JANE VELEZ-MITCHELL

Jane Velez-Mitchell is a television and social media journalist. Her journalism is centered around animal rights, addiction, and social justice. Jane is well known for her advocacy and headlining stories. She previously hosted her own show for six years where she would cover high profile cases, and did a weekly segment on animal rights. She’s a graduate of New York University and has anchored for KCALTV LA and WCBS-TV in New York. Having earned several Genesis awards and the Celebrity Animal Activist Award, and other renounced awards for her journalism and activism, Velez-Mitchell has dedicated her career to uncovering injustices. She is author of four books that tackle the subjects of addiction, murder, and the trial of Jodi Arias. Today, she is content editor and founder of Jane Unchained, a multiplatform social media news network where she continues to report on animal rights, veganism, and the like.

Back in New York, I spent eight years at WCBS as a reporter and weekend anchor. Then I got a job as a weekday anchor in LA, and I was working at Paramount Studios. We had a studio on the Paramount lot, and in walks Howard Lyman, the fourth-generation cattle rancher, who had made a pact with God when he got very ill. And he said, "God, if you get me out of this surgery alive, I will reveal the horrors of animal agriculture.’’

He went on Oprah, and it was…in the history of television, a really famous incident where he revealed the horrors, and she said, "That just stopped me cold from eating another burger." I think that was the quote. Cattlemen sued her. She ended up winning that suit, but it turned Howard Lyman, this cattle rancher turned vegan activist, known as the mad cowboy, into a bit of a celebrity. He was doing a tour, and so I interviewed him.

Afterwards he and his publicist, [Mar Nealon], came up to my cubicle where I worked and they said, "We hear you're a vegetarian." I said yes. They said, "Do you eat dairy?" and I kind of hung my head, because he had just described the horrors of the dairy industry. The boy calves being ripped, put in field crates, shot, left on dead piles. The mothers grieving, chasing after their babies, just the whole horror of it. And so I kind of hung my head and I said, "Yes." And they pointed their finger right at my nose and they said, "Liquid meat." And that was the moment I went vegan.

Now, if they had been oh so very polite and said, "Well, you know you really should consider giving up dairy, because it's really not what we...

‘‘I might not have gotten it. I might not have heard their message. They confronted me, and they called me out, because I was thinking of myself as an animal lover and blah, blah, blah; I was contributing mightily to the oppression and suffering of animals by that choice of eating dairy products. And so, I thank them every time I run into either one of them. Mar Nealon is a very fierce activist. Nobody's fool. I always thank her, and I always thank Howard Lyman. From that point on, I realized I'm a vegan. It took me a month to really change my taste buds. They accidentally put parmesan cheese in my salad about a month later, and I spat it out. It tasted awful. Now, I used to love parmesan cheese. So there's a reason why rehab is at least 28 days. It takes 28 days at least, sometimes a lot more, to change a behavior pattern and change your taste buds and change your habits. So, give yourself at least 28 days. You may not love soy milk the first time you taste it or cashew milk, but within twenty-eight days, it'll taste absolutely normal. It takes a while.

Chapter 5

Torre Washington

Torre Washington is a professional bodybuilder, well known for his vegan lifestyle. He is also an NASM certified coach, and publicly speaks on animal rights. Washington has been vegan since 1998, after he began to embrace Ital and his Rastafarian background. He began competing in 2009 and quickly became known as the ‘‘vegan bodybuilder.’’ He has placed first, second, and third in Musclemania Pro competitions. Torre is also a fitness model and has been featured in GQ, Thrive, and Vegan Health and Fitness. Motivated by his own transformation, he is passionate about inspiring people around the world to pursue their dreams and embrace their power.

I was raised Seventh-day Adventist, and Seventh-day Adventist is a religious belief where they practice worship on Saturdays. Saturday is the Sabbath. It starts from Friday at 6:00 PM, or whenever the sun sets to sunset Saturday night. During this time, you're not supposed to work. You're only supposed to worship and go to church. Typically the mainstay of the nutrition intake for a Seventh-day Adventist is supposedly vegetarian based on the biblical beliefs from the Bible, if you believe in that. So I'm saying all that to my mother, who raised us strictly with that vegetarian lifestyle. That led me down to this path of the label now known as vegan, because I took from that point when I moved from Alabama to Jamaica, I learned a little bit more about the Rastafarian culture.

Then I moved back to south Florida. A lot of my brethren were Jamaican. We started hanging together in high school and we started to grow our locks, more so for fashion, because we just wanted to be in the now. The fashion was to grow little locks on the top, have like a blow-out of locks on the top and shaved around the sides. But we started reading more, reading more into Rastafari, and one of our friends, his dad, was a Rasta. He didn't have his locks anymore, but he was working within corporate America. So at that time, to have locks in certain countries was considered very evil. It was to the point where they would shoot you on site just because Rasta was considered the type of person that would go against modern man, because Rasta's whole history was not to be oppressed. We're lions. We don't bow down to nobody. Just because you say professionalism is clean-cut, no hair, da, da, da, whose definition of professionalism is it? You've come up with your own definition. We don't agree with that.

Understanding that whole history, studying it and seeing that Rasta live more of an Ital lifestyle. You know, Ital is natural, meaning Ital is vital. We live, we eat from the earth, especially from the Bobo Ashanti Rasta that lived in the bushes in Jamaica. But a lot of what I started to find out is, although you have the differences with certain Rastas, but you have some Rastas who still ate fish, still ate chicken. Even though they still consider themselves Rasta, they were still Haile Selassie and Marcus Garvey and all them things. I didn't want to. When I really found out what ital truly was, to see that Rastas weren't actually following that made me feel more of a hypocrite to actually call myself a Rasta but still partake in items that may contain eggs in it or butter or what have you. They’re still some form of not eating from the earth.

In 1998, I decided to say, you know what, I'm going to cut all of that out. Now at that time, I didn't know what this vegan thing was. Even though vegan has been around since the '70s, or even probably earlier than that, in this country and this day and age, everything has a label. So in order for you to be lumped into a group, we have to label it so that way we can understand it more by giving you a label and then put a definition to it. I feel like that's an asinine way to do things, to always put a definition to a group of people so that you can separate them from everyone else, when in this time, we should be wanting to come together.

I will never forget the first time I really truly got tested for being vegan. I was in Atlanta at a Veg Fest. I was standing at a food truck about to get some food. It's cold. This is Georgia. Alabama's north. It was in September, November timing. I had on my Tims, nice jacket, whatever. And this lady standing next to me in line says, "Are your shoes vegan?" And I was so confused, like, "What are you talking about? I'm not going to eat my shoes." Because to me, I looked at vegan or that lifestyle as what you took in, what you consumed for your bodily performance.

From that point on, it was just a learning process for me, learning more about the lifestyle, understanding it and taking out the parts that I didn't really agree with, which was people considering it a diet. "Hey man, what's your diet?" Because to me, I look at diet as even if you just break down the word and say it in the way it is, the D-I-E-T, it sounds like you're saying, "I'm ready to die." But die yet? I'm not ready to die yet. I'm ready to just continue to thrive and live.

Chapter 6

DR. NEAL BARNARD

eal Barnard, MD, FACC. is a researcher, author, and president of the Physician’s Commision for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) which he founded to promote preventative medicine. In 2016, he opened the Barnard Medical Center, providing primary and preventative care with a dietary focus.

Dr. Barnard is a New York Times best-selling author and has nineteen books under his belt in which he deep dives into the science and research of plant-based nutrition and its role in preventing common healthcare issues. His work has led to him being awarded the Lifestyle Medicine Trailblazer Award in 2016 and 6th Plantrician Project Luminary Award in 2019.

Dr. Barnard Began exploring vegan diets during his time at George Washington University School of Medicine while in training. He is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He is a non-practicing psychiatrist, dedicating his career to clinical research. The PCRM provides resources for clinicians, medical students, scientists, and patients alike. Available on their website is curriculum, continuing education, nutritional breakdowns and information on a considerable number of common health conditions. Dr. Neal Barnard utilizes research to prove the pros of being plant-based and preaches it as a method of prevention.

I grew up in North Dakota and every day of my life it was roast beef, baked potatoes and corn except for special occasions when it was roast beef, baked potatoes and peas. That was all I knew. The year before I went to medical school, I had a job in Fairview Hospital in Minneapolis, in the basement where the morgue was. When anybody died, my job was to prepare… [don't look at me that way] the body for the examination. They were in the cooler, and I'd pull them out, and the pathologist knew that I was going to go to medical school. So he would tell me everything.

One day in particular, there was a guy who died in the hospital of a massive heart attack. And so the pathologist slits open his... you open the skin. Then he ripped out a big chunk of ribs so he could expose the heart and he looked at the heart and it was filled with atherosclerotic plaque. That's in one of the coronary arteries on the surface of the heart, it's just narrowed. It's like rusty pipes. And he showed that to me. And he would say, "This is your bacon and eggs, Neal. This is your pork chops, dah, dah, dah. That's what causes this." At the end of the exam, he left the room. And my job then was to clean up.

And so I’d put all the organs back in the body. I put the ribs, which were on the table, back in the chest. I sewed the skin up and cleaned everything. Then I went up to the cafeteria, and they were serving ribs for lunch. I want to tell you, I did not become a vegetarian on the spot. But it looked like a dead body and smelled like a dead body, and I realized, "This is a dead body."

It's not a human body, but if you're eating pieces of a cow or a chicken, or whatever, you are eating... I know it sounds funny to think of it as a corpse. But that is what it is. I started to reflect on it. I mean, up until that point I had hunted, I had driven cattle to slaughter myself with my uncle. I had a job at McDonald's when I was a kid, and all this stuff. I started to rethink, "This is kind of crazy." and eventually I also discovered the health aspects, the animal aspects, the environmental aspects.

I have to say that you grow up, and in the same way as you learn there is no Santa Claus, there is no normal sane way to keep eating the way we're eating. That's a little bit about what I want to talk about today. The diseases that we suffer from, I'm talking about heart disease, many forms of cancer, obesity, diabetes, hypertension. These are things that are directly related to what we eat, and related to a primarily animal based diet. Now, our bodies are fragile things. You can get sick no matter what. Nothing's perfect. Even a vegan is going to have a health problem here and there. But we are asking for trouble. If you pop a cigarette in your mouth and you light it up, you're asking for trouble, same as if you put a burger or a steak, or a chicken breast on your plate. It took me a long time to figure that out, but it's true.

What we have been doing is what I mentioned earlier, we do research. I don't want people to just take this on faith. We have to prove it. We bring people in who have diabetes, and we put them on vegan diets. And you see their diabetes improving dramatically. Dean Ornish, who is a medical genius if ever there was one, showed that you could do this for heart disease. You bring in a person with narrowed arteries, you put them on a plant-based diet, have them put out the cigarettes, have them handle stress, and have them exercise. Even mild exercise. Put it all together. The arteries start opening up again. It's amazing. So that's the word that we want to get out there. Anyway, that was my journey. It started in the basement of Fairview Hospital in Minneapolis.

Chapter 7

JOHN LEWIS ‘‘BAD ASS VEGAN’’

John Lewis, AKA the ''Bad Ass Vegan’’, believes all vegans are cool. A former Division I college basketball player, John has roots in the health and fitness industries. He is a public speaker, entrepreneur, activists, and fitness expert. John is also director and producer of the film They’re Trying to Kill Us, which takes a look at institutional racism and what leads to higher numbers of people of color suffering from chronic diseases. John has created a community for ‘‘Bad Ass Vegans'' where everything from recipes, workout tips, blogs, and more can be shared. His passion for plant-based and passion for sharing knowledge has created an incredibly successful and uplifting community that promotes veganism and provides resources for newbies and veterans alike.

I guess you could say, I did try vegetarian for two years prior. It was when I first moved to Miami, I was going to grad school and I always said, I loved animals. And I always said, I can't do this. I can't do this anymore. And then when I finally moved away from that impact of home, because everybody knows, peer pressure can come from the family. Sometimes you want to do something, but your family's like, "You're going to go vegetarian, you're gonna die." I fell into that trap. And I was pushed into it…

Okay. So actually, I was basically having IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). I come from St. Louis, coming from Missouri. We eat the same thing every day. No change in the diet, every day. When I got down to Miami, I was eating Caribbean food, Jamaican food, Dominican food, Cuban food. I had some of everything. And my stomach was like, "Wait, hold on. This ain't us." I went to the doctor at the University and he was like, "Do you eat a lot of meat?" And of course, we lie sometimes because that's just what we used to do. And I'm like, "No, no of course not." Now, granted I had meat probably on everything, every meal and if it wasn't meat, it was dairy.

He's like, "I want you to try going vegetarian for thirty days." I'm like, "Nah, man, look at me. It's classic. You see how big I am, man, I need..." And he was like, "Just try for thirty days." I didn't do it immediately when I left out there. I want to say that was October 15th. October 31st, I had a good friend of mine slash fraternity brother back home in St. Louis who passed away from sickle cell. I had already done a little bit of reading and I was like, "You know what? This is like an ode to him. I'm going to go ahead and try this for thirty days."

In days, I felt like a million bucks. I was like, "You gotta be kidding me." I was like, "Damn." Just being real. I was a Philly cheesesteak fan and I was like, "Yo, no more Philly cheesesteaks and no more this and that." So I was like, "Wow." This was sixteen years ago.

"Man, what am I going to do?" We had a couple options like Boca, but we don't have what we got now. Fast forward two years, I was about to graduate from my master's program. I remember getting a call from my brother. He said, "Hey man, we're about to take mom to the hospital. We don't know what's wrong."

I talked to my mom on the phone. She says, "I don't know what's up."

My mom was the happiest person in the world and this is the one time I ever heard her just totally out of it. She tells me she feels like shit. We've been through a lot and I ain't never seen her like that. I flew back home, talked to the doctors, everything. They say it’s colon cancer.

‘‘Too much animal protein, fried fatty foods’’’ they told her. I’m shocked. It isn't hereditary?

The doctor says ‘‘No, this is not hereditary,’’ He was just so frank with it. ‘‘This is not hereditary.’’ Wow.

I started doing more research, of course, CDC, World Health Organization, all these websites that aren't even vegan. I just started seeing and connecting the dots, and I'm like, "Wow man…you know what? I'm done with this shit."

I'm a big believer in learning from my mistakes, but I'm a bigger believer in learning from somebody else's mistakes. I just incorporated 100% vegan and it wasn't to start a business. It wasn't even to motivate other people. I was just like, "Yo, I don't think this is right." So I stopped. Then that's when more of the aspects of social justice and animal rights and the world, the ecosystem, that's when everything else came into play. I honestly did it for health reasons. I know some vegans there, they're all like, "Well, if you don't go for the animals, you'll change back." That's not necessarily true. I did it for that and then it opened me up to a wider range of reasons to stay.