I’m vegocentric.

That is, I’m vegan for entirely selfish reasons. It’s all about me.

I want to be healthy, not suffer from chronic diseases, and live a long life. (I’d like to be skinny at some point, too, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

It is telling that the two most influential people that provided the foundation for my ongoing veganism are Dr. John McDougall and T. Colin Campbell, both of whom followed the medical and scientific evidence to reach veganism as their conclusion. They didn’t work backward from an environmental or animal rights concern to further a cause.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to create animosity in the vegan world. I just don’t think it is important why people become vegan or, for that matter, if they do at all. It really needs to be something people do for themselves, so it’s not my place to do anything but live my life.

Among my own family and friends, I usually say that I want people to make “informed bad choices.” I will tell them what I’ve learned, lived, and read, but after that, they’re on their own to do what they want. As much as it will suck when it happens, when I end up visiting people in the hospital (if we’re that lucky), I’ll know they had the proper tools to prevent their diet-related surgeries and cancers. But that’s all I can do, aside from biting my tongue and staying quiet when people wonder “How could this have happened…”

I almost held off on launching this site. The holidays are a strange time, as I will be leaving the vegan-friendly confines of San Francisco, and headed to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. When I’m back in my hometown, my veganism seems far more pronounced. Every restaurant, potential party, or social interaction receives more advance scrutiny.

A few years back, when I was back east visiting during the summer, I decided to have a themed picnic to ensure I got to see a large number of people during my visit. Apparently, the theme of “healthy picnic” caused some distress (for the healthy aspect as much as the very notion of having a theme, it seems). My mother, then on her short-lived adherence to the McDougall Program, got phone calls from every person invited as to what they could bring that would be considered appropriately “healthy.” They would offer their thoughts, and she would tell them it didn’t meet the McDougall Program criteria. She ended up giving people recipes to make, and we made a lot of dishes ourselves. The picnic was very popular, with food most people never had before (or since, most likely). And this wasn’t fussy vegan gourmet fare, artfully presented; just bowls of interesting salads and rice dishes and such.

But, it always amuses me to think no one knew a single recipe to bring that was actually “healthy,” let along vegan. And, don’t get me wrong here, no one offered healthy dishes that were rejected for being either non-vegan or ovo-lacto vegetarian. None were remotely close to healthy, by any standard.

During the holidays, I become something of a guilt magnet. People will start in with the “You only live once”s, the “You don’t know what you’re missing”s, and reference debunked or misleading medical studies they half-read, while I’m just trying to peacefully eat. I never prompt these conversations, but my not eating the same junk as everyone else sort of upsets the herd mentality of holiday eating. If everyone’s not doing it, and I’m tagged as the healthy one, my actions alone indicate what is on their plate is not healthy. So, after that subconscious wrangling, they will jump right in with something to justify their food choices, yet it will be phrased as a reply to me; and it is, only they are replying to my plate and not anything I actually said.

Subtlety is, admittedly, not anyone’s strong suit back home. And there are always the too-loud inquiries from concerned family members or nervous hosts as to whether someone’s dish has butter in it, the answer often being “Why?” instead of yes or no. I hear my name come up a lot in conversations other people are having about diet, which is always a perplexing topic of discussion given how Americans eat in general, but especially over holidays. When we go out to restaurants, my family members will invariably point out things they found that I can eat before finding their own selections.

Of course, my weight is still at a point where there does seem to be a palpable disconnect in my theory. There’s no mystery here, though. I eat too much food (all of it vegan, and much of it low-fat) because of stress over finishing my novel and finding a job. And while I’m home for a visit, those are really topics I’m even less fond of discussing than veganism. But, you can see their point. I’m overweight, they’re overweight, but I’m supposedly this “healthy” person. I suppose I could bring my latest blood pressure and cholesterol numbers, but even then it wouldn’t be a given.

When I mentioned my cholesterol and blood pressure numbers to my grandmother, she was surprised that they weren’t that much lower than hers. She is on blood thinners as well as other drugs to lower her cholesterol and high blood pressure, though. She will often comment that her doctor said her blood pressure or cholesterol results were “good,” but to me that always seems to be more of a comment on her dosage than anything else.

When my mother did McDougall for less than 90 days, her doctor said if she kept it up, he’d have to take her off her blood pressure pills… but that day never came. But, if you ask most people on drugs about their cholesterol or blood pressure numbers, they will say it is good or normal, glossing over the fact that they have to take medicine every day to directly counteract the unhealthy food they eat. Yet, if I do things to avoid taking those pills, I’m the one that often has to prove my beliefs are valid.

It is usually a case of being put in a defensive position about something I don’t really care to defend in the first place. Even when you know more than they do, and actually read deeper than the headlines of the studies they blindly cite, you can never win. The fallback is usually “One study says this, one study says that, so until they figure it out I’ll do what I want.” (And, again, I don’t care what they do in the first place. Eat your meat.) Except, they don’t want to hear that one peer-reviewed medically supervised study said the thing they don’t want to hear, and one corporation-funded study with weak findings that wasn’t peer reviewed said what they do want to hear. Few things are really unresolved, but they really want the jury to be out so they can keep eating whatever they want and have a scapegoat handy.

For example, one time when I was ranch-sitting my uncle’s cattle ranch in Texas (I told you this wasn’t going to be an animal rights blog. And, sorry, I didn’t set anything free that week), my uncle was challenging my veganism, specifically my claim that it has been shown to thwart the growth of diet-based cancers.

“You’re saying being vegan is going to stop you from getting cancer?”

“No, I can still get it. But it will grow so much slower that I’ll be dead before it ever could most likely be detected or negatively affect my life.”

“Jeffrey, do you know what kind of study it would take to prove something like that? You’d need a study that went on for at least a decade, with thousands of participants…”

My uncle loves to debate. Well, he actually only likes to win debates, but I knew I had him, so I let him go on and on listing a ton of criteria for such a “perfect study.” From the moment he started, I knew that The China Study done by T. Colin Campbell had double, tripled, or otherwise blew every metric of his out of the water with pretty solid results. So, I told him how, based on a fraction of his own criteria, the case was settled then, and told him all about Campbell’s book.

Without missing a beat, he shrugged it off. He just said, “I’ve never heard of that study,” in a tone that suggested that the debate was a draw based on his guesswork and my studied reading of a 400-page nonfiction book based on the biggest epidemiological study of diet and its relation to cancer that has ever been performed.

So, as much as I rather just eat vegan, let people in my life make “informed bad choices” and otherwise do my thing, it’s impossible to avoid.

This site is basically going to be an ongoing experiment for me to explore being vegan. There will be essays, and lots of other content to help me explore the depth, breadth and shape of my conviction.

I want to look into the spiritual, environmental, social, and romantic issues surrounding being vegan in today’s society. And, hopefully, it will be a fun, interesting read for everyone who visits, too.

Let’s get started.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.