Bill Clinton on Plant Based Diet

Wolf Blitzer: How did you lose so much weight? What kind of diet are you on?

Bill Clinton: I went on essentially a plant-based diet. I live on beans, legumes, vegetables, fruit. I drink a protein supplement every morning — no dairy — I drink almond milk mixed in with fruit and a protein powder so I get the protein for the day when I start the day out. And it changed my whole metabolism and I lost 24 pounds and I got back to basically what I weighed in high school.

     But I did it for a different reason. I wanted to lose a little weight, but I never dreamed this would happen. I did it because after I had this stent put in, I realized that even though it happens quite often that after you have bypass [surgery] you lose the veins because they’re thinner and weaker than arteries, the truth is that it clogged up, which means that the cholesterol was still [causing] buildup in my vein that was part of my bypass. And thank God, I could take the stent. I didn’t want it to happen again.

     So I did all this research and I saw that 82 percent of the people since 1986 who have gone on a plant-based [diet], no dairy or meat of any kind, no chicken, turkey. I eat very little fish; once in a while I’ll have a little fish, not often. If you can do it, 82 percent of the people who have done that have begun to heal themselves. Their arterial blockage cleans up; the calcium deposit around their heart breaks up. This movement has been led by a doctor named Caldwell Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic, Dean Ornish who you know out in California, the doctors Campbell (father and son) who wrote The China Study, and a handful of others. But we now have 25 years of evidence and so I thought that, well, since I needed to lose a little weight for Chelsea’s wedding, I’ll become part of this experiment. I’ll see if I can be one of those that can have a self-clearing mechanism—we’ll see.

BILL CLINTON, Wolf Blitzer television interview, CNN, 22 September 2010. Clinton, 64, had quadruple bypass surgery in September 2004. In March 2005, he underwent surgery for a partially collapsed lung. In February 2010, he was rushed to a hospital after complaining of chest pains and had two stents implanted in his heart. Excepting CNN, mainstream media has virtually ignored Clinton’s switch to a mostly vegan diet. Given the soaring obesity rates, chronic-disease rates and healthcare costs in the U.S., his example — had it been widely reported — might have benefited many people.