The Diet Change That Completely Transformed Bill Clinton's (79) Health

A former president once known for late night burger runs and a love of fast food seems like an unlikely face for plant based eating. For years, that reputation followed him everywhere he went.

After a serious health scare, he made a change that reshaped how he ate almost entirely. Keep reading to see what pushed him to change and how different his diet actually became.

A Second Health Scare Forced A Real Reckoning

Bill Clinton underwent a quadruple bypass surgery in 2004 after decades of a diet heavy in fried and fatty food. When doctors later had to implant stents to reopen one of those same vessels, he realized cutting back on cholesterol alone was not going to be enough.

He has said he decided he was simply too high risk to keep dealing with the same problem over and over. Wanting to be around for future grandchildren became the motivation he needed to make a much bigger change.

He Turned To Doctors Studying Reversal, Not Just Management

Rather than just managing his condition, Clinton wanted to actually reverse the damage already done to his heart. He began following research from Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, both of whom had spent decades studying how a strict plant based diet could reverse existing heart disease.

He also read The China Study, a large scale look at diet and disease risk by researcher T. Colin Campbell. All three sources pointed toward the same basic conclusion, a near total shift away from animal products.

His Actual Diet Looked Nothing Like His Old Habits

Clinton’s new diet bore almost no resemblance to how he used to eat. His meals became built around beans, legumes, vegetables and fruit, with dairy cut out entirely and almond milk taking its place.

Mornings started with a protein shake made from almond milk, fruit and protein powder rather than anything closer to his old breakfast habits. It was about as far from his previous reputation as a diet change could get.

The Results Went Beyond Just The Scale

The physical results were hard to ignore. Clinton has said he lost more than twenty pounds after adopting the new way of eating, along with reporting noticeably more energy than before.

Beyond weight, he has described the diet as slowly working to reverse damage already done to his arteries. What started as a health scare turned into one of the most complete lifestyle transformations of his post presidency.

So the man once associated with burger runs became, somewhat improbably, one of the more visible faces of plant based eating in America. Sometimes the most convincing diet transformation is the one nobody would have predicted from where someone started.