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President Bill Clinton is a Vegan

President Bill Clinton promotes a vegan life style. 

The transcript of the interview is below:

Blitzer: How did you lose so much weight? What kind of diet are you on?

Clinton: The short answer is, I went on essentially a plant-based diet. I live on beans, legumes, vegetables, fruit. I drink a protein supplement every morning. No dairy. I drink almond milk mixed in with fruit and protein powder, so I get the protein for the day when I start the day out.

And it changed my whole metabolism and I lost 24 pounds. And I got back to basically what I weighed in high school.

But I did it for a different reason. I mean I wanted to lose a little weight, but I never dreamed this would happen. I did it because, after I had this stint put in, I realized that, even though it happens quite often, that after you have bypasses, you lose the veins because they’re thinner and weaker than arteries. The truth is that it clogged up. Which means that the cholesterol was still causing build-up in my vein that was part of my bypass. And thank God I could take the stints. I don’t want it to happen again.

So I did all this research and I saw that 82% of the people since 1986 who have gone on a plant-based, no dairy, no meat of any kind, no chicken, turkey… I eat very little fish, once in a while I’ll have a little fish, not often. If you can do it, 82% of the people who have done that, have begun to heal themselves. Their arterial blockage cleans up, the calcium deposit around their heart breaks up.

This movement has been led by a doctor named Caldwell Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic, Dean Ornish you know out in California, the doctors Campbell, father and son, who wrote The China Study, and a handful of others.

But we now have 25 years of evidence. And so I thought, well since I need to lose a little weight for Chelsea’s wedding, I’ll become part of this experiment. I’ll see if I can become one of those that can have a self-clearing mechanism. We’ll see.

Blitzer: I hope you’re healthy for many years and get to see grandchildren for many years to come.

Clinton: Me too. That’s really the big deal. You know I, Hillary and I, we’re happy, we love our son in law and we admire him, and we’d like to be around if there’s grandkids, we want to be there to do our part.

Blitzer: Mr. President, good luck. 

United Nations Urges Worldwide Shift Away From Animal Products
A new United Nations report entitled Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production is the first of its stature to actually stress the necessity of moving away from meat and dairy. Specifically, the paper says that “impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth [and] increasing consumption of animal products [...] A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.”

View the Executive Summary and the Findings and Conclusions (PDFs).

The report goes into detail about the consequences we can expect if business continues as usual. Increases in population and wealth have historically resulted in increased consumption of meat, dairy, and eggs, which they blame for the bulk of agriculture’s environmental impact. Agriculture is said to be responsible 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use and 19% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

It is now undeniable that we need to substantially reduce our use of animal products in order to prevent global catastrophe. The simplest way to do this is to adopt a vegan diet, which, in addition to avoiding all of animal agriculture’s ecological impacts, also spares the lives of dozens of animals each year- amounting to thousands over one’s lifetime. The American Dietetic Association calls a well planned vegan diet “healthful and nutritionally adequate […] for individuals during all stages of the lifecycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes” and adds that it “may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.”