Both on and off the ice, pro hockey star Georges Laraque is not afraid to keep wrongful play in check. Now retired from the NHL, the amicable enforcer is putting some muscle into the fight for animal rights. Recently, Big Georges and his booming voice talked with the Post about animal agriculture, nutritional myths and his unique experience as a vegan playing professional hockey.

The UWM Post: I was reading on your website that you went vegan in 2009 after watching Earthlings. Who introduced you to the idea of animal rights? How did you discover the Earthlings documentary?

Georges Laraque: A friend of mine, a long-time vegetarian, had been telling me that I should watch it. I set it aside for a while because I really didn’t want to watch it – I thought I knew everything already, I thought I knew how the animals were killed – but eventually I sat down and watched it. When I started watching it, I was in tears and I decided right at that point that not only was I going to turn vegan, I was also going to start being a voice for animals and do everything I can to defend their rights.

Post: Being a professional athlete in as physical a sport as hockey, how did your coaches/trainers respond to your decision to become vegan?

Laraque:  Well I was lucky because the GM, Pierre Gauthier, was vegan from birth. So with the boss of the team being vegan, obviously it was easy for the team to have half its menu vegan and have vegan meals on the plane when we’d travel.

And the trainers, half of them were vegetarian, so it was well received. People are more open to this in today’s society. Even guys on my team were trying to eat less and less meat and they said they could actually feel a difference when they didn’t have meat, so that was really good. Of course they made a couple of jokes and asked some dumb questions, but they quickly warmed up to the idea.

Post: So how has your physical health changed since going vegan? What changes have you noticed in your strength, energy level and overall health?

Laraque: I wanted to carefully document my body’s response to the vegan diet, so what I did was I went to a cardiology hospital and had them do a full range of tests on me: physical tests, cardiovascular tests, blood tests, and they monitored my blood pressure. I went vegan right away, and then six months later I did the same tests again to get a “before and after” report – I wanted to know how my body reacted. My high blood pressure was gone, asthma was gone – they actually did a documentary about it. I didn’t want to just tell people, I wanted to show it with facts and prove to them that even as a professional athlete, going vegan was the best thing I’d ever done. You become a bigger, stronger, better athlete once you eat better.

Post: What would you say to people – guys especially – who think they need to eat meat to build muscle and be “manly”?

Laraque: The problem is that most of the people who advocate vegetarianism and veganism are skinny, hippie types. Because that’s the image most often associated with veganism, people look at them and say, ‘I don’t want to be that small, I don’t want to lose all my muscle.’ So that’s why it’s really interesting for people to see a big guy like me talking about it. That’s when people realize, ‘Oh, well, I guess it’s not true that I’m going to lose all my muscle.’ They can see that obviously I didn’t lose any.

People who combine amino acids from plant-based foods to create a complete protein instead of eating meat really see a huge difference. People are so misguided with their meat-and-potato diets.

Post: On your website you wrote: “If you can watch the entire Earthlings documentary and still eat animal products, I will respect your decision because at least you know what you’re contributing to, and if you can live with that, then so be it.” I think you’ve hit on the root of the problem – people just don’t want to know what goes on behind the scenes of animal industries. Ignorance is comfortable, so how do you get people to come out from that sanctuary of denial and agree to get informed?

Laraque: People often say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to watch Earthlings because then I’ll stop eating meat,’ to which I respond: ‘Then why are you eating meat in the first place?’

Just to be educated is the least you can do. But you’re right; it’s difficult to get people to agree to hearing the truth. There’s comfort in staying misinformed. I say to people, ‘What do you think would happen if all the slaughterhouses had glass walls and everybody would be able to see how animals are often still alive when they get to the cutters?’ They would see all the violence that goes into what they eat, and all the BGH [bovine growth hormone] that gets injected into the animals – which is why all the seven-year-old girls have tits now and why at 55-60 years old they all have breast cancer – because of all the chemicals that are injected into the animals, which people are then ingesting.

Obviously the meat industry is not going to tell you these things, because they don’t care. They just think about profit and profit and profit. They’re not going to tell you that animal agriculture is responsible for more than 20 percent of all global warming. That’s more than automobiles!

It’s what you don’t know that often leads you to make the wrong decisions. For instance, when you drive on the highway and you see a sign that says ‘Drink milk,’ people don’t realize that this is just an advertisement for another billion-dollar-a-year industry. They’re not going to tell you what happens to your body when you drink milk, they’re not going to tell you that drinking milk can cause cancer, and they don’t tell you that milk is so acidic that not only does it not strengthen your bones, it actually eats away at your bones; they don’t tell you that when you drink milk it leeches iron from your body, which is especially dangerous for women, who often become anemic during their periods. All these things they don’t tell you because then they know you would stop drinking milk.

It’s because of these industries and all the misinformation they put out there that people are so sick. And that in turn feeds another billion-dollar-a-year industry: the pharmaceutical industry. But when you eat a vegan diet, your risk of illness – from things as minor as a cold to as serious as cancer – decreases because plant-based foods make your body more alkaline [the opposite of acidic]. Alkaline bodies are much less prone to diseases.

Also, when you eat a diet full of meat and foods of low nutritional value, your body isn’t going to feel full because it’s not finding the nutrients it needs; you end up eating a lot more food because your body is telling you to go find more nutrients, despite having already taken in a lot of calories. This is why we have such a big obesity problem in America.

Post: So what do you say to people who claim to know all of this but still haven’t made the change to veganism?

Laraque: Sometimes I’ll talk to people, and they’ll agree with everything I’m saying, but when I ask them if they’re vegan, they say, ‘Well I know all of these things, but I’m just not ready yet.’ I hear that so many times and it just doesn’t make sense. They’re like, ‘Yeah I know it’s bad. I know, I know. I know I have to change…’ It’s kind of like the guy that smokes and says ‘Yeah I know it’s bad. I’m going to stop next year. I’ll make it my next New Year’s resolution.’ And of course they never actually do it.

I encourage your readers to look up testimonials on the Internet from people who had cancer and were told they were going to die, but they changed to a completely vegan diet and their cancer went away. Once you eat right, once your body becomes more alkaline, that’s when your body fends off disease.

When it comes to their health, people will pay attention. They may not care about the environment or the meat industry, but when they hear what animal products do to their bodies, they can’t argue with that. We need to view food as our primary medicine. People need to be aware of the power food has.

For more on what Georges Laraque has to say about animal agriculture, nutrition and the environment, visit www.georgeslaraque.com.