 How do you wipe out the nation's heart disease epidemic? According to the Center for Science and the Public Interest, one of the best approaches for preventing the disease in the first place is the CHIP program, which tells people to eat more whole-plant foods and less meat, dairy, eggs, and processed junk. It's considered to be a premier lifestyle intervention targeting chronic disease that has been offered for more than 25 years, through which more than 50,000 individuals have gone and most CHIP classes are run by volunteers, sourced primarily through the Seventh-day Adventist Church, who had an interest in positively influencing the health of their local community. Why the Adventists? Well, they have a health philosophy built around a biblical notion that the human body should be treated as a temple, and many of the participants of the program are Adventists too. Is that why the program works so well? Because they just have faith you don't know until you put it to the test. The influence of religious affiliation on responsiveness to the Complete Health Improvement Program, they looked at 7,000 participants, even though Adventists make up less than 1% of the US population. About one in five CHIP goers were in the church. How did they do, compared to the non-believers? Substance or reductions in selected risk factors were achieved for both Adventists and non-Adventists, but some of the reductions were actually greater among the non-Adventists, non-SDA. This indicates that Seventh-day Adventists do not have a monopoly on good health. Middle-class educated individuals also disproportionately make up CHIP classes. Would it work as well in poverty-stricken populations? We didn't know until now. How about trying to reduce chronic disease risk factors among individuals living in rural Appalachia, one of the poorest parts of the country? Conventional wisdom has been that you need to have some financial skin in the game to really commit to lifestyle change programs, and so if offered for free to impoverish communities, maybe the results wouldn't be as good. But the overall clinical changes were similar to those found in other four-week CHIP classes throughout the US, suggesting CHIP may benefit across socioeconomic lines and independent of payment source. So, hey, why don't employers offer it free to employees to save on health care costs? CHIP is described as achieving some of the most impressive outcomes published in the medical literature, clinical benefits, and cost effectiveness as well. Lee Memorial, a health care network in Florida, offered it to some of their employees as a pilot program. Sadly, health care workers can be as unhealthy as everyone else. They reported an average 17-pound weight lost 20-point drop in LDL cholesterol and blood pressure normalization in most participants. They invested about $38,000 to make the program happen, but then saved just in that next year $70,000 in reduced health care costs, because they became so much healthier. For a financial return on investment, if like 1.8 times what they put in. But there hasn't been an ROI study published in the peer-reviewed medical literature until Dexter Sherney stepped up to the plate and published this workplace study out of Vanderbilt. Now, there was a high degree of skepticism at the planning stage of the study that active engagement could be realized around a lifestyle program that had its main tenants exercise and a plant-based diet. Vanderbilt is, after all, in Tennessee, smack dab in the middle of the stroke belt and known for their Memphis ribs, yet they got on board enough to improve their blood sugar control and cholesterol, as well as positive changes in self-reported health and well-being. Health care costs were substantially reduced. For example, nearly a quarter were able to eliminate one or more of their medications, and so got about a two-to-one return on investment within just six months, providing evidence that just educating a member population about the benefit of a plant-based whole foods diet is feasible and can reduce health care costs. The largest workplace chip study done to date involved six employee populations, including, ironically, a drug company, a mix of white collar and blue collar, and check out what happened to the worse off. Those starting out with blood pressures up around 170 over 100 fell down to around 140 over 85. Those with the highest LDL cholesterol dropped 60 points, a 300-point drop in triglycerides, 46-point drop in fasting blood sugars. Theoretically, someone coming in with both high blood pressure and high cholesterol might experience a 64 to 96% reduction in overall risk of a heart attack, our number one killer. For the cost of a Humvee, Michael Jacobson from CSBI figured any town could have a chip program of its own, and for the cost of a submarine or a farm subsidy, the entire country could get a chip on its shoulder.