 The best-kept secret in medicine is that, given the right conditions, the body can sometimes heal itself. And when it comes to cardiovascular disease, there's no substitute for nutritional excellence. So, Ornish, Pritikin, Barnard, Asselstyn, all the great names in evidence-based nutrition. But how many have heard about the CHIP program, the Coronary Health Improvement Project, a volunteer-run, community-based education program, educating physicians and patients alike about the power of nutrition as medicine. As perhaps the best investment we can make in the fight against heart disease. More effective, cheaper, safer, and what are the side effects? Improved overall health, and not just physical health. Lifestyle change programs such as CHIP, aimed at improving physical health behaviors, can likewise have a profound effect on mental health. Based on studies of thousands of individuals who went through the CHIP program, there were significant improvements in a number of sleep or stress disorders, like sleeping restlessly or not sleeping at all, stress, upset, fear, depression. Here are the numbers. Most of these cut in half all highly significant findings. The question is why? Well, the psychological well-being of the CHIP participants might have been positively affected by increasing feelings of empowerment and making strides towards reducing their body weight, improving other health indicators. As they start eating better and making strides, feelings of despair and failure may be replaced by a growing sense of accomplishment, increased social support, new sense of hope, or they may just be physically feeling better. I mean, if your diabetes goes away, that's reason enough to perk you up. While these before-and-after results look great, what was missing? Right, a control group. Now you say, wait, they each acted as their own control before and after. Ah, but you're forgetting about the Hawthorne effect. Remember, just being in a study under observation can affect people's behavior. So, you know, if they put you on a scale, weigh you and say they're going to weigh you again in six months, people may consciously or unconsciously just eat better on their own, even if they're not told to do anything special. So how much of these improvements would have happened without the CHIP program? Yeah, it's great that you can take a thousand people and markedly reduce their risk factor profiles for our leading killer in just four weeks, I mean, regardless. But to know exactly what role healthy eating and living advice can play, you need to put it to the test by performing randomized controlled trials. And as expected, there were small improvements, even in the control group, but for almost all variables, the CHIP intervention group showed significantly greater improvements. So much so as to have the potential to dramatically reduce the risk associated with common chronic diseases in the long term. Ironically, CHIP was so successful in the city of Rockford, Illinois that dozens of restaurants started offering special plant-based menu options so the control group might have been sneaking in some healthier meals, too. OK, but what about the mental health improvements? Our randomized controlled trial and those in the CHIP group showed significantly greater improvements in physical functioning, pain, general health perceptions, vitality, social functioning, emotional and mental health. For example, significant improvements in particularly mild to moderate depression compared to the control group. And not just right after the program ended, but six months later. So the CHIP acronym started out as the Coronary Health Improvement Project, but as study after study showed the efficacy of the intervention in addressing other chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and even depression, it has since been renamed the Complete Health Improvement Program. As Hans Diehl, the founder of CHIP explains it, we as a society are largely at the mercy of powerful and manipulative marketing forces that basically tell us what to eat. Everywhere we look, we're being seduced to the good life, as marketers define it, but this so-called good life has produced in this country an avalanche of morbidity, immortality, disease and death. What he'd like to see in America is not this so-called good life, but the best life, a simpler lifestyle, characterized by eating more whole plant foods, in other words, foods as grown.