Veganism: Just What the Doctor Ordered

Dr. Michael Klaper "does no harm" by promoting a plant-based diet

By Mickey Z.
Astoria, NY, USA | Sun Jan 10, 2010 08:00 AM ET
Planetgreen.com

In case you're confused by all the conflicting info out there, a vegan is someone who doesn't eat meat, chicken, fish, eggs, dairy products, or any other animal-derived food. But there's much more to this lifestyle, e.g., vegans also don't "wear" animals (wool, fur, leather, down, etc.). There are at least 101 reasons to go vegan, not the least of which is that such life choices can have a major, positive impact on our environment. For example, a relatively recent U.N. report found that animal agriculture is responsible for almost 1/5 of the pollution causing global warming. Plus, as Michael Klaper, M.D. reminds us:

"The human body has absolutely no requirement for animal flesh. Nobody has ever been found face-down 20 yards from the Burger King because they couldn't get their Whopper in time."

...and...

"People are the only animals that drink the milk of the mother of another species. All other animals stop drinking milk altogether after weaning. It is unnatural for a dog to nurse from a giraffe; a child drinking the milk of a mother cow is just as strange."

Hmm...who's Dr. Klaper and why is he saying such things?

A graduate of the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago (1972), Dr. Klaper served his medical internship at Vancouver General Hospital in British Columbia, Canada and took under took additional training in surgery, anesthesiology, orthopedics, and obstetrics at the University of California Hospitals in San Francisco. "My nutritional awakening began when I was on the cardiovascular anesthesia service, and that's the service that deals with people's hearts and blood vessels," he explains. It was after drawing blood from a patient scheduled for a four-vessel coronary by-pass, that Klaper saw with his own eyes the results of the standard American diet.

"When you draw blood into a glass tube and allow it to sit there for a couple of hours, it separates out into two parts," says Klaper. The liquid serum—which should be transparent—was, he says, "thick and greasy white, it looked like ivory glue when I shook the tube, the serum stuck to the sides of the tube." When Dr. Klaper asked the man what he had eaten lunch, the answer came back: "I had a double-bacon steerburger with extra cheese and a milkshake."

What was floating on top of his blood tube, Klaper realized, was "all the beef-fat in the burger, it was all the butterfat in the cheese, it was the butterfat in the ice-cream, it was the egg yoke fat that was in the mayonnaise that was slathered on the bun. All the fat that this man had eaten had oozed out into his bloodstream and turned his blood fatty."

A new career as a vegan spokesperson was launched. Dr. Klaper has spoken to millions across the globe, never wavering in his commitment to the planet-based diet. "Being vegan is doing actions where no one gets hurt," he says. "The world will become vegetarian, one way or another."