Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [39]
My awakening to the harm of dairy and meat came in middle age, almost thirty years ago. I was forty-seven years old and healthy—or so I thought. Like so many athletes of my generation, I ate lots of chicken, fish, and low-fat dairy.
While in the shower one morning, I found a lump in my right breast. My doctor thought cancer unlikely, but scheduled a mammogram, to rule it out, he said. I was, as you can imagine, delighted when the results came back negative; to be safe, I was encouraged to schedule annual mammograms, which I did. For the next two years, the results were negative.
That third year, though, my life was turned upside down: positive. And not just positive, but the lump was now golf-ball size. The doctor did an immediate excisional biopsy (meaning that he intended to remove the entire lump) and found that it was infiltrating ductal cancer, an invasive cancer that was already spreading to my bones, liver, and left lung. And because there were no clear margins, meaning they didn’t get it all, I had to go back for more surgery.
My doctor, as well as other doctors I consulted, recommended standard cancer care—chemotherapy, radiation, tamoxifen. I wanted answers, but all I had were questions and uncertainty. No one could tell me if I had months to live, or years. They couldn’t tell me if I might send the cancer into remission, or anything else. I felt totally powerless.
And even more: I felt betrayed. I was an athlete. I stayed away from high-fat foods and junk food. I ate a lot of chicken, fish, and low-fat dairy. How could this happen to me?
As I pondered chemotherapy, radiation, and so on—I got more and more scared. I read that people on chemotherapy didn’t necessarily live for longer than people who didn’t have chemotherapy. But by then I had resigned myself to it.
By the wildest of coincidences, I came across an advertisement for a research study that Dr. John McDougall was conducting with breast cancer patients. My first consultation with Dr. McDougall was revelatory. I’ll never forget the first thing he said to me after he reviewed my record—that my cholesterol level of 236 put me at a risk of heart attack that was on par with my risk of dying from my cancer.
Dr. McDougall encouraged me to change my diet, noting that ample research had shown (and the evidence is much stronger now) that diet is linked to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and a host of other ailments. In fact, making the dietary change was a condition of my being a subject in his study. Remarkably to me as one who grew up with “the four food groups,” his biggest recommendation was the elimination of animal products, which constituted two of the four groups (and about half of what I was eating).
Once Dr. McDougall showed me the science, and explained the power of the research—especially about diet and cholesterol level—I was convinced. I adopted a vegan diet—and became a subject in his research study—that very day.
I know that some people find a vegan diet difficult to follow, but I can’t understand how or why. For me, the diet opened me up to a range of foods that I had previously ignored. My old diet was centered on four animals, with everything else only making up “sides,” that now strikes me as narrow and boring. My new vegan diet was exciting, colorful, and much more varied than my previous diet.
Anyway, my body responded immediately. And I do mean immediately: From that point on, I’ve had daily bowel movements—I had been constipated my entire life and had no idea why. Doctors had told me that going three or four times per week is normal for some people; maybe in a meat-based culture, but once you adopt a vegan diet and begin to go every day (sometimes repeatedly, especially if you’re athletic and thus eat a lot), you realize that for the entirety of your pre-vegan life, you’ve been incubating rotting food for days at a time. You felt lethargic, heavy—and didn’t even know why.
My oncologist assured me that my diet and cancer were unrelated, but I’d seen so much evidence linking diet and cancer that I didn