 Aloha Friday everyone and welcome to Lillian's Vegan World where we talk about veganism and the plant-based diet. I'm coming to you live from the Think Tech Hawaii studios in downtown Honolulu and I do want to thank Think Tech for allowing shows like this to broadcast so huge mahalo to Think Tech Hawaii. Today I have a guest that I am actually meeting for the very first time and she has sort of intrigued me in some sense. I met her on social media and I had to ask her to come on the show. You'll see why as I introduce and am very excited to introduce my guest today, Ellen Hansen. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. The pleasure is all mine. Ellen, you are a nurse, yoga instructor, animal activist and vegan chef. I am. So you're one busy lady. I am. I am. Very busy. Yes. I didn't actually call you on to the show only because you're vegan. You just seem to have such a really healthy and positive and awesome lifestyle that I would love for you to share with our viewers. Well, I wasn't always healthy. I was pretty much like everybody else sort of a disconnect between buying the food in the grocery store and where it came from. And I was busy. I was working full-time, going to school, raising a family. And like all the other moms I know, it was what was convenient and quick and not expensive. And then it was actually my daughter, Meredith Ruby, she lives here in Oahu and she's also a yoga instructor. She came home and said, you know, mom, I'm not going to be eating meat anymore. And I thought, what am I going to cook now? So I had to start thinking about at least vegetarianism. And we did. We became vegetarian for quite a while. And then I watched a video on YouTube called the most important speech you'll ever hear by Gary Uralski. And that turned me into a vegan overnight. Okay. And I've been a vegan ever since. Yeah. He is amazing. If anybody is interested in looking to hear some real good stuff, I think Gary is a place where you should start. He was one of the first sort of vegan activists or people that I also listened to. Ellen, let's just back up a second, if you don't mind. Why did your daughter suddenly say to you that she wanted to stop eating meat or wanted to at least start becoming a vegetarian? Well, I think, you know, she moved into the city, into New York City, so she was exposed to a lot of different people. She started doing yoga, and she met some vegans. And she didn't know what that was, but she knew she wanted a more healthy lifestyle. So her friend, Heather, said I can teach you how to do it. And she gave her a shopping list, and Meredith came home and told me what we had to clean out of the pantry. Wow. Yeah, and that's how it started. And for me, I started to do more scientific research. Because I'm a nurse, I said, what is it? Is it true that being a vegan is part of being human? Because everybody says you have to have protein. You must eat meat. Right, where you get your protein from. A million dollar question. It doesn't matter how often we answer it. It still keeps coming back in, again and again back in. But that's how we're trained, you know, from childhood you must eat dairy, you must eat meat. And doing the scientific research and being in the medical field, I started to notice that people that were coming into the hospital were meat eaters, heavy dairy eaters, soda drinkers, sugar, all the things that I've cut out of my diet and feel so much better. But all the things that we grew up on, never ever, you know, being told by our parents or teachers or doctors to stop eating that sort of stuff, so it is going to be very interesting to see what the younger generation now are like when they're middle age to see whether all of this era of information that you cannot escape, what kind of effect it's going to have on their health because now there really is no room for being brainwashed, you just can't do it anymore and I think that's why people are starting to go, okay, well, we didn't know that our bodies are perhaps not meant to be consuming animal products and that's why probably we feel sick and that's probably why we get sick and all of the evidence seems to point in the direction that the plant based diet is the healthiest one on the planet. Oh, there is, absolutely, I meet so many people when we do the Cube of Truth from one of the organizations I volunteer for and we do outreach, so we speak to people on the street and they are either defend their position that they cannot live without it, I met a girl who was about 18 and she said, well, I'm an athlete, I have to eat meat, so I went on my phone and I showed her a picture of some of the bodybuilders that are vegan and she thought it was fake, she said, how do you build muscle without meat and I said, well, do you ever see a gorilla, look at their muscles, they're vegetarian, so it's really, it's mostly education, we're brainwashed from birth and you're right, now with social media, there's so much more exposure and I think that's a good thing because it forces people to think for themselves. So Ellen, you did mention that I think was it from the year 2000 you were actually a nurse and you were assisting in open heart surgeries for around six years? Right, I used to do the anesthesia, I'm a nurse anesthetist, that's like an anesthesiologist, so I would put the patient to sleep for surgery and the open heart surgery is when the arteries through the heart are actually blocked, so your heart's not getting any oxygen and that causes the heart to hurt and all of the patients were meat eaters, I've never operated on a vegan. See that's quite fascinating and that's very huge, what you just said, now I actually looked online to find some information about that and I needed a little bit more time but it's definitely a fact that less vegans are on the operating tables, undergoing heart surgeries. So Ellen, I did find an article that was published by Harvard Medical School and just a quick disclaimer for this show, no content on this show regardless of date should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice, so do seek advice from your doctor or other medical professional if you are looking to change your diet in a very drastic way but I do want to talk about the article that again Harvard Medical School put out and it says quote unquote, a vegan diet may help lower heart damaging inflammation more than the diet recommended by the American Heart Association, a new study finds the study included 100 people with heart disease which was defined as having at least one narrow heart artery, half were randomly selected to follow a vegan diet which excludes meat, poultry, dairy, eggs, seafood and fish, the others followed the AHA diet, so the American Heart Association diet which encourages lean poultry, fish and low fat dairy products along with plant based foods, so all of the participants received weekly groceries, a cookbook and sample menus, they also provided 24 hour diet, recall records twice a week on random days, now after eight weeks of this study it goes on to show that C reactive protein, what they are calling CRP levels with 32% lower, lower among people in the vegan diet group when compared with the AHA diet group, so elevated levels of CRP of course are the marker of inflammation that are associated with higher risk of heart attack. The study in the December 4, 2018 journal of the American Heart Association lends further support to the benefits of plant based diets. Absolutely, and I've seen the same study with the American Cancer Society where we now know that beef causes colon cancer, there's no question about it and in their diet they also suggest lean meat and when you think about meat in general it is full of chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, all kinds of horrible things that we're ingesting sit in our liver and how can that not affect our health, our circulatory system, so it's very irresponsible of these huge associations that everybody looks to for guidance in your diet and your health to say that it makes me wonder who is funding them. Yes, that's so well said Ellen, I mean it's obvious there are some big weeks out there that kind of perhaps feeling threatened by this whole, not vegan movement, lifestyle because it's not a movement, it's definitely a healthy lifestyle and anyway I think on this show one thing that I do hope that I'm achieving is to just bring more awareness and to have people like yourself coming on the show and pointing all these really important facts out is incredible. I'm so grateful that you're here to do that. Well I'm grateful that you're doing it because it is important work and people tend to look at vegans as some weird alien, you know, crazy group of people. We can't seem to sort of shift outside of that stereotype, except you know we're walking around like normal people, looking like normal people except only healthier, but yeah that stereotype still somehow exists, maybe one day one day we'll be accepted in society as you know part of the normal people and maybe eventually it will be the other way around like the people that still consume animal products might be in the minority. Exactly, I mean who's the fanatic? Ellen you prepared some slides for us, I would love to take a look at some of them, so let's have a look at the first slide. This is your business card, so go ahead Ellen and talk about this. So that's my business is neighborhood yoga, I'm a private and public yoga instructor and I like to incorporate yoga, meditation and nutrition, so a lot of my students start with yoga and then they'll come to me and tell me what their medical issues are and then I can sort of guide them in a plant based diet, a lot of women suffer from really bad cramps and they eat a lot of dairy and they are shocked when they cut dairy out of their lives that every month they don't have any cramps. It's as simple as that. Yeah it is amazing, I became vegan about almost 13 years ago now, prior to that I was a vegetarian throughout my childhood so I never ate meat or fish but I always ate dairy, I ate dairy through all those years and again for me the most difficult thing that I was giving up was the cheese but now we live in an era where vegan cheese, plant based cheese is everywhere, you can make them, you can buy them, so it's definitely gotten a lot easier. Going back to, yes you're also a yoga instructor, that's fantastic because it sort of all melds in what you're doing, you're on this really healthy lifestyle, you're taking care of your body, feeding it the good stuff and then you're also exercising and calming the mind as well because yoga is one of the best ways to not only exercise but also you get that meditation value that I think is also important and I talk about this on the show that stress is one of the worst things that you can do to yourself so it's not only about food however you know food obviously plays a huge role but getting those stress levels down, finding ways to make yourself feel good in general so. Well yeah, yoga, I did yoga for a year, I made a commitment when I first started before I was teaching, I decided to do yoga every day for a year so for 365 days I did yoga and in that one year I dropped my cholesterol 100 points without medication, dropped my blood pressure 25 points and my doctor had put me on Lipitor because my cholesterol was high and a year later she said I see the Lipitor is working and I said I never took it and she said well what did you do, I said I did yoga and she was stunned and it really worked. I think nowadays a lot of people like yourself actually are educating their doctors because they're quite behind the times when it comes to this vegan thing and I find every person that I meet who's on a plant based diet knows so much about the diet, knows so much about health what they have to eat and the one thing that I also don't do is pop pills and if I am going to need something for my body it's going to come from food and I'll find a way to get it in but Ellen, fascinating, we are heading for our first or our little break before the second half so just sit there tightly, we've got so much more to talk about and please stay tuned, we'll be back very shortly after the break. Aloha, my name is Mark Shclav, I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. My program airs every other Monday at one o'clock on Think Tech Hawaii. Most of my programs deal with my own life and law experience. Recently I interviewed Alex Jampel who I have known for over 30 years about his voyage across the sea as a lawyer from Tokyo to Hawaii. Those are the type of stories that I like to bring and like to talk about. Human stories about law and life. Aloha. Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, host of Beyond the Lines. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years and we are fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championship. This show is based on my book which is also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence, achieving and sustaining success and finding greatness. If you're a student, parent, sports or business person and want to improve your life and the lives of people around you, tune in and join me on Mondays at 11 a.m. as we go Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Welcome back everyone to Lillian's Vegan World. I have my awesome guest Ellen Hansen here with me today, yoga instructor, nurse, animal activist, vegan chef. Ellen, you're kind of like what we would call the perfect vegan. We've just been talking about yoga and how important it is and exercise. Ellen, if you don't mind, I do want to show some more of your slides and what I've prepared. Let's have a look at the next one. Captain Mushroom. What a wonderful name. I love it. Tell us about this slide. That's my husband, Vance. We used to live in the Virgin Islands. We had a charter boat company and Vance was the captain. He owned the boat and we were hit with two category five hurricanes in 2017, Hurricane Irma and Maria and it pretty much destroyed our island. After living there without any power or water for six months, I came to Oahu, visited my daughter, Meredith, and I went back and said to Vance, I'm going to Hawaii and you can come with me if you want or you can stay here. That sounds like a sweet way to give someone an ultimatum. Yes, it was sort of an ultimatum and he was wonderful. He came with me to Oahu. It was a big, big change for him but he said, what are we going to do now? It was very difficult to get into the boating industry here so he did a lot of research and after a few months he came up with, let's grow mushrooms. I thought, well that's not anything I'm very familiar with. I never thought of myself as a farmer but I trusted his judgment and I came up with the name Captain Mushroom to incorporate the past life with the present life. It's such a great name and I must say I'm sorry to hear that you had to go through that. It must have been tough that you're here now thriving, not only surviving, thriving and enjoying life. It's brilliant to see and I'm so happy for you. Thank you. Ellen, let's have a look at another slide. This is some of your vegan food. I had to ask you to include shots of your food because I find your food to be very, very beautiful. Thank you. What have you got here? So the striped one is Indian food. It's bagpineer which is spinach and vegan cheese and then instead of the chicken masala I make a tofu masala and in the middle is wasabi rice and on the outside is garlic and vegan butter naan. Yum. Really delicious. And then the top corner is my Italian vegan calzone with spinach and pepperoni and sausage and cheese, all vegan. So for those of you out there who think they can't have their Italian food, there you go, vegan calzone. And then the bottom is a vegan lasagna. Again with meat sauce and sausage and cheese, Parmesan cheese, vegan and ragotta vegan and mozzarella vegan, all homemade cheeses and I was a vegetarian for a long time as well and cheese was the hardest thing to give up but now I could never go back to regular greasy cheese because vegan cheese is delicious. That looks incredible. Yeah. And it just goes to show like you've got vegan all over that slide but if you didn't have the word vegan there, no one would really know. No one would now. And I'm sure that it is absolutely not only delicious but also very satisfying which is something that I think people are still these days misled into believing that somehow vegan food or plant-based dishes are not very satisfying but they are very hearty and filling because we have so much fiber in there as well. But the other thing about vegan food I find that my students or clients always say to me is after they eat huge amounts of vegan food in one sitting, they don't feel sick after. Right. Or sluggish. Or sluggish. They don't get that downer. You know when people eat a burger and fries or something. You have to take a nap. Yep, they're down. That's it. They're gone. So that's something that we don't have to deal with anymore because that's another benefit of being on the intense. We're much more productive. Yes. I don't need a nap at four o'clock anymore. No, I get more productive and more energetic. Yeah, definitely. That's perhaps a good thing. Let's have a look at another one, Ellen. Beautiful. Okay. So yeah, I wanted to talk about breakfast food because everybody thinks vegans only eat salad. And in the top left, there is a vegan omelet with sausage and cheese and vegan eggs made out of tofu. Sorry, Ellen. I showed this particular picture to my husband and he's asked me to cook something that looks like that. Sure. So I'm going to have to steal that very simple. Very simple. It looks just beautiful. It's easy. And then in the lower corner, that heart shape is one of our mushrooms from our company, Captain Mushroom. That's Elm Oyster Mushroom over quinoa and rice used with ginger. And then underneath is this eggplant and peppers, a whole bunch of different vegetables in a secret place. Mmm. And then the big one is my vegan chocolate mousse. Yes. So there is no dairy in that. It is made with coconut milk and avocados and a little cocoa. And it's so easy to make. It's things that I have in the house all the time. I don't have to go to the store if I want chocolate. I have it right in my house. That's another thing that a lot of people don't really know about, that avocado and chocolate, it makes a really great mousse, makes a really great dessert, and it's just so good for you. This is all like guilt-free eating, isn't it? Right. But very sophisticated, your food. I'm really loving it. Oh, thank you. The flavors, the spices, the presentation. It's very clever cooking. Oh, thank you. Have a look at another one. This is what I've got coming up this month. Ellen, as I told you, I am a chef, a vegan chef, and this month is all about Serbian cuisine gone vegan. So all of my events, cooking demos, lessons, and seven course lunches and dinners are going to be centered around the Serbian cuisine, which I'm veganizing. Very exciting. Yeah, so the star of this one's going to be my vegan feta cheese that I make from Tofu. And that's going to be incorporated into a lot of the dishes there. You can see the pie, that's actually a spinach and vegan feta cheese. Pillo pastry. Very popular in Serbia. My father was Serbian. So I grew up eating a lot of Serbian food. And having visited Serbia so many times, it has the most amazing food. Very underrated. So I hope that people come and join my Serbian month. Definitely. Vegan feta cheese. I know so many people that would love that recipe. Yeah, and so simple to make. Made from Tofu, so very, very quick and simple. That's neat. And another one. There it is. The vegan feta. Very simple, but very, you know, that salty edge. It makes food pop. Right. You want to stimulate your palate when you're eating. You don't want to be eating bland food again. Another misconception and myth about plant-based food because it's just so tasty. And I think that the Tofu, when you prepare it correctly, really takes on the right texture. Yes. Especially a feta cheese. Yeah, it does. It's so simple. You really wouldn't know the difference if it was crumbled up and added to dishes and stuff. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. Next one, please, Hailey. I do want to say thank you to Down to Earth. I had a really great class on Tuesday a few nights ago where I was doing my vegan cashew cheeses. So thank you very much Down to Earth and everyone who came to the class. Really appreciate it. Big mahalo to you all. And the next one. So here's just some dates for my vegan Serbian month. You can take a look at slowly and some of the dishes that I'll be serving. All Serbian dishes, very delicious, very unique in flavor. You can use any dish or any of in Honolulu. So it should be interesting. And the next one, please, Hailey. Here we go. This is stunning. These are all your creations, you and your husband, Vance at Captain Mushroom. Right. So these are where the mushrooms grow. They grow indoors in climate control. It's very, very technical. Vance takes care of all of that. In the top left corner are the blues. And they're delicious mushrooms. They hold up well in recipes. The ones in the right are called elms. And they grow intense. Awesome. They look so amazing. And I do have some here that you've brought in that are gorgeous, these elms. Sorry, we're running out of time, Ellen, but could you quickly tell us how we can buy these or get our hands on some of these mushrooms? You can just give us a call at Captain Mushroom and put in your order and we'll deliver. Okay, what's the number? It's 808-365-2622. Ellen, these look amazing. And I believe I'm going to have the pleasure to meet Captain Mushroom on my next show where we're going to go into more detail about these beautiful shrooms that you've got. Thank you. Ellen, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for coming. Thanks for having me. This was wonderful for me as well. And thank you everyone for tuning in again. Looking forward to seeing you all next time on Lillian's Vegan World. Have a great weekend and aloha.