 What exactly do they mean by sudden cardiac death? It's defined as the sudden unexpected natural death from a cardiac cause, a short time, generally less than an hour, after the onset of symptoms in a person without any known previous condition. Most know that the number one killer, both men and women in the United States, is heart disease. What people may not know, though, is that, according to the American Heart Association, for the majority of Americans that die of heart disease, their first symptom occurs not years before they die, but literally minutes before they die. In our last hour on this earth, in agony, all the dietary change in the world isn't going to reverse our course. Even if the paramedics snatch away our milkshake, refuse to stop at our favorite fast food joint on route to the hospital, it is too late. One moment, we're talking to our family, and less than an hour later, we could be gone forever. The number one cause of death in America is not just heart disease, but more specifically sudden cardiac death. People dropping dead in their 30s, 40s, 50s. Is that just what happens when you get old, though? Your ticker just conks out, your pump just wears out on you? No. That's why Dr. T. Cohen Campbell's work was so revolutionary. In fact, he's the reason I chose Cornell. At the same time, Ornish was studying what, in fact, a plant-based diet was having on hundreds of people. Campbell and colleagues were studying hundreds of thousands. Here's just one of the 894 pages of the Oxford-Cornel-China study. Let me share just one statistic. Guizhou County, in China, where among a population of 246,000 men over three years, there was not a single recorded death from coronary artery disease. If that was in the U.S., that many men, it would be thousands of recorded deaths. Instead, there were none. There's nothing natural about heart disease. So when Dr. Esselstyn talks about how most heart disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never exist, and if it does exist, need never progress, he's not exaggerating. Nobody else has to die. Plant-based diets can prevent, successfully treat, and even reverse our number one killer.