Re: Why are you a vegan?

Description: For health and vitality.

Transcript: Well first of all it started with love, as all stories do.  I met someone years ago, fell in love, and found out she was a vegan.  Now I didn’t know what a vegan was.  And for those of you who are tuning in and you don’t know what a vegan is, I’ll make it simple.  It starts with your approach to what you eat.  It means that I don’t eat any meats, poultry, fish.  I don’t eat any dairy products.  You know there goes Iowa, right?   In the book that I mentioned earlier, “Courage to Survive”, I talk about a bout with Crone’s disease that I had since I was a little kid.  I didn’t know until years later in life that dairy products had something to do with irritating that condition.  And so when I switched diets – this was in 1995 – I started to achieve a level of health that I didn’t have before.  I lost a little bit of weight to be sure, and it became an adventure to find out what’s appropriate substitutes – beans, grains, tofu.  There’s a lot of different substitutes that you can have in moving towards a vegan diet.  But I had a level of health that I hadn’t experienced before.  So I’m not gonna tell anyone, “Well this is the way you have to eat.”  I can share with people what I’ve discovered by changing my diet.  And I have enormous amounts of energy . . . and clarity, by the way.  So I don’t feel like I’m dragging.  And I have more energy than people half my age.  I’m 61 years old, and you know I . . .  I have a very young wife.  And you know if you’re gonna be in a relationship, you better be in good shape because, you know, you’ve got to be able to have a lot of vitality.  And I have enormous vitality because of my diet. 

Recorded on: 10/19/07