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How a Vegan Diet Really Works
My science-based journey to a plant-based lifestyle
“Heart disease? Oh, c’mon, that’s so old school.” So went my thinking as I rode a conveyor belt into a CT scan in one of those dreary medical-imaging facilities I’d managed to avoid for the entirety of my 51 years. I was fairly certain this was just another test that didn’t really apply to me, one of the many my doctor had tacked on to the growing list of exams we Americans find ourselves subjected to as we move through the decades.
And why should it? I’d never smoked, I drank only in moderation — usually red wine. I exercised for a half-hour on most days, meditated not infrequently and did all the other things one is supposed to do to manage stress. The EKG tracings of my heartbeats were suitable for framing. True, I didn’t exactly follow Michael Pollan’s dictum to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” But I did mostly avoid processed junk. (Doritos while driving were, for some reason, allowed.)
I’d managed to limit myself to what I thought was a tolerable dozen or so pounds of extra weight and I ate red meat only a couple times a month. That my “bad” LDL cholesterol had been creeping up slowly since my early 40s didn’t concern me that much. My “good” HDL levels were, well, good, and my GP assured me that my ratio of good cholesterol to bad was, also, well, good. And anyway, hadn’t the whole cholesterol thing been debunked by some New York Times writer or something?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, both of my grandfathers had died of cardiovascular disease. And yeah, yeah, yeah, my blood pressure had started sneaking up on me too. Just as sneakily, in 2017 the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology lowered the standard for normal blood pressure by 10 points, placing me on the border of hypertension. Still, I continued to think of all this heart disease stuff as something that only applied to guys who carried around tackle boxes full of pills, listened to Sinatra on AM radio and instructed waitresses to “Go easy on the salt, will ya sweetheart? I gotta watch my presha.”
But unbeknownst to me, as my medical practitioners logged the various changes in my numbers, they were starting to reconsider my normally salubrious state of affairs, moving me out of what they considered “low…
