“I didn’t want to give people expensive and side-effect-prone pills”

By: Brian Duke

In 2013, during a break from studying for the PCAT (entrance exam for Pharmacy school) I watched the Forks Over Knives documentary which I found randomly while searching on the internet. Forks Over Knives dramatically changed my opinion about what we should eat and my career choice. The idea that you could avoid heart disease completely was thrilling and motivating. I had been eating mostly home cooked meals containing meat and dairy with occasional microwavable dinners when I needed to save time. I changed my diet immediately.

I struggled a bit at first to find things to cook and eat and to eat enough calories. I have always been at a healthy weight due in part to running long distances for exercise. When I started the Whole Food Plant Based (WFPB) diet, I lost 8 pounds in a few months that I did not need to lose. When I saw the weight loss, I realized that I just needed to eat more volume of food than I was used to, which quickly solved the problem.

I abandoned my pharmacist career path for becoming a dietitian. I didn’t want to give people expensive and side-effect-prone pills for the rest of their lives for conditions that could be prevented and treated with diet. I took some extra classes to qualify for a Masters program in Dietetics, applied, and was accepted.

During my graduate schooling in Nutrition, I did change my diet a bit, adding back in wild Alaskan salmon and some low fat dairy as there were recommendations for those foods from government science panels like the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans. My spiritual rational was that Jesus ate fish, and both fish and dairy were not mentioned in the Word of Wisdom. During graduate school, only the positives of these foods were talked about. When I learned outside of school about the negatives of fish and dairy, such as contaminant pollutants (pesticides, PCB’s, mercury), carcinogenic compounds created from cooking these foods (heterocyclic amines), the presence of active hormones (estrogen), and the economic and political influences on the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans, I took these foods back out.

My graduate school had a vegan faculty member, which helped me see that the more you know about the science of nutrition, nothing you learn is a show-stopper for the vegan diet. In fact, the more I learn, the more I see that the sum of the evidence points toward a WFPB diet as the best diet for humans if it is well planned to get all the needed nutrients. I did my thesis work on magnesium, which is a nutrient that most Americans don’t get enough of unless they take a supplement, with the exception of those who eat closer to WFPB.

During these grad school years, I met and married my wife, who wondered when we were dating what to cook for me, so I usually did the cooking, which she enjoyed. A vegan husband that cooks great meals was the envy of her co-workers when they saw the dinner leftovers she brought for lunch. She did occasionally add in some meat and dairy to the dishes we cooked, until she saw the Discovering the Word of Wisdom documentary on YouTube, and we read Jane Birch’s book, Discovering the Word of Wisdom. Now we both eat exclusively WFPB. We have not had significant health problems in our lives, and we hope to keep it that way for as long as possible through exercise and WFPB eating.

Since graduating, I have worked for a year and a half as a dietitian. I mention the health benefits of WFPB as the occasion calls for it and whenever people ask what the dietitian is eating. I continue to learn more supporting the WFPB diet and have found good resources to be Dr. Greger’s Nutritionfacts.org and Becoming Vegan by Brenda Davis and Vesanto Malina.

The fact that the Word of Wisdom clearly supports this diet lets me know that this way of eating will withstand the honest tests of science despite all the noise and contrary opinions and conspiring efforts at money making at the expense of our health.

Brian Duke is 37 years old and lives in Cedar Hills, Utah. He and his wife have one child. They enjoy triathlons, fruit and vegetable gardening, and hiking.