East Hamptoners Take On Vegan Challenge
442.5 pounds lost and counting
(12/03/2009) For the past few years, more and more people have been extolling the virtues of a purely or mostly vegetarian diet. Recent books by Mark Bittman, a food writer for The New York Times and an author of several popular basic cookbooks, and Jonathan Safran Foer, a fiction writer, have been
 Jennifer Landes
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critical of the primacy meat holds in the American diet.
For seven weeks, 65 East Hampton residents (and this reporter) gave up meat, dairy, fish, and eggs to improve their health, lose weight, and just feel better in general. The results were not only positive, but will serve as a model for the introduction of a similar program to be run in Whole Foods stores around the country on a quarterly basis.
The center used Rip Esselstyn’s “Engine 2 Diet” as its model. Mr. Esselstyn, who is a firefighter and former triathlete who lives in Austin, Tex., put his own firehouse crew on a low-fat vegan diet a few years ago. The results among these largely meat-eating Texans were dramatic weight loss and significant drops in cholesterol levels. He has since broadened the program to residents of Austin. East Hampton is the first place outside of Austin that has participated in such a structured program.
The diet was modeled after the research of his father, Dr. Carl Esselstyn Jr., an endocrine surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic who put his patients on a low-fat, whole-grain vegetarian diet to reverse their heart disease and wrote his own books detailing the plan. Even Alzheimer’s disease has been connected to a high-fat diet and sedentary lifestyle in several studies cited in the “Engine 2 Diet” book.
Jennifer Taylor, the executive director of the East Hampton Wellness Foundation, which sponsored the program, said almost everyone who participated did exceptionally. "The total weight loss was 442.5 pounds" and the "total cholesterol fell 1,500 points," she said.
From the traditional arguments of the cruelty and brutality of mass market meat production to new reports on the health and environmental impacts of a meat-based diet, it appears that a drive for eating mostly or all plants is becoming more and more mainstream. In New York City, Le Pain Quotidien, a popular chain bakery and cafe, has introduced vegan options and Candle Cafe and its upmarket sister restaurant Candle 79 are packed with people seeking out their solely vegan fare.
In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report stating that current levels of meat production contribute 14 to 22 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted each year — more than transportation.
Michael Pollan, the author of “The Botany of Desire” and “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” who appeared in the documentary “Food, Inc.” about the food industry, noted in an opinion piece in The New York Times in September that obesity and illnesses related to overeating junk food accounted for as much as 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past two decades.
Other doctors, such as Dean Ornish, have also been arguing for the benefits of diet in reversing heart disease and other illnesses, but have also acknowledged that getting people to actually follow such a plan has been a challenge.
Yet, Ms. Taylor, who led a weekly support group in Amagansett, noted that her group and most of the people who answered the questionnaires given before and after the seven-week program said it was surprisingly easy to follow the program. “I expected people to say it was hard, but there were so many things to substitute for things like meatloaf, so many bridge foods. It was not just rice cakes and tofu,” she said.
The foundation has sponsored group programs in the past, but this time they approached it more scientifically. They used thorough questionnaires that detailed each participant’s eating habits, lifestyle, weight, body mass, and general fitness going into the plan as well as a doctor’s questionnaire for medical data such as blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar levels both before and after the plan.
Mr. Esselstyn’s program included an exercise component, which was demonstrated during one of the seven support sessions. He said he preferred to call his plan “plant strong,” because even the standard vegan diet can be high in fat and processed starches and sugar.
Local participants included firemen, teachers, and a good number of nurses. Many came with concerns about their cholesterol and had either started medication to lower it or were considering it and wanted to see if diet could control it instead.
Ann Fink, who lives in East Hampton, had high cholesterol and was told in June that medication was a possibility for her. “I wasn’t really interested in going that route,” she said on Tuesday. “I had a family history of heart disease and Alzheimer’s, and I thought this would be something that would be good to do.”
She went to hear Mr. Esselstyn speak at the East Hampton Emergency Services Building in September and “was very impressed. I thought this was a way I could take care of my health.” Although she missed salt and the bit of oil she used in cooking, “I felt much lighter.” She said she lost 15 pounds without exercising and her cholesterol dropped 49 points. In addition, “the little aches and things in my joints all disappeared. I feel great.”
Ms. Fink has older children living at home and kept the foods they were used to eating in the house, but still incorporated the plant-based foods into the family diet with whole-wheat salad pizzas and other recipes. She said she plans to keep following the plan strictly until her cholesterol drops to an even healthier level, which she thinks will take another six months or so. “I’m a nurse by background and I abhor taking medicine. I know you can keep well by exercising and eating well. In a lot of food there’s nothing really in there but chemicals. The body was not meant to process it.”
She said she thought the real challenge was to make the commitment to change one’s lifestyle. “If you don’t like it, you can always go back to the old way.” After she meets her goals she said she would incorporate a bit of meat or fish back into the plan.
Brett Morgan, who lives in Sag Harbor with a young family, was interested in dropping his cholesterol and eating healthier foods. He had done other diets and cleanses in the past, but wanted something he could sustain. He started the plan right after he heard Mr. Esselstyn’s presentation in September. His cholesterol dropped from 206 to 157 and he lost eight pounds.
Mr. Morgan thought the structure of the group setting and the challenge of the commitment really helped people get started and gave them the support they needed. “It gave people goals to work for and then, with the metrics of the doctor’s numbers, you could see how you did.”
He found there was some stomach upset in the first week. “I think the body needed time to adjust, whether it was eliminating toxins or just adjusting to all the vegetables.”
Now that the official challenge is over, he expects to stick with the plan. “You can sustain it more because you get enough food to eat. A lot of diets you are basically starving yourself and the variety isn’t there. Sometimes it would be nice to get prepared food, but if you are at a place that doesn’t have vegan fare, you can always go with a salad that maybe has dressing, but then get back to it.”
The reactions of family members and friends, he said, have been curiosity mixed with incredulity. “I’ve been explaining what we were doing to all of our friends. Some showed interest. Some said they would like to try it. Some asked, ‘Where do you get all your protein from?’ ” Mr. Morgan said one of his friends has challenged him to stay with it for six months. “He doesn’t believe it will keep lowering my cholesterol.”
Denise Fulham, who lives in Wainscott, said she really enjoyed the diet and found that giving up caffeine and sugar was a big challenge, but other than that she did not find it that difficult. “Before, I would never go for the healthy option,” she said. Now, after going through the program and reading some of the supplemental materials recommended by Doug Mercer, the foundation’s founder, she said of the typical high-fat, high-salt, and high-sugar diet, “It’s amazing to me that we have done this to ourselves in America.”
She wanted a healthier approach to food and to put an end to “yo-yo dieting. There was no medical reason. My cholesterol dropped 21 points, that was just a plus,” and she lost 14 pounds. “My doctor said, ‘Wow, eating healthy, how novel.’ ”
Now, she is “trying to figure out where to go from here. I don’t want to go back to sugar and caffeine. But what do you add back in? I see that I could be back in the sugar crater real soon. I didn’t have turkey at Thanksgiving. I just didn’t feel like having it. But I did not ignore dessert. I still have to be very careful.”
The foundation has added three additional weekly meetings for people who have been through the program and are looking for a way to keep it up through the holiday season. On Tuesday, they will have a potluck dinner, at which Mr. Esselstyn will be video-conferenced in to show his support and recipes will be shared.