Twenty years ago US President Bill Clinton’s diet featured a high amount of hamburgers and doughnuts, now two heart procedures later, and following a gradual conversion from meat-based to plant-based foods, he says his vegan diet makes him feel good and have more energy. “All my blood tests are good, and my vital signs are good,” Clinton told CNN medical correspondent Dr Sanjay Gupta in an interview reported on Friday.
Clinton’s dietary conversion began in 1993, when Hillary, concerned for his health, sought advice on how to change the food at the White House, which at that time consisted of a fatty French cuisine.
However, even with a revised, healthier White House menu, Clinton struggled with his weight during his presidency. His White House doctors advised he move to a low-calorie diet and exercise more, after a check-up in 1999 showed he had put on 18 pounds (8 kilos) in two years.
And neither he nor his doctors realized that a bigger problem was looming: plaque was building up in the arteries to his heart. There is a history of heart disease in Clinton’s family, but the White House doctors did not pick up any signs of it.
It was only a few years after leaving the White House, when he was doing the circuit promoting his memoir “My Life”, that the then 58-year-old Clinton started to feel tightness in his chest. He had a quadruple bypass in 2004, to restore blood flow to the heart.
Clinton told Gupta he was lucky he did not die of a heart attack. After the operation he reduced his calorie and cholesterol intake, but there were more heart problems to come.
In 2010, shortly after returning from Haiti where he had been helping with the relief effort, he underwent another operation to insert two stents to open one of the blood vessels from his bypass.
Dr Dean Ornish, director and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, who Hillary had originally brought in to transform the White House menu, met with Clinton a few days after his operation, and told him because of his family history, moderate changes in diet and lifestyle were not going to be enough to stop his heart disease from getting worse.
Ornish told CNN their research showed “that more intensive changes actually reverse progression of heart disease in most people”.
Clinton now takes advice from two doctors, Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn Jr, who directs the cardiovascular prevention and reversal program at The Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute, Cleveland, Ohio. Both doctors say a plant-based diet can prevent, and in some cases reverse, heart disease.
Clinton started talking publicly about his gradual conversion to a vegan diet when he spoke to guests at his daughter Chelsea’s wedding in July last year. He had been under pressure from Chelsea, who has been vegan for many years, to shed some pounds before he walked her down the aisle.
He recommended a book called The China Study (from BenBella Books), by nutrition and health researcher, Dr T Colin Campbell. The book describes a 20-year study by Cornell University, Oxford University, and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, of diseases and lifestyle factors in rural China and Taiwan.
On the book’s promotion website, Campbell says the project eventually “produced more than 8000 statistically significant associations between various dietary factors and disease”, and found that: “people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease … people who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease.”
65-year-old Clinton says he no longer eats meat, dairy, and eggs. He also consumes hardly any oil. He says his goal is to get his weight down to 185 pounds (84 kilos), which is what he weighed when he was 13 years old.
In an interview last year, reported by the Telegraph, Clinton said he lives on beans, legumes, vegetables and fruit. He drinks a protein supplement every morning, but consumes no dairy. He drinks almond milk mixed with a fruit and protein powder, so he gets his protein for the day at the start of the day. He said then that he occasionally ate fish.
“I like the vegetables, the fruits, the beans, the stuff I eat now,” he told Gupta in his most recent interview.
Written by Catharine Paddock PhD