Taraji P. Henson is making a major shift in her eating habits.
The “Empire” actor, like many of her celebrity peers, decided to start following a plant-based diet after having a health scare. According to her interview in Women’s Health this week, Henson has always had stomach issues that caused her to vomit uncontrollably. She recalled three times when it happened, once two decades ago, another time in 2015, and also in 2017.
During her first incident, she was prescribed a proton-pump inhibitor, and while she had positive results, the inhibitor medication did not cure her issue, it just remedied her symptoms. In 2017, her doctor gave her another PPI and warned her, “‘If you don’t correct what’s going on inside of you, you’re going to develop stomach ulcers, which can lead to stomach cancer,’” she said.
But the PPI that she was given this time worsened her condition instead of helping that time, and that is when she tried a different approach by visiting a holistic doctor. She told Women’s Health, “Western medicine saves lives. But it wasn’t helping in my situation.” Her doctor instructed her to do a breath test that would see how much hydrogen and methane she’s exhaled after drinking glucose and water.
In conclusion of the breath test, Henson was diagnosed with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or SIBO for short. She also discovered that the PPI’s she was being prescribed to treat her condition might have been the reason for her condition worsening and not being fully cured. To reverse the condition, her holistic doctor put her on a plant-based diet which included papaya, avocado, and “fermented vegetables, which contain probiotics key to restoring gut flora” according to Women’s Health.
She did admit that every once in a while she would cheat on her plant-based diet in order to enjoy a nice home-cooked meal from her grandmother. “Everything in moderation,” she said.
The 51-year-old is joining other celebrities like Venus Williams, who also went vegan after being diagnosed with Sjogren’s Syndrome in 2011. David Carter, former defensive lineman for Dallas Cowboys, said he suffered from painful tendinitis and had high blood pressure when he made the choice to go vegan. He was 305 pounds but lost 40 of those in six weeks after switching his diet.
Social media influencer Tabitha Brown is also vegan, and what influenced her choice were these painful headaches she had in the back of her head which caused “chronic fatigue,” “major panic attacks,” and she said, “I felt like I was dying.” After a year and seven months, her daughter influenced her to watch a documentary called “What the Health,” and from that she decided to go vegan. She said by the tenth day of going vegan her headaches had went away.
