For Peter Ebdon, it’s all about well being

BY-Anand Vasu

There is just about one thing more difficult to deal with than being a professional sportsman, and that is giving up the one thing you know and love. Peter Ebdon has been on the road with his cue for 28 seasons as a professional player, and in some of these years he is away from home and family as many as eleven months each year. Ebdon is 49 and the end is much closer than the beginning, something he knows acutely.

At the Indian Open in Kochi, the former World Championship winner and twotime finalist battled through his first round but couldn’t get past Sam Craigie. But the end of the tournament is far from the end of the world to Ebdon.


When he’s at the table, addressing a ball — much harder for him than most mortals as he’s colour blind and has, under pressure, occasionally played the red thinking it was brown —his eyes are shimmering little pools of concentration, but they turn into burning orbs when he gets talking about his greatest passion. In 2011, Ebdon lost his father to cancer, and that literally changed his life.

The first thing Ebdon undertook was a deep-dive into the correlation between diet, nutrition and cancer. “I researched a guy called Dr David Klein, who’s probably the world’s leading authority on Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Colitis and Crohn’s disease. He said in the studies that had been done, even a cooked vegan meal will raise the white blood count. We’re primates after all. If we stay as close to nature as possible by eating as many organic fruits and vegetables, that’s when we’re looking at having the strongest possible immune system,” says Ebdon.

“The world’s longest nutritional study, which was covered in a book called the GIANT Study, Professor T Colin Campbell came across a small Indian study, done maybe 50 years previously, and it found that it was animal protein that turned on cancer genes.

They used Casein which is approximately 87% of the protein in cow’s milk.

In his own words, he could literally turn on and turn off cancer genes, depending on how much animal protein he fed to the animals.” If Ebdon sounds more like an evangelist — he’s been vegan since 2011 and not once looked back — it’s because he knows his stuff and he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is. “Unfortunately people are told through marketing, propaganda that they should fear fruit. But, hey, we’re primates.

For longevity, health promoting capabilities and immunity nothing comes close to the vegan diet. If I were to become seriously ill, I wouldn’t even consider the standard treatments.

I’d almost certainly be raw vegan.” Six years ago, a friend of Ebdon’s was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer and came to the snooker pro looking for advice.

Ebdon handed him the 1921 book written by Joanna Brandt, the South African doctor, who had cured herself of stomach cancer by eating nothing but organic grapes for three months. The oncologist had given Ebdon’s friend an outer limit of nine months to live, and the markers were not good. The Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) returns a reading of between one and four in healthy humans and his friend was at 1998. “Two months after turning vegan, his PSA levels came down to 22. In eight months it was 0.21, a normal, healthy reading,” says Ebdon.

“They gave him nine months. Six years on, he’s still alive. Food is in the healing.” Ebdon has seen much in his lifetime, having lived in three different countries, made 3.5 million pounds and gone bankrupt and the peppery young man in a ponytail who took down the great Steve Davis in 1992 is a far cry from the sage of today. When he gives up the game, Ebdon won’t have a vacuum to fill. He’s certified as a Professional Healer from the College of Healing in Malvern in Worcestershire, practices reiki and runs his own consultancy advising breeders on which stallions their thoroughbreds should visit.

You can try to steer the conversation there, but Ebdon will bring it back to his spicy obsession. “Some marketing genius, somewhere in the past, convinced us that we should drink cow’s milk. Bravo! Wonderful!” Those last two words are accompanied by sarcastic applause.

“If you think about it, milk has always been species specific. So, cow’s milk is for cows, rat’s milk is for rats, human milk is for humans … It’s not too difficult to work out, is it? But, unfortunately it’s all about the profit.” Not for Ebdon, it isn’t for him, it’s all about well-being.