Some vegans can be a bit preachy. Like Louisa May Alcott, they’ve hit on something good and they’re not going to miss a single chance to talk to you about it. While I’m all for evangelizing for a good cause, I’ve never been comfortable with the concept of converting people. I think each of us has the responsibility of finding a path in life that’s truly authentic to us. This is why, in my private life, I seldom talk to the people I meet about the way I eat. I wouldn’t be the vegan who interrupts Thanksgiving dinner to talk about the terrifying bacteria in a dead turkey. Someone else will have to do that. I value the gift of free will, belonging to each human being, too much to try to sway other people to my own way of thinking.

It had to be irony I was feeling, then, driving home from the surgical center with a diagnosis of Crohn’s Disease on a piece of paper in my purse. Scar tissue in my ileocecal valve had become so inflamed that it obstructed my small intestine, sending me straight from a doctor’s office to a hospital, feeling pain so intense, I thought I might die. That was round one. 30 days later, it happened again, and I ended up spending this year’s Thanksgiving holiday being poked, prodded, drugged and scanned into a listless stupor in a hospital bed. My frantic husband spent the night at my side, on a cot so old it groaned every time he exhaled. It was a wretched time, and it led to the trip to a surgical center, where I got my diagnosis, and a picture of my future filled with IVs, pills and surgeries. Crohn’s Disease is the 3rd autoimmune condition I have been diagnosed with in the past decade, and in order to explain to you the irony in this, I have to sound a bit like a vegan who is bragging about the superiority of their lifestyle. Follow me.

Pick up just about any health-related book or magazine today and the general advice given for either protecting yourself from disease or helping to get well from disease will read something like the following:

- Get plenty of exercise
- Decrease or eliminate meat and dairy
- Eat mostly whole grains, fruits and vegetables
- Don’t eat processed foods
- Find healthy ways to manage stress

Whether the condition being discussed is acne or cancer, you are almost sure to find some version of the above list being given as your guide to preventing and overcoming ill-health. And, the most enlightened authors, doctors and researchers are taking this advice a step further by warning you to throw out all of the toxic cleaning and cosmetic products in your house. Sticking with vinegar and wiping all that goop off your skin will certainly decrease your exposure to an entire directory of toxins that should never have been invented in the first place, let alone wiped across your kitchen counter or into your face. Over the past couple of decades, people who write about health have caught onto the idea that a plant-based diet and a chem-free body and home are smart choices for pretty much all people. By leaps and bounds, the public is making efforts to catch on, too.

Well, I’m sorry to say that it may be too late. I offer myself and the past 20 years of my life as an object lesson.

How I Live

For the past 20 years:
I have followed an organic, whole foods vegan diet
This means I eat no animal products of any kind
I prepare all of my meals at home, from scratch
I do not eat refined sugar, junk food or restaurant food of any kind
I even bake my own bread
I am product-phobic; we buy the fewest manufactured items for our home we can
There is no cleaning substance in my house stronger than vinegar
I do not use cosmetics apart from a plant-based liquid soap
I have many enjoyable, simple hobbies and spiritual pursuits to help me keep stress levels low
I spend as much time outdoors and in nature as I possibly can
I have an organic microfarm which my family is working in an effort to become self-sustaining

This isn’t meant to sound boastful, but when presented as a list like this, I hope it gives a pretty clear picture of the natural life I’ve tried to pursue. Basically, my goal with my life has been to live as much like a natural human animal as I possibly could. I’ve watched all of the other kinds of animals in my environment, going about the business of being themselves so simply and humbly, and I’ve tried to figure out how a human could do that – live like the earthly sorts of animals we are. Getting rid of all the ‘products’ has been an important part of that. And choosing to live with compassion, trying not to harm the other animals, has been a choice open to me because I’m lucky enough to live in a part of the world with a long growing season that can provide a delicious and nutritious diet without any need to rely on animal-derived foods. I’ve used the gift of free will in a way that seemed authentic to me and in a way I thought wouldn’t cause any suffering to others.

It’s an interesting choice, ‘going’ vegan. This was long before the Internet, long before Whole Foods, long before the doctors were really saying vegetarians were likely to avoid diseases. I picked up a simple paperback book somewhere as a girl – Diet for a New America by John Robbins. Other than the Bible, I can’t think of another book that’s had so profound an effect on my path in life. I was young, but even then, rather painfully distressed by needless suffering, and it was the story John told of the true lives of farm animals that presented me with a choice to either participate in the suffering or withdraw my support from it. I chose to withdraw, ‘go vegan’ as they say these days, and I’ve never regretted it…not for a minute.

The animal stories were the things that stood out to me then. Yes, there was a big section about the health benefits of a vegan diet, but what kid is really going to be attentive to a discussion of cholesterol and high blood pressure? Kids are invincible. No, I stopped eating, wearing and using animal products because I just couldn’t see how my life could be judged to be more important than the life of an animal, in the grand scheme of things, and I didn’t think anyone had given me the right to benefit at the expense of others. And really, I didn’t want to have to go to heaven one day and explain to God that I’d found out I was hurting someone, but kept on doing it anyway. I could almost see that conversation playing out, and I didn’t want to have to have it! This was one of the first real ethical debates I’d ever held with myself. It was an important decision for a young person to make, and I’m still proud of my kid self for choosing what felt right to me.

Many Years Later

It wasn’t until many years later that I came back to the ‘uninteresting’ section about the vegan diet and health in John’s book. I was in my early 20s then, and in the midst of trying to make a life for myself, I was stricken with a strange abdominal illness. The day before, I was as healthy as anyone else. Overnight, that all changed. I lost my job and began the visiting-doctors ritual that was to continue for many years. I was given a blanket diagnosis of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (doctor-ese for ‘I have no idea what is wrong with your guts’) and told to stop eating so much meat and dairy! When I explained my squeaky clean diet to doctors, they were even more eager to see me go because then they really had nothing to tell me to do.

I had already been living a greatly diminished life when weird illness number 2 struck like a thief in the night. Endometriosis left me more or less bed-ridden for a couple of years, in between more rounds of visiting clueless and even dangerous doctors. They wanted to cut out my organs. They wanted to dope me with hormones. One of them gave me a shot called Depo-Provera which gave me sickness number 3 – Fibromyalgia. That drug became the subject of a class action lawsuit as thousands of women fell ill with Fibromyalgia from it. I didn’t join the suit…I was sick in bed, with my 20s passing by somewhere outside the window.

Endometriosis was my first autoimmune disease. I hardly knew what that meant at the time, and I certainly didn’t guess that it was part of a pattern that would continue on, leading up to this year, and the newest diagnosis of Crohn’s. Living now, with 3 autoimmune diseases, each one of them enough to destroy what anyone thinks of as ‘normal’ life, the portrait of my health centers on the angry, red word: inflammation. My body reacts with inflammation to the normal functions of being alive. It’s not just one organ that behaves this way. It’s whole systems of digestive, reproductive and muscular function. What the misguided doctors told me was Irritable Bowel Syndrome 12 years ago was likely my body’s first declaration that, from then on, anything going on inside would be met with an indignant response of inflammation.

When your body loses its ability to distinguish between its own cells and invading foreign organisms, you’ve pretty much ceased to function as you’ve been designed to. Life always tries to support itself. But with autoimmune disease, life tries to commit suicide.

Again, I had to think back to John’s book that had been so pivotal in my life, and its thoroughly sound and excellently researched proofs of hope for the very best of health with a whole-foods, plant-based diet. I’ve been blessed with the pleasure of communicating with John, and he is a wise and loving person. His facts aren’t flawed. Eating an animal-based diet is fraught with health hazards. You’ll be hard pressed to find any doctor now who will disagree with that. But a picture has emerged for me regarding the efforts people can make to eat right, rid their habits and homes of poisons and manage their stress in creative and healthy ways, and it’s a very bleak scene.

Autogens not Carcinogens

What can you expect for yourself if, today, you start eating an organic, whole-foods diet, free of toxic animal products? What can you expect if you throw out your makeup and take your commercial household cleaners to a toxic waste dump? What can you expect if you do yoga, meditate, jog, swim, bike? I can only offer my 20 years of healthy living in our land of America as an answer. If someone like me makes a consistent effort to make all the right choices when it comes to health, and she winds up with 3 debilitating diseases by her mid-thirties, what does this mean for you and for all of the people who have spent their lives trying to promote an enlightened approach to wise and loving care of the human body?

It means that your freedom is disappearing. It means that your choice to be healthy is being taken from you.

Consider these facts:

  • 23.5 million Americans have autoimmune diseases now
  • That means 1 in 12 Americans
  • 75% of these people are women
  • The incidence of many autoimmune diseases has doubled in the past 30 years
  • 80,000 chemicals have been approved for use in our environment
  • An average of 5 new chemicals are approved for use every day
  • Autoimmune diseases are called the ‘Western Disease’ because they predominantly occur in industrial, chemical-laden countries
  • The rise of the autoimmune epidemic has gone hand in hand with the rise of chemical manufacture

It is the chemicals pouring out of factories, industrial agriculture, pharmaceutical laboratories and the products and plastics we are surrounded with that are triggering the rewiring of the human body, turning it from an elegant, life-supporting machine into a self-destructing mess. The toxic output of ‘industry’ is what is robbing us of the choice to pursue a healthy lifestyle. You can choose to go vegan, go organic, go jogging, but if industry chooses to pump your air, water and soil full of autogens, you are swimming against a tide as large as your whole environment, with nowhere to turn for the basic needs of life.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa is another gifted, wise and delightful author with whom I’ve had the pleasure of communicating, and her tremendous book, The Autoimmune Epidemic, meticulously chronicles the dual risings of pollution and autoimmune disease. Stricken with an autoimmune disease which left her temporarily paralyzed, Donna’s investigative reporting of this crisis in human health has won praise from the likes of Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health. I have nothing but praise for this landmark publication, but as with Diet for a New America, it strives to offer the choice for better health through diet and conscientious shopping. Even as I applaud the author’s insistence that people must only eat organically-grown food, the vegan organic farmer in me heaves a very heavy sigh. And looks at the irony of my life.

Even as a child, I was able to see that it isn’t right to make choices that hurt others. If that meant giving up ice cream and fancy leather boots, I could make that sacrifice. Because it wasn’t really a sacrifice, once I knew I was getting to do something helpful and kind in the world. If a little girl can meet, weigh and make a moral choice on this issue of doing-unto-others, how can it be that the head of a multi-billion dollar corporation or the man in the White House cannot bring himself to do the same? How can it be that after being offered abundant proofs of causing debilitating illness and death, the pesticide planes continue to fly, the factories continue to fill our water and air with poisons and we the people keep handing over our paychecks to keep the system that is killing us going?

When will enough be enough? When the average American woman realizes that her SUV, her hair dye and her microwave dinner may actually be the cause of her Lupus and her children’s asthma and autism? When the average American man realizes there will be no one left for him to marry because all of the women have quietly faded away from multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivities, endometriosis and Crohn’s disease? When the health magazine writers are all out of work because everyone realizes there is no point anymore in trying to make a tofu sandwich when you’re living in an autogenic world?

Healthy living has been a matter of choice for all modern people with the ability to be self-supporting. You could choose to eat the cheese burger or go to the health club instead. Some people made a ritual out of procrastinating about it, waiting until some better time to really get serious about living more healthily. Others went at it whole hog.

At this point, the weaker ones like me, the ones with the genetic predisposition to have our systems be triggered by autogens into a state of self-destruct, are already seeing that our efforts have won us nothing but a growing list of chronic illnesses. We are the canaries in the autogenic coalmine and the pollution is getting us first. Consider the fact that cancer, treated as the great and peerless killer, is less likely to be a woman’s fate now than the acquisition of an autoimmune disease. If someone told you that by giving up meat and dairy today, by paying extra for organic, by growing your own food, you could hope that in 20 years….a doctor would tell you that you had Crohn’s disease, would you even bother to try?

I think we are coming to a time when people will look back to the granola they ate in the 60′s, the headbands they bought for exercising in the 80′s and the organics they paid an arm and a leg for at the turn-of-the-century and wish with all their souls that they could get back to those days when pursuing health was a free choice almost anyone could make. I think my own life is a herald of that time that will come to all people, no matter what their genetics or mode of living. I think that they will look around at the GMOs, the SUVs, the plastics and the filthy air and see that these were their enemies, mute and innocuous-seeming though they were. I think that ‘progress’ is about to becoming the most obscene word in the English language.

What The Autoimmune Epidemic Means For You

I honestly don’t know the answer. I’m not a psychic and I’m certainly not the Creator of this beautiful but toxic planet. I remind myself that the choice to go vegan, live naturally, become an organic farmer was made primarily out of compassion for others, not out of some hope of health for myself. I didn’t want to harm animals or people, ruin their water supply or fill their air with poisons to put food on my table. So, I’ll never regret the choices I’ve made and I will always be thankful for the wisdom of others who inspired me to make authentic and compassionate choices when I was young and everything seemed like a free choice.

We ought to love freedom better than this. We ought to love life too much to sell it out for a tank of gas and a new brand of noxious shampoo. Oh, yes, maybe you still can be better off by making healthy choices. Maybe if I hadn’t made the choices I have to live so naturally, I’d be dead by now. I’ve had that thought many times over the past few weeks. Maybe it’s still bright to make yourself as resistant to disease as you can by pursuing health as though the choice were still as free and real as it once was on our blue and green Earth, before the chemicals began to seep from the halls of industry. Despair is an evil and we humans seem duty-bound to look for hope in the most profoundly black days, if we are to show our appreciation of the gift of life.

But my looks are all dark for the people of industry who have taken away my choice to be healthy, because we *must* have progress, or nail polish, or hamburgers…or whatever they’re selling today. Even as the women fall ill, one by one on the home planet, the people of industry continue to sell us the very things that are killing the mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. The people of industry keep selling. And we keep buying. And one day, that conversation I imagined as a girl will be happening in the next world, and the Great Spirit will be asking us what we did with the beautiful, life-sustaining planet He created just for us, and the wonderful, elegant bodies he gave us to walk about in amongst the oxygen-giving trees. What will we have to say for ourselves?