 Around 400 BC, a man named Hippocrates laid the foundations of modern medicine. He believed that the human body had an innate capacity for self-healing, with the highest form of medicine to the body being everything that we put into it. Let food be thy medicine became a Hippocratic oath, which is still recited by medical doctors today. Over the course of history, our modern approach to treating illness has changed dramatically. Today doctors receive little, if any, training in nutrition. We have a system revolving around a pill for every ill, and the healthcare system fights to keep it that way. Heart disease and cancer are the two top killers in the US annually. Additionally, roughly 39,000 people die due to unnecessary surgery, and other hospital errors. 80,000 people die due to other infections, and 106,000 people die due to adverse drug reactions. The biggest question is, why is this happening? Why are we trapped in this system? How can we UNTRAP ourselves? When we look at all of the data under the lens of science, the correlations that we find are absolutely jaw-dropping. Nevertheless, this is something that we all need to know about. So let's talk about it. It seems to be a maxim of the world, something that we've heard over and over and over again. Everybody knows it. You are what you eat. In the standard American diet, the average diet looks something like this. Counting strictly by percentage of calories, 63% of our caloric intake comes from refined and processed foods. This includes soft drinks, packaged chips, snacks, and other things that have been processed in a factory created for us to eat. The next largest grouping is 25%, which is made up of animal food, meaning meat, dairy, eggs, fish, and other forms of seafood. Final 12% is made up of plant food. Out of that 12%, about 6% of that comes entirely from potatoes, and out of this other 6%, which is made up of vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, seeds, and grains, even half of it may be mixed with processed foods, such as the almonds in an almond joy. Now, we've been reading and seeing information like this for a long time. A long time. And thanks to the internet, news sources, and more and more documentaries on the topic, the information is just now starting to really reach people. Someone has to stand up and say that the answer isn't another pill. The answer is spinach. And while hundreds of thousands of people are taking notice, there still doesn't seem to be a slowdown in the consumption of processed or animal foods. In fact, they appear to be increasing. But why is that? My belief, based on our observations, is that we really don't know just how critical this is. The scientific evidence of the correlations between the foods that we eat and the diseases that we have is outstanding. It's probably the most vital piece of information pertaining not only to curing all of our diseases, but the survival and future of the human race. In 1974, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was hospitalized with bladder cancer. Knowing that his disease was terminal, he decided that in his final days, he would dedicate to giving his country and the world a more complete understanding of cancer. He thus initiated what would become one of the largest and most scientific investigations in history. 650,000 researchers catalogued the mortality patterns caused by several types of cancer between the years 1973 and 1975. The study encompassed every county across China and over 880 million people. Zhou died in 1976, years before his study was complete. Published in 1981, the Cancer Atlas was the result of Zhou's initiated study. It shows a highly unusual distribution of different types of cancer in China, which tended to be clustered in certain hotspots. The results of this study demonstrated that the causes of all of these clusters of cancer had to be related to the environment, and in the researchers' professional opinions, related heavily to diet. Two researchers who have made groundbreaking contributions to this effort are Dr. Colin Campbell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. These are two of the most prominent biological nutritionists in the world today. When Dr. Campbell learned about the Cancer Atlas, it became what he described as the capstone of his research, and took him down a road of discovery which would ultimately become published in a book called The China Study. This 20-year project examined the links between diet and disease in one of the few areas of the world where people still consumed a mostly plant-based diet. Dr. Campbell teamed up with Chinese and British researchers who went into 65 counties in rural China, finding out what 6,500 people ate and how they lived. They also took urine and blood samples. It took them years to analyze and correlate all of this data. In 1990, the China study was published, which identified over 94,000 correlations between diet and disease. The study was published with countless tables and charts presenting the raw data which had been accumulated during the study. Then, this information was cross-referenced in multiple ways to demonstrate its reliability and to show how it linked with the 367 variables that the study examined. The study was a very clear indication of some very powerful revelations. The moment that animal products were introduced into the diet, blood cholesterol levels went up, cancer started to appear, and disease started to make its way into the communities. Since this study, the connections between meat and dairy consumption and disease has been confirmed over and over and over again in scientific studies and even studies of studies. Diabetes, for example, of which 30 million people in the U.S. are reported to struggle with, has been demonstrated to be outright cured with a plant-based diet. The results were amazing. Based off the lab result I had before, I was type 1. I'm not supposed to be producing insulin. This isn't supposed to happen. But as you can see from results, I'm producing insulin. I can go from being type 1 to not having diabetes. That's incredible. Incredible. Diabetes is reversible. We have the results to show. And the funny thing is, it's actually illegal in most countries to treat cancer with nutrition therapy. There have been many physicians now speaking out about this at conferences saying that they're only allowed to treat cancer with chemo, surgery, or radiation. What this ultimately means is that you have to take your own health into your own hands. All of this research by Dr. Campbell and the researchers from China and Britain correlated heavily with Dr. Esselstyn's work, who demonstrated how to naturally reverse heart disease and outline the specifics of what's happening to your body when you eat animal and processed foods. You see, lining all of the blood vessels are something called endothelial cells. These cells are vital to survival, for they naturally produce nitric oxide, which keeps our blood flowing smoothly without being sticky or clogging up. It also helps to dilate blood cells during physical activity and inhibits the formation of plaque, as well as eliminates the inflammation that comes along with plaque in the first place. Scientific tests have demonstrated that when we start eating the standard American diet, meaning predominantly animal and processed foods, our endothelial cells become damaged and can no longer support the healthy flow of blood through the body. This leads to clogged arteries, diseases, cancers, feeling heavy, and cloudiness of the mind. And at the top level of all of this research, it really shows that a plant-based diet is beneficial for human health, and an animal or processed food-based diet simply is not. Dr. Esselstyn's research, however, demonstrated that if anybody, regardless of who they are, adopts a plant-based diet, we instantly begin reversing the process of the damage caused by meat and processed foods. Let food be thy medicine. According to new research on the standard American diet, today only between 6% and 12% of the foods that we eat come from plant-based sources. Sickness is abundant in the world, but there is something we can do about it. We have to change our own lives, and we have to do it by changing what we're putting into our bodies. If we continue to eat a predominantly animal and processed food-based diet, we will destroy ourselves. In fact, we already have to a large extent. Not only is this way of life linked to all of our degenerative diseases, but they are also linked to a tremendous amount of CO2 which we are releasing into the atmosphere, which we'll be covering soon. Change yourself, change the world. You are what you eat. It's time to shift our way of life. See you next time.