Every February, American Heart Month, health experts advise people to take steps to prevent heart disease and stroke, mainly by eating fruits and vegetables, exercising, maintaining a healthy weight and not smoking. Unfortunately, many people don’t listen: Heart disease kills an estimated 630,000 Americans each year. Because of this, more and more health professionals are telling people that they should go vegan in order to ward off cardiovascular disease. Doing so, physicians say, will also reduce people’s risk of becoming seriously ill from the novel coronavirus.
One of these experts is Dr. Kim Williams, the past president of the American College of Cardiology and the current chief of the Department of Cardiology at Rush Medical Center in Chicago. Dr. Williams urges everyone — especially people with weight problems, diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol — to go vegan.
Vegans are considerably less likely to suffer from heart disease, mainly because vegan foods are naturally cholesterol-free and generally low in saturated fat. Studies show that vegans tend to have a lower body mass index, or BMI, than their meat-, cheese- or egg-eating counterparts. An Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics position paper indicates that people who go vegan reduce their risk of heart disease by 29% and their likelihood of being hospitalized for a heart attack by 33%.
Scientists from Stanford Medicine suspect that “a diet that includes an average of two servings of plant-based meat alternatives lowers some cardiovascular risk factors compared with a diet that instead includes the same amount of animal meat.”
Of course, a healthy diet should include mostly produce, legumes, whole grains and other wholesome plant foods. When researchers with Warwick Medical School in the U.K. compared seven different eating styles, they concluded that consuming mostly plant foods best helps lower one’s blood pressure — the number one risk factor for cardiovascular diseases — and may prevent nearly 5 million premature deaths a year.
And now that the coronavirus has become part of our lives, health experts recommend going vegan to ward off the worst symptoms of COVID-19, too. In a paper titled, “The Importance of Healthy Lifestyle in the Era of COVID-19,” Dr. Williams explains that people with serious health problems, including heart disease, are more likely to succumb to the coronavirus.
Many other doctors, including Dr. Michael Greger, the author of "How Not to Die" and "How to Survive a Pandemic," have said the same. The healthier you eat, the stronger your immune system will be.
Going vegan is the solution to much of what ails us. Vegan foods are powerful enough to prevent — and in some cases, reverse — common chronic diseases, and they can help ward off, or at least reduce the severity of, infectious diseases, not to mention reduce animal suffering and protect the planet. Perhaps we should all listen to the experts’ advice this time and go vegan for American Heart Month — and every other month of the year.
