TL;DR–There are many things I want to tell you after the cruise, but all you need to know (and they say it better than I would) is in The Game Changers documentary on Netflix. Seriously. Go. Watch it. Pros like Jackie Chan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and James Cameron made it. Even if you’re completely uninterested in a plant-based lifestyle, it’s worth the watch just to see those three male college athletes blushing over that one part …
Okay, so I’d heard good things about spending a week with 2,000 people who share my values, but I had no idea. The cruise was life-changing. From yoga in the morning, through classes all day, to dinner with different people each evening, it was a week of new ideas, validation for old ideas, and some of the most phenomenal people wandering around our planet.
They say sitting is the new smoking, but eating animal protein is the new smoking. Literally–just like smoking was promoted by physicians as being good for you, and promoted by celebrities as being attractive (before it gave those celebrities lung cancer), animal protein is carcinogenic, eating it is something your doctor will likely recommend based on studies funded by animal protein industries, and the idea that attractive men eat meat and glowing women consume dairy is deeply ingrained in our culture.
The people on the cruise represented 2,000 stories of people who realized that the new smoking is bad for them. Some of us resisted initially, and many of us wobble, and all of us make mistakes, but the stories I heard had the same ending: “I had stage 4 prostate cancer,” “I had high cholesterol,” “I had breast cancer,” “I was on insulin,” “I had stage 4 pancreatic cancer” … and I’m still here because I switched to a whole-food, plant-based lifestyle. It’s important to emphasize that the survivors on the cruise combined their new lifestyles with modern medicine, and that not everyone has as good an outcome. Plant-based isn’t a guaranteed cure, and that’s why you need to make a lifestyle change before you need a cure. Don’t worry about your genetics–you’ve probably heard that genetics load the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger.
The lectures on the cruise were given by physicians who spent 90 minutes reporting charts, graphs, and test results from a mountain of medical studies not funded by the animal protein industry. The truth is evidence-based, and the truth is that animal protein is a pathogen to herbivores (and humans are biologically herbivores–the flat teeth, the long digestive system). Eating animal protein accelerates cancer growth, causes your body to produce more cholesterol, and saps your energy while your body spends resources trying to fight all the things you’re putting into it. You don’t have to have heart disease, breast cancer, prostate cancer, high blood pressure, or type 2 diabetes. Think about that for a second. The diseases that plague your family, that you think isn’t a matter of “if” but “when” they’ll come for you, are paper tigers. Bottom line: get your protein directly from from plants instead of filtering it through animals first, and you’ll feel amazing.
Because of the Simpsons, I think of veganism in levels. At the top (we’ll call them level five) you have the SOS vegans (they avoid sugar, oil, and salt). So at the goodbye party they had hummus and veggies for the level five vegans …
… and ice cream for the rest of us! (I like to think I graduated to vegan level two on the cruise. Starting right after the ice cream.) This is a scoop of pistachio and a scoop of strawberry topped with peanuts, almonds, and chocolate sauce.
The cruise also has several vegan and cruelty-free sponsors who donated the treats left on our pillows each night. Here is all the loot I’d accumulated by the end of the trip.
I went vegan for health reasons. I was working at Loma Linda University medical school’s alumni association, helping out at a convention, selling books at a booth. During lunch, foot traffic slowed down, so I picked up the book and started skimming. It was Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn’s Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. So I went home after work that day and threw away the cow’s milk. Going completely vegan definitely took a while. I was raised vegetarian, so I didn’t have to give up bacon or anything, but I love pizza.
(Side note: Turns out, cow’s milk is addictive! Baby cows need to put on weight quickly, so the casein in milk turns into casomorphin during digestion. Go ahead and click the link and read the first sentence, “Casomorphin is an opioid peptide (protein fragment) derived from the digestion of the milk protein casein.” It’s morphin like morphine and attaches to the same receptors in your brain as heroine. Granted, it is much weaker than heroine, but it’s enough to keep you coming back for more. And cheese is concentrated milk! No wonder we can’t give up our cheese!)
Anyway, so since I went vegan for health reasons, and I hang out with vegans who made the switch for health reasons, I hadn’t talked to many people who did it for the animals. If I’m totally honest, I’m afraid animal rights activists will point out my flaws and hypocrisies in a blunt, high-volume monologue. But just like the stereotype surrounding plant-eaters is false, so is the one around the vegan-for-the-animals crowd.
The vegans on the cruise who did it for the animals are some of the most compassionate, empathetic, and understanding people I’ve met. They’ve realized another truth about eating animals, and they are eager to share it because the sooner everyone knows, the sooner the suffering stops. I sat next to a woman at dinner one night who is active with Anonymous for the Voiceless. They stand in public places with footage of the animals destined for our dinner plates, and talk with the people who stop to watch. I mentioned that it’d taken me a while to go vegan, and she said, “If you do it for someone else, it’s instant. It’s easy.” Another woman said something similar–she only had to see one video, and she was a vegan from then on. For another woman, it was her daughter asking why they were eating the equivalent of the family dog at meals.
The photo above is during James Aspey‘s lecture. Aspey didn’t just go vegan for the animals, he took a 365-day vow of silence for the creatures who have no voice, he got tattooed for 25 hours with animal rights messages, and he biked 5,000 kilometers across Australia to show how well plant protein works. And yet he still showed compassion for those of us who are imperfect. His stories included accidentally saying a knee-jerk “Happy birthday!” to someone during his vow of silence, and passionately evangelizing to someone about animal rights while he ate a piece of cheese.
Aspey also showed us footage of the lives and deaths of chickens, pigs, cows, and fish, while narrating how the industry works. I started thinking. What are my shoes made of? My purse? These earrings? What about that wool sweater I just bought? Who were my makeup and hair products tested on? What about my cats who I would never eat or wear or use for chemical testing? How is an unknown cow or rabbit different? Why hadn’t I stopped to think about this before?
So in the middle of Aspey’s lecture I started checking my accessories to see if they were made out of anyone. The shoes and purse were fake, and I was pretty sure the watch was as well, but … you can see the photo above. So I’m going to wear a different watch. And I’m going to have to work up to replacing that new wool sweater, but I’m motivated to do it. (What about sweatshops, though? What should I replace it with?! Clearly I’ll need to do some research … I can see how this could raise a lot of questions about my life choices. I’m way afraid to read the labels on my beauty products, but I think I’m going to do that, too.)
So I had no reason to be afraid of animal rights activists. They understood where I was coming from–they’d been there not too long ago. The animals hadn’t occurred to them, or if they had, it took a while to honestly look at the reality of suffering and take action. The point they made, as did many of the physicians, is that the truth is sometimes hard to accept, and that once we hear it we’re doing the best we can with it, and can’t beat ourselves up when we make mistakes or are hypocritical or get information we hadn’t heard before. We’re all just human, and that’s okay.