Through all my medical training, I can still say that plants truly are the best medicine

In 2020, James and his wife Lina started “Elixir Shots” from their home-base in Newport Beach, CA. Lina is a Family Medicine Physician with a passion for lifestyle and integrative medicine. She has been influential in helping James thrive with a whole food plant-based diet, which helps him power through his busy schedule. When Lina isn’t busy practicing medicine with a preventative focus to help patients stay out of the hospital, she is crafting the most delicious, tasty, healthy recipes.

Meatless Movement recently had the opportunity to chat with Lina. She told Meatless Movement that the goal of Elixir Shots is to share these recipes with the world. The wellness shots are not only the tastiest but also the freshest organic cold-pressed nutrient powerhouses available on the market.

Please tell us more about yourself

Plant Powered Doctor Mama
plantbasedrx_

Hi, my name is Lina and I’m from San Diego, CA. I’m half Japanese, half German, and grew up going to school in Japan every summer. 日本語もしゃべります。I became vegan during medical school when I did a rotation with Dr McDougall, who wrote The Starch Solution and runs a 10 day program where patients come stay at a resort and eat buffet all you can eat style whole plant foods and reverse their diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and much more.

Plant Powered Doctor Mama – plantbasedrx_

I helped monitor patient blood pressures, blood sugars, etc and was astonished at HOW QUICKLY people who had been diabetic for decades stopped being diabetic even though we stopped all of their diabetes oral medications at the start of the program! They were eating as many potatoes as they wanted yet their blood sugars no longer qualified as being “diabetic”. This changed my life. For one, the food there was delicious. But also I know every medication has side effects and it’s far better to prevent or reverse the disease than to “manage” it with pharmaceutical pills (that don’t even work that well!)

Since then I turned the rest of my family vegan by showing them how delicious is can be and introducing them to the research. All my loved ones got the “How Not to Die” book for Christmas. A misconception about being vegan (that even my colleagues in medical residency would make) is thinking that vegan means you only eat salad actually, being vegan requires you to eat a lot more calorically dense plant foods than you would need if you were eating steak. I eat so many sweet potatoes it’s actually my family nickname. Another misconception is that I despise steak houses.

Actually, fancy steak houses tend to have fabulous side dishes of plant foods. And lastly, people think I’m living a restricted life. It feels quite the opposite. I eat such a variety of colorful fragrant foods, that eating a hamburger sounds incredibly boring in comparison!

See also Making every bite count

Our family business of wellness shots
Plant Powered Doctor Mama – plantbasedrx_

I met my husband in 2019 just a month before the pandemic, and he proposed 5 weeks after we met。 He also turned vegan and quit smoking and we started a wellness shot company called Elixir Shots using produce from his family farm in Kauai which grows 150 acres of organic foods like turmeric. We aim to make the freshest, most potent and best tasting turmeric shots on the market – and we’re killing it! Through all my medical training, I can still say that plants truly are the best medicine.

That’s why I trained in lifestyle and integrative medicine so I could learn the healthiest combinations of recipes to create for our shots and to make it easy for everyone to get the best out of earth’s superfoods like matcha, turmeric, cacao, ginger, and beets. Here’s our website https://elixirshots.com/

Like mommy like daughter
Plant Powered Doctor Mama – plantbasedrx_

By the way, I had a completely vegan pregnancy and I had a super healthy baby girl! 9lb 2 oz and could already lift her own head when she was born! I gained 30 lbs without ever counting calories or restricting portions, just eating all I wanted of whole plant foods and I think that’s why I had such a comfortable healthy pregnancy and was able to have a wonderful natural unmedicated birth. I think our baby continues to benefit from my vegan mommy milk too. Isn’t she cute?! Japanese, Lebanese, German, Italian mix.