How Not to Die Documentary

There’s an emerging consensus that what’s good for our hearts is also good for our heads because clogging of arteries inside the brain with atherosclerotic plaque is thought to play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s. This is what our cerebral arteries should look like. Open, clean, allowing blood to flow throughout our brain. This is what atherosclerosis in our head looks like. Clogged with cholesterol, closing off arteries, clamping down on blood flow. What kind of brain arteries do you want in your head?

As dementia is one of our greatest public health problems and the most feared condition of later life, there’s kind of misconception that we have no control over whether or not we develop dementia. But the good news is that although Alzheimer’s may be incurable, at least it is preventable. Too much cholesterol in our blood is unanimously recognized to be a risk factor for the development of Alzheimer’s disease. We looked for alternatives and we found the same model in heart disease and cancer and diabetes. Why wouldn’t it apply to the brain? The brain is the same system, but a little bit more. I mean this little three pound organ, which is 2% of bodies weight, consumes 25% of body’s energy, but it still consumes energy. It is a vascular organ, but a lot more than other organs, 400 miles of vasculature. So it’s the same mechanism, but much more so.

So if the lifestyle factors affect cancer, if they affect heart disease, why wouldn’t it affect the most energy hungry organ in the body? And it does. According to the Global Burden of Disease study, our largest study of risk factors is in human history. The number one cause of death in the United States is the American diet. Number one killer of men and women, bumping tobacco smoking to number two. Tobacco now only kills about 500,000 Americans every year, whereas our diet kills many more. So it’s the number one cause of death. Then obviously it’s the number one thing your doctor talks to you about, right? Obviously it’s the number one thing. I mean, you know, but no. It’s so dismal to have patients come in with these reversible diseases and just tell the patient, “Oh, well I just have to increase your statin dose and come back in a month. At that point you’re an enabler of their disease.

Why do we have the medical system we have, which I consider to be flawed? A lot of good people working in that community, obviously, but they’re corrupted by a paradigm that’s been hanging over our heads for more than a century. We’re trained to use drugs in surgery. We’re reimbursed to use drugs in surgery, so we use drugs in surgery. Abraham Maslow once said, if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see everything as a nail. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that. If we could get people to eat to save their heart, it would markedly diminish the likelihood of acquiring these common Western cancers of breast, prostate, colon, and pancreatic. So many times I have patients who come and tell me, their doctor said, “Your inflammatory bowel disease has nothing to do with nutrition. Don’t worry about it. You just get medications and you’re gonna be fine.” You couldn’t be farther from the truth if you think that. This is an investment in your future self, that future self may be six months. That future self may be a year, it may be 10 years. There is so much value in that because we all can say, “I don’t mind dying.” It’s not about dying. It’s about are you shortening that health span and now you’re sitting there for five years, 10 years, 12 years, a shell of yourself. You can neither live nor die. Who wants to live that life?

I am a surgeon, a bariatric surgeon, so I operate on obesity and I also am boarded in medical management of obesity. So I do both surgery and medical management for weight loss. Funny enough, as a doctor, you would think I would know better, but I had no training in nutrition as a doctor. Even in my training in weight loss surgery, I had no training in diet as a doctor. In fact, as a weight loss surgeon, we kind of felt like diets just don’t work. It’s fortuitous that we’re both neurologists and you know, with due respect to all the cardiologists and other doctors, we always say, you know, you are your brain. You can replace somebody’s heart and they’ll be fine. You can transplant a kidney and you’ll be fine. But the day you replace a brain, you’ve actually replaced a whole person. That’s not even possible. Our emotions, motivations, everything emanates from the brain, and food is the most important environmental factor for your brain. You have to give it that wonderful environment for it to grow and thrive.

You know, we always get scared of diseases, but you know, eating good food is not just about preventing disease, but giving your brain the capacity to grow and it does grow. Allow me to begin on a personal note. This is a picture of me taken around the time that my grandmother was diagnosed with end stage heart disease and sent home to die. The killer I’m talking about is coronary heart disease. Plaque accumulates inside the coronary arteries, the blood vessels that crown the heart, and it’s affecting nearly everyone raised on the standard American diet. At that time, the medical profession didn’t even think it was possible to reverse heart disease. Drugs were given to try to slow the progression and surgery was performed to circumvent clogged arteries to try to relieve symptoms. But the disease was expected to get worse and worse until you die. She already had so many bypass surgeries, basically run outta plumbing at some point, confined in a wheelchair, crushing chest pain. There was nothing more they could do. Her life was over at age 65.

I think what sparks many kids to wanna become doctors when they grow up is watching a beloved relative become ill or even die. But for me, who’s watching my grandma get better. Eventually I heard about this guy, Nathan Pritikin, one of our early lifestyle medicine pioneers, and what happened next is actually detailed in Pritikin’s biography. My grandma was one of the death’s door people. Francis Greger, my grandmother arrived in wheelchair. Mrs. Greger had heart disease, and claudication. Her condition so bad she can no longer walk. Heart disease is the nation’s number one killer. It accounts for half of all the deaths in the United States. This year, more than 1 million Americans will die from it. One reason almost all doctors agree is the way we eat. Nathan Pritikin is not a doctor, not even a nutritionist. Pritikin discovered he had heart disease, which he reversed, he says, by changing his diet.

Would you say flatly that you can reverse serious heart disease? I would say that we can take the most serious heart disease and return them in many cases to normal function. We found we could reverse heart disease in just three weeks. When you make really healthy changes, most people feel so much better so quickly, it reframes the reason for making these changes from fear of dying, which is not sustainable, to joy and pleasure and love and feeling good, which are. The normal American diet, is so toxic to the body that practically no human can stand up against that kind of assault. In fact, almost anyone over 20 years old in this country, I can almost guarantee you by autopsy studies has some closed arteries already. 20 – 20, right. Atherosclerosis, harden of the arteries, is a disease that begins in childhood. By age 10, nearly all kids raised on the standard American diet already have fatty streak building up inside of their arteries the first stage of the disease. These streaks then turn into plaques in our 20s, get worse in our 30s, and then can start killing us off. In our heart causes a heart attack, in our brain, the same disease process causes a stroke.

So if there is anyone here this morning, older than age 10, then the question is not whether or not to eat healthy to prevent heart disease. It’s whether you wanna reverse the heart disease you likely already have, whether you know it or not. But is that even possible? You know, when researchers took people with heart disease, put them on the kind of plant-based diet, followed by populations that do not get epidemic heart disease, their hope was maybe we could slow the disease down a little bit, maybe even stop it. Instead, something miraculous happened. As soon as people stopped eating an artery clogging diet, their bodies were able to start dissolving that plaque away, opening up art without drugs, without surgery, suggesting their bodies wanted to be healthy all along, but we’re just never given the chance. This remarkable improvement in the blood flow to the heart muscle itself was after just three weeks of plant-based nutrition.

Imagine if terrorists created a bio agent that spread mercilessly claiming the lives of nearly 400,000 Americans every year. We’d marshaled the army, march in our finest medical minds into the room to figure out a cure for this bio-terror plague. In short, we’d stop at nothing until the terrorists were stopped. This particular biological weapon may not be a germ released by terrorists, but it kills more Americans annually than have all our past wars combined. It can be stopped, not in a laboratory, but right in our grocery stores, kitchens, and dining rooms. As far as weapons go, we don’t need vaccines or antibiotics. A simple fork will do.

Nathan Pritikin gaining a reputation for reversing terminal heart disease, opened a new center in California, and my grandmother in desperation somehow made the cross country trek to become one of his first patients. This was a live-in program where everyone was placed on a plant-based diet and then started on a graded exercised regimen. Within three weeks though, not only was she out of her wheelchair, she was walking 10 miles a day. Here’s a picture of my grandma 15 years after doctors had abandoned her to die. Though she was giving her medical death senses at age 65, thanks to a healthy diet, was able to enjoy another 31 years on this planet till age 96 to continue to enjoy our six grandkids, including me. That’s why I went into medicine.

I remember her going out to Pritikin, she came back and she was overly… She’d look at the bread that I had and said, “What? This has oil in it, or it has souls in it. Or it has this in it, and you’re killing everybody.” You see, we lived near her when we were living in Florida temporarily. Yeah, she lived to 96. 96.

A plant-based nutrition appears to be the principle component, alone accounting for about half the difference in lifespan. No wonder since the number one risk factor for death in the United States is the American diet. Now, if you can read here, you know, unsafe sex, bad. Sedentary lifestyle, bad. Alcohol and drugs, particularly tobacco, bad, but cigarettes now only kill about a half million Americans every year, whereas our diet kills many more. We are what we eat, which is good news because it means we have the power. We’re talking about life and death here. You go online and you hear, you know, people spouting, you know, nutritional nonsense with some, you know, corrupting commercial influencers or something. And it’s not like someone is lying to you to get you to buy their brand of toothpaste. But when someone says, you know, “Here, eat this bacon and butter diet,” we’re talking about people that could die over this. These are life and death decisions. Remember diet number one cause. If there was any decision to be made in life based on evidence, it should be what to feed ourselves and our family. It’s the most important decision as to how long we and our loved ones live.

It makes me want to apologize to patients everywhere for the practitioners of my profession, who, I have to be charitable here, but we’re not taught anything about nutrition. Most doctors don’t respect nutrition, even though they’re seeing nutrition based diseases all day in their clinic, and they’re eating the same foods themselves. They’re eating the burgers and the pizzas and the lobsters and the steaks, they’re not gonna tell their patients don’t eat it.

When you hear all the diets that are out there, there’s only one that I’m aware of that has ever taken patients who are seriously ill with heart disease and be able to get a halting of the disease and reversal of the disease. And that’s whole food, plant-based nutrition. It doesn’t happen with paleo, it doesn’t happen with keto, doesn’t happen with Atkins, doesn’t happen with Agatston or Barry Sears or you know, these are all caring physicians, but when the research is done, it’s whole food, plant-based nutrition, it will halt and reverse heart disease.

They never teach you nutrition and forget about behavior change. So that intimidation for a person that’s done four years of college, four years of medical school, four years of residency, then fellowship. After these 15, 16 years coming out and then somebody saying, “Oh, everything you learned is wrong or not enough.” Now you gotta do a whole different thing. And by the way, we’re not gonna pay for it. You create language to take you away from the truth. Not that people are bad, systems create myopic linear people, linear physicians that focus on just pills.

In this country, when doctors are trained, there’s not a medical school in the United States that teaches nutrition. We published a paper recently where we surveyed how much nutrition training does the average doctor get in four years of medical school? And it turns out it’s about four hours a year. You know, and even then it’s really about, you know, vitamin C and scurvy and vitamin B and beriberi, things like that. And then we looked at the average amount of training in nutrition the average cardiologist gets in four years of fellowship training, and it’s a zero.

Time and again, is so apparent they had very little information whatsoever about nutrition, either in medical school or in their postgraduate training. We have in this country, for example, about 130 different medical specialties. And those medical specialties, they document their experience with a patient. And so it turns out that all 130 medical specialties, there’s not one called nutrition. We’re talking about life and death situations. We need to stop eating animal products with high saturated fat, high sugar, refined carbohydrates. If we do all that, which would be a whole food, plant-based diet, and we’re doing the exercise, we’re paying attention to our weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, no one smoking. We can actually do this. It’s not hard.

So does the American Heart Association recommend a no meat? No, they recommend this low meat diet, the so-called DASH diet. So wait a second, when this DASH diet was being created, I mean, were they just not aware of this landmark research done by Harvard’s Frank Sacks? No, they were aware. The chair of the design committee that came up with the DASH diet was Frank Sacks. See the Dash diet was created to try to get the benefits of eating a more plant-based diet, yet contain enough animal products to make it palatable to the general population. They didn’t think the public could handle the truth. Now, I mean, in their defense, you can kind of see what they were thinking, right? Just like drugs never work unless you actually take them. Diets never work at all unless you actually eat them. So they’re like, look how many people are gonna eat strictly plant-based, right? If we soft pedal the message, come up with some kind of compromised diet, well then on a population scale, we might do more good. Okay, tell that to the thousand American families a day that lose a loved one to high blood pressure. Maybe it’s time to start telling the American public the truth. Which is that in the United States of America, most deaths are preventable and related to nutrition. The number one cause of death in these United States is the American diet.

When Western Medicine talks about disease prevention, they’re really talking about early diagnosis. They’re not talking about not getting sick, they’re talking about, let’s catch it when you first get sick. So there’s colonoscopy and there’s mammogram, and you know, lab tests like PSA and things like that for prostate cancer. So we’re never telling someone, “Hey, this is how you eat to not get colon cancer,” or, “This is how you eat to not get prostate cancer.” Because really in the mind of a doctor, they almost don’t think of food having anything to do with this. It’s almost like disease is just bad luck. Like I really literally thought that our bodies, it was almost like, you know, how you get a car, you call it a lemon ’cause it’s a bad car, it’s gonna break. That’s what I saw the human body as. I mean, it’s gonna break down and I’m a fix it guy and I’m gonna fix it up with my tools and you stay outta the way. Let me do my job and you’ll be fine.

I switched onto a more plant-based diet. I thank God there were a few doctors out there that had written some papers and I started doing research and the more research I did, I was like, oh my God, it is the food that we eat and it’s the exact opposite of what I’m eating and what I’m telling patients. And then of course I start looking around my patients. Everybody’s got the same diseases and they’re not separate diseases. We think of them separately. We think there’s obesity and there’s heart disease and there’s cancer and there’s diabetes. They’re all one disease process. I mean, they’re all part of an inflammatory process. How can there be this disconnect between the science and the practice of mainstream medicine? Well, let’s do a little thought experiment. Imagine yourself a smoker back in the 1950s. The average per capita cigarette consumption, 4,000 cigarettes a year.

The media was telling people to smoke. Famous athletes agreed, even Santa Claus wanted you to smoke. I mean, look, you wanna keep fit and stay trimmed so you make sure to smoke and eat lots of hot dogs to stay trim and you eat lots of sugar to stay slim and trim a lot better than that apple there. I mean, shees, right? Hey, but “Apples do connote goodness and freshness,” reads one internal tobacco industry memo, which brings up “many possibilities for a youth-oriented.” They wanna make apple flavored cigarettes for kids, shameless. “For digestion sake, you should smoke.” I mean, “No curative power is claimed by Philip Morris,” but hey, better be safe than sorry and smoke. “Blow in her face and she’ll follow you anywhere.” After all, no woman ever says, no. They’re “So round, so firm, so fully packed.” After all John Wayne smoked them until he got lung cancer and died. You know, back then even the paleo folks were smoking. And so were the doctors. Now, this is not to say there wasn’t controversy within the medical profession. I’m sure you know, some doctors smoke Camels, but others preferred Lucky. So there was a little disagreement there. The leader of the US Senate agreed, who wouldn’t want to give their throat a vacation? Not a single case of throat irritation. How could there be when “Cigarettes are just as pure as the water you drink?” But anyway, if your throat does get a little irritated, don’t worry because your doctor can always write you a prescription for cigarettes. This is in the “Journal of the American Medical Association.” So when the AMA is on record saying that smoking on balance may be good for you, where could you turn back then if you just wanted the science? I mean, what’s the new data advanced by science? Well, she was, “Too tired for fun and then she smoked a camel.” Babe Ruth spoke of proof positive medical science that is when he still could speak before he died of throat cancer.

If by some miracle back then there was some kinda smokingfacts.org website that could have delivered the science directly, bypassing commercially corruptible institutional filters, you would’ve become aware of studies like this. There’s an Adventist study outta California published in 1958 showing that non-smokers had at least 90% less lung cancer than smokers. But this wasn’t the first. When famed surgeon Michael DeBakey was asked why his studies back in the ’30s linking lung cancer and smoking were simply ignored off the face of the planet, he had to remind people what it was like back then. We were a smoking society. It was in the movies on airplanes, medical meetings were one heavy haze of smoke. Smoking was, in a word, normal.

So back to our thought experiment. Imagine you’re a smoker in the ’50s in the know. What do you do? I mean, with access to the science, you realize the best available balance of evidence suggest your smoking habits, ah, not so good for you. So do you change or do you wait? If you wait until your doctor tells you between puffs to quit, you’d have cancer by then. If you wait until the powers that be officially recognized it, like the Surgeon General did in the subsequent decade, you could be dead by then. It took more than 25 years, it took more than 7,000 studies and the deaths of countless smokers before the first Surgeon General report against smoking came out. You’d think maybe after the first 6,000 studies could give people little heads up or something. Powerful industry. Maybe we should have stopped smoking after the 700th study like this came out. But as a smoker in the ’50s, on one hand you had all of society, the government, the medical profession itself telling you to smoke. And on the other hand, all you had was the science. If you’re even aware of studies like this.

Let’s fast forward 55 years. You know, there’s a new Adventist study outta California warning Americans about something else they may be putting in their mouths. Of course, it’s not just one study, put all the studies together and deaths from all causes put together, including many of our dreaded diseases, stroke, cancer, significantly lower among those eating more plant-based diets. So instead of someone going along with America’s smoking habits in the ’50s, imagine you or someone you know going along with America’s eating habits today, what do you do? I mean, with access to the science, you realize the best available balance of evidence is yes, you’re eating habitant not so good for you. So do you change or do you wait? I mean, if you wait until your doctor tells you between bites to quit, it could be too late. In fact, even after the Surgeon General’s report came out, the American Medical Association officially went on record refusing to endorse it, why? Could it have been because they were just handed a $10 million check from the tobacco industry, maybe. Okay, so we can see why the AMA was sucking up to the tobacco industry, but why weren’t more individual doctors speaking up? There were a few, ahead of their time, speaking up against industries killing millions. But why not more? Maybe it’s because the majority of physicians themselves smoked cigarettes. Just like the majority of physicians today continue to eat foods that are contributing to our epidemics of dietary disease. What was the AMAs rallying cry back then? Everything in moderation. Extensive scientific studies, proven smoking in moderation. Oh, that’s fine. Sound familiar?

If you cut out the animal protein and the animal fat, which has in the literature clearly proven to cause gut disease, if you cut this junk outta your diet, you are gonna be healthier. I recall some of my mentors telling me that I was committing a career suicide, that I would never be supported by any grant whatsoever because diet, I mean we all know that it doesn’t work, right? Why do I say it’s a little bit better? Well, if I look at historical data, it tells us that animal protein versus plant protein, plant protein wins. So if this is a plant protein, it’s going to win. One of the quotes that I really love is from Wendell Berry who said, “The problem that we have is that, you know, we’ve got a food care system that doesn’t care about health and a healthcare system that doesn’t care about food.” And that’s how we get into the problem that we’re in.

The food industry uses those same tobacco industry tactics, twisting the signs, misinformation, the same scientists for hire paid to downplay the risk of cigarette smoke and toxic chemicals, are the same paid for by the National Confectioners Association to downplay the risk of candy. And the same paid for by the meat industry to downplay the risks of meat. Whereas processed foods and animal foods we’re talking 14 million lives lost every year. So those of us involved in this evidence-based nutrition revolution, we’re talking about 14 million lives in the balance. So plant-based eating can be considered kind of the modern day nutritional equivalent of stopping smoking. But how long do we have to wait before the CDC says, “Don’t wait for open heart surgery before starting to eat healthier,” as well. Until society changes, we need to take personal responsibility for our own health, for our family’s health. We can’t wait until society catches up to the science again because it’s a matter of life and death. The science was there since the 1930s. We’ve known that tobacco associated with lung cancer, yet it took literally decades before the powers that be have actually came out and said it. We are in the same situation today. We have this mount of evidence implicating our diet as the leading killer of men and women in the United States, yet we’re still not seeing pronouncements from on high, just the acknowledgement of the available science. So that means we have to take our own health, the our own family’s health, we have to take a responsibility for it until we finally get that acknowledgement of the science.

It’s gonna be a while before we can see warning labels before ads on TV saying don’t wait until the cancer diagnosis before you stop smoking. The same thing with diet. And so we’re just in that window. We’re in that transition period where the science is there for anyone to see, but it’s just kind of hidden upon public view. And so we just need to get it out there. And because these underlying biological mechanisms are so dynamic, you know, and so for someone who, you know, gets 30 or 40 episodes of chest pain a day, can’t walk across the street without getting chest pain or make love with their spouse or play with their kids, or go back to work without having angen or chest pain, and usually within a few weeks they’re essentially pain free.

That’s been my whole life, is to get the word out. The good news that we have tremendous power over our health destiny and longevity. The vast majority of premature death and disability is preventable with a plant-based diet and other healthy lifestyle behaviors.

Michael, you know, he was always very independent. You know, he never talked about it, but he just decided he was not going to eat meat anymore. He’s a good kid. He spent two years, he just went from one place to another giving lectures. He didn’t have a place to live. He’d stay in somebody’s couch or something. He got to know a lot of people. So when Dr. Dean Ornish published his landmark lifestyle heart trial, proving with something called quantitative angiography that indeed heart disease could be reversed, arteries opened up without drugs, without surgery, just a plant-based diet and other healthy lifestyle behaviors, I assumed this was gonna be the game changer. 1990 when Dr. Dean Ornish’s lifestyle heart trial came out, that was the turning point personally for me and should have been the turning point for all of medicine. I mean, my family had seen it with their own eyes, but here it was in black and white published some of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, yet nothing happened.

Remember, there’s this hidden mountain of evidence. It’s not hidden in the literature, the medical literature, it’s there for anyone to go to a medical library and down into the dusty stacks of the basement to pull it out. It’s like those 6,000 tobacco studies, right? Just here. Look, if you would still wanna smoke, it’s your body, your choice. Smoke, go bungee jump, disconnect all the smoke alarms in your house, whatever you want to do, whatever floats your boat. But just know the predictable consequences of your actions. I said wait a second, if effectively the cure to our number one killer could get lost down some rabbit hole and ignored, what else might there be in the medical literature that could help my patients but just didn’t have a corporate budget driving its promotion? Well, I made it my life’s mission to find out. For those of you unfamiliar with my work, every year I read through every issue of every English language nutrition journal in the world so busy folks like you don’t have to. And then compile all the most interesting, most groundbreaking, most practical findings to new videos and articles that I upload every day to my non-profit site, nutritionfacts.org. Everything on the website is free. There’s no ads, no corporate sponsorship, strictly non-commercial, not selling anything, no kickbacks. We just put it up as a tribute to my grandmother.

If everyone ate the way I ate or the way I tell patients to eat, I’d somewhat be out of business. If people ate like that, yeah, it would be a humongous change in healthcare. It would be very preventative to a vast majority of the diseases that we have because that diet is taking out meat and dairy, which we know from epidemiology, we know from randomized controlled trials, we know from looking at societies that live long healthy lives like the blue zones, that stuff is bad for you. And so really what’s left is this just life affirming, life giving fruits, vegetables, antioxidants, phytonutrients fiber that fosters a perfect microbiome. Yeah, that would just eliminate disease or vastly reduce it. The actual doctors from the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, they say eat less meat. They say eat more fruits and vegetables. If you look at the plate that the government recommends, it’s a quarter fruit, a quarter vegetables, a quarter grains, and then it’s say a quarter protein. But if you then go and look at where our tax dollars are spent, are they spent a quarter on fruits, a quarter on vegetables? No, not at all. It’s spent mainly on meat and dairy and grains, but most of that grains to go to feed meat and dairy. So I think it’s important for the government to do something, but you could see where there’s a problem with the government doing anything as long as we allow lobbyists to drive policy, which we do in our current system.

So where did Pritikin get his evidence from? Well, you know, a network of missionary hospitals set up throughout Sub-Saharan Africa uncovered what may be one of the most important advances in health. The fact that many of our major diseases were universally rare, like heart disease. The African population of Uganda, for example, coronary artery disease, was almost non-existent. You say, wait a second, our number one cause of death, almost non-existent. What were they eating? Well, they we’re eating lots of vegetables and grains and greens and their protein almost entirely from plant sources. And they had the cholesterol levels to prove it. Very similar to what we see in modern day plant eaters. So wait a second, maybe they were just dying early from something else. Never lived long enough to get heart disease. No. Here’s age match heart attack rates in Uganda versus St. Louis. Now 632 autopsies in Uganda, only one myocardial infarction. Outta 632 age and gender match autopsies in Missouri, 136 myocardial infarctions. More than a hundred times the rate of our leading killer. In fact, they were so blown away, went back, did another 800 autopsies. Ugandan still just that one small healed infarct, meaning it wasn’t even the cause of death. Out of 1,427 patients, less than one in a thousand. Whereas here, heart disease is an epidemic.

He got arrested a couple of times. In fact, in his medical school book, everybody has a page of the graduates and everybody has a picture of them and their wives or children and that Michael had his mugshot. This was when he was in medical school and he got arrested several times. Following the footsteps of my parents who were arrested over and over during the civil rights movement, in between classes at med school, I would go feed people on the commons with the organization Food Not Bombs, which was technically illegal and helped move homeless families into empty city-owned housing units with Homes Not Jails. All my arrests were for civil disobedience upholding Article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights that everyone has a right to a standard of living, adequate for the health and wellbeing of themselves and their family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care.

With enough portion control, anyone can lose weight. Lock someone in a closet, you can force them to lose as much body fat as you want. Chaining them to what treadmill would’ve a similar effect. But what’s the most effective weight loss regime that doesn’t involve caloric restriction or exercise or a felony? Well, I have scoured through the medical literature and all the randomized controlled trials. And the single most successful strategy to date is a diet of whole plant foods. The single most effective weight loss intervention like that ever published in the peer reviewed scientific literature, a whole food plant-based diet.

The most frustrating thing about being a physician in primary care is our patients don’t get better. About 80% of what a primary care physician sees in their practice are things like type two diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, things that just get worse, worse, worse then you die. And so what physicians can do is prescribe medications to try to slow down the rate at which their diabetics go blind, at which their diabetics go on dialysis or lose their lower limbs. Because they’re not treating the underlying cause, all they’re doing is kind of trying to slow the rate of the demise of their patient. That’s why lifestyle medicine is so important. If we can treat the underlying cause, we can prevent arrest and even reverse some of the chronic diseases that are decimating our population.

Every one of us physicians who practices a lifestyle medicine and gets our patients on whole food, plant-based diets, we witness this remarkable transformation, this kind of food stream flowing through the body, meal after meal, week after week, produces wonderful effects that within days the obesity starts to melt away and the arteries open up and the high blood pressure comes down and the joints stop hurting. And the asthmatic lungs stop wheezing so much, the migraine headaches get better and people turn into normal healthy people, normal heights and normal weights and blood pressures and they don’t need a lot of pills and potions and procedures. We’re all the same when it comes to eating food. We can maintain ethnic cuisines of course using the flavors and spices and herbs and stuff like that. But we should be eating quite frankly, whole plant-based foods. We’re looking at a solution for creating health unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

Surely if there was some safe, simple side effect-free solution to the obesity epidemic, we would know about it by now, right? I’m not so sure. It may take an average of 17 years before research evidence makes it in day-to-day clinical practice. To take one example that was particularly poignant for me and my family, heart disease. Decades ago Dr. Dean Ornish published evidence in one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world that our leading cause of death could be reversed with diet and lifestyle changes alone. Yet hardly anything changed. Even now, hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to needlessly die every year from what we learned decades ago was a potentially reversible condition. I had seen it with my own eyes.

These are choices that people make. I always used to say that, you know, the coronary heart disease is culinary heart disease mispronouncing it on purpose, okay? And saying that it’s an elbow problem. When the patient’s in the coronary care unit, I’m usually seeing them ’cause I’m not doing invasive cardiology, I’m seeing them on rounds the next morning. Okay, so I say “I’m gonna ask you to do a little quiz with me just to tell me where you are in terms of your thinking. And I’m gonna ask you some questions and they sound a little silly, but you have just humor me and let’s see how far we can get with this. Tell me what happened to you while you’re here.” And I say, “I had a heart attack.” “That’s right, how did the heart attack happen?” “Well, they told me I had a blocked artery.” “That’s right. What was it blocked with?” “Plaque.” “That’s right. What’s plaque made out of?” “Fat and cholesterol.” “That’s exactly right. And where did that fat and cholesterol come from?” The patient says 100% of the time, “I ate it”.

Back in 1903, Thomas Edison predicted that the doctor of the future will give no medicine but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame in diet and in the cause and prevention of diseases. Edison’s prediction hasn’t come true.

Why don’t we give a big warm welcome to Dr. Michael Greger. You know, some people are overwhelmed by medical articles and research and you know, having a way for somebody to, you know, disseminate that information to you, I think is paramount.

I’m a cancer survivor. I became a vegetarian shortly after going through my treatments. It’s been about 15 years now. I was learning a lot from the things that Dr. Greger was publishing. There’s a lot of mixed messaging out there about what you should be eating and what you should be doing. One of the things I do appreciate about NutritionFacts is it does make a lot of the harder information easier to consume. I think his videos are engaging. His personality is amazing. If you aren’t laughing, I don’t know what to say.

The notion that a calorie from one source is just as fattening as any other is a trope broadcast by the food industry as a way to absolve itself of culpability. Coca-Cola itself even put an ad out there emphasizing this “one simple common-sense fact.” As the current and past chairs of the Harvard’s Nutrition Department put it, “This central argument from industry is that the overconsumption of calories from carrots would be no different than the overconsumption of calories from soda.” If a calorie’s just a calorie, why does it matter what we put in our mouth?

It is true that in a tightly controlled laboratory setting, 240 calories of carrots would have the same effect on calorie balance than the 240 calories in a bottle of Coke. But this comparison falls flat on its face out in the real world. You could chug those liquid candy calories in less than a minute. But eating 240 calories of carrots would take you more than two and a half hours of sustained, constant chewing. Not only would your jaw get sore, but 240 calories of carrots is like five cups. You might not even be able to fit them all in. In a lab, a calorie is a calorie, but in life far from it. Unfortunately, if you go to your doctor, the doctor says, “Take these pills to lower your blood pressure or your cholesterol or your blood sugar.” And they say, “Doctor, how long do I have to take these?” The doctor, he says, “Forever.” And the reason is that the pill doesn’t make you feel better, but the lifestyle changes do. And there’s no point in giving up something that you enjoy unless you get something back that’s better and quickly. And because these underlying biological mechanisms are so dynamic, when you make really healthy changes, eat well, move more, stress less, love more, most people feel so much better so quickly. It reframes the reason for making these changes from fear of dying, which is not sustainable, to joy and pleasure and love and feeling good, which are.

What amazing potential the body has to heal itself. I, as a physician have a lot to do educating my colleagues. Before you order another $1,000 scan, another $500 set of blood tests, ask your patient what they ate yesterday. And if it’s full of burgers and buffalo wings, then that’s where to start. Send the patient to a plant-based dietician down the hall. Take them shopping and stock their refrigerator up. Medical education practice is funded by big pharma, both in undergraduate and postgraduate medical education. I’ve never been offered to been taken out to dinner by big broccoli. There’s a reason for that. These are the cash cow drugs for big pharma. Give a drug for a lifestyle condition, that means you have to take the drug every single day for the rest of your life. That’s where the money is. New blood pressure pill, new cholesterol lowering pill. And that’s their bread and butter. And here we come along and say, “Wait a second. No, no, we can lower your cholesterol as much, if not better. Have all these positive, healthy side effects with diet and lifestyle.” Yet it’s just not as profitable for big pharma.

We really cannot underestimate the public. When you think back on it, it took over 7,000 scientific papers to finally get the Surgeon General to say that smoking was harmful to your health. Now since that has happened, the amount of smokers have gone from 40 million to 20 million. We really try to change the outcome of our patients by not just the modern guideline-driven management of medications and revascularizations the latest therapies that you can do with this device for that one. But really changing the, what we like to say, changing the paradigm by turning off the faucet instead of mopping up the floor.

Drug companies are more than happy to sell you a new roll of paper towels every day for the rest of your life while the water continues to gush. A hundred years in a row that cardiovascular disease is the leading killer of Americans. It’s time that we actually start really turning off the faucet instead of just mopping up the floor. Is it really true that protein might increase cancer risk? And so being a biochemist as I am, we had an opportunity also of not only determining whether that’s true, but if it is true, how does it work? So we spent many of those years at first showing that yes, it is true. When I say yes, it is true, I mean, when animals are fed higher levels of protein, animal protein, they get cancer. But at lower levels they don’t. And one of the key experiments that we did, I found very, very exciting was that we could turn on and turn off cancer growth just by adjusting the level of the protein, animal protein. That was very exciting for some various reasons. One of which is the idea now recognized these days at least by me, that we can control cancer by nutrition. The second thing related to that was the idea that we could actually reverse cancer ’cause that’s what we did.

Let me share with you what’s been called the best kept secret in all of medicine. The best kept secret in medicine is that sometimes given the right conditions, the body can sometimes heal itself. You know, if you, you know, whack your shin really hard in a coffee table, right? Get a red hot, painful, swollen, inflamed, but will heal naturally if you stand back, let your body work it’s magic. Okay, what if you hit yourself in the same place day after day or three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner, you’d never heal. You’d go to your doctor, you’d be like, “Ah, my shin hurts.” They’d be like, “No problem.” Whip out their pad. Write your prescription for it, pain killers. You’re still whacking your sin three times a day. Still really hurts like heck, but oh, feel so much better with those pain pills on board. Thank heavens for modern medicine. Our body wants to come back to health if we let it. But if we keep reinjuring ourselves, keep stabbing ourselves with a fork three times a day, we may never heal. You know, one of the most amazing things I learned in all my medical training was that within 15 years of stopping smoking, your lung cancer rates approach that of a lifelong non-smoker. Isn’t that amazing? Like your lungs can clear out all that tar and eventually, it’s almost as if you never started smoking at all. Where our body wants to come back to health. And so every morning of our smoking life, that healing process starts until wham first cigarette of the day. Reinjuring our lungs with every puff, just like we can reinjure our arteries with every bite. When all we had to do all along, the miracle cure is just stand back, get out of the way, stop re-damaging ourselves and let our body’s natural healing processes bring us back towards health. Sure you can choose moderation and hit yourself with a smaller hammer, but why beat yourself up at all? We’ve known about this for decades. “American Heart Journal,” 1977 cases like Mr. F.W here, heart disease so bad, couldn’t even make it to the mailbox. Started eating healthier. Few months later, he was climbing mountains, no pain. All right.

We really do like to improve people’s outcomes. And even though it may cost us revenue in a given patient, because most of our people who follow their medication do the exercise and do plant-based nutrition, don’t come back to the stress lab and they don’t come back to the coronary care unit. And we’re not making money off of those people anymore. But it opens us up for new patients. And so, you know, the people who really are not following the program, they’re smoking, they’re eating animal products, high fat, high sodium, they’re coming back in and out of heart failure and hospital readmissions are a problem. But the people who actually adopt lifestyle, we’re moving their clinic visits out from six or 10 weeks to six to 10 months and seeing them sometimes once a year. And that actually does give us access to try and help the community around us. We are in an area that’s saturated with cardiovascular diseases, a lot of Hispanic patients, a lot of African American patients, but really all varieties. The burden of cardiovascular disease is so great in around the country.

You know, if we wanted to make money, you go to the stock market or something, people go into medicine because they care about people, yet we get in there and our patients don’t get better. I’ve heard these stories so many times from my lifestyle medicine colleagues that, you know, in the back of my mind I’m thinking, I’ve been telling you this, like there’s a mountain of peer reviewed medical evidence going back decades proving this. But no, it took the one anecdote, like the one person in front of you to change your mind. Same with the risk of cognitive impairment. Only healthy plant-based diets reduce risks. Same with dementia and depression. The same with frailty. Healthy, plant foods, good, plant-based junk, bad. And the same with aging. The more people cut down on meat, dairy, and eggs, the slower they appear to age. But that’s only if they replace them with healthy plant foods. Pile on the junk and you can accelerate aging. That’s why Cornell professor emeritus biochemistry, T. Colin Campbell coined the term whole food, plant-based diet.

Reversing cancer by nutritional means, cancer being promoted by animal-based protein, the most revered of all nutrients for a century or two. The more that information gets out there, the more patients are gonna show up to their doctors getting healthier. And that’s not what people do. People don’t get healthier over time. And so when that happens, that really opens the eyes. And if we could just get everybody to understand what is good nutrition. And that of course starts not just with parenting, it starts with cardiologists. The leading cause of death is of cardiologists, it’s still heart disease. Plenty of people who get a stent put in by a cardiologist and they’re now told nothing about their diet. And when I see that I don’t just worry about the patient, I will worry about the provider. Because if they don’t know to tell the patient that, it’s gonna get them.

As my good friend Kim Williams who said “There are two types of cardiologists, those who are vegan and those who have not yet read the literature.” The sicker people are, the more they spend money, the more they can charge for premiums. Again, these perverse incentives where the less healthy people are, the more money is made. I mean it’s just an unfortunate kind of consequence of our for-profit medical system. But again, we can step back, stick with the signs and save ourselves and our families.

1930s, a group of diabetics placed on a plant-based diet over a period of five years. A quarter of them were able to get off insulin altogether. But plant-based diets tend to be relatively low calorie diets. I mean, maybe their diabetes got better just because they lost so much weight. To tease that out, what we’d have to do is put people on a plant-based diet but force them to eat so much food that they don’t lose any weight. Then we can see if there’s some, you know, unique benefits to plant-based eating beyond just all the easy weight loss. Well we’d have to wait 44 years, but here it is. Insulin needs were cut 60% across the board, half the diabetics ended off all their insulin altogether. Wow, how many years did that take? No, 16 days. 16 days later. So we’re talking diabetics who’ve had diabetes for 20 years, injecting 20 units of insulin a day and then 13 days later on, none. Diabetes for 20 years, then off all insulin in less than two weeks. Diabetes for 20 years ’cause no one had told them about a plant-based diet. For decades, they were 13 days away at any time from being free. Lower blood sugars on 32 units less insulin. That’s the power of plants. And as a bonus, cholesterol drop like a rock to under 150 again in 16 days. So just like making moderate changes in diet may only net you modest reductions in cholesterol. How moderate do you want your diabetes? Asking diabetics to make moderate changes in diet can leave them with moderate blindness, moderate kidney failure, moderate amputate, maybe just a few toes or something. Moderation in all things isn’t necessarily a good thing.

You know, there’s a famous study published in a journal called “Cell Metabolism,” which purported to show that diets high meat, eggs and dairy could be as harmful to health as smoking. Explaining that for those in middle aged who eat a lot of meat, eggs, and dairy, four times as likely to die from cancer, diabetes. But if you look at the actual study, you’ll see that’s simply not true. Those eating a lot of animal protein in middle age didn’t have four times the risk of dying from diabetes they 73 times the risk of dying from diabetes. Now those only eating a moderate amount of animal protein, oh, they just had 23 times the risk of death. The academic institution where this study was done sent out a press release with a memorable opening line, “That chicken wing you’re eating could be as deadly as a cigarette.”

Eating lots of a diet rich and animal protein four times as likely to die from cancer. I mean that’s comparable to what one might get smoking, right? So I mean, what was the response in the academic community to this revelation that diets high meat, eggs and dairy could be harmful to health of smoking? Well, one nutrition scientist said it was potentially dangerous to tell people about this study, why? Well, smoker might think, “Why bother quitting smoking? My ham and cheese sandwich is just as bad for me.” So let’s not tell anyone about this whole meat and cheese thing shhh. Reminds me of a famous Philip Morris cigarette ad that tried to downplay the risk by saying, “Hey, you think secondhand smoke is bad, increasing the risk of lung cancer 19%. Well hey, drinking one or two glasses of milk every day, three times as bad, 62% increased risk of lung cancer.” Tripling your risk of heart disease by eating non-vegetarian. Multiplying your risk sixfold if you eat lots of meat and dairy. So they concluded, let’s keep some perspective here. The risk from secondhand smoke may be well below that of other everyday activities. So breathe deep. That’s like saying it, don’t worry about getting stabbed because getting shot so much worse. How about neither? Two risks don’t make a right. Of course, we’ll note Philip Morris stopped throwing dairy under the bus once they purchased Kraft Foods. Just saying.

For a while I was thinking, I mean the insurers, you would think the ones, the payers, you’d think they’d be clamoring for this because it would save them so much money. But then you realize they just get a part of the pie. And the bigger the pie, the more money they make, the sicker people are, the more they spend money, the more they can charge for premiums. Again, these perverse incentives. Obesity has become very common because we are not only eating a tremendous amounts of calories, way in excess of what our bodies require, but the particular combination of sugars and fats eaten at the same time evokes what’s called oxidative priority. We burn the sugars and store the fats for later. So when you eat something like ice cream, it is fat and sugar. You burn the sugar and store the fat. When you eat a cheeseburger, you’re gonna burn the sugar in the white flour bun and then the sugar and the ketchup and store the fat in the meat and the cheese. So we’re eating that sugar fat combination pretty much all day from the bacon and eggs and toast in the morning to the burgers and fries at lunch and to the fried chicken and the milkshake in the evening. Even the broiled salmon eaten with the grilled potatoes is that fat and sugar combination.

So the vast amounts of fat and sugar that we’re eating on a daily basis is making us grossly obese. And it’s more than just a cosmetic issue because as fat accumulates, especially inside the abdomen, intrabdominal fat puts out on an array of molecules that sets off inflammation. They’re called inflammatory cytokines and they set off inflammatory conditions all over the body. So obesity basically is a state of inflammation. People can say, “Well, I’m obese, but I’m still healthy.” No, if you’re obese, you’re fighting inflammation. And that sets the stage for diseases in many kinds of organs. Who says that, you know, African Americans are genetically predisposed, not so. We have about a 21% higher cardiovascular mortality rate in the black community of this country, and it really does have to do with the diet. It was called out by the Regards Trial investigators. Anyone can look that up to the Regards Trial and you’ll see these publications that say the Southern diet and what they really mean by that, the soul food. It’s taking your greens and putting ham hocks in it, or taking the yams and making candy yams out of it. So more cholesterol, more saturated fat, not just chicken, but fried chicken. And if you have that sodium content, the cholesterol content, saturated fat and sodium with sugar, that’s a combination that is set up for heart disease, kidney disease, stroke, and death.

Each year you are reborn. You create and destroy nearly your entire body weight in new cells every year. Your cells are pre-programmed to die naturally, to make way for fresh cells. In a sense, your body’s rebuilding itself every few months with the building materials you provided through your diet. Some cells, however, overstay their welcome, namely cancer cells. By somehow disabling their own suicide mechanisms, they don’t die when they’re supposed to. Because they continue to thrive and divide, cancer cells can eventually form tumors and potentially spread throughout the body. All cells contain so-called death receptors that trigger the self-destruction sequence. But cancer cells can disable their own death receptors. Vegetables are selective. They destroy cancer cells, but leave normal cells alone and underscores the importance of including a variety of vegetables in your diet.

What is the science of the disease? And by that I mean the following, if we can have them understand that all experts in this disease would agree that where cardiovascular disease has its inception, its onset, its beginning, is when we progressively injure the life jacket and the guardian of our blood vessels, which happens to be that delicate innermost lining, the endothelium. And what truly makes the endothelium so magical is the molecule of gas, nitric oxide, that it produces, which is the great protector and salvation of all of our blood vessels because of its remarkable functions. For example, nitric oxide will keep all the cellular elements within our bloodstream flowing smoothly like Teflon rather than Velcro. Number two, nitric oxide is the strongest blood vessel dilator in the body. When you climb stairs, the arteries to your heart, to your legs, they widen, they dilate. That’s nitric oxide. Number three, nitric oxide keeps the wall of the artery from becoming thick and stiff or inflamed. Protects us from getting high blood pressure, hypertension. Number four, and this is the absolute key. Number four, a safe and normal amount of nitric oxide will protect us all from ever developing blockages or plaque. However, anybody who develops cardiovascular disease, whether they’re in New York, Chicago, London, Berlin, is because in the previous decades, they now have so sufficiently trashed, injured, compromised, and turned their endothelial system into a train wreck. They no no longer have enough nitric oxide to protect themselves from making blockages and plaque. But the good news here is this, this is not a malignancy. And once you get patients to stop ever again passing any morsel through their lips, it is going to further destroy an already train wrecked endothelium. Then rapidly the endothelial, the system recovers, makes enough nitric oxide. So, you know, not only can you halt the disease, but often we’ll see significant elements of disease reversal.

Any lifestyle medicine doctor can tell you this, is where all of a sudden people get better. In fact, it’s interesting when I go to these lifestyle medicine conferences and talk to my fellow physicians and I ask them the question, which is, how did you get into this? Like, you know, I mean, none of us were taught this in medical school. So why are you here? Like, what was the light bulb moment? ‘Cause of course, I wanna find out what it is so I can tell the rest of my colleagues. And you know, more often than not, it’s a patient. It’s a patient that educated them. All of a sudden, one of the patients that’s been coming to them for years, all of a sudden they look great. They lost all this weight. In fact, they probably came to them because all of a sudden their blood pressure’s too low, they’re overmedicated and said, “Wait a second. I’ve been following you and your family for all these years. What happened?” You know, and they’re like, “Oh, I read the China Study, or I saw, you know, ‘Forks over Knives,'” or they got a hold of some resource and then change their whole lives, change the lives of their family and their doctors just spell bound thinking to themselves, in the back of their mind. “Wait a second, I’ve got like thousands of patients just like you.”

You know, half to two thirds of people prescribed cholesterol or drugs aren’t taking them after just four to six months, even though they’re proven value in people who have heart disease. But when paradoxically, you know, Medicare has been covering my lifestyle program for reversing heart disease. And most of the major insurance companies are now doing that. And we’ve been training hospitals and clinics and physician groups around the country, and we’re getting bigger changes in lifestyle, better clinical outcomes, bigger cost savings, and better adherence than anyone’s ever shown. This is nature. This is a fact of nature. What we’re discovering, once again, is how nature works. And that’s what goes on inside of a cell, one cell. And we have some people actually maybe between 10 and a hundred trillion cells in a body, and each of them doing their own thing. This is all operating in a symphonic way.

Once you get to this point of realization, you get this kind of empirical data. You cannot argue, “Oh, it’s the other way around.” No. Alright, high blood pressure, 78 million Americans affected. That’s one in three American adults. As we get older, pressures get higher and higher. Age 60, most of us have high blood pressure. So wait a second. If most of us get hypertension, well, maybe it’s just a natural inevitable consequence of aging. No, we’ve noticed since the 1920s, high blood pressure need not occur. Researchers measured the blood pressures of a thousand people living in rural Kenya. Typical Kenyan diets, something like this. Corn, beans, vegetable, fruit, greens. Our pressures go up as we age, such that by age 60, most of us have high blood pressure. Their pressures go down and the lower the better. So 140 over 90 cutoff is arbitrary. I mean, even people with pressures under 120 over 80 may benefit from blood pressure reduction. So the ideal blood pressure, the no benefit from reducing it further blood pressure 110 over 70. Is it even possible to get pressures down to 110 over 70? It’s not just possible. It’s normal for those living healthy enough lives. Two years of this rural Kenyan hospital, 1800 patients were admitted. How many cases of high blood pressure did they find? Zero. Wow. Must have had low rates of heart disease, right? No, they had no rates of heart disease. Now, the single case of arteriosclerosis, our number one killer was found. Rural China, same thing. About 110 over 70 their entire lives. 70 year olds with same blood pressure as 16 year olds. It’s amazing in Asia, Africa, vastly different diets. What they shared in common is that they’re plant-based day to day with meat only eaten on special occasions.

It’s amazing, why do we think is the plant-based nature of their diets that was so protective? Because in the western world, according to American Heart Association, the only group of folks getting it down to that low on average, are those eating strictly plant-based diets, coming in at a perfect 110 over 65. This is the largest group of largest study of plant-based eaters in history following 89,000 Californians, comparing non-vegetarians to so-called semi vegetarians, those who eat meat more on a weekly basis than a daily basis compared to those who eat no meat except fish, compared to those who eat no meat at all, compared to those who eat no meat, eggs, or dairy. And this was an Adventist study, so even the non-vegetarians didn’t eat a lot of meat compared to the general population. Ate lots of fruits and vegetables, tend not to smoke, and exercise. This is a really healthy group of meat eaters. But still we see this kind of stepwise drop in high blood pressure rates the more and more plant-based people ate. Same thing with diabetes, same thing with obesity. You can show this experimentally. You take vegetarians, you give them meat, pay them enough to eat it, and their blood pressures go up. Or you take people who already eat meat, remove meat from their diet and their blood pressures go down within seven days. And this is after the vast majority had to stop their medications or reduce their medications. They had to stop the medications. I mean, if you treat the cause, eliminate the disease, you can’t be on multiple blood pressure medications with normal blood pressure. You drop your pressures too low, get dizzy, fall over, hurt yourself. Lower pressures your doctor has to pull you off the pills. Lower pressures on fewer drugs. That’s the power of plants.

We’ve had about a 70% decrease in cardiovascular mortality just the time that I’ve been, you know, from the time I went to medical school until now. And it was really a lot of thoughtful, hardworking, dedicated physicians. Andreas Gruentzig, coming up with angioplasty, which then became stenting. We had people developing bypass surgery, heart transplants, you know, putting in defibrillators, coming up with statins, ALLHAT, the hypertension program that really changed the paradigm for how we treat blood pressure. All of these things, all these dedicated physicians, all of this career that they dedicated lose to a double cheeseburger, really? That’s really what’s going on and our CDC, Center for Disease Control, is talking about it incessantly. That our Medicare system is gonna go broke, if we don’t change something, and that mortality that we fought so hard to get down is headed right back up. So what are we gonna do about it? I’m telling everybody it’s their patriotic duty to do a whole food plant-based diet and tell everybody about it.

You know, a few years ago, Dr. Kim Williams became president of the American College of Cardiology. He was asked in an interview why he himself follows the same diet he recommends to all his patients, strictly plant-based diet. “I don’t mind dying,” Dr. Williams replied, “I just don’t want it to be my own fault.” Thank you so much, everyone.

Acknowledgement: The Greenbaum Foundation

• Alzheimer’s disease
• angina
• animal protein
• blood pressure
• breast cancer
• cancer
• cardiovascular disease
• CDC
• cheese
• chicken
• cholesterol
• chronic diseases
• colon cancer
• dairy
• diabetes
• eggs
• fish
• heart disease
• high blood pressure
• hypertension
• inflammation
• kidney disease
• kidney failure
• lifestyle medicine
• meat
• mental health
• microbiome
• plant protein
• Plant-Based Diets
• prediabetes
• prostate cancer
• smoking
• standard American diet
• stress
• stroke
• vegans
• vegetables