HOW TO LIVE LONG AND DIE WELL
Author of The Secrets of People Who Never Get Sick: What They Know, Why It Works, and How It Can Work for You
In 2013, a study of more than 73,000 subjects by researchers at Loma Linda University in California created compelling headlines around the world. According to the report, vegetarians had a 12 percent lower risk of dying over a six-year period than nonvegetarians. Vegans had even better numbers: a 15 percent lower risk of death. (Lacto-ovo vegetarians, who consume dairy and eggs, had a 9 percent lower risk, and semi-vegetarians, who eat some meat, had an 8 percent lower risk.)
As remarkably cheerful as plant-based eaters found this news, there’s more to consider. For one, vegetarians and vegans in general tend to be more health conscious and thinner than the general population. So perhaps it wasn’t their diet as much as other facets of their daily life that kept the subjects alive. Furthermore, the Loma Linda subjects weren’t exactly your average cola-guzzling, burger-gobbling Americans: All of them belonged to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, whose health-conscious members do not drink liquor or smoke cigarettes. They don’t even drink coffee. They don’t even drink tea. In fact, Loma Linda, home to one of the largest Adventist congregations in the world, is the only American city that qualifies as a Blue Zone. Blue zones, discovered by author Dan Buettner, are locations where inhabitants live unusually long and healthy lives. Finally, vegan diets haven’t been around long enough for anyone to be able to prove that plant-based eaters enjoy longer life spans than carnivores. Come back in another generation or two, people say, and the science will be clearer.
However, there are other highly encouraging signs that plant-based eating has significant health benefits. A whole-food vegan diet is very low in cholesterol and saturated fats and high in fiber and complex carbohydrates, all of which lead to better health. Plant-based eaters tend to have a much higher frequency of bowel movements, which is also strongly associated with better health. Vegans have been shown to have lower levels of inflammation than those who consume animal protein—another marker of good health.
There’s more: Eating a plant-based diet has been strongly associated with lower blood levels of industrial pollutants than an omnivorous diet. The breast milk of vegans has been found to be significantly less polluted with fire retardants and dioxins than that of meat-eating moms. Mercury levels in vegans have also been found to be ten times lower than in those who eat fish. Consider that because Americans feed farm animals to other farm animals, the toxins in these creatures’ bodies bioaccumulate up the food chain before the meat lands on an omnivore’s plate. So eating lower on the food chain (a plant-based diet) may decrease exposure to the industrial pollutants linked to poor health.
Despite the myth that vegans don’t get enough calcium, plant-based eaters have been found to have bone density similar to omnivores’, and vegans even have been found to have higher blood-plasma protein levels than meat eaters. An egg-free vegetarian diet has also been found to result in higher blood levels of the hormone DHEA, which may extend one’s lifespan. Vegans also appear to be at the lowest risk for developing arthritis and cataracts. Rheumatoid arthritis can in some cases be reversed by a vegan diet. A plant-based diet also appears to prevent and even treat Crohn’s disease. And plant-based diets may prevent kidney function decline and possibly treat kidney failure.
In fact, a plant-based diet has been shown to help prevent or reverse the fifteen leading causes of death in America, which claim 1.6 million lives annually. In his recent book How Not to Die, Dr. Michael Greger, director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of America,1 shows how a plant-based diet can prevent or reverse: coronary heart disease, lung disease, brain disease, digestive cancers, infections, diabetes, high blood pressure, liver disease, blood cancers, kidney disease, breasts cancer, suicidal depression, prostate cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and iatrogenic disease (conditions caused by medications and other medical treatments).
Furthermore, the newest research on telomeres seems to corroborate Dr. Greger’s research. Telomeres are the caps on the ends of our DNA strands that protect our chromosomes, akin to the aglets at the end of shoelaces. Our telomeres need to stay as intact as possible because shortening affects our health and, quite possibly, our lifespan.
The first telomere studies were published in the 1970s (one of the principal researchers, Elizabeth Blackburn, shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine for this work). A more recent study from the University of California, San Francisco, indicated that men who switched to a vegetarian diet were able to protect their telomeres, thus enhancing their health. Another study, published in the journal Lancet Oncology, showed that a plant-based, whole-foods vegan diet, along with stress management, exercise, and social support, backed up previous studies that found participants’ telomeres were longer and stronger.2 That research was overseen by Dr. Dean Ornish, founder and president of the Preventive Medical Research Institute and clinical professor of medicine at the university.
Not all scientists are convinced that longer telomeres are indeed a marker of longevity, although a 2012 study from the University of East Anglia supports Ornish’s findings. The researchers wrote, “We saw that telomere length is a better indicator of life expectancy than chronological age.” So did an announcement made by Salt Lake City’s Intermountain Heart Institute at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session: “Our research shows that if we statistically adjust for age, patients with longer telomeres live longer, suggesting that telomere length is more than just a measure of age.”
Convincing stuff. But not proof. The jury will be out until medical science has had the opportunity to conduct research on multiple generations of vegans, vegetarians, and semi-vegetarians. However, these studies do suggest that even if the life spans of vegans and omnivores turn out to be comparable, those who ate more plant-based meals and fewer animal products will have enjoyed better health throughout their lives.
Think of it this way: Which would you rather do—live nine healthy decades and then die quickly, and or live the same number of mostly disease-ridden years? It’s not necessarily how long we live, but how well we die.