this is trying to prevent disease and so much of that comes through food. The fact that you're here today supporting our effort means so much to us and I know we're going to let the viewers know the people that are participating about your Instagram channel and your book and we'll make sure that's on there. We're so excited to have you and your help and helping to burn that healthier drum and that more positive vibe like everything that comes out of you is positive. Thank you for that. Well, it's a choice. Yeah, it is a choice. You can choose to be negative, you can choose to be positive. It's funny because I'm lucky enough to work out with somebody that's very good. He's like, "Bill, your negative self-talk has got to go" and I was like, you know, it's hard to shake but the more energy and time you spend around positive people can make a world of difference. Not only for help, I'm just grateful for your attitude and the positive energy you put in the world. I'm super glad that you could be part of this. You're really doing great, great work and I really admire your leadership. Thank you so much and I appreciate you and thank you for having me and thinking of me. I really do appreciate that because I know you're looking at many people Eddie and I'm not like, whenever I get certain like organizations, they know I'm not a doctor, I'm not a nutritionist, I'm just a woman who shares. We love that. I'm not a doctor or a scientist. I'm a sea student from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. When you started this organization, I just really wanted less cancer. I wanted to figure out how to lower the incidences of cancer. Unfortunately that's what we have scientists and physicians for and health care providers that guide us in our work. But there's a lot to be said for the squeaky wheel. And lot of things can change just by speaking up and we're already seeing just from market research, the work that you're impacting is so powerful. You're certainly a leader on that level and we're very grateful. Thank you so much and that means I'm doing something right In fact a lot right. In your book, you talk about sticking to the drain, following your lead. When we first started this organization, I had to juggle a lot of jobs, still do. It's good. It is good because we really don't have any messaging that is shaped by outside forces. It's all evidence-based science. That's great, we also need people like you and your stories and the change that you're making, not only here across the country but around the globe. Thank you. Anyway, I would not stop, but I will always share and do it with love and kindness and no judgment, and that's what helps people pay attention. It allows people to lean in. I think too when you talked about judgment, when people talking about what you should do because of blah, blah, and blah. It's hard for some people to listen to. While we are educating healthcare providers on this feed, we're also educating a lot of people that want their health better. They may not be a health care provider, but they have the tools to do incredible things around exercise and diet that can vastly improve their lives and that's great.
