By Jessica Scott-Reid
Jessica is a Canadian writer, animal advocate and plant-based food expert. Her work appears regularly in media across Canada and the US.
Market research over the last few years has typically pointed to people under 40 as those driving the growing trend towards plant-based and flexitarian eating. While statistically this is true, there are also members of another generation who are quietly making diet and lifestyle changes to include more plant foods and less animal harm: Baby Boomers. And my Mom is one of them.
Turns out she is part of a growing trend. 45% of Canadian Baby Boomers are open to embracing a diet of more plants and less meat, according to the Dalhousie University Agri-Food Analytics Lab.
Like so many Boomers, my Mom grew up with a very idyllic idea of animal farming. She would visit her uncle’s small farm as a kid, where the animals seemed happy and the lone cow was always providing milk. My Mom didn’t think at that time how cows actually produce milk, they just did. Today, my Mom is 67, and now knows too well what that mother cow must have gone through, having babies out of sight who would then quickly disappear. And then so would the cow.
“It was hidden from us,” she recounts, about the truths about meat, dairy and egg production. “But it was a passive acceptance. We all knew that those animals died. Somewhere inside we knew.” But in the 1950s and 1960s, she says, eating animal products was just the norm, “everyone did it.”
Today, plant-based eating has gone mainstream. Hidden realities about the inherent cruelties and environmental harms involved in industrial animal farming are being exposed. So now, after decades of cultural conditioning making animal eating appear normal, natural and necessary, some older people are asking questions, finding new answers, and making changes.
The most difficult part of transitioning to plant-based eating over the last five years, my Mom says, is changing those decades-old ways of thinking about food. “To change doing anything at that age, over 60, over 50, is monumental. But to change your whole way of eating, your whole thoughts about animals, about meat eating, it’s a lot.”
She points to the Canada Food Guide — which had always included dairy as an essential food group and animal-derived protein as a must-have portion on your plate — as part of the programming she had to counter while going plant-based.
Thankfully, she had me to help. My work as a journalist, writing about animal cruelty in the food system, plant-based foods and nutrition, and the impacts of animal farming on the environment put my Mom in the front row for receiving this new information (she is my proof reader). And then she got Netflix. “Documentaries, What the Health, Cowspiracy, Forks Over Knives,” she says, really helped solidify her choice.
Jessica and her Mom. Photo: Jessica Scott-Reid
Lisa Raymond, who is 56 and has been eating plant-based for a year and half, says she too was inspired to make the change by her daughter, who is vegetarian. “She challenged me to eat vegetarian with her for a month, which I breezed by easily and had no problems with.” Afterward, she says, “I felt good eating vegetarian, but also felt that for me being vegan was the way to go.”
She says a family history of high cholesterol and her own struggles with the condition helped push her to go fully plant-based. “My doctor agreed that it could help,” she says, adding that thanks to the switch she has benefited from not only reduced weight, cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar, but also “I am clearer mentally, have more energy and focus better than I have in years.”
Registered dietician Dr. Pamela Fergusson says people over 55 benefit greatly from a plant-based diet, “which is naturally high in fibre and low in saturated fats and cholesterol.” She explains that “as we age, our risk of common diseases like diabetes and heart disease increases, and eating more whole food plants will help reduce that risk.”
She does also note that after age 55, people need to up their plant protein a bit, to maintain and build muscle. “And be sure to include a glass of fortified non-dairy milk each day to help maintain bone mass. Everyone can benefit from a vitamin D supplement, but it’s especially helpful for older adults to help with immune function, mental health and healthy bones.”
For my Mom, becoming vegan was more about helping animals and the planet than personal health. But she does say that after trying every possible treatment to help with a 25-year-long battle with persistent psoriasis, a long-term inflammatory skin disease with no cure, “it completely disappeared after three months of going off meat.”
Both Raymond and my Mom say that one of the challenges with changing to a plant-based diet later in life is dealing with family and friends who don’t understand or agree with it. But, says Raymond, “the benefits for me outweigh any negative vibes from my friends and family.”
Today, my Mom says she feels validated by the latest version of the Canada Food Guide, which has now eliminated dairy as an essential food group, and includes plants in its protein recommendations. She knows that those happy, bucolic ideations of animal farming that she learned as a kid were not only false, but also perpetuated by the animal agriculture industry.
She is hopeful that as the realities about animal farming become exposed to more people, more Baby Boomers will consider eating more plants and fewer animals. “Once you are educated about what’s really going on,” she says, “once you face those truths, you can’t un-face them.”