The shortened version of the story
After being on a low fat, “mostly” vegan diet for about 6 months, I have lost 25 lbs, my cholesterol went from 214 to 156, I feel good, and I like collard greens.The longer version of the story
What should one believe about nutritional research? It seems like every other day we are bombarded with news stories about nutritional research or a new fad diet claiming to be the magic cure for the obesity epidemic in America. Most often, when reporters (or their writers/editors) refer to research, they have a tendency to exaggerate the benefits of “good” foods or misrepresent the risks of “bad” foods. The media doesn’t find it convenient to report the limited context of research and as a result they carelessly mislead their audience by extrapolating results to all people in all situations. Next time you hear a headline about a nutrition or health study, listen carefully to the details in the story and you too will begin to see how the media distorts language when they interpret and report on scientific research. Better yet, try to get a hold of the actual paper that discusses the results, including the researchers' own interpretations, to see exactly how limited the results are.One recent strand of research I began hearing a bit about was several studies related to vegetarian and vegan diets, and the reported results seemed pretty dramatic. As a researcher, I try to look for bias in interpreting all kinds of results, but as I read more about the research findings of vegan diets, I started to become convinced. But before I started citing the research myself, I decided to do my own research - a sample size of one (me). My specific research question: is a vegan diet "good" for you?
What convinced me this time to try a vegan diet?
Several factors actually came together at the same time to convince me to consider a vegan diet. Mike Tyson discusses several reasons to consider veganism and while none of his reasons directly applied to me, they may apply to others.Of course, there are more reasonable reasons for going vegan, some of which are pushed by “radical” animal rights groups. But trying to convince me that eating meat is cruel to animals isn’t as persuasive as other arguments in favor of plant based foods.
Here are the some of the factors that played a role in my decision to go vegan:
1. I’m interested in health issues
I guess part of my interest in health issues is my actuarial background. In my first job, I priced health insurance. As a result, I am still on quite a few mailing lists relate to health and nutrition issues. But probably most relevant to this study, I tend to pay some attention to changes in my own health and correlate that with what I am eating. In fact, I noticed that at the end of last summer, my weight starting to creep up. I didn’t have a huge complaint about the specific number on the scale, rather it was the trend that I didn’t like. Gaining weight was an indication to me that I probably wasn’t eating very well. But this didn’t come to much of a surprise to me since I was consuming (and enjoying) an endless array of smoked pork ribs, pulled pork sandwiches, beer can chicken, fatties, cheese stuffed bacon wrapped jalapeno poppers, plus tons of other tasty smoked goodness. Also, BBQ tends to take some time, so I waited for my food by having a few beers with friends and family. My startling conclusion: eating tons of rich, fatty, smoked BBQ, combined with volumes of tasty cold malt-flavored beverages leads to weight gain and is may not good for you (gasp!).2. My cholesterol
Another issue that led to my interest in diet changes was receiving the results of my blood test. While I’m sure I have taken a blood test in the past, it had definitely been a while. Certainly I was interested in the results of my previous blood work, but I don't think I ever got the results directly from my medical provider - probably because I’ve never lived somewhere long enough to see the same doctor twice. (Knock on wood… I’ve been lucky to be healthy.) Or perhaps I assumed that because I never got the results or received a phone call about it, everything from the blood test was considered “normal”.But I have always been curious of my cholesterol level (sadly, I realize I’m getting older) and so I took my first physical in many years during the month of July 2012, and the exam included a full blood test. Though there were many numbers I could not directly interpret from this test (what the hell is “anion gap”?), I knew that most doctors recommend that total cholesterol should be below 200. My total count was 214 - not “dangerous” but it was another indicator that I probably could attempt to eat a bit healthier. (Side note: some would argue that low cholesterol is not important, while others argue that genetics is a much more dominant factor in cholesterol levels. I fall in the camp that genetics is only one factor and that environment also plays a significant role. But I guess my study of a vegan diet was a joint hypothesis - is veganism healthy and is diet a contributing factor to cholesterol levels.)
3. Forks Over Knives and Similar Anecdotal Evidence
A third reason for changing my diet was curiosity about other research reports. I get up earlier than everyone else in my family (heck, most people do!), and on Saturday mornings the house is peaceful and quiet. To pass the time, I often sit and watch movies that others aren’t interested in, including a significant number of documentaries. I don’t like documentaries that promote crazy conspiracy theories (like trying to convince me that George Bush was in on a gigantic plot on 9/11 or that the Newtown, CT school shooting didn’t actually happen), but I prefer documentaries that actually educate the audience about an important issue and then go on to explain a specific solution that is backed by research.One of the movies I watched was Forks Over Knives and I was intrigued. (It’s on Netflix, so if you like documentaries, I think it was pretty well done.) The premise is that heart disease can actually be reversed through diet. Up until recently, while doctors recognized that genetics and diet contribute to heart disease, it was commonly believed that you could only stop the progression of the disease, but not turn back time. The one study that blew me away a bit was by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, who took 22 patients with severe heart disease whose doctors had given up hope to treat them. Their disease had progressed to the point where it was inoperable and these patients were literally left to die by their cardiologists. Dr. Esselstyn was frustrated that most medical and surgical procedures only treat symptoms (temporarily) and not the underlying causes of disease. So he wanted to look at the effects of diet and asked these heart patients to become part of his study. Five of the 22 dropped out because they couldn't commit to the diet. But of those that stayed with the diet, all survived over 15 years and had a significant reduction in risk factors for heart disease. (Of the 5 that dropped out, two died during the same period and all the others had significant coronary disease “events” such as heart attacks.)
The focus of Dr. Esselstyn's study was a plant-based diet. In the beginning, other doctors were skeptical and the diet was criticized as being extreme. But Dr. Esselstyn quips “they call our diet extreme, but half a million people a year have their chests cut open and a vein from their leg sewn onto their hearts, some of which is likely to be caused by diet. I call that extreme.” Forks Over Knives shows stories of several people who lost significant weight, eliminated numerous medications, dramatically lowered their risk for diabetes and heart disease, and simply made these people feel better. It seemed almost too good to be true. So I wanted to learn more.
Then I kept hearing other anecdotal evidence of individuals on a vegan diet. On more than one occasion, I had seen or heard interviews of people who were clearly in good or better health. During the conversation, the questioner complimented the individual saying “you look good, how do you do it?” and the answer I kept hearing is “I stopped eating meat and dairy”. As an example, consider Bill Clinton who has been a follower of the diet mentioned in Forks over Knives.
Ultimately, as the evidence piled up, I just got too curious.
4. It made sense to me
A fourth reason for considering a vegan diet is that it seemed reasonable to me. I mentioned that I do tend to read a reasonable amount about nutrition and health. As I started to learn about a plant-based diet, I started to wonder “of course it HAS to be good for you. Who would actually say that eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains while eliminating fats and oils is actually bad for you?” Probably every nutrition study you’ve ever heard of probably concludes that diets high in vegetables and whole grains are good for you, especially your heart. That has been a consistent story. Consider indisputable simple facts like plant based foods have zero cholesterol, (usually) have less saturated fat (if any at all), or that vegetables tend to have a wider variety of vitamins and nutrients than meat. I think most doctors would agree that those are generally all worthy goals for a healthy diet. While there is some direct evidence to support this, some of what I read indicated fairly rapid and dramatic improvements in health measures. I just had to test it.My friends and family remember that I am an advocate of a low-carb diet (well I guess … I was an advocate). People will suggest that I am completely abandoning my beliefs and reversing my diet now. There is an element of truth to that, no doubt. But what many people don’t realize about the Atkins diet is that it is much more vegetable based than you might think. Most fresh vegetables are very low in carbohydrates and the Atkins diet places emphasis on lettuce (of all varieties), salad vegetables (cucumbers, tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, etc), squash, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, green beans, and even sweet potatoes. Significantly restricting carbs in the Atkins diet is only part of the early weight loss phase while transitioning to low carb. As you get to a point where you want to maintain your weight, Atkins adds back whole grains like brown rice, oatmeal, and whole wheat. In fact, some research supports Atkins, suggesting that low carb leads to health improvement measures, including lower cholesterol. I would argue that some of these benefits come from eating more fresh vegetables which are a major part of the low carb diet.
I hear some people say “but doesn’t Atkins allow you to eat all the bacon, cheese, and oil that you want?” Again, even in the strictest phase of the diet, they do not advocate eating only meat. If you look at some of the original material available on the diet (back in the 1970s), Dr. Atkins makes it a point to still “eat healthy,” meaning that bacon is clearly less good for you then lean beef, chicken, or fish. I remember a live interview where the questioner was somewhat rudely accusing Dr. Atkins of advocating a diet that promotes eating double bacon cheeseburgers, as long as you skip the bun. Frustrated, Dr. Atkins actually fought back and chastised the interviewer on air for not doing background work before the interview to understand what the diet was all about. He then went through what he ate over the last 24 hours: poached eggs over a whole wheat english muffin for breakfast, spinach salad with broiled salmon for lunch, and roasted, skinless chicken with sweet potatoes and brussel sprouts for dinner. Then Dr. Atkins ended by saying "I cannot remember the last time I had a bacon cheeseburger, because as a cardiologist, every day I see the effects that link the significant amounts of saturated fat in beef, cheese, and bacon in the American diet and resulting heart disease." I remember the blank look on the interviewer's face who clearly was over their head in the interview. While the current Atkins literature says to eat “healthy” fats, it doesn’t seem to educate people about the difference between what is healthy and what isn’t. To me, the South Beach Diet made a name for itself by simply refining the Atkins diet and openly restricting the types of meats and cheeses that should be eaten.
Anyway, my point is that, while it may seem a contradiction, there is actually a reasonable overlap between an Atkins diet and a vegan diet. Which got me to thinking, where is the overlap among ALL diets? What types of food are allowed in the Mediterranean diet, Atkins, vegan, paleo, Weight Watchers, South Beach diet, raw food, etc.? To me, every single one promotes fresh vegetables and whole grains. Many advocate fruit too, but to a lesser extent. So again I wondered: why not restrict ourselves to those items that are accepted on all of these diets? Who would argue that this would be bad for you?
Thus, reason #4 - it just made sense to me.
5. Plant based foods are better for the environment.
The fifth reason I find going vegan compelling is that plant based foods are better for the environment. Animal based food production is fairly wasteful and you can feed more people on an acre of land planted with vegetables than you could if using the land for meat. In fact, this is probably one of the reasons that back in the early 90s, though I wouldn’t have called myself a vegetarian, I rarely ate meat, especially during the week or at home. From those days, I still have several cookbooks that I bought which focuses on vegetarian food. At that time, I fell victim to the false belief that vegetarians don't get enough protein. I remember going to the doctor and telling them that I was worried about protein intake since I didn't eat a lot of meat and the doctor's response was to literally laugh at me. (Though I admit, most people laugh at me when they meet me, I'm pretty sure it was my question about protein intake...though I can't be too sure.) Her follow up response was that Americans eat too much protein (especially when compared to the amounts suggested by the USDA) and that as long as I wasn't starving, I should stop worrying about getting enough.But back in those early 90s days, I still definitely ate meat, especially when I went out to eat at restaurants, but occasionally at home since Chicago had some damn good butchers (like the Paulina meat market). I think I pretty much ate this way until I got a full sized Weber grill. I love grilled foods and at that point, I used my grill quite a bit, all year long. If you pick up any BBQ cookbook, most recipes are based on large quantities of meat. And I loved it, which is why I now own three different types of grills.
I'm no "radical" animal rights person at all, so the argument that eating animal products is cruel isn't that persuading to me. But I do care about the environment (does this make me a radical liberal?) and I've smelled a hog farm up close and from many miles away. The smell by itself is not good for the environment.
6. I’m a researcher
Finally, my interest in testing a vegan diet stems from pure science. Not that I'll ever get anything published from this research, but the point is that I was just really curious. Despite the fact that most people think college professors just teach, I do have other responsibilities, specifically research. When people ask me “what do you do in the summer?” the answer is that I get to devote more time on this other half of my job.As a researcher, I am fascinated by nutritional research, partly because of its importance but partly because of how difficult it must be to prove anything definitively when there are so many variables to consider. We have all been frustrated by nutritional research that appears to contradict itself periodically- coffee is good for you one week and bad for you the next. Same for eggs, butter, and (it seems like) a billion other things. The problem is that this type of research is so difficult and it is so time consuming. How do you create an experiment that can isolate one specific factor and directly measure its impact on our long term health? Answer: it's really, really hard.
As an example, if you wanted to design a test to see if butter is bad for you, you’d have to have two completely identical people eat exactly the same diet with only one specific difference: one person eats butter while the other doesn’t. Everything else would have to be exactly the same: age, gender, occupation, family stress, exercise, etc. Constructing such an experiment is impossible, so we have to try to factor out other differences. Since butter has calories, we can't just add butter to one diet without substituting other calories in the control group. Then how do we interpret the results? Is it butter directly that is bad for you or is it the cholesterol or saturated fat or the dairy component? Or is it because we tend to put butter on refined white bread or pasta or use it as a turkey baste on Thanksgiving, which means the better gets roasted in the oven thereby changing its chemical compounds? Can the negative effects of butter be offset by other issues? For example, perhaps the French eat more butter than Americans, but does their wine consumption help alleviate the potential negative effects of butter? How long of a test do we need to make a conclusion from these tests and how many people do we need to include? How much will this research cost? Ugh… this is all very difficult which is why each and every research study needs to be qualified based on all of these factors. If the study is based on rats over two months, I'm skeptical.
Knowing these limitations, I was just too curious, so I decided to test the theory of a plant-based diet on myself - sample size of one.
The results
My results won’t be published in any journal because the sample size is too small and my measurable health indicators cannot be statistically tested but here was my experiment. From about the beginning of September to March, I modeled my diet after the recommendations of the Forks Over Knives or similar Engine 2 Diet. This meant I wasn't supposed to eat any meat, fish, or dairy, plus severely restrict the use of oil. Did I “cheat” over that six month period? Of course I did - I wasn't "perfect". I’d say I had a small piece of meat about once per month and I ate cheese (probably veggie pizza) or dairy (perhaps a dip with sour cream) about once per week. No doubt my biggest “cheat” was sushi (with fish), which I ate quite a bit at the beginning of the experiment, but later I discovered how to make sushi at home (without fish) and it actually tasted pretty good. Plus homemade sushi was not as difficult as I thought it was going to be, and it was a lot cheaper than eating out. So while I did dramatically lower my intake of meat and dairy, I wasn't perfect over this six month period. Outside of these changes to what I ate, I cannot really think of any other changes that I made that would influence my results. In particular, I still drank too much.After six months of this diet, here are a smattering of my results:
- My cholesterol went down from 214 to 156
- I lost 25 pounds and my weight is much more consistent over time
- You could set your clock by the timing of my bowel movements
- I never count calories, carbs, or anything else
- I never feel overly “stuffed” or need a nap after having a big meal, but I still am very satisfied after I eat
- My body just feels “cleaner” - hard to describe, but I just feel better with less fatigue during the day, especially after lunch
- I’ve shaved about 40 seconds off my running pace (per mile)
- I’ve had to buy smaller pants
However, I will admit, the hardest thing for me to avoid most of the time is cheese. I guess I never really realized what a cheese addict I was. When reading about vegans, I saw that the number one source of saturated fat in the American diet is cheese - it certainly was in my diet. I put cheese on everything, mostly because cheese is delicious. Cheese has been the one thing that I probably haven’t lost the taste for and certainly I have less willpower against it. On more than one occasion, I had good intentions walking into a pizza place, expecting that I would “be good” and just get some pasta with tomato sauce while those I was with would have pizza. But one smell of that pizza oven and one look at that flowing, gooey cheese would put me over the edge. While I could ask for cheeseless pizza, my willpower over the dairy industry is just not that good. Or the cheese balls at Joe's Station House...aggggghhhh....
So what exactly do I eat?
Mike Tyson described a vegan diet as “eating a lot of stews… kind of soupy”. This is pretty accurate since you can make a soup out of just about any vegetable and add any type of starch or bean to create a meal. And this is a good thing because I've always been a fan of soup. I also carry over one aspect of my low carb days too by creating a variety of salads that are composed of just vegetables. But back in my Atkins days I would add tons of cheese, chicken, and ranch dressing. Now I add beans, skip the cheese, and use balsamic vinegar or salsa as a dressing. For breakfast, I've become an old man and eat oatmeal or shredded wheat with fruit and nuts.One difficulty that I will admit is that it’s like learning how to cook all over again. Something as simple as sauteeing vegetables was "new" because I wasn't supposed to use oil (I use vegetable broth instead). I started adding vegan meals slowly, a few times a week, because I just didn't have the creativity to come up with new meals every single day. Over time, I gathered recipes and got more comfortable trying new things. I have always been a pretty adventurous eater, but there are a lot of ingredients that I never ate before and I am trying to figure out ways to cook them. (Although living in central Illinois, some ingredients can be hard to come by given the basic meat and potatoes living of most of the population here.)
If you wanted to go by the book and be a complete vegan, the absolute most challenging moments are going out to eat at a restaurant. And this is a problem for me because I like to go out to eat - even though I live in the most boring restaurant town in the country. Finding a vegan meal on a restaurant menu is pretty much impossible (make it a game - try it next time you're out to eat). In fact, if vegan research is correct, look no further than a restaurant menu to explain some of the health problems in the US as just about everything has large portions of meat and/or cheese in it, with a side of fried something. On the plus side, since there isn't a lot of vegan friendly restaurant options, perhaps I might even save a few dollars by not eating out as often.
Going to parties can be a bit tricky too because there is nothing more delicious than grazing on finger food for several hours. Plus, most of these items include my Achilles heel - cheese. But usually when invited to a party, the host/hostess asks others to contribute by bringing a dish with them to share - I just make sure that the item I bring is something that is acceptable for me to eat. Plus, chips are technically vegan and there’s usually a bowl of salsa, or alternatively someone brings pretzels.
The experiment is over - but will I continue?
Based on the results of my very limited experiment, if I were a reporter I'd proclaim a vegan diet as having significant positive effects on health. In particular, my cholesterol has fallen significantly, my weight has been very constant, and in general, I really do just feel better. But I will admit that the most challenging aspect of eating this way is that it just isn't as convenient as other ways of eating. In fact, when compared to other diets, this is typically the biggest criticism of being a vegan. However, I feel like I've gotten over the most difficult part: learning how to cook new meals, suffering through animal product withdrawals, and accepting, even liking, collard greens. I can see that instead of "cheating" with meat, I might be more likely to periodically add certain ingredients, such as olive oil. But I can see myself continuing to eat this way in the near term.But talk to me again at the end of the approaching BBQ season.
