Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [35]
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