 All right, welcome back. We have what I consider the McDougal team, which is a group of associates, actually friends that I've had for 20, 30 years. And our next presenter is one of those men who's worked with us, worked in conjunction with the things that we've done, supported each other, had similar crowds. And one thing really distinct about our next presenter is his ability to communicate. I understand I was just shocked that he's given over 1,000 lectures. And sometimes he's given four lectures a day. Amazing. What a dedicated person. And so he also finally came out with his first book. It's How Not to Die. What a title. And it has put him on the New York Times best-selling list for the last seven weeks. So because of our longtime friendship and my great respect for him, he's been a speaker for at least one presentation every year for Who Knows How Far Back It Goes. And I know you're going to enjoy Dr. Michael Greger. I have taken so many great ideas from Dr. John McDougal that it's only fair that he take my beard. Allow me to begin on a personal note. This is a picture of me right around the time that my grandma was diagnosed with end-stage heart disease and sent home to die. She already had so many bypass operations, basically run out of plumbing at some point, confined to wheelchair, crushing chest pain. Nothing more they could do. Her life was over at age 65. But then she heard about this guy, Nathan Pritikin, one of our early lifestyle medicine pioneers. And what happened next is chronicled in Pritikin's biography. My grandma was one of the death's door people. Francis Greger arrived in one of Pritikin's early sessions in the wheelchair. Mrs. Greger had heart disease, angina, claudication, her condition was so bad she could no longer walk without great pain in her chest and legs. Within three weeks, though, she was not only out of her wheelchair but walking 10 miles a day. This is my grandma at her grandson's wedding 15 years after she was given her medical death sentence. And thanks to a healthy diet, she was able to live another 31 years on this earth till 96 to enjoy her six grandkids, including me. That is why I went into medicine. When Dr. Ornish published his lifestyle heart trial years later proving with quantitative angiography that coronary heart disease could be reversed, already opened up without drugs, without surgery, just a plant-based diet and other healthy lifestyle changes, I assumed it was going to be the game changer. I mean, my family had seen it with their own eyes, but here it was in black and white in some of the most prestigious medical journals on the planet. But nothing happened. Leaving me to wonder if effectively the cure to our number one killer could get lost down some rabbit hole and ignored, what else was there in the medical literature that could help my patients? I made it my life's mission to find out for those of you who are unfamiliar with my work every year. I read through every issue of every English-language nutrition journal in the world. So busy folks like you don't have to. I then compile all the most interesting, most groundbreaking, most practical findings to new videos and articles I upload every day to my non-profit site nutritionfacts.org. Everything on the website is free. There are no ads, no corporate sponsorship, strictly non-commercial, not selling anything. Just put it up as a public service as a labor of love. New videos and articles every day, and the latest in evidence-based nutrition, what a concept. Where did Pritikin get his evidence from? Well, a network of missionary hospitals set up throughout sub-Saharan Africa, uncovered what may be the most important advance in health according to one of our most famous medical figures of the 20th century, Dr. Dennis Burkett. The fact that many of our most common and major Western diseases were universally rare, like heart disease. In the African population of Uganda, coronary heart disease almost nonexistent. He said, wait a second. Are number one cause of death almost nonexistent? What were they eating? They were eating a lot of starchy vegetables, starchy grains, and greens, and their protein almost exclusively from plant sources. And they had the cholesterol levels to prove it, actually very similar to what you see down here in the corner of those eating modern day plant-based diets. He said, well, wait a second. Maybe the Africans were just dying early from some other kind of disease. Never lived long enough to get heart disease? No. Here's age-matched heart attack rates in Uganda versus St. Louis. Out of 632 autopsies in Uganda, only one myocardial infarction. Out of 632 age and gender-matched autopsies in Missouri, 136 myocardial infarctions were the 100 times the rate of our number one killer. They were still blown away. They went back to another 800 autopsies in Uganda and still just that one small healed infarct, meaning it wasn't even the cause of death. Out of 1,427 patients, less than 1 in 1,000, whereas here, heart disease is an epidemic. This is a list of diseases commonly found here and in places that eat and live like the US, but were rare or even non-existent in populations centering their diets around whole plant foods. These are among our most common diseases, like obesity, for example, or hyaluronic, one of the most common stomach problems, varicose veins and hemorrhoids, two most common venous problems, colorectal cancer leading cause of cancer related death, diverticulitis, the number one disease of the intestines, appendicitis, number one cause of emergency abdominal surgery, gallbladder disease, number one cause of non-emergency abdominal surgery, as well as ischemic heart disease, our commonest cause of death here, but a rarity among plant-based populations. And so this suggests that heart disease may be a choice, like cavities. If you look at the teeth of people who lived over 10,000 years before the invention of the toothbrush, pretty much no cavities. Didn't brush a day in their lives, no flossing, yet no cavities. Why? Because candy bars hadn't been invented yet. So why do people continue to get cavities when we know they're preventable through diet easy? Because the pleasure of dessert basically outweighs the cost and discomfort of the dentist chair for many people, and look, that's fine. As long as people understand the consequences of their actions, as a physician, what more can I do? If you think the benefits outweigh the risk for you and your family, then go for it. I certainly enjoy the occasional indulgence. I've got a good dental plan. But what if instead of the plaque in our teeth, we're talking about the plaque building up inside of our arteries? This is another disease that can be prevented by changing our diet. Now what are the consequences for you and your family? Now we're not talking about scraping tartar anymore. Now we're talking life and death. The most likely reason that most of our loved ones will die is because of heart disease. So being at a McDougall event is the best Valentine's Day present ever. It's still up to each of us to make our own decisions as to what to eat and how to live. But we should make these choices consciously, right? Educating ourselves about the predictable consequences of our actions. Coronary heart disease, atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, begins in childhood. By age 10, the arteries of nearly all kids raised on the San American diet already have fatty streaks at first stage of the disease. And then these plaques start forming in our 20s and our 30s and then can start killing us off. And our heart is called heart attack. Our brain, the same disease is called a stroke. If there is anyone here in the room today older than age 10, then the question isn't whether or not to eat healthy to prevent heart disease. It's whether you want to reverse the heart disease that you already have. Is that even possible? You know, when researchers took people with heart disease, put them on the kind of diet followed by populations that did not get heart disease, their hope was to slow the disease down. Maybe even stop it. But instead, something miraculous happened. The disease started to reverse to get better. As soon as patients started eating an artery-clogging diet, their arteries started opening up. Their bodies were able to start dissolving some of that plaque away without drugs, without surgery, even some cases, severe triple vessel heart disease, arteries opening up, suggesting that their bodies wanted to be healthy all along, but were just never given the chance. This improvement in blood flow on the left you see up here. You can see this is after just three weeks eating healthy. Let me share with you what's been called the best kept secret in medicine. The best kept secret in medicine is that sometimes, given the right conditions, our body can heal itself. If you whack your shin really hard on a coffee table, get all red, hot, swollen, and flamed, but will heal naturally if you just stand back and let your body's magic take its place. But what if you kept whacking your shin the same place every day, in fact, three times a day breakfast, lunch, and dinner? It never healed. You'd go to your doctor and be like, oh, my shit hurts so bad. You'd have no problem. Whip out their pad, write your prescription for pain killers. You're still whacking your shin three times a day. Oh, it's still really, oh, but feels so much better with those pain pills on board. Oh, yeah. Thank heavens for modern medicine. It's like taking nitroglycerin for crushing chest pain, or a tremendous relief, but not actually treating the underlying cause of the disease. Our body wants to come back to health if we let it. But if we keep re-injuring it three times a day, it may never heal. It's like smoking. One of the most amazing things I learned in all my medical training was that within 15 years of stopping smoking, your lung cancer risk approaches that of a lifelong non-smoker. Isn't that amazing? Your lungs can clear out all that tar, and eventually it's almost as if you never started smoking at all. And every morning of our smoking life, that healing process started until wham, our first cigarette of the day. Re-injuring our lungs with every puff, just like we can re-injure our arteries with everybody. When all we had to do, the miracle cure is to just stand back, get out of the way, and let our body's natural healing processes bring us back towards health. Now sure, you could choose moderation and hit yourself with a smaller hammer. But why beat yourself up at all? We've known about this for decades. American Heart Journal 1977, cases like Mr. F.W. hear such severe angina couldn't even make it to the mailbox, then started eating healthier, and a few months later, climbing mountains, no pain. Now there are some fancy new anti-angina drugs on the market now cost thousands of dollars a year, but at the highest dose, they can successfully prolong exercise duration as long as 33 and 1 half seconds, ladies and gentlemen. It does not look like those choosing the drug route will be climbing mountains anytime soon. See, plant-based diets, not just safer and cheaper, but can work better. Heart disease is our number one killer. Killer number two is cancer. What happens if you put cancer on a plant-based diet? Dr. Dean Ornish and colleagues found that the progression of prostate cancer could be reversed with a plant-based diet and other healthy lifestyle behaviors and no wonder. If you drip the blood of those in the stand American diet onto cancer cells growing in a petri dish, cancer growth is cut down by about 9%. But put people on a plant-based diet for a year, though, and their blood can do this. The blood circulating throughout the bodies of those eating plant-based diets has nearly eight times the stopping power when it comes to cancer cell growth. Now this is for prostate cancer, the leading cancer killer specific to men and women. It's breast cancer. So they wanted to repeat this study using women in breast cancer cells instead. But look, they didn't want to wait a whole year to get the results. So they said, well, let's see what a plant-based diet can do in just two weeks against three lines of human breast cancer cells. Here's the before cancer cell growth powering away to 100%. Here's after just two weeks eating healthy. Here's kind of a before picture. This is a photograph taken under a microscope. What they did is they laid down a confluent layer, like a carpet of human breast cancer cells. And then they dripped the blood of women eating the standard American diet onto those cells. And as you can see, it kind of breaks up the cancer and these kinds of cancer continents here. So even women eating crappy diets aren't totally defenseless. But then they take these same women, put them on a plant-based diet two weeks later. So they act as their own controls. Same women, two weeks later after a plant-based diet, they lay down another layer of breast cancer. And then they drip the blood of the same women two weeks later and their blood can do this. Just a few individual cancer cells left with their bodies cleaned up. Before and after just two weeks eating healthy. Their blood became that much more hostile to cancer. Slowing down the growth of cancer cells is nice, getting rid of it's even better. This is what's called apoptosis, programmed cell death. Bodies were able to somehow kind of reprogram the cancer cells, forcing them into early retirement. This is what's called tunnel imaging, measuring DNA fragmentation or cell death. So dying cancer cells show up as little white spots. So as you can see in that little corner there, there's a dying cancer cell. Again, this is after you drip the blood of women and the standard American diet onto them. Then you take these same women, two weeks later, eating healthier, drip their blood again on cancer, and you see this. It's like you're an entirely different person inside. The same blood, now coursing through these women's bodies, gained the power to significantly slow down and stop breast cancer growth within just two weeks of eating a plant-based diet. What kind of blood do we want in our body? Kind of immune system. Do we want our blood just kind of rolls over when new cancer cells pop up? Or do we want blood circulating to every nook and cranny in our body with the power to slow down and stop? Now this dramatic strengthening of cancer defenses was after 14 days of plant-based diet and exercise. They had these women out walking 30 to 60 minutes a day. You say, well, wait a second. If you do two things, I mean, how do you know what rolled the diet played? So the researchers decided to put it to the test. So this is measuring cancer cell clearance. This is what we saw before. The effect of blood taken from those eating a plant-based diet, in this case for an average of 14 years, along with mild exercise, just like out walking every day. Plant-based diet and walking, that's the kind of cancer cell clearance you get. Compare that to the cancer stopping power of your average sedentary meteor. You see a little burger in there. I don't know if you can see that. Which is basically nonexistent. Now, but this middle group is interesting. Instead of 14 years on plant-based diet, 14 years standard American diet, but 14 years of daily, strenuous, hour-long exercise like calisthenics, they wanted to know if you exercise long enough, if you exercise hard enough, can you rival some strolling plant-eaters over here? And the answer is exercise helped. No question, but literally 5,000 hours in the gym was no match for a plant-based diet. Same thing as we saw before. Even if you're a couch potato eating fried potatoes, you're not totally defenseless. You can kill off a few cancer cells. If you exercise for 5,000 hours, you can knock off cancer cells left and right, but nothing appears to kick more cancer tush than a plant-based diet. We think it's because of the animal proteins, meat, egg, white, and dairy proteins increasing the levels of IGF-1 in our bodies and something like growth factor one, a cancer-promoting growth hormone involved in the acquisition and progression of malignant tumors. But if we lower animal protein intake, if we put people on a plant-based diet, their IGF-1 levels drop. This is the graph on the left. And if you put people on a plant-based diet for years, it drops even further. And their IGF-1 binding protein levels go up. IGF-1 binding protein is like our body's emergency break. It's one of our ways our body protects itself from excessive growth, sure. Within two weeks, you can drop your liver's production of IGF-1. But wait a second. What about all the IGF-1 you have circling your body from the bacon and eggs you had three weeks ago? Well, your body releases this snatch squad of binding proteins into the bloodstream to tie up any excess IGF-1. As you can see, binding protein levels go up. Within weeks, continue to get better at the longer one eats healthy. Here's the experiment that really nailed IGF-1 as the villain. Same as last time. Oh, did I go back? Same as last time. Go on a plant-based diet. Cancer cell growth drops. Cancer cell death shoots up. But then here's the interesting column here. What if you add back to the cancer, just the amount of IGF-1 banished from your system because you were eating healthy for two weeks? What happens? You erase the diet and exercise effect. It's almost as if you never started eating healthy at all. So the reason the largest perspective study on diet and cancer ever found that the incidence of all cancers combined was lower among those eating vegetarian than those eating meat, maybe because they're eating less animal protein. So end up with less IGF-1. And so end up with less cancer growth. How much less cancer are we talking about? Middle-aged men and women with high protein intake, 75% increase in total mortality, fourfold increase in the risk of dying from cancer, but not all proteins. Specifically, animal protein, which makes sense, of course, given the higher IGF-1 levels. The academic institution sent out a press release with a memorable opening line. That chicken wing you're eating could be as deadly as a cigarette. Explaining that eating a diet rich in animal proteins during middle age makes you four times more likely to die from cancer, which is comparable to what you can see with smoking. So what was the response to this revelation? The diet's high meat, eggs, and dairy could be a harmful health of smoking. Well, one nutrition scientist replied that it was potentially dangerous to compare the effects of smoking to the effects of meat and cheese. Why? Because a smoker might think, oh, wait a second. Why bother quitting smoking if my ham and cheese sandwich is just bad for me? So we can't tell anyone about this meat and cheese thing. This reminds me of a famous Philip Morris cigarette ad, which tried to downplay the risk by saying, you think secondhand smoke is bad, increasing the risk of lung cancer 19%, drinking one or two glasses of milk maybe three times worth, 62% increased risk of lung cancer, or doubling the risk frequently cooking with oil, or tripling your risk of heart disease by eating non-vegetarian, or multiplying your risk sixfold by eating lots of meat and dairy. So they conclude, let's keep some perspective here. The risk of lung cancer for secondhand smoke well below that for other everyday activity. So breathe deep. It's like saying, yeah, don't worry about getting stabbed because he didn't shot so much worse. How about neither? Two risks don't make a right. Of course, you'll note Philip Morris stopped throwing dairy under the bus once they purchased Kraft Foods, just saying. All right, what about the other 13 leading causes of death? Let's do it. The top three killers used to be heart disease, cancer stroke, oh, that's so 2007. Now it's heart disease, cancer, and COPD chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases like emphysema. Thankfully, COPD can be prevented with the help of a plant based diet, even treated with plants, improving lung function over time. Of course, the tobacco industry viewed these landmark findings a little differently. If adding plants to one's diet can help one's lung function, I mean, wouldn't it be easier to just add plants to cigarettes? Oh, and indeed, oh, let's go back. The addition of ascii berries to cigarettes evidently has a protective effect against emphysema in smoking mice. Who would have thunk it? Next, they're going to start putting berries in meat. And indeed, I couldn't make this stuff up, ladies and gentlemen. The addition of fruit extracts to burger patties was not without its glitches. For example, the blackberries dyed the burger patties with this distinct purplish color kind of turned people off. Although evidently, you can improve the tenderness of lamb carcasses by infusing them before rigamortis sets in with kiwi fruit juice. You can even improve the nutritional profile of frankfooters by adding powdered grapeseeds, though there were complaints that grapeseed particles became visible in the final product. And look, I mean, if there's one thing we know about hot dog eaters, it's that they're picky about what goes in their food. Oh, pig anus, OK, but grapeseeds, oh. Strokes are killer number four. Preventing strokes, maybe all about eating potassium-rich foods, yet most Americans don't even reach the recommended minimum daily intake. And by most, I mean more than 98%. 98% of us eat potassium deficient diets because 98% of us don't eat enough plants. Potassium comes from the word potash. Take any plant put in a pot, reduce it to ash. Left with potashium, potassium, a so-called vegetable alkali, true story. But who can name me one plant in particular, a plant food high in potassium? Bananas, right? I don't know why. It's like the one thing everybody knows about nutrition. I think like Chiquita must have this great PR firm or something. But it turns out bananas don't even make the top 50 sources coming in at number 86 right after fast food vanilla milkshakes. It goes fast food vanilla milkshakes and then bananas. You know, it's funny when I was writing the book, I wanted to go back and make sure that they didn't update their list and they had. Turns out now bananas don't even make the top 1,000 sources coming in at 1,611 right after Reese's Pieces. I kid you not. The most concentrated whole food sources of potassium in the American diet are beans and greens and dates of all three things. Bananas don't even make the top 1,000. In fact, if you look at the next leading cause of death, bananas could be downright dangerous. It's Alzheimer's disease, our sixth leading killer now striking a staggering 4 million Americans affecting. 20 years ago, it wasn't even in the top 10. According to the latest dietary guidelines for the prevention of Alzheimer's, the two most important things we can do, cut down our consumption of meat, dairy, and junk and replace those with vegetables, beans, fruits, and whole grains. This is based in part on data going back 20 years now. Those that eat meat, red meat, white meat doesn't matter. Between two to three times, the risk of becoming demented later in life and the longer one eats healthy, the lower the risk of dementia drops. Next on the list is type 2 diabetes, which we can prevent, arrest, and reverse with a plant-based diet, something we've known since back in the 1930s, within five years, about a quarter of the diabetics were able to get off insulin. But plant-based diets are relatively low-calorie diets. Look, maybe their diabetes just got better because they lost so much weight. To tease that out, what one would have to do is design a study where you put people on healthy diet but forced them to eat so much food that they wouldn't lose weight despite eating healthier. Then we can see if plant-based diet has particular benefits, unique benefits beyond just all the weight loss. Well, we'd have to wait 44 years, but here it is. Subjects were weighed every day. They started losing weight. They were made to eat more food. In fact, so much food, some of the participants had problems eating and all. They're like, oh, no, not another tostada, not another salad. But they mentioned that. So no significant alterations in body weight despite restricting meat, dairy, eggs, and junk. So with zero weight loss, did the plant-based diets still help? Well, overall, insulin requirements were cut about 60%, and half were able to get off insulin altogether, despite no change in weight. How many years did this take? No, 16 days. So we're talking diabetics. We've had diabetes for the longest 20 years, injecting 20 units of insulin a day, and then as few as 13 days later off of all insulin altogether, thanks to less than two weeks on a plant-based diet. Diabetes for 20 years off all insulin in two weeks. Diabetes for 20 years because no one had told them about a plant-based diet. Here's patient 15. 32 units of insulin on the control diet, and then 18 days later on none. Lower blood sugars on 32 units less insulin. That's the power of plants. And as a bonus, their cholesterol dropped like a rock to under 150 in just 16 days. Just like moderate changes in diet, you only get moderate changes in cholesterol. How moderate do you want your diabetes? Everything in moderation is a truer statement than many people realize. Moderate changes in diet can leave diabetics with moderate vision loss, moderate kidney failure, moderate amputation, maybe just a few toes or something. Moderation in all things is not necessarily a good thing. You know, that study that purported to show that diets high in meat, eggs, and dairy could be the harmful health of smoking. Supposedly suggested that people eat lots of animal protein, have four times more likely to die from cancer or diabetes, but if you look at the actual study, you'll see that's not true. Those eating lots of animal protein didn't have four times more likely risk of dying from diabetes. They had 73 times higher risk of dying from diabetes. Now those who chose moderation, eating a moderate amount of animal protein, they only had 23 times the risk of death from diabetes. Killer number eight is kidney failure, which can be both prevented and treated with a plant-based diet, and no surprise. Kidneys are highly vascular organs. Harvard researchers found three dietary risk factors for declining kidney function. Number one, animal protein, number two, animal fat, and number three, cholesterol, all of course only found in one kind of food. Animal fat can alter the actual structure of our kidneys based on studies like this, showing plugs of fat literally clogging up the works in autopsied kidneys, and the animal protein can have a profound effect on normal kidney function, inducing what's called hyper-filtration, increasing the workload on the kidney, but not plant protein. Eat some tuna fish, and you can see increased pressure on the kidneys one, two, three hours after the meal. It shoots right up, right? But if instead of having a tuna fish salad sandwich, you had a tofu salad sandwich with the exact same amount of protein, no effect. Kidneys can deal with plant protein without even batting an eyelash. So they say, why does animal protein cause that overload reaction, but not plant protein? It appears to be due to the inflammation triggered by the animal protein, how do we know that? It's because if you give a powerful anti-inflammatory drug along with the tuna fish, you can actually abolish that hyper-filtration effect, that protein leakage effect in response to meat ingestion. Then, of course, there's the acid load. Animal protein induces the formation of acid within the kidney, which can then lead to what's called tubular toxicity, damage to the delicate urine-making tubes within the kidney. Animal foods tend to be acid-forming, whereas plant foods tend to either be neutral or actually alkaline, actually base-forming, to counteract some of that acid. So the solution to stopping the progression of chronic kidney disease may lie in the produce market, produce aisle rather than the pharmacy aisle. No wonder plant-based diets have been used to treat kidney failure for decades now. Here's protein leakage on the traditional low sodium diet that physicians would normally put these patients on, switch to a supplemented vegan diet, conventional, plant-based, conventional, plant-based, turning on and off kidney dysfunction like a light switch based on what's going into their mouths. Killer number nine, respiratory infections. What possible role could diet play? Well, you obviously haven't seen my video, Kale and the Immune System, talking about the immunostimulatory effects of kale. Is there anything kale cannot do? Boosting antibody production seven-fold, but this is in a Petri dish, what about in people? Well, if you take two groups, older men and women, split them up, half, continue to eat their regular diet, other half add just a few servings of fruits and vegetables to their diet, after getting their pneumonia vaccination, their pneumavax vaccination, you can see a significant improvement in protective antibody response in response to just adding a few servings of fruits and vegetables to their diet. This wasn't cutting out meat, just adding fruits and vegetables can significantly improve immune function. Killer number 10 is suicide. We've known that those eating healthier have healthier mood states. In fact, only about half the depression, anxiety, stress scoring compared to those that eat meat. Researchers suspect that it's the arachidonic acid, this inflammatory long-chain omega-6 fatty acid found predominantly in chicken and eggs. That's where it's mostly found in the American diet. You can't tell if it's causing effect until you put it to the test. So they took people in the standard American diet, removed meat, removed fish, removed poultry and eggs from their diets, significant improvement in mood within just two weeks. Thanks perhaps to this removal of arachidonic acid from their body, which they thought was adversely impacting mental health via a cascade of neuro-inflammation, brain inflammation, but we could bring down that inflammation in their brain within just two weeks by removing cutting out eggs, chicken and other meat. Now my just cherry picking though, what about all the other studies, randomized control trials, showing that other diets have improved mood? There aren't any. Recent review found that only that plant-based dietary intervention fit the bill in terms of working. It's hard to cherry pick when there's only one cherry. Works in a workplace setting two, significant increase in physical functioning, general health, vitality, mental health and not surprisingly translating into improved worker productivity. The biggest such study, across 15 corporate sites at Geico, found the plant-based diets significant improvements in depression, anxiety, stress, improvements in emotional wellbeing, et cetera, et cetera. So a lifestyle interventions like exercise that can help mental as well as physical health among the most effective of those is this plant-based diet. Killer number 11, blood infections. Sure foodborne bacteria can kind of burrow through the intestine into the bloodstream, but women can creep up into their bladder. We've known for decades that it's bacteria creeping up from the rectum that actually cause bladder infections, but only recently did we figure out where this rectal reservoir of UTI causing bacteria was coming from and we now know it's chicken. We have DNA fingerprinting proof of a direct link between farm animals, meat and bladder infections. Solid evidence that urinary tract infections can be what's called a zoonosis, an animal to human disease. Say, wait a second. Can't I just use a meat thermometer, cook the meat through? I mean, what's, you know, no, because of cross-contamination. We've known for decades. You give someone a frozen chicken to prepare and cook in their own kitchen as they normally would and a multitude of antibiotic resistant bacteria jump from the chicken into the gut of the volunteer before they even eat it. So you could reduce, you could incinerate that thing to ash. You don't even have to eat any of it. You're infected before it even makes it into the oven. Just handling it is the problem. Within days, the drug resistant chicken bacteria multiplied to the point of becoming a major part of the gut floor. The chicken bacteria was like taking over their intestines. Now, what about if you follow the safe handling guidelines as well? No one actually does this, but the official USAA recommendations is you should disinfect all common kitchen surfaces with a bleach solution then they spray the bleach on all the surface. Okay, what if you did this? And then came in later and swabbed common kitchen surfaces. And when you do that, researchers find pathogenic fecal bacteria, salmonella, campylobacter, serious human pathogens still left behind in the kitchen. The reason that most people have more bacteria from feces in their kitchen sink than on their toilet seat is because most people rinse chickens in the sink, not the toilet. So unless our kitchen is like some biohazard lab, the only way we're gonna guarantee we're not leaving infection around the kitchen is to not bring it into our homes in the first place. Now, but the good news is it's not like you eat chicken once and you're colonized for life. In this study, the chicken bacteria only seem to last about 10 days before your good bacteria kind of muscle it out of the way. The problem is that many families eat chicken more than once every 10 days. So maybe constantly reintroducing these chicken bugs into their systems, right? Say, wait a second. You can't sell unsafe cars. You can't sell unsafe toys. How is it even legal to sell unsafe meat? Well, they do it by blaming the consumers when USDA poultry microbiologists said, look, raw meats are not idiot-proof. They can be mishandled when they are. It's like handling a hand grenade. You pull the pen, someone's gonna get hurt. Now, while some may question the wisdom of selling hand grenades in supermarkets, if we get sick, it's our fault, right? The USDA poultry expert suggests that it's the consumer responsibility but we just refuse to accept it. It's like a car company saying, yeah, we installed faulty brakes, but it's your fault for not putting your kid in a seatbelt. The head of the CDC's food poisoning division famously responded to this kind of blame the victim attitude coming from the meat industry. She asked, is it reasonable that if a consumer undercooks a hamburger, their three-year-old dies? Is that reasonable? Not to worry, though, the meat industry's on it. They just got FDA approval for a bacteria-eating virus. They can spray onto the meat. Now, the industry's concerned about the consumer acceptance of these so-called bacteriophages may present somewhat of a challenge for the food industry. So, of course, I'm not gonna label it or anything, but they think that's gonna be a challenge. Check out their other bright idea. The effective extracted housefly pupae. This is a science-y way of saying they wanna smear a maggot mixture onto the meat. No, wait, wait. It's a low cost. Let's think about it, right? Look, maggots thrive off of riding meat, however, there are been no reports, oh, sorry, there have been no reports of, sorry, this is a new clicker for me. We'll see if we can get through it. However, there are no reports of maggots having serious diseases, right? Have you ever seen a maggot sneeze? I don't think so. So, they must be filled with some kind of antibacteria, something, right? So, let's take some maggots, grow them three days old, wash them off, top them up, a little Vitamix action there, and voila! Safer meats. We did kidney failure. What about liver failure? We've known for decades that a plant-based diet could be used to treat liver failure, significantly reducing the toxins that would otherwise build up eating meat without a fully functional liver or two to toxify your blood. One does have to admit though that some people, there are some people that eat plant-based diets with worsening liver function. They're called, you know, alcoholics living off of, you know, barley and corn and grapes and, you know, strictly plant-based, but not doing so good. It's not clear what high blood pressure is next, affecting nearly 78 million Americans. There's nearly one in three of us, and as we age, our pressures get higher and higher, so it's about age 60, strikes more than half. I said, wait a second. If it affects more than half of us, then maybe it's less of a disease and more just kind of an inevitable consequence of aging. No, we've known since the 1920s that high blood pressure need not occur. Researchers measured the blood pressure of 1,000 people in rural Kenya who ate a diet centered around what? Whole plant foods, starchy vegetables, grains, vegetables, fruit and dark green leafies. Our pressures go up. As we age, their pressures actually go down and the lower the better. The whole 140 over 90 cut off is arbitrary. Even people that start out with a blood pressure under 120 over 80, you went to your doctor, had 120 over 80, you would get a gold star, but even 120 over 80 people appear to benefit from blood pressure reduction, so the ideal blood pressure, the no benefit from reducing it further blood pressure is actually 110 over 70. Say, wait a second, is it even possible to get blood pressures down to 110 over 70? It's not just possible. It's normal for those eating healthy enough diets. Over two years at a rural Kenyan hospital, 1,800 patients were admitted. How many cases of high blood pressure did they find? Zero. Wow, they must have had low rates of heart disease, right? No, they had no rates of heart disease. Now the single case of arteriosclerosis, our number one killer was found. Rural China too, about 110 over 70, their entire life, 70 year olds, same average blood pressure as 16 year olds. Now of course, Africa, China, vastly different diets, but they share this common theme that they're plant-based day to day with meat only even on special occasions. Now why do we think it's the plant-based nature of their diets that was so protective? Because in the Western world, the only group getting blood pressures down that low, according to the American Heart Association, are those eating strictly plant-based diets, coming in an average of 110 over 65. Based on the largest study of those eating plant-based diets to date, this is a study of 89,000 Californians. There appears to be this stepwise drop in blood pressure rates, the more and more plant-based one's diet gets as one goes from meat eater to kind of flexitarian to just fish to just meat, eggs and dairy to all the way plant-based. Same thing with obesity and diabetes, the more and more healthy we eat, the better. So of course, yes, we can eliminate the vast majority of our risk, but what's important about the slide as well is that it's not all or nothing, it's not black and white. Any steps we can make on the spectrum towards eating healthier can accrue significant health benefits, which just get better and better the more you actually do it. Blood pressure-wise, you can show this experimentally. You take vegetarians, you give them meat and pay them enough to eat it and their blood pressures go up, or you remove meat from their diet and their blood pressures go down after seven days in this mysterious McDougal program cohort, whatever that is, and this is after the vast majority had already stopped or reduced their blood pressure medications completely. They had to reduce their blood pressure medications because you're treating the cause of the disease and so if you don't have high blood pressure anymore and you're on blood pressure medications, you can drop your pressures too low, fall over and crack your head open. You have to reduce blood pressure, so we got lower pressures on fewer drugs. That's the power of plants. So, does the American Heart Association recommend a no-meat diet? No, they recommend a low-meat diet, so-called DASH diet, why not vegetarian? When the DASH diet was being created, were they just not aware of this landmark research done by Harvard's Frank Sacks? No, they were aware of the landmark research. The chair of the design committee that came up with the DASH diet was Frank Sacks. See, the DASH diet was explicitly designed with the number one goal of capturing the blood pressure-lowering benefits of a vegetarian diet yet contain enough animal products to make it palatable to the general public. They didn't think the public could handle the truth. Now, in their defense, you can see what they were thinking. Just like drugs never work unless you actually take them, diets never work unless you actually eat them. So they're like, okay, well, no one's gonna go on a strict vegetarian diet. So if we soft-pedal the truth on the population scale, maybe we'll actually help more people. All right, tell that to the thousand families a day. That lose a family member to high blood pressure. Maybe it's time to start telling the American public the truth. Killer number 14 is Parkinson's disease. Does a plant-based diet reduce the risk of Parkinson's disease? Well, most studies today suggest this link between dairy products and Parkinson's, but why? Well, there's evidence that milk is contaminated with neurotoxic chemicals, high levels of pesticide residues and have been found both in the milk supply and the brains of people that die from Parkinson's disease. These are compounds like tetrahydroisolquinoline, which is actually what they use to induce Parkinson's and primates in a laboratory. Found mostly in cheese, actually. And so there's been calls that we should have toxin screenings of the milk supply. Yeah, good luck with that. Of course, you could just not drink it, but then what would happen to your bones? That is a marketing ploy. If you look at the actual science, milk does not appear to protect against hip fracture risk, whether drinking in your adult years, whether you're drinking it in your teen years. If anything, milk consumption was associated with an increase in fracture risk. Maybe this is why hip fracture risks are highest in populations where they drink the most milk. So Swedish researchers decided to put it to the test. 100,000 men and women followed for up to 20 years and milk drinking women had the higher rates of death. More heart disease, significantly more cancer for each daily glass of milk. Three glasses a day was associated with nearly twice the risk of premature death. And they had significantly more bone and hip fractures too. More milk, more fractures. Milk drinking men also had higher rates of death, but for some reason you never see milk ads like this. I'm not clear why. And finally, aspiration pneumonia was caused by swallowing difficulties due to a stroke or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, things we've already talked about. Okay, so where does this leave us? This is the top 15 reasons that Americans die. And a plant-based dye can prevent nearly all of them, can help treat more than half of them and even prevent and even reverse the course of disease. And some of them, including in some cases our top three killers. Now look, there are drugs that in some circumstances that can help too. There's cholesterol-lowering statin drugs. There's usually a whole bunch of different classes of blood pressure-lowering medications. One has to be on this, blood sugar pills and insulin injections. But think about the diet, this same diet though, does it all. It's not like there's a liver-healthy diet and then there's a heart-healthy diet and a different brain-healthy diet. No, a liver-healthy is a kidney-healthy diet, is a body-healthy diet, one diet to rule them all. And what about drug side effects? I'm not talking about a little rash here or something, prescription drugs kill. More than 100,000 Americans every year say, wait a second, 100,000 American deaths every year from adverse drug reactions. Wait a second, that means that the sixth leading cause of death in the United States is actually doctors. The sixth leading cause of death is me. Thankfully, I can be prevented with a plant-based diet. Now seriously though, compared to 15,000 American vegetarians, meat-eaters, about twice the odds of being on aspirin, sleeping pills tranquilize and acids, painkillers, blood pressure medications, laxatives of course, as well as insulin. So plant-based diets are great for people that don't like taking drugs, for people that don't like paying for drugs, and for people that don't like risking drug side effects. Want to solve the healthcare crisis? I've got a suggestion. There's only one diet that's ever been proven to reverse heart disease in the majority of patients, a plant-based diet. So anyone anytime tries to sell you on some new diet they heard about, do me a favor. Ask them a simple question. Wait a second, has this new diet been proven to reverse heart disease? You know, the number one reason me and all my loved ones will die. And if the answer is no, why would you even consider it? If that's all a plant-based diet could do, reverse our number one killer. Shouldn't that kind of be the default diet until proven otherwise? And the fact that can also be effective in preventing, treating, or reversing other leading killers like type 2 diabetes and hypertension would seem to make the case overwhelming. Most deaths in the United States are preventable and related to nutrition. According to the most rigorous analysis of risk factors ever published, the number one cause of death in the United States and the number one cause of disability is our diet, which has since bumped tobacco smoking to killer number two. Cigarettes only kill about a half a million Americans every year, whereas our diet kills hundreds of thousands more. So let me end with a thought experiment. Imagine yourself a smoker in the 1950s. The average per capita cigarette consumption was 4,000 cigarettes a year. That means the average American smoked a half a pack a day. The media was telling you to smoke. Famous athletes agreed. Even Santa Claus wanted you to smoke. I mean, look, you wanna keep fit and stay slim. Stay slender and keep yourself trimmed by eating lots of hot dogs, so you smoke, eat your hot dogs. And to stay slim and trim, you need a lot of sugar, do a lot better than that apple there. Can you see that? I mean, sheesh, right? Although apples do connote goodness and freshness, according to one internal tobacco industry memo, which they see many possibilities for youth-oriented cigarette. They wanna make apple-flavored cigarettes for kids shameless. For digestion's sake, you smoke. I mean, no curative powers claim by Philip Morris, but look, ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so better than safe than sorry, and smoke. Blow in her face and she'll follow you anywhere. No woman ever says, no, they're so round, so firm, so fully packed. After all, John Wayne smoked them until the gut lung cancering died. You know, back then, even the paleo folks were smoking, and so were the doctors. Now, this is not to say there wasn't controversy within the medical profession. Yes, you know, some doctors smoke camels, you know, but other doctors preferred lucky, so it was a little conflict there. The leader of the U.S. Senate agreed, I mean, who wouldn't wanna give their throat a vacation? How could there be a single case of throat irritation when cigarettes are just as pure as the water you drink? Perhaps in Flint, Michigan. And if you do get irritated, no problem, your doctor can always write you a prescription for cigarettes. This is an ad in the Journal of the American Medical Association. So when mainstream medicine is saying the smoking on balance is good for you, when the American Medical Association is saying that, where could you turn back then if you just wanted the facts? What's the new data advanced by science? She was too tired for fun, and then she smoked a camel. Babe Ruth spoke of proof positive medical science, that is when he still could speak, before he died of throat cancer. Now if there's some miracle, there was a smokingfacts.org website back then that could deliver the science directly bypassing commercially corruptible institutional filters. You would've become aware of studies like this. This is a event of study in California, published in 1958, showed that non-smokers, at least 90% lower lung cancer risk than smokers. This wasn't the first. When famed surgeon Michael DeBake, he was asked why his studies published back in the 30s, linking smoking and lung cancer, were 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, and smoking was, in a word, normal. So back to our thought experiment. If you're a smoker in the 50s in the know, what do you do? Do you change or do you wait? If you wait until your doctor tells you between puffs to quit, you're gonna have cancer by then. If you wait until the powers that be officially recognized like the Surgeon General did in the subsequent decade, you could be dead by then. It took 25 years for the Surgeon General report to come out. It took more than 7,000 studies, and the deaths of countless smokers before the first Surgeon General's report against smoking came out. You'd think maybe after the first 6,000 studies, it could've been a little heads up here or something. No, powerful industry. So one wonders how many people are currently suffering needlessly from dietary diseases. Maybe we should've stopped smoking after the 700th study like this came out. So as a smoker in the 50s, on one hand, you had all of society, the government, the medical profession itself telling you to smoke. And on the other hand, all you had was the science. If you're even aware of studies like this. Now let's fast forward 55 years. You know there's a new Adventist study in California warning Americans about the risks of something else. They may be putting in their mouths. It's not just one study. According to the latest review, some total of evidence suggests mortality from all causes put together. Many of our dreaded diseases, stroke, cancer, diabetes, et cetera, significantly lower among those eating plant-based. So instead of someone going along with America's smoking habits in the 50s, imagine you or someone you know going along with America's eating habits today. What do you do? With access to the science, you realize you're the best available balance of evidence suggesting you're eating habits not so good for you. So do you change, do you wait? If you wait until your doctor tells you between bites to eat healthier, could be too late. In fact, even after the Surgeon General report was released, medical community still dragged their feet. The AMA actually went on record refusing to endorse the Surgeon General's report. Why? Maybe it's because they just got a $10 million check from the tobacco industry. Maybe not, maybe it's coincidental. Okay, so we know why the AMA may have been sucking up the tobacco industry, why weren't just individual doctors speaking out? Well, there were a few gallon souls ahead of their time as there are now, riding in as there are today, standing up against institutions, killing millions. But why not more? Well, maybe it's because the majority of physicians themselves smoked cigarettes. Just like the majority of physicians today continue to eat foods that are contributing to our epidemic of dietary diseases. What was the AMA's rallying cry back then? Everything in moderation. Scientific studies have proved that smoking in moderation, oh, that's fine. Sound familiar? Today, the food industry uses the same tobacco industry tactics. Supply misinformation, twisting the science. The same scientists for hire paid to downplay the risks of secondhand smoking toxic chemicals are the same paid by the National Confectioners Association to downplay the risks of candy, and the same paid by the meat industry to downplay the risks of meat. Consumption of animal products and processed foods cause at least 14 million deaths around the world over your 14 million people dead. Plant-based diets can now be considered kind of the nutritional equivalent of quitting smoking. How many more people have to die though before the CDC says don't wait for open art surgery to start eating healthy as well? Until the system changes, we need to take personal responsibility for our own health, for our family's health. We can't wait until society catches up to the science because it's a matter of life and death. Last year, Dr. Kim Williams was made president in the American College of Cardiology. He was asked why he falls. His own advice that he gives to patients 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. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. If you want to share the talk that I gave, it's actually on a combination, it's kind of a little best of my last four annual DVV kind of talks on the leading cause of death, the leading cause of disability, the most common diseases, the most dreaded diseases. We have all those DVDs here, as well as I think my latest DVD. I'm up to volume 30 or something by now. All proceeds from the sale of all my books, DVDs and speaking cases, all goes to charity. And I'm so excited for the first time here at McDougal to actually have my book here, How Not to Divers. Remember back in September, I was like in three months, my new book is out and now finally, I'm so excited to be here. Of course, all my work is available free at NutritionFacts.org. Yes. Michael, you are the master. Thank you, Dr. Greger. It was a wonderful presentation. I have a question for you since you are the master of reading studies disseminating them to the general public. Are you aware, I know that you cited and the research regarding the impact on cancer with a plant-based diet, Dr. Dean Ornish's study on prostate cancer out of UCSF, are you aware of any other clinical human trials that are happening now that we can expect to see some results on that actually show the impact of a plant-based diet on the treatment of cancer as opposed to preventing cancer? Professor Campbell, wouldn't that be an amazing study to do? Yes. All right. The only studies we have, so there are some studies on individual foods, but in terms of a plant-based diet, no. We just have Ornish's study until we have future studies coming out, hopefully soon. But currently, so we have, for example, I have videos about the effect of strawberries, for example, on the progression of esophageal cancer where they just took people with these precancerous lesions of their esophagus and gave them basically, I think, two pints of strawberries a day for a month. That's a lot of strawberries, but it's just strawberries, right? And found that in the majority of patients regressed, so I think 80% of the patients, the lesions got better, and I think half the patients, they disappeared completely, like they went away. I mean, that's, and it was just, and then they looked, they did biopsies and saw all the gene changes that took place, the oncogenes go down, the tumor suppressor genes go up. And so, and there's been similar studies on black raspberries painted onto oral cancer lesions and given black raspberry suppositories for rectal cancer lesions, and yeah, don't try it at home, folks. But, and then studies on flaxseeds and studies on, you know, soy for breast cancer patients and things like that, where there's been the intramural foods, but we said, well, wait a second, what if your entire diet was filled with plant foods and all we have to point to, I mean, in terms of clinical studies, is Dr. Dean Ornish's landmark work beyond all the kind of ex vivo work like we saw with the breast cancer patients, where, yes, we're using, you know, what happens in your body after eating healthy for two weeks in terms of what happens to your bloodstream, your bloodstream's ability to suppress cancer growth, but that's different from taking people with cancer, changing their diets and actually seeing what happens. You said, wait a second, why hasn't anyone done that study? Big Broccoli doesn't quite have the same kind of a research budget, I'm afraid, that big pharma, but wouldn't you, I mean, I certainly would donate to have that kind of study done. I mean, wouldn't you be like, I wanna see that study done. And so if, for example, Dr. Campbell put together such a research proposal and got some research institutions involved and said, let's take cancer patients, let's put them on a plant-based diet and see what happens and put out like a Kickstarter kind of program, I told them, we're gonna raise money for them in a flash, I'll promote it on the site, we'll get it out there, and I think it's gotta be doable. So hopefully next year we'll get back with some better news, right? Michael, forgive me for this interjection topic, but something very profound happened February 13th, 2015. And that's the American Cancer Society came out and recommended that people with cancer follow a diet in this direction because it improves survival. And there are multiple studies that have been done that show that people with breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer, even melanoma, when they eat a healthier diet, they live longer. So the American Cancer Society has come out and supported the treatment of cancer with diet. If you have cancer, you're to follow this kind of diet. And up-to-date, which is often referred to, in February they submitted the same conclusion, part of the fundamental treatment of all cancer patients should be a plant-based diet. So there's a lot of information to find out there about that. Yeah, so there certainly have been studies showing that for example, women who eat more saturated fat after breast cancer diagnosis live significantly shorter and have greater recurrence. And so, absolutely, so more plant-food consumption. But in terms of actually randomizing people to plant-based diets, unfortunately, there's not enough of those studies, but hopefully that'll change, yes. I was wondering if there was any correlation between a good diet or a bad diet and joint replacements? Because everyone seems to be getting them. Yeah, well, there is, I mean, probably the number one reason, so when you talk about knee replacements, why are people's knees wearing out is because they're carrying 200 pounds, not in their back, but in their waist. And so, I mean, that's kind of the primary cause where we get these osteoarthritis in our knees, our knees grind down, and they have to get replaced. And so, I mean, does diet have anything to do with obesity? If you think there's some possible mechanism there, then absolutely, you know, then kind of our most common replacement surgeries, absolutely, but it's not like you can be like, oh, I've got to get my knees replaced next week, okay, well, let's do some dietary reversal. Now, it's got to start decades before, I'm sure you can prevent that kind of, that response in one's joints. Thank you so much for this talk. I'm a nutrition educator, and my question is, are there any studies done whether people make more drastic changes if they're told the truth about eating a plant-based diet versus when they're told make some changes, eat more plant foods while you're still eating animal foods? Like, what group of people make more changes in their long-term in their diets? Like, as an educator, should I teach the PCAM programs or should I work for public health and teach some classes but where I don't go fully out and say, get on a plant-based diet because it can cure you of diabetes? Yeah, so there's actually studies, there's a whole psychology literature on behavioral change, and it turns out the more you ask for, the more you get, right? So I think doctors are like, well, I'm gonna scare people off if I tell them the truth, so I'll be like, yeah, why aren't we eating apple once in a while? You know, but it turns out, no. I mean, it's kind of the old adage, you shoot for the stars and up on the moon or something like that. I think it's the other way around but it doesn't make sense astronomically so I have to flip it. And so now, it doesn't mean your patient's never gonna follow, but you say, look, we don't tell our patients cut down to a pack a day, right? We tell them to quit, right? Now, I mean, is smoking half a pack a day better than two packs a day? Probably, but no, it's not good for you. Ideally, we should only put healthy things in our mouths and that's what we should tell our patients, right? And so when you tell patients, this is the ideal, right? You know, so like in my book, like, you know, I get, it's funny out of all the kind of radical ideas in my book, I get all this pushback about my exercise recommendation. You know, I just review the science on what the best, you know, so I recommend 90 minutes of exercise a day. Like walking. And people are like, 90 minutes a day? And I'm just like, well, look, that's what the, I mean, the science show. And so wait a second, well, then why does the government only recommend 22 minutes a day? Because they're trying to make it palatable, right? They're trying to make it doable. They're trying to make it, but they don't want to scare people off. So instead of telling people the truth, but you look at the science, it's very clear. 30 minutes is better than 22 minutes. 45 minutes is better than 60 minutes. And then 90 better is 60. And then there's no studies where anyone's ever exercised more than 90 minutes. So we don't even have studies past that. So the best available balance of evidence is just 90 minutes is better. Okay, so that's what I got to look. Doesn't mean you have to do it every day, but you should just know that that's, I mean, that's kind of, and then, you know, anything we can do towards that is, and the same thing with diet, right? We should tell people, this is the ideal diet. This is the diet that's actually kind of reverse disease, right? And then look, then it's up to you. Look, you're an adult, you want to smoke cigarettes? It's your body, it's your choice, but you should know the predictable consequences of your actions as physicians. That's our role in form consent. I'm going to go shoot for the stars. All right. You know, Michael, without a doubt, everyone in the audience would agree with me. We could just sit and listen to you all afternoon. But the time has come. And if you'll, Michael, if you'll go outside because I know you're going to have a big crowd. We could be back in six minutes. Thank you.