Bill Clinton Is Now a Vegan

How did the famous appetite become a vegan diet?

By the time he reached the White House, Bill Clinton's appetite was legend. He loved hamburgers, steaks, chicken enchiladas, barbecue, and french fries. At one campaign stop in New Hampshire, he reportedly bought a dozen doughnuts and was working his way through the box until an aide intervened.

Today, the former president considers himself a vegan. He has dropped more than 20 pounds and says he is healthier than ever. The transformation took nearly two decades — and two heart procedures — to complete.

What pushed him there?

The dietary saga began in 1993, when Hillary Clinton decided her husband needed a healthier menu and asked Dr. Dean Ornish, the preventive-medicine physician, to work with the White House chefs, who were accustomed to rich French cuisine. Soy burgers appeared alongside the usual fare; stir-fried vegetables with tofu and salmon with vegetables joined the rotation.

Even so, Clinton battled his weight through both terms. At his 1999 annual physical, the White House physician noted he had gained 18 pounds in two years. But weight was not his real problem. With a family history of heart disease, plaque was silently building in his coronary arteries. In 2004, at 58, he felt tightness in his chest returning from a book tour stop in New Orleans; days later he underwent quadruple bypass surgery. "I was lucky I did not die of a heart attack," he later said. In 2010, he needed two stents in a coronary artery.

What does he eat now?

After the stent procedure, Clinton adopted a plant-based diet — no meat, no dairy, no eggs — on the advice of Ornish and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn of the Cleveland Clinic, whose research argued that a plant-based diet could reverse heart disease. In a 2011 interview with CNN's Sanjay Gupta, Clinton described the change plainly: the science convinced him, the weight came off, and his blood work improved.

The vegan label drew its share of jokes — this was, after all, the president of the McDonald's run. But the underlying message was serious and universal: heart disease is largely a disease of habit, and habits can change. For readers exploring plant-based eating from an Indian tradition, Swastik's comparison of triphala and isabgol looks at two classic Ayurvedic supports for digestion — the system a heavy diet taxes first.