photo courtesy of Pam Popper
Dr. Pam Popper came upon veganism as a lifestyle unexpectedly, but in the past 18 years it has become her passion and her life’s work to teach others about the benefits of a whole foods plant-based diet, which she does through her work at the Wellness Forum. Vegan Mainstream recently had the opportunity to talk to Pam about the Wellness Forum, her part in Forks Over Knives, and more.
Vegan Mainstream: Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how you became interested in a vegan diet in the first place?
Pam Popper: Well, actually it was quite by accident. I am very lucky that I had my first exposure to nutrition in general in this particular way. I had seen an article about 18 years ago about diet and health. I was the most un-health-conscious person you probably could have met at that particular point in time, but I knew my diet was terrible.
I saw this article that suggested that what you eat can affect your health outcome and I thought it was interesting, and I made a comment to an acquaintance of mine who loaned me Dr. John McDougall’s book called The McDougall Plan and I read it and I was intrigued. First of all I asked myself the question that I think a lot of people ask: “why doesn’t everyone know about this?” If we can really reverse multiple sclerosis with diet, why aren’t we telling the whole world?
It got me thinking about the profound influence that diet can have on health, and within a short period of time it became something that I wanted to devote my life to doing. So that’s how it happened. I’m real lucky because you hear people talking about this dietary conversion, and usually it’s a health issue that brings people to the table – I’m lucky that I [figured this out] before I got sick or before something terrible happened.
VM: So what was it like to be vegan at that time? That’s a while ago. Now it’s becoming more mainstream, but at that time, I’m sure it wasn’t.
PP: I didn’t start out vegan. I gave up all the meat and chicken and eggs and dairy – all that went away. I kept eating fish a couple times a month for a while and I eventually gave that up. Back in those days it was inconvenient to be vegan. The grocery stores didn’t carry much stuff. I live in Columbus, Ohio and we had a health food store that was about the size of my bedroom.
Also, when you talked about it and others became aware of what you were doing, there was the shock factor. There was this assumption that you had joined some strange cult and you would sooner or later get over the brainwashing factor – it was just not widely understood. You can’t have acceptance of something that’s not widely understood or common. It was difficult. My company, The Wellness Forum, teaches people how to [become vegan]. But at that time there wasn’t anything like that around. I had kids at home and I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning that made it harder. If you serve your kids something they hate, it’s harder to get them to try something new the next time. One of the benefits of our business is that we help people to avoid a lot of the things that I did wrong in the beginning.
VM: So how did you decide that the Wellness Forum was the way you wanted to spread this message or to educate people?
PP: That also was an accident! You’re going to think my whole life was a happy accident if I tell you the whole story! After I decided to go back to school and I became real passionate about this and I was experimenting with new recipes at home – it’s just amazing – even today – people tell me this – you change your diet and start talking about it and everybody else has questions. I was rather busy at the time – like we all are – and I thought wouldn’t it be a better idea to just have a little class at my house and have everybody come out at the same time for anybody who was interested, and I did that – I scheduled this little class at my house and 12 people came and they liked it, and they wanted to come back next week and bring friends. Eventually it got to the place where I had quite a thriving little business in my house – I wasn’t charging anybody, but certainly I did have a lot of traffic in and out, and I figured I should probably get this out of the house. So I rented a little office on High Street and started holding classes there. And from there it grew. I don’t think I ever really had a business plan, although eventually we developed a vision for what we wanted this thing to be, but the market just took over and demand grew it into what it is today.
VM: I understand now that you have an education component – that you are starting up a school – and that’s been a more recent part of your business?
PP: Yes – just to give you an idea of all of the things that we do … Our primary business is, and always has been, directed at the individual person who buys a membership to The Wellness Forum because they are interested in education that will help them to change their diet, to change their health, and also they’re interested in information about how to interact with the medical profession. I think that’s one of the unique things that we do here. We are not only teaching people about how to eat the right diet. We’re also teaching them how to evaluate information about their health. Should you or should you not have a mammogram or a PSA test? And if you develop an illness the types of questions you should ask your doctor – we still have to interact with the medical field regardless of our diets at some point in time.
That’s the original business that was here, and then we’ve added things to that. We have an opportunity for people to learn how to have a career with us; we license people to offer our classes and even to open Wellness Forum facilities. We have a food manufacturing company. Wellness Forum Athletics includes a yoga studio and a gym here locally. We operate a public policy institute that works on legislative issues in all 50 states and at the federal level, and our most recent addition is the Wellness Forum Institute for health studies which was approved by the State of Ohio to operate as a school in 2009. The objective for the Wellness Forum Institute is to provide education for people who have already gone through some type of health professional education program – dietitians, and doctors and nurses and people who are already educated, but who didn’t learn about diet and lifestyle as an intervention tool. It’s also there to educate health care professionals who are just starting the process of education. The other program we have approved and we started this year is the Nutrition Educator program, which is an alternative to traditional dietetics. We eventually want to grow this into a full-fledged private college with a residential medical school because we think that we have to do something about the lack of knowledge about diet and lifestyle with health care professionals if we are really going to solve our problems here in this country.
VM: In your opinion, is the public perception of veganism changing?
PP: I think it’s changing. I think it’s important that we talk about plant-based diets and use terms and language that are not deceptive but are more inviting. One of the reasons I say that is, when we talk about vegan diets, people normally get there because they are either interested in ethical issues or they have health issues… so that leaves a huge number of people who are untapped, but who I think could be convinced to adopt a plant-centered diet that isn’t necessarily vegan. I think that the perception of veganism is still that it’s extreme by the general population and I think that we need to reach those people by addressing them differently.
VM: Were you surprised at the success of Forks over Knives?
PP: In a way, yes. I knew we had made a great movie… the first time I saw even the rough cut version of it I was so excited and proud of it. But what I thought would happen was I thought there would be a big splash when the movie came out in May – and there was – and then it would sort of die off. But what happened was the theatre run happened and we were getting a lot of calls from people who were really curious about the movie and about the diet. After the theatre run it became available on Netflix and more people than ever started calling us and emailing us … I guess that’s what surprised me – the sustained interest in the film is what has been a little bit surprising. But I think that the reason why people love this film and why it’s going to continue to be successful is that it’s a pretty happy film. You’ve got a couple of guys in the film – Dr’s Campbell and Esselstyn – who are having a great time doing what they believe in and are following their passion and a bunch of doctors who love to practice and the patients get well – I mean what’s not to like about that? You’ve got to be a pretty pessimistic person to find something wrong with that.
VM: I hadn’t thought of it in terms of that, but you’re right, it’s very uplifting.
PP: Yeah, and I think that’s the way we should be approaching health care. Health care is such doom and gloom. It’s expensive and who’s going to pay for it and oh my god there’s something wrong with me and the side effects of the meds …. I think that we need to get back to really promoting health and putting the fun back in healthcare. Doctors can have fun …. I think that if you talk to people who operate a practice centered around plant-based nutrition and lifestyle changes, they’re all having a ball. We are here … because people get better. That’s always fun! If I were some traditional doctor in a practice where all the diabetics got worse over time I’d probably want to quit too.
VM: What are your plans for the future? You mentioned you have some lofty goals for the Wellness Forum – what are they?
PP: We started with a goal (when I say “we” I meant the people who have helped me build this company over the years – most of them are still here). Our goal was to change health care inAmerica. It’s a pretty lofty goal in the general sense and I think we have made great strides in doing our part to do that up until now. But what I want to do is take it to the next level. In the next five years we want to take our membership from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people.
We are really aggressive right now in promoting our employer-sponsored plans which are designed to help companies that need to lower health insurance costs to do so by showing their employees how to change their diet and their health. We are committed to helping 500 companies in the next five years to adopt a program like ours. We are going to continue to build the Wellness Forum Institute with the idea of full accreditation a residential medical school. We are going to continue to work in the schools through our foundation, changing not only the nutrition status of the cafeteria offerings, but also the education that kids get in the classroom – which today is mostly industry-sponsored…We want to continue down the path that we’ve been going down for the past fifteen years – we just want to accelerate it – make it bigger, faster and I think the timing is really right!
