 In my 2012 review, I explored the role healthy diet may play in preventing, treating and reversing our deadliest diseases. In 2013 I covered our most common conditions this year. I'd like to address some of our leading causes of disability. We want to live a long, healthy life, not a long, miserable one. Heart disease is not only our leading cause of death, but also our leading cause of death and disability. Dr. Dean Ornish proved with his plant-based diet and lifestyle program that cardiac patients had 91% reduction in angina attacks. That's the crushing chest pain that some people with advanced heart disease can get. In contrast, control group patients who were instead told to listen to the advice of their doctors had a 186% increase in attacks. This marked reduction in chest pain was sustained five years later. A long-term reduction in pain comparable to that of bypass surgery but without the knife or the saw used to cut our chest in half. Forks over knives, soup over saws. But this was back in the 90s when Ornish was only studying a few dozen patients at a time. How about a thousand patients on a whole food plant-based diet within three months, nearly three-quarters of angina patients became angina-free. 74% cured without a single scalpel or side effect. Now, Ornish didn't just put people on a plant-based diet. He also advised moderate exercise like walking. So how do we know what role the diet played? Well, if you go back to Ornish's first publication, he put cardiac patients on a quasi-vegan diet with no added exercise. Just diet and stress management and got a 91% reduction in attacks in less than a month. And Dr. Asselstyn was able to improve angina using plant-based diet as the only lifestyle intervention. So we know diet is the active ingredient. But you know, they weren't the first. There are case series going back to the 1970s. We've known about this for decades. Angina and the vegan diet. Like Mr. F.W. here. Chest pain so severe he had to stop every nine or ten steps. Started on a vegan diet, not even a low-fat vegan diet, and months later climbed mountains, no pain. Now this may be because vegetarian arteries dilate four times better than arteries of omnivores. Put people on a plant-based diet for a year and their clogged arteries literally get cleaned out. 20% less plaque in their arteries at the end of the year than at the beginning. Put people on a low-carb diet, a meat-heavy, Atkins-like diet though, and their condition worsens. 40 to 50% more artery blocking at the end of the year. Here are some representative heart scans. The yellow and particularly red represents blood flow to the actual heart muscle through the coronary arteries. This patient went on a plant-based diet and their arteries opened right up, increasing blood flow. This person, however, started out with pretty good flow, but after a year on a meat-based diet, their blood flow significantly clogged down. This isn't measuring risk factors, but actual blood flow to the heart muscle plant-based versus meat-based diets. No wonder a recent meta-analysis found that low-carb diets associated with significantly higher risk of death all cause mortality in the long run, meaning those on low-carb diets live, on average, significantly shorter lives. Now, there is a new category of anti-angina drugs, but before committing millions, billions of dollars to dishing them out, maybe we should take a more serious look at dietary strategies. To date, these strategies have been marginalized by the drug pusher mentality of orthodox medical practice. Presumably doctors feel most patients will be unwilling or unable to make the substantial dietary changes required. Now, while this may be true of many patients, certainly not true for all, and in any case angina patients deserve to be offered the plant-based diet alternative before being shunted to expensive surgery or drug therapies that can have a range of side effects and never really get to the heart of the problem. Now, in response to this paper, a drug company executive wrote a letter to the medical journal, although diet and lifestyle modifications should be part of disease management, he said many patients may not be able to comply with the substantial dietary changes required to achieve a vegan diet. So, of course, everyone should go on their fancy new drug called renalazine, sold as Renexa, costs about $2,000 a year to take it, but the side effects aren't horrible and the drug works. So, collectively, the studies show that at the highest dose, the drug may prolong exercise duration in angina patients as long as 33 and a half seconds. It does not look like those choosing the drug route will be climbing mountains anytime soon. Plant-based diets aren't just safer and cheaper, but can work better. I've talked about COPD as a leading killer, but what about low back pain like sciatica? Now, low back pain became one of the biggest problems for public health systems in the western world just in the second half of the 20th century. Chronic low back pain affects about one in five, disabling 30 million Americans. It's an epidemic. Are people just lifting more heavy stuff? No. Mechanical factors such as lifting and carrying probably do not have a major role in the disease. Well, then, what causes it? Touched on it before atherosclerosis can obstruct the arteries that feed the spine in this restriction in blood flow can cause back problems. This can be seen on angiography, showing normal spinal arteries on the left clogged on the right, or on autopsy where you can see how the openings to the spinal arteries can get squeezed shut by these cholesterol-filled plaques on the right. Autopsy because back pain can predict fatal heart disease, just like clogs in the penile arteries, erectile dysfunction, can precede heart attacks because it's the same disease. Inflamed, crippled clogged arteries throughout our body. Now we have MRI imaging, which can show the narrowing of spinal arteries in people's back with back pain and the degeneration of the discs all linked to high cholesterol. Those with narrowed arteries appeared about eight and a half times more likely to suffer from chronic low back pain. This makes sense. Now the discs in our low back are the largest avascular tissue in the body, meaning they have no blood vessels, so nutrition just kind of has to diffuse in from the edges so they're particularly vulnerable to deprivation. Using MRIs you can measure the effects of this impaired blood flow on the diffusion and you can see how this can turn into that. By age 49, 49, 97% of the discs of those eating a standard American diet show at least stage 2 degradation, starting in our teens. Our discs are already starting to degenerate by age 11. As I've talked about nearly all kids eating the standard American diet have the beginnings of atherosclerosis by age 10. And sadly, low back pain is now common among children and adolescents and it's getting worse. Just like children getting adult onset diabetes teenagers starting out their life with a chronic disease. That's why it's never too early to start eating healthy. To get you back into circulation you need to get circulation to your back. Just giving down a few in the interest of time, having a stroke can be severely disabling. Thankfully a high dietary fiber intake which is a whole plant foods may help prevent strokes as well. This belief that dietary fiber intakes particularly associated with some chronic diseases was postulated 40 years ago and since has been enormously fueled and kept alive by a great body of science. Today we therefore believe that eating lots of fiber, eating lots of whole unprocessed plant foods helps prevent obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases such as stroke. Stroke is the second leading cause of death worldwide, a leading cause of disability. And so preventing strokes in the first place, it's called primary prevention, should be a key public health priority. Based on all the best studies to date different strokes for different folks depending evidently on how much fiber they've been eating. Notably increasing fiber just 7 grams a day may decrease stroke risk 7 percent and 7 grams is easy like a small serving of whole grain pasta with tomato sauce and an apple, easy. But if you really don't want a stroke we should all try to get 25 grams a day of soluble fiber which is found in beans, oats, nuts and berries and 47 grams a day of insoluble fiber found primarily in whole grains. One would have to eat an extraordinarily healthy diet to get 72 grams a day. And a huge amounts of plants yet these cutoff values could be considered the minimum recommended daily intake of fiber to prevent strokes. Now they admit these minimums are higher than is commonly and arbitrarily proposed as adequate but do we want to be patronized too as to what authorities think is practical or do we just want to have them tell us what the science says as they did here so we can make up our own minds. Now someone funded by Kellogg's wrote in to complain that in practice such fiber intakes are unachievable. Rather the message should just be the more the better you know have a bowl of cereal or something. The real Dr. Kellogg who's actually one of our most famous physicians accredited for being one of the first to sound the alarm about smoking may have been the first American physician to recognize the field of nutrition as a science would today be rolling in his grave if he knew what his company has become. Diabetes are seventh leading cause of loss of life is also our eight leading cause of loss of health. Up to 50% of diabetics eventually develop neuropathy damage to the nerves. It can be very painful and the pain is frequently resistant to conventional treatments. In fact supposedly no effective treatment exists for diabetic neuropathy. Us doctors are just left with steroids and opiates and antidepressants anything to try to mediate the suffering. But 20 years ago a remarkable study was published on the regression the reversal of diabetic neuropathy with a plant based diet. 21 diabetics suffering with moderate or worse painful neuropathy for up to 10 years were placed on a whole food plant based diet. Years and years of suffering and then complete relief of the pain in 17 out of the 21 patients within days. Numbness noticeably improved too and the side effects were all good. They lost 10 pounds blood sugars got better insulin needs dropped in half and five of the patients not only did their painful diabetic neuropathy was cured so apparently was their diabetes normal blood sugars off of all medications. Diabetics for up to 20 years and then off all their drugs in a matter of weeks. And the triglycerides and cholesterol improved too high blood pressure got better in fact gone in half of the hypertensives and 80% drop overall in the need for high blood pressure medications within three weeks. Now we've known plant based diets can reverse cure type 2 diabetes and hypertension but this was new. Years of painful suffering then complete relief of pain in 80% within days. Now this was a live in program where you know patients were actually given meals. You know what happened when they were sent home and kind of had to go back to the real world. Well the 17 folks were followed for years and in all except one the relief of painful neuropathy continued or improved even further. How'd they get that kind of compliance with a strict plant based diet because it works. One of the most painful and frustrating conditions to treat in all of medicine and three quarters cured in a couple days with a natural nontoxic in fact beneficial treatment a diet composed of whole plant foods. Should have been front page headline news. So how could nerve damage be reversed so suddenly? It didn't appear to be the improvement in blood sugars because it took about 10 days for the diet to control the diabetes whereas the pain was gone in as few as four. There are several mechanisms by which a total vegetarian diet can alleviate the problem of diabetic neuropathy as well as diabetes itself. Now their most interesting speculation is they thought it could be the trans fats naturally found in meat and dairy that could be causing an inflammatory response. They found a significant percentage of the fat under the skin of those who eat meat or even just dairy and eggs was trans fats. Trans fats stuck inside their body under their skin whereas those who had been on strictly plant based diet, whole food plant based diet had no detectable trans fats within their bodies. The researchers stuck needles in the buttocks of people eating different diets and nine months or more on a strict plant based diet appeared to remove all trans fats from their bodies or at least their butts but their pain didn't take nine months to get better more like nine days. So more likely the amazing reversal was due to an improvement in blood flow. Nerve biopsies taken from diabetics with severe progressive neuropathy shown to have arterial disease within the nerve. There are blood vessels within our nerves that can get clogged up too depriving the nerves of oxygen presumably leading them to cry out in pain. Within months though, improvement in blood rheology meaning the ease at which blood flows on a plant based diet may play a prominent role in the reversal of diabetic neuropathy. Plant based diets may also lower the level of IGF-1 within the eyeballs of diabetics and decrease the risk of retinopathy, diabetic vision loss as well. But what about treating retinopathy? Kempner and Duke used a plant based diet composed mostly of rice and fruit to document for the first time the reversal of diabetic neuropathy in a quarter of his patients something never even thought possible. For example, 60 year old diabetic woman already blind in one eye can only see contours of large objects with the other effectively blind. Five years later on the diet, instead of it getting worse, it got better. She could then make out faces, see signs, start to read a large newspaper print in addition to being off all insulin, normal blood sugars, and a hundred point drop in her cholesterol. The most effective way to avoid diabetic complications is to eliminate the diabetes in the first place and this is often feasible for those type 2 diabetics who can make an abiding commitment to daily exercise in a healthy enough diet. Type 2 diabetes can be reversed, can be cured, eliminated with diet and so can some of its complications. Since the initial report of neuropathy reversal was published 20 years ago it's been replicated by other researchers. So why didn't we learn about this in medical school? The neglect of this important work by the broader medical community is little short of unconscionable, Alzheimer's disease. Perhaps best captures the difference between lifespan and health span who cares if you live to be 100 if in the final years you don't recognize yourself in the mirror. In 1901, Augusta was taken to an insane asylum by her husband she was described as a delusional, forgetful, disoriented woman who tragically could not carry out her home-making duties anymore. She was seen by a Dr. Alzheimer and was to become the case that made his a household name. On autopsy he described the plaques and tangles that would go on to characterize the disease but lost in the excitement of discovering a new condition a clue may have been overlooked. He described arteriosquatic changes, hardening of the arteries within her brain and we typically think of artery clogging in the heart but as we saw with the spine and the nerves atherosclerosis involves virtually the entire human organism our whole vascular tree from top to bottom including our brain. One of the most poignant examples of the systemic nature of clogged arteries is the link between coronary heart disease, degenerative brain disease and Alzheimer's dementia. Just as a heart attack or brain attack stroke can be significantly prevented one can think of Alzheimer's as a mind attack. Mind attack like heart attacks and strokes need to be prevented by controlling vascular risk factors like high blood pressure and cholesterol controlling chronic blood hypoperfusion the lack of adequate blood flow to the brain in the years before the onset of Alzheimer's. We now have a substantial body of evidence strongly associating atherosclerotic vascular disease with Alzheimer's autopsy studies for example and so the individuals with Alzheimer's significantly more atherosclerotic narrowing of arteries within their brain. This is what cerebral arteries should look like open, clean, allowing blood to flow. This is what atherosclerosis in our brain arteries looks like clogged with fat and cholesterol closing off the artery restricting blood flow within our brain. What kind of arteries do you want in your brain? This reduction in blood flow can starve the brain of oxygen causing the sound of little mini strokes, brain atrophy, shrinkage the cumulative effects appear to play a pivotal role in the development of Alzheimer's. But what about the role of metals in Alzheimer's? Metals appear to just aggravate the detrimental effects of the high intake of saturated fat and cholesterol. What about the so-called Alzheimer's gene, ApoE4? Diet trumps genes. The highest frequency of Alzheimer's gene in the world is Nigeria but they also have some of the lowest Alzheimer's rates to understand why one has to understand the role of ApoE. What does the gene do? The Alzheimer's gene makes the principal cholesterol carrier in the brain but if your cholesterol is low enough because your diet is low enough in animal fat if you center your diet around grains and vegetables then changes in cholesterol can lead to changes in gene expression. Just because we've been dealt some bad genetic cards doesn't mean we can't reshuffle the deck with diet. According to the latest guidelines for the prevention of Alzheimer's the two most important things we can do is cut down our consumption of meat, dairy and junk and replace them with vegetables, beans, fruits and whole grains that's the best science we have on the prevention of Alzheimer's disease. Wait, grains protective of the brain? I had the distinction this year of surfing on a panel with grain brain author Dr. Pearl Mutter who sold lots of books claiming carbs are destroying our brain but what does the science show? Take Japan for example where the prevalence of dementia has shot up over the last few decades and the blame for this increase in Alzheimer's increases in animal products. Traditional diets weighed towards vegetable products like grains away from animal products but since 1960 the diet in Japan has changed from more traditional rice based diet to one with a preponderance of meat so less grain equaled more Alzheimer's. The dietary factor most strongly associated with Alzheimer's was the consumption of animal fat. So the link between diet and dementia can be characterized less as grain brain and more as meat head. A similar analysis in China arrived at the same conclusion on the basis of these findings the rates of Alzheimer's disease and dementia will continue to increase unless dietary patterns change to those with less reliance on animal products. This is consistent with data that's showing that those who eat vegetarian are two to three times less likely to develop dementia and the longer one eats meat free the lower ones risk falls. In fact where are the lowest rates of Alzheimer's in the world? Rural India maybe no coincidence that the lowest the country with the lowest rates of Alzheimer's has among the lowest rates of meat consumption about 40% eat meat free and egg free diets that are high grain high bean high carb diets. Population studies have found a protective strongly protective role of grains in relation to Alzheimer's disease and including gluten containing grains not just rice. The science shows the exact opposite of what might one might read in the popular press in other words don't pass on the grain pass the grain to spare the brain. The link between arterial blockage and Alzheimer's is good news because atherosclerosis can be prevented and treated so maybe Alzheimer's can be prevented and treated as well. Well let's put it to the test. If you follow people who are just starting to lose their mental faculties the cognition of those with the least artery clogging in their brain remains pretty stable over the years but those with more cholesterol buildup got worse and those with the most blockage rapidly declined and the same with ability to carry out activities of daily living like dressing oneself and arterial disease doubled the progression to Alzheimer's and summary an inefficient blood supply to the brain can have very grave consequences on brain function but does treatment of vascular risk factors like high blood pressure, high cholesterol make a difference? We didn't know until now. 300 patients with Alzheimer's and those with their vascular risk factors treated showed significantly less decline slowed progression of their disease. It is often said that the goal of medicine is to provide patients with hope and when there's no hope to offer understanding. Well for the first time in the history of this disorder we have the chance to provide Alzheimer's patients with hope. Let me close with cancer. A leading cause of death and disability. How many years of life are lost? Potentially preventable cancers. Every year more than 5 million expected years of life in the United States are lost to those three disabling cancers alone, lung cancer, colorectal cancer and breast cancer. Therefore identifying and improving strategies for prevention of cancer remains a priority especially since no more than 2% of all human cancer is attributed to purely genetic factors. So 2% may be in our genes but the rest may involve external factors particularly our diet. Our skin is about 20 square feet. Our lungs if you actually flatten them out like a thousand square feet of surface area but our intestines 3,000 feet if you include all the little folds. 3,000 square feet so what we eat is our primary interface with the outside world with our external environment. The most comprehensive study summary of evidence on diet and cancer ever compiled is that we eat foods of plant origin to help prevent cancer. This means centering our diet around whole plant foods. Not just whole grains and beans every day but every meal. And when it came to foods that increase cancer risk they were similarly straight forward unlike some other dietary changes that kind of went out and just advised people to moderate their intake of bad foods like eat less candy. The cancer guidelines didn't mince words when it came to the worst of the worst. For example don't just minimize soda intake avoid it. Don't just cut back on bacon and hot dogs and ham and sausage. Lunch meat avoid processed meats period. Because they did not show any level of intake that can be confidently be shown not to be associated with or even small amounts may be risky. Processed meat can not only be thought of as a powerful multi-organ carcinogen but may increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes. Red meat was bad but processed meat was worse and that included white meat like chicken, turkey slices. So with more heart disease cancer and diabetes no surprise processed meat consumption is associated with increased risk of death even at small amounts. In Europe they calculated that reduction of processed meat consumption to less than a half a hot dog's worth a day would prevent more than 3% of all deaths. This was the second largest perspective study on dying cancer ever a study of 400,000 people. Well the largest ever 600,000 was done right here in the US the AARP study they found the preventable fraction to be even higher suggesting that 20% of heart disease deaths among women for example could be averted if the highest consumers cut down to less than like a quarter strip of bacon's worth a day. That's a lot of death. So what does the meat industry think about all this? In the journal Meat Science the industry acknowledged that the cancer prevention guidelines now urge people to avoid processed meat a statement that represents a clear and present danger to the meat industry. Processed meat they say is a social necessity. How could anyone live without baloney? The challenge for the meat industry is to find a way to maintain the consumption of these products while somehow not damaging public health. Well they've considered removing the nitrites for decades because of the long known toxic effects the industry adds them to keep the meat pink. There are evidently other color additives coloring additives available nevertheless it's going to be hard for the industry to change you have to balance all that cancer with the positive effects of these substances as preservatives and desirable flavor and red color developing ingredients. No one wants green eggs in hand. It's like salt reduction in meat products they'd like to but one of the biggest barriers to salt replacement within the meat industry is cost as salt is one of the cheapest food ingredients available. Now there are a number of taste enhancers you can inject into the meat to help compensate for the salt reduction but some of the compounds lead to a bitter after taste so they can also inject a patented bitter blocking chemical that can prevent taste nerve stimulation at the same time the first of what may become a stream of products are produced due to the convergence of food technology and biotech or they can always start adding non-meat materials to the meat you could add fiber or resistance starch from beans that have protective effects against cancer after all the United States dietary fiber is under consumed there's a meat sign saying under consumed fiber indicating that fiber fortification of meat products could have health benefits failing to note of course that their products are one of the reasons why America is so deficient in the first place. The industry is all in favor of causing less cancer but obviously such optimization has to achieve a healthier product without affecting the hedonic aspect. It's important to realize that nutritional and technological quality in the meat industry are inversely related and improvement in one leads to a deterioration of the other so you've got to balance it out. They know that the consumption of lard is not the best thing our disease being our number one killer however those downsides are in short contrast to lard's technological qualities which makes saturated fats indispensable in the manufacture of meat products otherwise you just don't get the same lard consistency see the pig fat doesn't get hard enough and as a result a fatty smear upon cutting or slicing can be observed on the cutting surface of the knife so look you've got to get your priorities straight so the evidence for the relationship between colorectal cancer and leased and processed meats cannot be denied the meat industry suggests further research for example compare the risk of eating meat to other risky practices alcohol, inactivity, obesity, smoking compared to lung cancer and smoking maybe meat wouldn't look so bad but don't worry consumers probably won't even hear about the latest cancer prevention guidelines consumers today are overloaded with information thus the industry can hope that the dissemination of the update in cancer drowns out in this inflammation cloud and even if the consumers do see it the industry doesn't think they'll much care for many consumers in the western world the role of healthfulness although important is not close to taste satisfaction in shaping the final choices of meat products it is hence questionable whether the revised recommendations based on the carcinogenic effects of meat consumption will yield substantial changes in consumer behavior you know doctors and nutrition professionals feed into this patronizing attitude that people just don't care enough about their own health to change this paper from a leading nutrition journal scoffed at the idea that people would ever switch to a prudent diet reducing their intakes of animal protein and fat no matter how much cancer was prevented the chances of reducing consumption to avoid colon cancer are virtually nil consider heart disease we know we can prevent and treat heart disease with the same kind of diet but the public won't do it the diet they say would lose too much of its palatability in other words the great palatability of ham largely outweighs other considerations although health and well-being are increasingly important in factors and consumer decisions this 1998 industry article feared that unless meat eating becomes compatible with eating that is healthy and wholesome it could be consigned to a minor role in the diet in the coming decade their prediction didn't quite pan out here's meat consumption per person over the last 30 years rising, rising 1998 was when the meat science article was published worrying about the next decade of meat consumption which continued to rise even further but then did sort of flatten out before it fell off a cliff per capita meat consumption down about 10% millions of Americans are reducing their consumption of meat so don't tell me that people aren't willing to change their diets yet we continue to get diluted dietary guidelines because authorities are asking themselves what dietary changes could be acceptable to the public rather than just telling us what the science says and letting us make up our own minds as to whether, you know, pig fat smearing on knives should trump our family's health what we eat doesn't just affect cancer risk in the colon why do constipated women appear to be at higher risk for breast cancer whereas women who have three or more bowel movements a day super poopers I call them sounds like an Abba song doesn't it appear to cut their risk of breast cancer in half this could be because constipation means a greater contact time between your waist and the intestinal wall which can increase the formation and absorption of fecal mutagens these compounds that can cause DNA mutations and cancer into the circulation and then into the breast we know that breast actively take up chemicals from the bloodstream so research is concerned that substances originating in the colon might enter the bloodstream and reach the breast specifically bile acids which are formed as a way of getting rid of excess cholesterol our liver dumps bile acids into the intestines for disposal assuming our intestines will be packed with fiber to trap it and flush it out of the body but if we haven't been eating whole plant foods all day it can get reabsorbed back into the body and then build up in the breast carcinogenic bile acids are found concentrated in the breast at up to 100 times the level found in the bloodstream they just concentrate it, pull it out of the system by radioactively tagging bile acids we're able to show the intestinal bile acids rapidly gain access to the breast where they can exert an estrogen like cancer promoting effect on breast tumor cells this could explain why we see 50% higher bile acid levels in the bloodstream of newly diagnosed breast cancer victims so how can we facilitate the removal of bile acids from our body well we could speed up the so-called oral anal transit time the speed at which food goes from mouth to toilet because slowed colon transit can lead to increased absorption of bile acids we can speed things up by eating lots of fiber a diet packed with plants greatly increases bile acid excretion fiber can bind up and remove toxic elements like lead and mercury as well as cholesterol and bile acids but plants can even bind bile acids independent of fiber vegan diets had significantly more bile acid bind up significantly more bile acid than lactoval or non-vegetarian diets even at the same fiber intake which could explain why it appears that individuals eating vegetarian might excrete less mutagenic, less mutation-causing feces in the first place now you'll notice that the same type of diet used to help lower cancer risk is the same type of diet used to help lower Alzheimer's risk and diabetes and diabetic complications and high blood pressure and stroke and back pain and heart disease or at a diet centered around whole plant foods the type of diet eaten by populations that are largely free of our deadliest and most disabling diseases heart disease was so rare among those eating traditional plant-based diets there were papers published like this a case of coronary artery disease in an African after 26 years of medical practice they finally recorded their first case of coronary artery disease among a population of 15 million a judge who had started consuming a partially westernized diet now some thought it was the preponderance of plant foods that was protecting these populations others thought it was the avoidance of animal foods but either way we couldn't prove it was the diet until it was put to the test Pritikin, Orinish, Esselstyn and others took people with heart disease and put them on the kind of plant-based diet followed by populations that didn't suffer from heart disease hoping it would stop the disease process keep it from progressing further but instead something miraculous happened the disease started to reverse to get better as soon as they stopped eating an artery-clogging diet their bodies were able to start dissolving away some of that plaque even in some cases of severe triple vessel disease arteries opening up without drugs, without surgery suggesting their bodies wanted to heal all along but were just never given the chance this is Esselstyn's new study published four days ago this increase in blood flow to the heart muscle on the left happened within just three weeks of eating healthy let me share with you the best kept secret in medicine the best kept secret in medicine is that under the right conditions the body can heal itself you know if you whack your shin really hard on a coffee table it can get a red hot swollen painful but it'll heal naturally if you just stand back and let your body work its magic but what if you kept whacking your poor shin against that coffee table in the same place over and over three times a day breakfast lunch and dinner it would never heal you go to your doctor and you'd be like ah my shin hurts and doctor would be like no problem whip out their pad write your prescription for painkillers you're still whacking your shin three times a day still hurts like heck but feel so much better with the pain pills thank heavens for modern medicine it's like when people take nitroglycerin for chest pain tremendous relief but doesn't do anything to treat the underlying cause our body wants to come back to health if we let it but if we keep re-injuring it three times a day we may never heal it's like smoking one of the most amazing things I learned in medical school was that within ten years of stopping smoking your lung cancer risk approaches that of a lifelong non-smoker amazing your lungs can like get rid of all that tar and eventually it's almost as if you never started smoking at all our body wants to be healthy and every morning of our smoking life that healing process started until bam our first cigarette re-injuring our lungs with every puff just like we can re-injure our arteries with every bite when all we had to do all along the miracle cure is just stop re-damaging ourselves get out of the way and let our body's natural healing processes bring us back towards health there's only one diet that's ever been proven to reverse heart disease in the majority of patients a plant-based diet anytime anyone tries to sell you on some new diet ask them one, do me a favor one simple question does your as your diet been proven to reverse heart disease you know the number one most likely reason you and everyone you love will die does it reverse heart disease if it doesn't why would you even consider it and if that's all a plant-based diet could do reverse our number one killer well then shouldn't that be the default diet until proven otherwise and the fact that it can also be effective in preventing, treating, reversing other leading killers like diabetes and high blood pressure would seem to make the case for plant-based eating overwhelming so why don't more doctors prescribe it available time is a reason frequently cited by physicians but if you probe a little deeper yes they complain about not having enough time to give their patients dietary advice but the number one reason was their perception that patients fear of being deprived of all the junk that they're eating can you imagine a doctor saying yeah I'd like to tell my patients to stop smoking I know how much they love it Dr. Neil Barnard wrote a compelling editorial in the American Medical Association's Journal of Ethics when he stopped smoking in the 80s the lung cancer death rate was peaking in the US but has since dropped with dropping smoking rates no longer were doctors telling patients to give their throat a vacation by smoking a fresh cigarette doctors realized that they were more effective at counseling patients to quit smoking if they no longer had tobacco stains on their own fingers in other words doctors went from bystanders or even enablers to leading the fight against smoking and today he says plant-based diets are the nutritional equivalent of quitting smoking this is not vegetarianism vegetarians often consume all sorts of junk vegans too for that matter this new paradigm is exclusively plant-based nutrition whole plant foods why exclusively well as reported in the Cornell Oxford China study there does not appear to be a threshold beyond which further benefits did not accrue with increasing proportions of plant foods in the diet it appears the more plant based foods and less animal based foods the better it took five decades after the initial studies linking tobacco and cancer for effective public health policies to be put into place with enormous cost to human health must we wait another 50 years to respond to the epidemics of dietary diseases they do have money on their sides the chemical tobacco food industries have the luxury to share similar tactics with the drug companies because they have the resources to do so in contrast powerful and cheap health promoting activities like eating healthy are too cheap can't be patented or profitable and they throw that money around the American Dietetic Association for example promotes a series of nutrition fact sheets who writes them they pay $20,000 per fact sheet to the ADA and explicitly take part in writing the documents so you can learn about eggs from the egg industry the benefits of chewing gum from the Wrigley Science Institute I didn't know Wrigley's had a science institute in 2008 the ADA announced that the Coca-Cola company had become an official partner to give them prominent access to key influencers and decision makers and share the Coca-Cola company's research findings for example did you know that there are no harmful effects of different Coca-Cola beverages on rat testicles was that even a concern thou doth protest too much me thanks when the American Academy of Family Physicians was called out on their proud new corporate relationship with Coke to support patient education on healthy eating an executive vice president of the academy tried to quell the protest by explaining that the alliance was not without precedent they had relationships with Pepsi and McDonald's for some time reminiscent of similar types of relationships in the past this didn't seem to placate the critics so the exec assured them that the American Dietetic Association has made a policy statement that there are no good or bad a position that the food industry has then exploited in the early years the tobacco industry sounded a similar theme smoking per se wasn't bad just excess smoking sound familiar everything in moderation is this what family docs and dietitians have been reduced to to justify unholy financial alliances they deny that there are actually unhealthy foods thankfully there is a corporate sector that actually benefits from healthy people the insurance industry last year a nutrition update for physicians was published in the official journal of Kaiser Permanente the largest managed care organization in the country covering about 9 million people about 15,000 physicians who were told that healthy eating may be best achieved with a plant based diet defined as a regimen that encourages whole plant based foods and discourages meats, dairy and eggs as well as all refined and processed junk and too often physicians ignore the potential benefits of good nutrition and quickly prescribe medications instead of giving their patients a chance to correct their disease through healthy eating and active living physicians should therefore consider recommending a plant based diet to all their patients especially those with high blood pressure diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity the major downside is that it may work a little too well if people are on medications for blood pressure or blood sugar they can actually drop too low so physicians may need to adjust medications or eliminate them altogether the side effects ironically may be not having to take drugs despite the strong body of evidence favoring plant based diets many physicians are not stressing the importance of plant based diets as a first line treatment for chronic diseases that's a bit of an understatement now this could be because of lack of physician awareness or a lack of patient education materials so Kaiser sought to change that want to lose weight feel better, improve stabilized or even reverse chronic disease get off some of your medications if you answered yes to any of these questions then plant based eating plan may be right for you side effects may include lower cholesterol blood pressure and blood sugar reversal or prevention of our number one killer a longer life, healthier weight lower risk of cancer, diabetes even slow the progression of cancer improve inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis they offer tips to get started meal plan ideas and I'm honored to say good taste in websites the paper ends with a familiar refrain further research is needed in this case though further research is needed to find ways to make plant based diets the new normal thank you