I can remember standing in front of my neighbors house at the age of 6 watching my dad being taken out of the house by the paramedics. At the age of 42 he was having a heart attack. I can remember about 8 years later my family was getting ready for ski holiday. My mom accompanied my dad to routine check up. My brother and I were vegging out in front of the TV when she came home that night without him. He was forced to stay in the hospital and within a week he was having a quadruple bypass. A little over ten years later I was living half way across the country when my mom called to tell me that dad was having congestive heart failure. His heart was pumping fluid into his lungs……that’s bad. He was fitted with a defibrillator in his chest. Fast forward to the spring of ‘07. I was in and out of consciousness due to pain killers (I just had ankle surgery 2 days prior). I was in the living room on the couch when the I heard my moms voice on the answering machine. She sounded terrible. My narcotic haze melted in an instant and I remembered that the phone was buried in the couch beneath me somewhere. After an eternity fumbling for it, I found out that my dad’s defibrillator had gone off twice. That meant he was having a full blown heart attack and the machine in his chest was doing all it could to keep his heart from stopping.
22 years of this emotional roller coaster is exhausting. It took 22 years for me to finally realize that this can’t just be a hereditary thing. I just wasn’t convinced that lineage was the sole culprit to my dad’s struggles. Enter a book that made me ask more questions. “The China Study” through well documented research and experimentation convinced me that dietary choices play a bigger role than our own government tells us. Another book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” does a superb job at breaking apart how messed up our diets become when food is manufactured for the masses as opposed to keeping the produce and animal products local.
All that being said, is it easy to see why I so easily committed to a vegan lifestyle?
