The Ol' Family Tree

Remember I said that I'd found envelopes of old family records while cleaning my office/guest room last week? (Of course you do, my vast readership memorizes everything I say in case there is a pop quiz.)

Well, the other day I sat down and went through them, and filled in some gaps on birth dates and parents' names (I'm still at a brick wall at Ireland on my paternal grandmother's side). Oh, this is such fun!

Then I started reading the death certificates I'd found. Whoa. Every person on my father's side died at or before the age I am now, and all of coronary artery disease.

This actually was news to me, because my father (who had been the custodian of these documents and had neatly labeled them in manila envelopes for future genealogical research) apparently had been lying to himself about this cold, hard fact, and in turn, had lied to me. I knew both grandparents and my uncle all died in their 40s-50s, but he'd given me explanations for his brother and father that didn't mention clogged arteries. Only my grandmother's death was called a heart attack. Denial and rewriting of family history, I could write a book on the topic. But I digress.


While my grandmother had put on some weight when she was in her 50s I have a few photos and she wasn't obese by any stretch. The men were short, skinny and wiry, like my son (he strongly resembles his namesake great uncle). They had various jobs and corresponding levels of activity - my grandfather had at various times been a lumberjack and a dock worker, and I believe was working the docks when he died. They also ate the classic American diet - lots of meat, lots of cheese, eggs for breakfast and ice cream for dessert. Veggies from a can, and fruit in a pie - it was the way it was, and the way I was raised. I was out of the house and on my own before I knew there was any lettuce but iceberg.

By the time my father was my age he was on several medications, he proceeded to have heart attacks, a couple of bypasses, stents, all while eating the heart-healthy diet his doctors recommended, exercising, and taking truly disciplined care of himself. He was never overweight, let alone obese, he walked daily, he followed all the rules to the letter.

While following the rules to the letter, eating a disciplined diet and walking miles every day and while thin as a rail, he developed Type 2 diabetes and was put on meds for that, too. Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine he did nearly reach his 80th birthday, but spent the last couple of years of his life on oxygen and lurching from one medical emergency to the next, all while obeying doctor's orders to perfection. He started getting sick when he was the age I am now, and I can only see that as my future if I don't try something different.

As I've mentioned from time to time, I've gone basically plant-based/vegan. I do hop off the vegan wagon now and then for social occasions because I don't want to inconvenience other people, but I eat this way 90% of the time.

When I adopt a new Thing I tend to go all in and build a library on the topic, so for the last year I've been accumulating books about eating a plant-based diet and its effect on health, particularly with regard to coronary artery disease. I've read the other popular vegan books, like Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Diet and also the bestselling Skinny Bitch. For me, they both made going plant-based seem like a helluva lot of work. Lots of ingredients I'd never heard of and had no idea how to work with, and of course SB tended to use the word "sacrifice!" - which, if I hadn't already been eating this way on a simpler level, would have been a huge turnoff.

The other day I picked up The Engine 2 Diet: The Texas Firefighter's 28-Day Save-Your-Life Plan that Lowers Cholesterol and Burns Away the Poundsand actually sat down and read it in one sitting. It is a serious book written in a breezy and non-threatening and humorous style - medical topics are mixed with firefighter war stories, tales of the other participants in his plant-based diet experiment, and of course recipes, some of which sound so good I must make them this weekend. He doesn't demand ALL OR NOTHING SACRIFICE!!! and even writes his 4 week experiment with the diet plan to include an easier path for those who want to take baby steps.

It's a light, fun, non-scary or demanding book about a serious topic. The author is the son of a physician who did ground-breaking work on coronary artery disease, and I bought his book too: Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven, Nutrition-Based Cure. A review will follow. I hope he's as entertaining a storyteller as his son, but I'm guessing this one will be more serious.

I'm looking back on the past decade or so, and wondering if any of this information would have helped. The studies existed, the books were out there, but in my mind, vegans were Extreme Vegetarians, and the only ones I knew were kinda out there and lecture-prone, and OMG, is that purse leather? The idea that a vegan diet had serious health benefits was simply not on my radar, nor on the radar of any doctor we dealt with (and damn, there were so many - between my husband's cancer, my father's heart, my brain thang, and then my mother's end of life issues, I spoke to specialists in every discipline but podiatry). A few years later, a friend reports that her husband's doctor handed him a copy of Dr. Barnard's book about reversing diabetes and told him to do it. And of course President Clinton, after jogging to McD's while in office, had his share of heart scares and has adopted the diet.

But in looking for a link to Clinton's dietary changes, I was annoyed by the tone of the articles at the top of the Google search. Most were so half-hearted - "Yes, he says he's eating this way, but not everybody can do it!" "It's expensive and elitist!" (Yeah, because generations of poor folks who ate beans and rice and collards were elitist.) And on and on. The editorial slant of the articles was just ridiculous.

Anyway, that concludes this rant/book review. Engine 2 is interesting and inspiring, and the recipes don't contain anything too weird or take an hour to assemble, and I'm looking forward to trying the recipes, especially the mushroom stroganoff.