 England has been keeping mortality statistics since 1665, when, yes, one person fell down some stairs and died, but in that week, nearly 4,000 people died of the plague. Today, the modern plague is heart disease, the number one killer of men and women. But it wasn't always this way, and if you dig back into those old statistics, by the middle of last century, heart disease was already killing a 5% to 10% of the population, but it was practically unknown at the beginning of the 20th century. Check out the natural history of coronary heart disease just in the 1920s and 30s, skyrocketing 10-fold in men and the same in women. What was going on? A clue could be found if you split people up by socioeconomic class. You can tell this is a paper written about 1950 to discuss its split into males and wives. It was the richest folks who had up to triple the heart disease as the poorest. Maybe it had something to do with their rich diets? You don't know until you put it to the test, and in doing so, discover the natural cure of coronary heart disease. Discover decades ago by Pritikin, a plant-based diet and lifestyle program. Followed by Dr. Dean Ornish, and then Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic. But how many know of the name Hans Diehl? Dr. Diehl was the first director of research at the Pritikin Center back in 1976. He was inspired by the amazing results they were getting at the Pritikin Center. Amazing results like that of a certain grandmother Gregor's. But he recognized the limitations of live-in residential programs, including their cost and the kind of artificial living environment that made sustaining the behaviors more difficult when patients returned back home. So Diehl developed the CHIP program, as an affordable 30-day lifestyle intervention to be delivered in a community setting. Ten years in, Esselstyn encourages Hans to publish their results in the American Journal of Cardiology. And here it is. Coronary risk reduction through a community-based lifestyle intervention and famously starting out with a quote from the pioneer of coronary bypass surgery, describing it as only a palliative treatment. The only way we're going to stop this epidemic is through prevention. We know vigorous cholesterol lowering can slow rest or even reverse atherosclerosis, but it only works if you do it. Living programs work because you can control people's diets, but they're expensive and people may go back home to toxic food environments. So how about instead of them coming to you, you go to them in the community? The original program was 16 evening sessions over four weeks. The major focus being to encourage participants to adopt the optimal diet. They also encourage people to walk a half hour a day, but most importantly, center your diet around whole plant foods. Now that was the optimal, whole food, plant-based, but the program isn't dogmatic. Just encouraging people to move along the spectrum towards incorporating more whole healthy plant foods into their diets. They didn't provide meals, just advice and encouragement, and four weeks later, got an average weight loss of about six pounds. Blood pressures went down about six points and their LDL-Bad cholesterol down between 16 and 32 points and fasting blood sugars dropped as well. Often, participants were able to decrease or discontinue anti-diabetic cholesterol-lowering and blood pressure-lowering medication, making their findings even more extraordinary, better numbers on fewer drugs. Living programs like Pritikin and McDougal are great and that you can optimize the clinical benefits, but they can cost thousands of dollars in addition to missing work, whereas CHIP is cheap and they're living at home, so it's not like they've been spoon-fed some perfect diet for a few weeks and some spa and then go back to their cupboards of cookies. CHIP is a free-living program, teaching people how to eat and stay healthy within their home environments. Well, at least that's the theory. And with these remarkable results, we're after just four weeks in the program. The true test will be to what extent people adhere to their new lifestyle and sustain their health benefits weeks, months, or even more than a year later, which we'll explore next.