Dr. Horwitz describes how autoimmunity is affected by plant-based diets.
Dr. Horwitz:
When we look at things that can trigger the immune response we generally focus on proteins. They are the most immunogenic if you will, and a plant-based diet would mean get your proteins from soy products for example. Now certainly you have to mitigate that with the risk of breast cancer if you are a breast cancer survivor, but it doesn’t take very much and a serving per day is usually sufficient.
You can get proteins from peanut butter. You can get proteins from all kinds of plant sources. We exclude fish from the animal proteins so really fish is just fine, however proteins from red meat, not the best saturated fats - things of that nature.
There is one exception and that is if you are going to eat beef or a meat of any kind, red meat, go ahead and get grass-fed and grass-finished because then the fat that’s contained is not completely saturated, it’s omega-3, the same as you get in salmon because those animals are fed on grass the way nature intended.
About Dr. Randy Horwitz, Ph.D., M.D.:
Dr. Randy Horwitz, Ph.D., M.D., received a B.S. degree in biochemistry from the University of Illinois, and a Ph.D. in Immunology and Molecular Biology from the University of Florida. He received his medical degree from the University of Illinois, and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at University Hospitals (Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland.
Visit Dr. Horwitz at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine