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In the October issue of Men’s Journal: Michael Douglas talking about fatherhood while reprising the role of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 2; debunking some of veganism’s biggest myths; and riding with Haiti’s burgeoning crew of cowboy EMTs .

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From Stephen Rodrick’s Michael Douglas’s Second Chance:

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Michael Douglas says things have changed. He says that he’s now just another stay-at-home dad minding his two kids while the wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones–you may have heard of her–does eight shows a week on Broadway. He says the Jets matter more than the Academy. He says his hurricane-eye days are over. He says he has slowed down.

And then you spend time with him.

Yoko says hello. Spider-Man thanks him for making him less of a prick. The secretary-general of the United Nations develops a man crush. Tabloid reporters are dodged. Dad arrives on a private plane. Wife gooses him at Lincoln Center.

It’s not all smiles. It never has been. A son goes to jail. A lump is found on a throat. Things have not changed. But time is more precious…

A few choice Douglas quotes from the article:

On working on the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with his dad:
He always makes a big thing out of Cuckoo’s Nest and being pissed off about that. He’s concerned about his legacy. But I did give him a producer credit. He made more money off of Cuckoo than any of his films.

On going to rehab for alcohol abuse, and denying being treated for sex addiction:
My dad didn’t know what the big deal was. He thought that was a good thing.

On filming a sequel to Wall Street with Stone:
I was on board before he was. It went to the studio, and he had just had a rough couple of years. They said, ‘Who should direct this picture? I said, ‘You have to go back to Oliver. This is his.’

On his reluctance to deliver some of Gekko’s more aphoristic lines:
You read them on the page and you think, There’s no way I can get away with saying this. But that’s Oliver’s way.

On casting LaBeouf in Wall Street 2:
Shia had tears in his eyes about going back and doing another Transformers.

On his dad’s revisionist history:
He gets into this whole thing that I didn’t recast him for the past. Well, if you’re so fucking close to Milos Forman, since when has the producer ever had control on casting? The whole ‘I sent the script to Milos’ makes for a good story and it undermines me a little bit as far as the originality in picking Milos, but God bless him.

On getting older:
The older you get, the more you realize what you can’t control. You look at what’s going on in the Gulf, how the government was in bed with the oil companies, and you just don’t think anyone can get a fair shake.

On moving in with Catherine Zeta-Jones:
When I got together with Catherine, I thought maybe she wouldn’t want to move into a house I had with my ex. But she looked around and said ‘I like it; just change the pictures.’ I like that kind of confidence.

Read the full article in MJ’s October issue…

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From Kevin Gray’s The Rise of the Power Vegan:

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For years the gospel of the vegan convert centered on Teva wearers fighting for animal rights or on righteous punks sticking it to their parents at the dinner table. It did not include $7-million-a-year freight trains like Atlanta Falcons tight end Tony Gonzalez, hockey brawlers like former Montreal Canadiens winger Georges Laraque, or seven-time Western States Endurance Run champ Scott Jurek. But vegan athletes — who eschew all animal products for a plant-based diet — and their vegetarian cousins, who may or may not eat eggs and dairy, are challenging meat eaters on every field. Even former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson ditched the burgers and went vegan several months ago and, as a result, is looking a lot like the old lean-and-mean Mike (except for that face tattoo, which is still just bizarre).

No one is saying that eating vegan will make you stronger, but the rap that you cannot build muscle or get enough protein for competitive strength training, or have the stamina for endurance training, turns out to be a myth. Even more compelling, though, is new evidence that eating vegan can reduce your risk of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. “People can bulk up and knock other people around with animal-based proteins — that we know,” says T. Colin Campbell, a retired Cornell University professor and author of The China Study, which outlines the link between animal-based proteins and disease. “But it comes at a cost. Your life span is much shorter. Cancer and diabetes risk goes up. You pay a big price.” In his 2005 bestseller, Campbell says he first discovered a relationship between protein and cancer while working in the Philippines, where children were getting liver cancer because of high levels of animal protein in their diets. A study on rats showed that those given a diet of 20 percent protein got the cancer. Those given only 5 percent protein did not.

And it’s not just athletes looking to shave time off their marathon bests or add inches to their guns. Hard-charging Fortune 500 types, watching their blood pressure spike every time stock prices dip, are equipping their corner offices with raw-food Kind bars and enough locavore produce to choke a
rabbit. Among them are social-networking wunderkind Biz Stone, the 36-year-old co-founder of Twitter; real estate magnate Mort Zuckerman, who is worth some $2 billion; and, perhaps less surprisingly, the co-CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, who oversees a $6.3 billion empire with 55,000 employees ‹ whom he urges to eat green.

Mackey, who has been a vegetarian for 27 years and a vegan for seven, recently set up a program to teach his employees and customers the benefits of eating a plant-strong, nutrient-dense diet. “I feel satiated and empowered, and have a sense of vitality that I haven’t felt in years,” he says. Interest in whole grains and health foods has, of course, skyrocketed in the past decade, with a Whole Foods in every city. Even Burger King has a veggie burger on its menu. Three percent of the U.S. adult population now calls itself vegetarian, according to a 2009 Vegetarian Resource Group poll. (The fact that there’s a resource group counting leaf eaters says a lot in itself.) That’s some 9 million people, nearly quadruple what it was in 1994 when the VRG asked the same question. Of that population, around a third are vegans and eat no dairy or eggs, and sometimes no honey.

Still, kicking the meat habit doesn’t automatically make you healthy — there are risks, especially if you’re an athlete. Tony Gonzalez found that out three weeks into his new diet. It was the spring of 2007, and he had quit “eating flesh,” as he likes to put it, after meeting a fellow passenger on a flight who refused nearly all the food offered to him. The guy told him about The China Study. Gonzalez had already suffered a bout of Bell’s Palsy, which temporarily paralyzed his face that year. He was convinced that the NFL diet, which fattens players with burgers and ice cream, was slowly killing him. Forty pages into the book, he was hooked.

But when he showed up for training, he found he had shed 10 pounds and struggled to lift the 100-pound dumbbells that he used to throw around. “The diet killed me,” says Gonzalez, still visibly shaken. “There was no way I could do this and play football, at least not the way I was doing it.”

Read the full article in MJ’s October issue…

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Kitt Doucette’s Haiti’s Cowboy EMTs

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Vince Degennaro Jr. is not taking no for an answer. Sporting cheap-flip flops, cargo shorts, a University of Miami Hurricanes T-shirt, and black wraparound sunglasses to shield his bloodshot eyes, he’d look like a rangy beachcomber if he were ever to stand still. Right now, though, he’s storming past two machine gun-toting guards at the World Health Organization’s warehouse in Port-au-Prince in a last-ditch effort to find the immunoglobulin used to treat diphtheria.

It’s hardly standard operating procedure, but in a place as broken-down as Haiti, off-the-books-measures are often the only hope to get things done.

Read the full article in MJ’s October issue…

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