 When famed surgeon Michael DeBakey was asked why his studies published back in the 30s, linking smoking and lung cancer was simply ignored. He had to remind people what it was like back then. We were a smoking society. It was in the movies. It was everywhere. Medical meetings were one heavy haze of smoke. Smoking was, in a word, normal. It's like the debates over cigarettes and lung cancer in Congress taking place in smoke-filled rooms. It makes me wonder what served at the breakfast buffets at the Dietary Guidelines Committee meetings these days. I previously talked about a famous statistician by the name of Ronald Fisher, who railed against what he called propaganda to convince the public that cigarette smoking was dangerous. Fisher made invaluable contributions to the fields of statistics, but his analysis of lung cancer smoking were flawed by an unwillingness to examine the entire body of data available. His smoke screen may have been because he was a paid consultant to the tobacco industry, but also because he was himself a smoker. Part of his resistance to seeing the association may have been rooted in his own fondness for smoking, which makes me wonder about some of the food's nutrition researchers may be fond of to this day. It always strikes me as ironic when vegetarian researchers come forward and list their diet as a potential conflict of interest, whereas not once in the 70,000 articles on meat in the medical literature have I ever seen a researcher disclose their non-vegetarian habits because it's normal. Just like smoking was normal. How could something that's so normal be bad for you? And it's not like you smoke one cigarette and fall over dead. Cancer takes decades to develop. Since at that time most physicians smoked themselves and could not observe any immediate deleterious effects, they were reluctant to accept even the possibility of such a relation despite the mountain of evidence. May have taken 25 years for the Surgeon General's report to come out and longer still for mainstream medicine to get on board, but now there are no longer ads encouraging people to inhale to your heart's content. Now there are ads from the CDC fighting back. For food ads you don't have to go all the way back to meat for health defense or nourishing bacon or doctors prescribing meat, or soda for that matter. Think heaven's tricks are habit-forming. You know things are bad when the sanest dietary advice came from cigarette ads. In modern times you can see hot dogs certified by the American Heart Association, or sirloin tips for that matter. And of all foods, which was the first to get the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics kids eat right on their label was it an apple, broccoli perhaps? No, Kraft prepared cheese products. Now, just like there were those in the 30s, 40s, and 50s on the vanguard trying to save lives today, there are those turning ads about what you can do with pork butt to what the pork can do to your butt. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicines Meet is the new tobacco campaign. As Dr. Barnard tried to get across in an editorial published in the American Medical Association's Journal of Ethics, plant-based diets can now be considered the nutritional equivalent of quitting smoking. How many more people have to die, though, before the CDC encourages people not to wait for open-out surgery to start eating healthy as well? But just like we don't have to wait until our doctor stops smoking to quit ourselves, we don't have to wait until our doctor takes a nutrition class or cleans up their own diet before choosing to eat healthier. No longer do doctors hold a professional monopoly on health information. There's been a democratization of knowledge, and so until the system changes, we have to take personal responsibility for our own health, for our family's health. We can't wait until society catches up with the science again because it's a matter of life and death. Dr. Kim Alley and Williams became president of the American College of Cardiology. He was asked why he follows his own advice to eat a plant-based diet. I don't mind dying, Dr. Williams replied. I just don't want it to be my own fault.