Scientific Power of the Vegetarian Diet

The center of our circulatory system, the heart, metaphorically represents our physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. It is the symbol of the energetic center of love. Diseases of the heart and cardiovascular system are devastating to human health; they are the number one cause of death and disability in the world.

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According to the World Health Federation, heart disease kills over seventeen million people a year, stealing more lives prematurely than all other causes of death combined. In the United States alone about 600,000 people die of heart disease every year—that’s one in every four deaths, making it the leading cause of death for both men and women. Every year about 720,000 Americans have a heart attack. Coronary heart disease costs the United States $108.9 billion each year. This total includes the cost of health care services, medications, and lost productivity.

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This health calamity across the globe is related to obesity and weight problems. Reflecting heart health statistics, more than a billion adults are overweight, and at least 300 million of them are clinically obese. The United States amplifies these statistics: 127 million Americans are overweight, sixty million are obese, and nine million are severely obese. While these rates are rising substantially throughout all of North and South America and Europe, obesity has now emerged even in traditionally slender populations such as China and Japan.

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Tragically, our heart health related epidemic has reached our young people as well: 15.5 percent of adolescents and 15.3 percent of children are obese in North America, an alarming increase in recent years. These figures for childhood obesity become even more disturbing when weighing the health costs: fully half of obese kids have a combination of high blood pressure, insulin resistance or pre-diabetes, unhealthy cholesterol, and other metabolic abnormalities.

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Houston, we have a problem.

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It is worth pointing out that for many of us, this is not a huge problem but rather a problem of simply being separated by a few extra pounds from our ideal weight. Somehow, though, these extra pounds become our albatross. Even a few pounds can loom large in the mind, becoming a nagging and oppressive thing far heavier than any reality. Ten extra pounds is like carrying a bowling ball around—if not in real life, then in our minds.

Vegetarianism protects heart health and weight in two ways.

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First, a plant-based diet moves you closer to your ideal weight. Vegetarians are thinner than non-vegetarians and in general, the thinner you are, the healthier your cardiovascular system is. While rates of obesity in the general population are indeed skyrocketing, obesity prevalence in vegetarians ranges from 0 percent to 4 percent body weight of both male and female vegetarians which is, on average, 20 percent lower than that of meat-eaters. The body mass index (BMI) of vegetarians is closer to the desired 20-25 BMI than that of the rest of the population. These weight statistics are seen throughout the world.

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Additionally, countless studies demonstrate that vegetarianism is also the easiest and healthiest way to lose weight and keep it off for good.[1] In fact, the vegetarian diet is the best way to shed unwanted pounds; in a famous year-long study comparing Dean Ornish’s vegetarian diet to the Weight Watchers® program, the Zone Diet, and the Atkins diet, the vegetarian diet showed the most weight loss.[2]

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This stands to reason. Meat and dairy are calorie dense foods and weight loss occurs simply by eliminating them from the diet. The average meat eater, doing nothing else but excluding meat from their diet, loses an average of two pounds a week. This weight loss increases dramatically if you also eliminate sugar and starches from your diet.

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There is an interesting correlation between conservative Christians and obesity. One of my mentors, the popular pastor Rick Warren saw this connection between excessive weight and his parishioners; while baptizing people, he noticed that most of them were…fat. This observation inspired him to write the bestseller, The Daniel Plan: 40 Days to a Healthier Life (with Daniel Amen and Mark Hyman) to address this very challenge. In it, the authors suggest eliminating meat and sticking to a vegetarian diet while initiating an exercise program like walking. This is sound advice for all of us.

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Weight loss and maintaining your ideal weight is just the first heart health benefit of a plant-based diet. A plethora of large-scale scientific studies show that vegetarian diets are extremely protective of heart health, and prevent deaths from heart attacks.

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When analyzing 8,300 deaths in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany among 76,000 men and women in five different, large studies, researchers concluded that vegetarians have a 24 percent reduction in death from heart disease.[3] This meta-study further demonstrates that the more you move towards veganism, the lower your incidence of all manifestations of heart disease.

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Similarly, in the famous Oxford Vegetarian Study where 6,000 vegetarians were compared with 5,000 meat eaters over nearly two decades, scientists found that the rate of death from heart disease was 28 percent lower in vegetarians than in meat eaters.[4] This older study has been repeated in many forms recently. Just one example: Scientists found in two large cohort studies that meat consumption was highly correlated with increased risk of coronary heart disease.[5]

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Do healthy meat eaters—people who don’t smoke and maintain a healthy weight with exercise, but who consume moderate amounts of meat— enjoy the same heart-healthy benefits provided by the vegetarian diet? Scientists compared vegetarians to healthy meat eaters, and vegetarians still had far lower rates of both heart disease and deaths from heart disease[6] [7].

 

The process of gradual blocking of the coronary arteries begins not in adulthood but in childhood...and the main cause of this arteriosclerosis is the steadily increasing amount of fat in the American diet, particularly saturated animal fats such as those found in meat, chicken, milk and cheeses. If there was another disease that caused half a million deaths a year, you can be sure that the public would be acutely aware of the danger, and that the cure or prevention would be practiced universally.

—Dr. Benjamin Spock

 

How does vegetarianism do this? Like the very arteries carrying blood throughout your body, it works through multiple avenues. Let’s zoom in to examine how a plant-based diet works this bit of magic.

 

“A man can live and be healthy without the killing of animals for food: therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking an animal’s life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.”

—Leo Tolstoy

 

Zooming in—Cholesterol:

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Perhaps the most serious risk factor in heart disease is cholesterol. The only foods that contain cholesterol are animal products, and so vegetarians have no cholesterol worries. Literally hundreds of studies make this point.

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An October 2015 meta-analysis of eleven large studies in the Journal of the American Heart Association examined how a strict vegetarian diet affects heart disease or risk factors for heart disease. In all the studies, people were randomized to receive a vegetarian diet versus a diet that included meat. The participants’ cholesterol levels were studied for up to six years.

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Here is a summary of what the researchers found about people’s cholesterol on a vegetarian diet:

• Total cholesterol was reduced by 13.9 mg/dL

• LDL (bad cholesterol) was reduced by 13.1 mg/dL

• HDL (good cholesterol) was reduced by 3.9 mg/dL

• Triglycerides levels were similar in nearly all studies regardless of diet

 

Please note that that pharmaceutical cholesterol medication does not often show these stellar results—in other words, going vegetarian is more powerful than our best medicine.

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 And let’s keep in mind that a mere 10 percent reduction in blood cholesterol levels lower your chances of getting a heart attack by a whopping 30 percent. This potent effect is seen in epidemiological studies around the world. People in China and Japan consume far less meat, and their cholesterol levels are much lower than people in the big meat-eating countries.[8]

 

“I don’t understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives.”

—Dr. Dean Ornish, Program for Reversing Heart Disease

 

[1] Huang, R.Y., Huang, C.C., Hu, F.B., Chavarro, J.E. (2016). Vegetarian Diets and Weight Reduction: a Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. The Journal of General Internal Medicine, 31(1):109-16.

[2] Dansinger, M.L., Gleason, J.A., Griffith, J.L., Selker, H.P., Schaefer, E.J. (2005). Comparison of the Atkins, Ornish, Weight Watchers, and Zone diets for weight loss and heart disease risk reduction: a randomized trial. The Journal of the American Medical Association, 293(1):43-53.

[3] Orlich, M.J., Fraser, G.E. (2014). Vegetarian diets in the Adventist Health Study 2: a review of initial published findings. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 100(1): 353S–358S..

[4] Thorogood, M., Mann, J., Appleby, P., McPherson, K. (1994). Risk of death from cancer and ischaemic heart disease in meat and non-meat eaters. BMJ, 308(6945):1667-70.

[5] Zong, G., Li, Y., Wanders, A.J., Alssema, M., Zock, P.L., Willett, W.C., Hu, F.B., Sun, Q. (2016). Intake of individual saturated fatty acids and risk of coronary heart disease in US men and women: two prospective longitudinal cohort studies. BMJ, 355:i5796.

[6] Mann, J.I., Appleby, P.N., Key, T.J., Thorogood, M. (1997). Dietary determinants of ischaemic heart disease in health conscious individuals. Heart 78, 450–455.

[7] Chang-Claude, J., Popanda, O., Tan, X.L., Kropp, S., Helmbold, I., von Fournier, D., Haase, W., Sautter-Bihl, M.L., Wenz, F., Schmezer, P., Ambrosone, C.B. (2005). Association between polymorphisms in the DNA repair genes, XRCC1, APE1, and XPD and acute side effects of radiotherapy in breast cancer patients. Clinical Cancer Research 11: 4802–4809

[8] Campbell, T.C., Campbell, T.M. (2006). The China Study. Dallas: BenBella Books, 1-932100-38-5.