Our First Vegan President?

It's president's day and, to celebrate, we wanted to highlight our first vegan president. Okay, so he wasn't a vegan during his time in office, actually far from it. In fact, if you had told anyone in the 90's that Bill Clinton would one day swear off meat and cheese, you'd get more than one person laughing in your face.

Image via Flickr

Clinton, notorious for his love of burgers (particularly McDonalds), only changed his ways after a couple of intense health scares. According to a CNN interview with Sanjay Gupta, Clinton had made some moderate changes in his diet, but still experienced a blockage in his artery. 

"I essentially concluded that I had played Russian roulette," Clinton said, "because even though I had changed my diet some and cut down on the caloric total of my ingestion and cut back on much of the cholesterol in the food I was eating, I still -- without any scientific basis to support what I did -- was taking in a lot of extra cholesterol without knowing if my body would produce enough of the enzyme to support it, and clearly it didn't or I wouldn't have had that blockage. So that's when I made a decision to really change."

So is it possible for a hamburger and doughnut loving guy to happily become a vegan? According to Clinton, it is. Even though he had to give up his junk food, he has learned to enjoy the vegan diet and all the health benefits that go along with it.

"I like the vegetables, the fruits, the beans, the stuff I eat now," Clinton told Gupta

Check out the hilarious Phil Hartman poking fun at Clinton's love of McDonalds.


And here is a recent video in which Clinton talks about his new diet.