Vegans Outsmart Heart Disease

It’s hot off the press—A recent article in The New York Times reports that scientists have found another connection between eating red meat and heart attacks.

The culprit in this Cleveland Clinic Study wasn’t the high level of fat and cholesterol found in red meat, it was “a little-studied chemical that is burped out by bacteria in the intestines after people eat red meat. It is quickly converted by the liver into yet another little-studied chemical called TMAO that gets into the blood and increases the risk of heart disease.”

In a word: Yuck!

The level of TMAO found in the body predicted the heart attack risk in humans, while TMAO also caused heart disease in mice. And, yes, regular meat eaters had much higher levels of TMAO than comparable vegetarians and vegans. The study’s findings indicated that the often-noticed association between red meat consumption and heart disease risk might be related to more than just the saturated fat and cholesterol in red meats like beef and pork.

Making the Connection

The Cleveland Study is just the latest one finding a strong correlation between eating meat and heart disease, and they all find that heart disease is the largest cause of death in America and other developed countries.
Another large-scale, 15-year study looked at more than 44,000 men and women living in Britain, with a sizeable portion of the group (34%) being vegetarian or vegan. Over the course of the study, 1,066 people with heart disease and 169 died from heart disease-related causes. Vegetarians participating in the study had a 32% lower risk of developing heart disease than those who ate fish and meat.

Positive factors for the large number of vegetarians participating included consistently lower blood pressure (obviously a big indicator of heart disease) and lower body mass index (BMI), another positive sign. Overall, the study found vegetarians are 28% less likely to develop heart disease, the researchers say.
It will be a few years before results of “double-blind” vegan vs. meat-eater clinical studies are complete, but lots of heart-healthy seniors are living evidence of the benefits of a vegan diet, including lots of former meat eaters who fought heart disease and other obesity-related conditions for years.

And many experts agree this type of diet is the way to go, including retired Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., who believes a vegan, low-oil diet can reverse the effects of this disease. He credits switching to a plant-based diet with dramatically dropping the cholesterol levels while widening the coronary arteries of his patients.

One inspiring example spent eight years in the White House. Looking better in his 60s than he did in his 40s, former President Bill Clinton has embraced a “plant-based” diet. The former McDonald’s devotee is just one of millions of Americans reversing damage to their hearts and circulatory systems by avoiding all animal products and limiting plant-based fats such as olive oil, avocados, and nuts.

DONATE