Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World (10 page)

You may be thinking that a vegan diet may be too challenging, and a more moderate diet change may seem more sensible. I always encourage people to “lean in” to a diet change so that the changes come comfortably and gradually. But when you have specific health concerns, a moderate change might not do the trick. If you are at serious risk it makes good sense to intervene in a major way. After all, if you were using medicines, you would not prescribe cold medicine for heart disease or cancer; you would prescribe the most effective medications in the best regimen possible. The same is true for diet. Someone who is killing himself with food needs a major change.

Interestingly enough, lots of research shows that the more changes people are asked to make, the more they make. Perhaps it’s more exciting to do a lifestyle overhaul rather than to just pick and choose a few small changes. It might not stick the first time you try, but just like quitting smoking or achieving any new skill, you may need more than one try.

I have devoted a section at the back of this book to “making the switch.” It’s full of ideas for what to buy, how to plan meals, and good snack foods. Do hang out in that section of the book for a while; I think you will find some interesting meal choices and tips. Most important of all, be gentle and kind with yourself. Try it, and try it, and try it until it sticks. Lean, and if you are so moved, leap!

Did you know?

• The current generation of children just might be the first to have shorter life expectancies than their parents, reversing the trend of ever-longer lives.
  
• The poor circulation from clogged arteries that can cause heart disease and stroke can also cause impotence and dementia. For the same reason that a vegan diet can reverse heart disease, it can also improve brain and sexual health.
  
• Whole plant-based foods have antiaging and anti-disease properties animal foods do not.
  
• Vegetarians live ten years longer than the average meat eater.
  

Modern culture has a love affair with meat. It’s everywhere—in the vast majority of homes and in most menu items. You look at the commercials on TV and you are persuaded to believe it’s wholesome, natural, and good for you. It also looks fun and social to enjoy meaty, cheesy dishes with friends and family. To many, meat signifies prosperity—not too long ago, only those of generous means could afford to eat meat regularly. But it’s become obvious over the past few decades that this prosperity, and the constant availability of food that comes along with it, is actually harming our health. We’ve already looked at the effects of our expanding waist-lines on our health, but there’s an even more sinister aspect of our prosperity diets: the fact that they’re shortening our lives and dramatically diminishing our quality of life as we age. In fact, the current generation of children just might be the first to have shorter life expectancies than their parents, reversing the trend of ever-longer lives.

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) lists the top three U.S. causes of death in 2006 as heart disease (631,636), cancer (559,888), and stroke (137,119). Just a couple of spots down on the list, diabetes killed 72,449.

We’ve already examined the fact that these causes of death can be inextricably linked to our diets—and that eating a more plant-based diet may actually reverse heart disease and stroke, and lower your cancer and diabetes risks substantially. So, of course, these simple effects will all but guarantee you a longer life (well, unless your newfound vitality turns you into another Evel Knievel!).

Quality of Life

Longevity isn’t just about living longer, of course—it’s about being healthy and living better, right through our twilight years. We want to feel vibrant and full of energy; we want to grow old with the physical and mental vitality to enjoy every minute we have on earth. After all, who wants to live a few extra years if it means being in constant pain or going senile?

People today might be living longer, but in our culture, they are also spending more time suffering from chronic diseases that cause weakness or incapacity (physical and mental). And, of course, just as our diet can kill us from heart disease or cancer, it can also incapacitate us and make our lives less pleasant (or even excruciating) from seriously debilitating conditions like dementia or Alzheimer’s, or less-serious warning signs of bigger problems like impotence, lethargy, and bad circulation.

According to the CDC, the life span of the average American in 2006 (the most recent numbers available) was 77.7 years, which is similar to other developed countries. Nearly 78 years of life sounds pretty good—after all, it’s far more than most people could expect just a hundred years ago—until we take a look at some of the problems that more and more of us are suffering through as we age.

Since I started writing about moving toward a plant-based diet, one thing that I hear from people—constantly—is that their change in diet has dramatically improved their life, almost instantly. Once people eliminate animal products from their diet and replace them with whole grains and legumes, their body can digest their food more easily. They feel lighter, have more energy, need less sleep and coffee, and so on. This only makes sense: Any food that can clog your arteries and kill you from heart disease, or lead to cancer, obesity, and diabetes, is sure to have serious short-term consequences as well (e.g., obesity or angina, and the many quality-of-life effects associated with both conditions).

Of course, the properties of whole vegan foods—fiber, complex carbohydrates, healthy plant proteins—are exactly what everyone in the medical establishment tells us we should eat more of. And the nutrients inherent in animal foods—animal proteins, saturated fat—are the nutrients that, over the long term, make us sick and can kill us. Again, animal products have no fiber at all, and no carbohydrates of any kind. That’s a prescription for ill health, and the more of them you eat, the less healthy you are likely to be.

Dr. Dean Ornish explains that “whole foods such as fruits, vegetables, grains, and beans contain literally thousands of other substances that are protective, having antiaging, anti-cancer, and anti–heart disease properties. These include fiber, isoflavones, carotenoids, bioflavonoids, retinols, lycopene, genistein, on and on.” He talks about the fact that when people adopt his low-fat plant-based diet to lose weight or reverse their heart disease, their sexual function, mental clarity, and energy all improve as well. As he puts it, they adopt the diet because they “fear dying.” Very soon, they see dramatic positive results, and they stay on the diet because they enjoy living.

Let’s talk about just two of the benefits of a plant-based diet, for your long-term joy in living: prevention of dementia and impotence.

Alzheimer’s and Other Forms of Dementia

Alzheimer’s disease, which affects more than 5 million people in the United States alone, is an irreversible degenerative brain disease that has to be, I think, the worst “natural” way to die. You lose your memory, your personality changes, you basically become a different (and certainly not better) person—an infant in your old age. And then you die—Alzheimer’s is the sixth most common cause of death in the United States, and it’s growing in prevalence (by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2006, according to the Alzheimer’s Association).

Not surprisingly, the causes of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia are the same as the causes of heart disease. According to a 2010 report from the Alzheimer’s Association, “A growing body of evidence suggests that the health of the brain—one of the body’s most highly vascular organs—is closely linked to the overall health of the heart and blood vessels.” The Association specifically notes that Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia have the same risk factors as “high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, smoking, obesity and physical inactivity…. Many of these risk factors are modifiable—that is, they can be changed to decrease the likelihood of developing both cardiovascular disease and the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.”

“The link between heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease is growing in strength every few months,” according to the Association’s scientific director, Bill Thies, speaking to
ABC World News
. “And we predict it will continue to grow…. I’m not surprised that there’s a relationship…. The heart is the organ that supplies essential elements to many parts of the body, and the brain is just one of the first.”

So we can easily make connections based on our analysis of heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. For the same reason that almost 100 percent of heart disease is preventable, dementia—including Alzheimer’s—can be staved off by a healthy vegan diet. And sure enough, we learn from Dr. Esselstyn that “at least half of all senile mental impairment is caused by vascular injury to the brain” and that “clogged arteries serving the brain and clogged arteries serving the heart are part and parcel of the same disease.”

He tells of one study of 500 eighty-five-year-olds, which found that fully one-third of them showed some form of dementia. A careful analysis revealed that in half of those with dementia, their mental impairment was due to a diseased arterial blood supply to the brain. Similarly, a study in the Netherlands focused on 5,000 people between the ages of fifty-five and ninety-four. “The researchers studied the circulation in the brains of all their subjects, then asked them to perform various written tests of mental acuity. The results were quite clear: those suffering from artery disease and thus impaired circulation in the brain performed less well on the tests than did those whose arteries were clean. Age made no difference. Arterial health was the variable that counted.”

Dr. Esselstyn concludes, “Just as you are not doomed to heart disease as you grow older, you also are not doomed to mental deterioration. Most cases of stroke and dementia, like heart disease, need never occur. Your aorta, along with all your other arteries, can be as clean at ninety years of age as they were when you were nine.”

Wow.

And Now Impotence

Viagra is the best-selling drug in U.S. history, but apparently it needn’t be so. Once upon a time, doctors thought that impotence was a purely mental condition. Now we know that the vast majority of cases are physical. And the cause of impotence: clogged arteries.

You might have read about the links between obesity and impotence, and diabetes and impotence. Of course, overweight men and women have worse circulation than people who maintain a healthy weight. One study published by the American Urological Association found that obese men had twice the impotence rates of men of a healthy weight. Similarly, the Harvard Medical School explains that “diabetes can cause nerve and artery damage in the genital area, disrupting the blood flow necessary for an erection.”

Impotence can also be a sign in itself of other problems. Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Ornish have both written about the connection between impotence and elevated cholesterol. According to Esselstyn, impotence is “as robust a predictor of cardiovascular disease as elevated cholesterol, smoking, or a strong family history of the disease.” Dr. Ornish writes in the introduction to his book
Eat More, Weigh Less
: “When you get less blood flow to your sexual organs, your sexual potency decreases… The reason that Viagra is one of the best-selling drugs of all time is that so many people need it. Impotence… is a silent epidemic, present in at least one-half of men over the age of forty. Did you know you’re much more likely to be impotent if your cholesterol level is elevated?”

I am talking here about impotence, a male problem, but for women, too, sexual pleasure is also dependent on blood flow. So although women don’t experience impotence, clogged arteries can—for the exact same reason they inhibit erectile function in men—inhibit sexual pleasure for women.

A Few Case Studies on Plant-based Diet and Circulation

I have included a variety of case studies in this book—anecdotes that support the overwhelming scientific evidence that diet can be used to beat back the greatest health scourges that are affecting the developed nations. When I started looking for stories, I was bowled over by how many there are—including dozens in Dr. Esselstyn’s book, and many more on Dr. John McDougall’s website (more on him soon). And they are all so deeply inspiring. In a moment, I’m going to introduce you to Dr. Ruth Heidrich, who is one of my heroes, but first, I’d like to mention just a few from two of my favorite nutritional experts.

Dr. Esselstyn explains:

Esselstyn tells of a man who came to him with multiple blockages in his coronary arteries. He was experiencing chest pain when he walked, and was scheduled for bypass surgery. After just eleven days on a low-fat, plant-based diet, the pain was gone. He canceled his surgery. In addition to publishing his best-selling book, Dr. Esselstyn also published his findings in the
American Journal of Cardiology
.

Dr. Ornish tells of “a man named Mark [who] came to my office and showed me a photograph of how he looked two years earlier. I hardly recognized him—because he weighed 335 pounds then and only 165 pounds now. He lost 170 pounds by following the program outlined in
Eat More, Weigh Less
and has not regained it.”

Of course, anecdotes are not science; but these doctors—and others—have published their results, which prove that these anecdotes put faces to the vast numbers of people who have beaten heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, impotence, dementia, and more—by changing the way they eat.

Other Factors That Influence Longevity

Okay, just so you don’t think I’m
only
about a plant-based diet, here are some other recommendations for long-term health and happiness!

1. Regular physical activity

It’s no secret that regular exercise benefits the body in a wide variety of ways. Regular physical activity helps us look better, increases energy levels, and boosts self-confidence. Evidence also suggests that it may help you live longer. Moderate physical activity is associated with a lower risk of heart disease and diabetes. A 2005 study conducted by the U.S. Department of Public Health and the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam found that women over fifty gained 1.5 years of life if they were moderately active, and 3.5 years if they led highly physically active lifestyles. While it is difficult with our superbusy lifestyles to be physically active, it is not impossible. It may be just a matter of trading up your morning coffee routine for a quick jog or brisk walk around the neighborhood that could make a huge difference in the length and quality of your life!