10 Questions: Vegan Rockstar with Sherra Aguirre

Credit: Grady Carter Photography

Sherra Aguirre, author of the soon-to-be-released book Joyful, Delicious, Vegan: Life Without Heart Disease, discovered the positive health effects of a plant-based diet in her personal life and is passionate about getting the word out. Overcoming her own hypertension as well as mitigating her family history of high blood pressure, heart disease and strokes, Sherra sold her successful business so she could dedicate herself full-time to promote reclaiming one’s health. Her book is going to be released in late May but is available for pre-order and you can find her on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and through her website, SherraAguirre.com.

I am thrilled to be able to feature Sherra as our latest Vegan Rockstar.

1. First of all, we’d love to hear your “vegan evolution” story. How did you start out? Did you have any early influences or experiences as a young person that in retrospect helped to pave your path?

I spent summers as a kid at my grandparents’ farm in East Texas and was always around chickens, pigs, horses and cows. I saw my grandmother kill a chicken by grabbing it by the head and twirling it to break its neck, then tossing it on the ground where it flopped around until it died. Although I still ate chicken at the dinner table, I would hide when she went to pick one from the hen house for our meal. As horrendous as that sounds, it pales by comparison to current factory breeding and slaughterhouse methods. Another major influence was watching my parents struggle with hypertension and seeing many members of my family experience heart attacks, strokes and other effects of cardiovascular disease.

2. Imagine that you are pre-vegan again: how could someone have talked to you and what could they have said or shown you that could have been the most effective way to have a positive influence on you moving toward veganism?

I spent about twenty years eating a mostly vegetarian diet out of concern for my heart health and my interest in finding a healthier diet and lifestyle. At that point I had not been exposed to movies like Forks Over Knives, Vegucated, nor read books like Diet for a New America by John Robbins. I think had I known people who ate a vegan diet earlier, I could have been persuaded by more information about the abuses…