His wife of 51 years, Elaine LaLanne, knew. "I have not only lost my husband and a great American icon,” she said, “but the best friend and most loving partner anyone could ever hope for.”

When it comes to exercise and health, the name “Jack LaLanne” has long been virtually synonymous with fitness. Jack literally inspired millions to live a healthful life. But Jack LaLanne didn’t start out as a model of health. Far from it.

When he was a teenager, he dropped out of school for a year because he was so ill. Shy and withdrawn, he avoided being with people. He had pimples and boils, was thin, weak, and sickly, and wore a back brace. “I also had blinding headaches every day,” Jack recalls. “I wanted to escape my body because I could hardly stand the pain. My life appeared hopeless.”

Then he met the pioneer nutritionist Paul Bragg, who preached a new way of living, and to his credit, Jack listened. Bragg asked Jack, “What do you eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”

Cakes, pies, and ice cream,” Jack answered truthfully.

“Jack,” Bragg replied, “you’re a walking garbage can.”

He pointed young Jack in a healthier direction. That night Jack got down on his knees by the side of his bed and prayed. He didn’t say, “God, make me the strongest man in the world.” Instead, he asked for a new beginning. “God, please give me the willpower to refrain from eating unhealthy foods when the urge comes over me. And please give me the strength to exercise even when I don’t feel like it.”

Jack set out to see what he could accomplish with a good diet and exercise. He found a set of weights and began to use them. He ate only the most healthful of foods. He developed exercise equipment that evolved into what has become standard in many health spas today. In 1936, he opened the first modern health club, paying $45 a month for rent in downtown Oakland.

Jack LaLanne touted the value of exercise and nutrition long before it became fashionable. Many people thought he was a charlatan and a nut. When he encouraged the elderly to lift weights, doctors said this was terrible advice. They said it was a good way for the elderly to break bones. But now, of course, we know that weight-bearing exercise is precisely what is needed to build bone strength and prevent elderly bones from breaking. He was among the first to advocate weight training for women. Doctors said women who tried it would not be able to bear children. Now we know that regular exercise is one of the best preparations for childbirth. Over the years, he’s been vindicated a thousandfold. His television programs have brought his ideas to hundreds of millions of people and helped change the way we all view health and fitness.

It has been said that without eccentrics, cranks, and heretics the world would not progress. Jack LaLanne was most certainly an eccentric. On his sixtieth birthday, he swam from the notorious Alcatraz island prison to San Francisco while handcuffed, towing a thousand-pound boat. “Why did you do that?” people asked. Jack’s response: “To give the prisoners hope.” (The prison has since closed, and today Alcatraz Island is a U.S. National Park Service attraction.)

On his sixty-fifth birthday, Jack LaLanne towed sixty-five hundred pounds of wood pulp across a lake in Japan. On his seventieth birthday, he celebrated by towing seventy rowboats with seventy people on board for a mile and a half across Long Beach Harbor, all while handcuffed and with his feet shackled.

He said his purpose in these phenomenal performances was to demonstrate that a healthful lifestyle can work wonders.

Having pioneered health and fitness gyms in the United States, Jack was gratified that physical fitness and nutrition have become a huge growth industry worldwide, because he believed that the emphasis on exercise and a healthful, natural diet creates stronger, smarter, and better people. “With healthier citizens,” he said, “we unburden society from sickness, and reduce the medical bills that are draining people’s savings and causing so much grief.”

Even in his nineties, Jack was a living testimony to the value of regular exercise and a healthful lifestyle. He was for many years a vegan (no meat, dairy, or eggs), but in his later years, though he still ate no dairy products―“anything that comes from a cow, I don’t eat”― he occasionally ate egg whites and wild fish. Mostly, he ate organic raw fruits and vegetables. And he took vitamins.

His vibrant message was that it’s never too late to get in shape. “Those who begin to exercise regularly, and replace white flour, sugar, and devitalized foods with live, organic, natural foods, begin to feel better immediately,” he said. He emphasized that it takes both nutrition and exercise. “There are so many health nuts out there who eat nothing but natural foods but they don’t exercise and they look terrible. Then there are other people who exercise like a son-of-a-gun but eat a lot of junk. . . . Exercise is king. Nutrition is queen. Put them together and you’ve got a kingdom!”

Even at the age of 95, Jack LaLanne was still a model of fitness and vitality. Full of life and spirit, his one-minute “Jack LaLanne Tip of the Day” pieces were still being shown on seventy television stations. As energetic and flamboyant as ever, he was still speaking all over the world, inspiring people to help themselves to a better life, physically, mentally, and morally.

When he was 94, Jack was asked if he thought he’d live to be 100. His answer was to the point. “I don’t care how old I live! I just want to be living while I am living! I have friends who are in their eighties, and now they’re in wheelchairs or they’re getting Alzheimer’s. Who wants that? I want to be able to do things. I want to look good. I don’t want to be a drudge on my wife and kids. And I want to get my message out to people.” He smiled. “I tell people, I can’t afford to die. It would wreck my image.”

He was once asked about George Burns, the famous comedian who made it to 100 though he smoked cigars, drank alcohol, and was not health oriented. Jack, it turns out, knew George Burns well, and he answered, “George Burns was more athletic than you think he was. And he was a very social man. He loved people, he enjoyed life. He worked at living. Old George was a social lion, he got around and did things. That’s the key right there. It starts with your brain.”

Jack LaLanne was a man of great accomplishments. But perhaps his greatest achievement was that this once painfully shy and sick young man learned to love people and to love being alive.

John Robbins is the author of many bestsellers include The Food Revolution  and Diet For A New America . He is the recipient of the Rachel Carson Award, the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, the Peace Abbey's Courage of Conscience Award, and Green America's Lifetime Achievement Award. To learn more about his work, visit http://www.johnrobbins.info

We visited Comic Con in San Diego and were pleasantly surprised to learn that actor, Michael Dorn (Star Trek: The Next Generation) is a vegan. In this video, he shares his strategy for keeping fit and why he turned vegan.

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Scroll down to watch video of Gov. Jesse Ventura discussing theories on the assassination of John Lennon.

Had he not been murdered by forces unknown, John Lennon would have celebrated his 70th birthday on October 9, 2010.

Though the media successfully made a cartoon character out of him and obscured the cause of his death, this song - and its wild popularity on YouTube 30+ years after its release with zero mass media publicity - shows he was an important figure:

First, remember that Steve-O earned his fame on MTV's Jackass, a show that was about grown men doing the dumbest, more painful things they could possibly come up with, on film.

Steve-O then fell into a cycle of drunken debauchery, depression and all around trouble. Arrested for drug possession, kicked off MTV for rowdy behavior and intoxication, things were not going well. So unwell, as a matter of fact, that his friends had an intervention that led to Steve-O's hospitalization, suicide watch and rehab.

That when then. What is the now? Steve-O at PETA's 30th anniversary gala telling reporters how much he gushes over his rescue dog, Walter Cronkite, a dog he picked up at a sidewalk adoption drive in Beverly Hills, and a dog he credits with teaching him "love and tolerance."

Fisher, 6-foot-2 and 280 pounds, is a rarity in college football: an offensive lineman who is also a vegetarian. Put him and his fellow O-line veggies around the country in the same room and it wouldn't take long to call roll.

"People ask if I'll ever eat meat. Someday, maybe," Fisher said. "But I worry about what might happen to my intestines the day after. I'm not sure it would be a good experience."

When fellow guard Brian Schwenke was asked if he could function as a vegetarian, he recoiled in horror. "I'd die," he said.

As for Fisher, a lacto-ovo vegetarian, he's living quite nicely on a diet of milk, cheese, eggs, pasta, beans, fruit, pizza (remember, hold the meat), peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, protein shakes, ice cream and, of course, vegetables. Stir-fry dishes with eggs is a favorite, as is pizza, particularly from the Cheeseboard in Berkeley.

Fisher, a senior from the Santa Cruz Mountains hamlet of Ben Lomond, has been a vegetarian longer than he can remember. A line in Fisher's bio in the media guide is startling: "has been a vegetarian since he was a toddler."

For that he can thank his progressive parents, Eric and Brett Fisher. They embraced a vegetarian lifestyle years ago and raised three no-meat children. "My parents originally ate meat," Fisher said. "They went to a Tony Robbins seminar and got the global food perspective. They were into working out and being healthy. They actually started out vegan, so I was a vegan for a couple years. That was really hard to get protein, especially growing up, so they said, OK, we can eat dairy."

Our little VegSource twins are growing up!

Remember back when they were 3-years-old, when we opened the website?

Well they just turned 17 and today are featured in mega-pop star Justin Bieber's new music video, "U Smile."

Watch the video below -- Nina and Randa are two of the five girls in the first 60 seconds who interact with Justin!

Playing a Justin Bieber fan isn't a big stretch when you're a 17-year-old American girl.

Nina and Randa have their own website, see NinaAndRanda.com

You can meet Nina and Randa in person Friday night at the Healthy Lifestyle Expo in California, Oct 15, when they'll be playing with their band. Click here for details.

Now watch the video!

On the set with Justin Bieber, Nina far left, Randa far right:

I've also been afraid to feel as if I know better than someone else -- a historically dangerous stance (I'm often reminded that "Hitler was a vegetarian, too, you know"). But this book reminded me that some things are just wrong. Perhaps others disagree with me that animals have personalities, but the highly documented torture of animals is unacceptable, and the human cost Foer describes in his book, of which I was previously unaware, is universally compelling.

The human cost of factory farming -- both the compromised welfare of slaughterhouse workers and, even more, the environmental effects of the mass production of animals -- is staggering. Foer details the copious amounts of pig shit sprayed into the air that result in great spikes in human respiratory ailments, the development of new bacterial strains due to overuse of antibiotics on farmed animals, and the origins of the swine flu epidemic, whose story has gripped the nation, in factory farms.

I read the chapter on animal shit aloud to two friends -- one is from Iowa and has asthma and the other is a North Carolinian who couldn't eat fish from her local river because animal waste had been dumped in it as described in the book. They had never truly thought about the connection between their environmental conditions and their food. The story of the mass farming of animals had more impact on them when they realized it had ruined their own backyards.

But what Foer most bravely details is how eating animal pollutes not only our backyards, but also our beliefs. He reminds us that our food is symbolic of what we believe in, and that eating is how we demonstrate to ourselves and to others our beliefs: Catholics take communion -- in which food and drink represent body and blood. Jews use salty water on Passover to remind them of the slaves' bitter tears. And on Thanksgiving, Americans use succotash and slaughter to tell our own creation myth -- how the Pilgrims learned from Native Americans to harvest this land and make it their own.