The problem is there is no known cure
and we probably won't even treat you
because we have no hope.
I don't think it's an accident
that the information on this
has been known for 15 or 20 years.
They told my parents I was going to die.
No one else should have died of heart disease.
We had the cure. We've had it for decades.
It's gonna take a radical shift in mindset.
We can't blame doctors,
they£re not trained in this field.
You know, my genes have already set my destiny.
What I thought I knew about
healthy eating almost killed me.
Three fourths of what we suffer from in America
is due to the food that we eat.
It's not food to me, it's torture.
I think we haven't really focused
on the quality of food that we take,
we're more interested in convenience.
Food is medicine.
You got to put back into the earth
in order to get back from it.
Changing what I put into my body
can make me live longer.
Why doesn't everybody know this?
About 19 years ago, we were staying at the house,
getting ready for Easter the night before,
dyeing Easter eggs and making cookies
and setting the table.
And my father and my husband
were watching television, this is hard for me, I'm sorry.
And in the wee hours of the morning
I heard my mom cry out that something was wrong.
And we raced up to their bedroom
and he was gone.
He was 58 years old and he was gone.
Everybody, everybody knows suffering, it's there.
People are hurting and it's a tragedy
and it's important to me.
Good evening, the news hit around breakfast time
as a lot of Americans were sitting down
in front of a plate of bacon or sausage.
The obesity crisis is getting worse in America not better.
We have to cut carbon pollution in our own countries
to prevent the worst effects of climate change.
This undercover video
shows chickens being buried alive.
You want to tell the story dramatically
and say you're in a hospital
and decide to change your mind, you know.
And I don't believe anything anyone says in a hospital,
on New Years Eve or during sex.
Those three times
are all information is considered invalid.
Everybody that goes to the hospital says,
you know, from now on I'm gonna eat right,
I'm gonna exercise, I'm gonna do all this,
they're always lying.
They say the same three things actually during sex
and on New Years Eve.
So I was in the hospital with bad hypertension
and I did not make any promises to change my life.
I would say I was probably 330 then,
got to get your weight down to about 280
where we can control your blood pressure with drugs.
And I said well it's 280 where I should get down to?
And then he said this sentence that blew my mind.
And it was the first time I'd ever something you know
anybody watching this is very familiar with
but I wasn't familiar with it.
He said, "Well if you get your weight down to 220, 230
you probably wouldn't need drugs at all."
And I said, "What!
I'd thought that my hypertension was genetic."
He says, "Well it is."
And I said, "Well no,
you're telling me that the drugs that I'm taking are,
telling me these are fat guy drugs.
I thought they were generic drugs."
He said, "Well yes of course."
I said, "Well it can't be both of course,
you can't say it's genetic
and yet if I get down to this weight
I wouldn't have it."
And that just bugged me,
that just bugged me tremendously.
We are eating ourselves in the most overweight,
obese population
in the history of the human race.
In this country this year we£ll spend
over three trillion dollars on health care,
Somewhere between 1 half and 75% of that
are lifestyle related problems.
You get out of your health exactly what you put into it.
And we have been putting the wrong fuel in our body.
We really didn't learn much of anything about nutrition
in medical school.
I was really angry.
I just could not understand why I didn't learn any of this.
The system is set up to reimburse,
kind of, pills and procedures.
You get paid to do things
for patients. You don't get paid if your patients get better.
We live in a pill popping generation
everybody wants a pill for this or a pill for that.
Big Pharma is
in the business of us being sick.
They fund medical education, that's what you learn about.
We've never had more pills in human history
and yet we've never had more chronic disease.
There's the food industry
which is a trillion dollar industry.
There's lot of people
that are making money off processed foods.
There are a lot of people making money off meat,
lot of people making money off dairy.
And it's a huge lobbying power.
Take away the supervision from the USDA
and give it to another body.
They£re handing out subsidies with this hand
and with the other hand they£re telling
the American public what to eat.
You know, they don't look at meat
and say this is full of saturated fat,
cholesterol, DDT,
environmental contaminants, infection.
not part of the sales pitch.
Dairy is the most toxic thing people put in their body,
I won't even call it food.
People that are eating the standard American diet
don't understand, number one,
the scientific implications of that in their body
but two, they often don't understand
that food has enslaved them by this addictive component.
Foods are the cause of diabetes, of heart disease,
of many forms of cancer, of hypertension
and if they are the cause they can also be the solution.
What is on our plate is really affecting our environment.
More global warming is caused by livestock consumption
that all forms of transportation combined.
Something's wrong with this paradigm
and we need to shift paradigms to find out what works better.
We're eating ourselves into our graves.
Since a small child, I've had a love of plants.
To have this living organism
within this tiny little package,
a seed and you plant it
and it grows into such beauty and potential.
I am a product of the state of New Jersey.
I went to Rutgers, the state university,
got a botany degree.
And then went on to the state medical school.
I received a, you know, standard academic training,
then went on to an internal medicine residency
in Washington, DC at George Washington
as a newly minted doctor.
My father who was an attorney, 69 years of age,
was suddenly diagnosed
with end stage metastatic pancreatic cancer.
He was given a prognosis of one to three months to live,
offered some standard treatment
and because there is very little success
with that age, my father decided to do nothing.
And just go home and prepare for death.
I knew in my world that I'd come from,
there was just nothing available
and even still to this day,
there is very little available for pancreatic cancer.
So I went to my local library
and finally came across some books on food,
brought these books home for my father.
The books were on a whole unrefined plant food
way of eating.
He grasped onto it and completely changed his diet
and a year later we went back.
When the doctor saw my father walk in,
he looked a little bit shaken.
He asked my father, what he was doing there
and why basically why was he still alive.
My father started to tell him about broccoli and brown rice
and the doctor lost complete interest
in what my father was saying.
That was the point for me
that changed what I would do as a doctor.
Our medical community in general
has really focused on symptoms of disease.
We see it throughout our whole pharmaceutical industry
and our whole approach to care.
And you know, we have this acute care model
in healthcare today.
And it was designed a 100 years ago
to treat communicable diseases and injury
and we're still trying to treat chronic disease now
with that same acute care model,
but it doesn't work.
We're trying to treat diabetes and heart disease
the way we treat strep throat with pills but it doesn't work.
I feel a little disenfranchised
if you will, to have gone through
four years of medical school
and six years of training after medical school
and never been introduced to the idea
that your health is so closely related to what you eat.
When I entered into practice,
I had patients constantly ask me,
"What should I eat doc?
How should I exercise? What should I do?"
I would throw out a little arbitrary words
and say, "Ah, be good the majority of the time."
Live by the four sevenths rule.
If you do well for seven days, that's good enough.
I started to become trouble by that. You know,
in that I was actually giving advice,
professional advice to individuals
when they're asking without a fund of knowledge.
Everybody knows that doctors don't get any really meaningful
education about nutrition.
Nutrition is really something that maybe you get one hour,
maybe you get two hours.
Nutrition in the 1970s
in my medical school was very, very limited.
I really still feel that it's nearly criminal.
There really haven't been many opportunities
to discuss nutrition in depth
because the topic only comes up and passing.
Maybe they assumed that we knew.
The average physician in this country
has less than 20 minutes of nutrition training period.
Nobody teaches you anything about nutrition
in medical school.
What I was taught was nobody changes their diet anyway
so just, you know, do what you can.
I hate to say it
but your physician probably knows
less about nutrition than you do.
We're taught to treat diseases after they occur,
we're not taught how to prevent them
in the first place.
I think that people that society in general
has a broken relationship with food.
We're a society that's chronically fed
from the time we get up in the morning
until the time we go to bed.
When you think about it, the only species
that are obese and chronically ill are us
and the pets we keep warm and fed.
And they get exactly the same diseases.
If you eat the same things that most Americans eat,
you're gonna get the same diseases
that most Americans get.
I'm a steak guy.
- Fish. - Sushi actually.
I like meat.
Anything protein based.
Steak, potatoes, greens.
Good cheese, I don't really eat processed cheese.
- Lasagna - Hamburgers, French fries.
Red Bull and a cigarette, which I don't need neither or.
But you know what?
I'm so old now, I'm just gonna do it anyway.
It's sad but I think I can say this honestly
probably 95% of America has no idea how to eat.
Who taught them? Grandma?
No, it's the television that's teaching them.
Nutritious, delicious, above all else, beef.
It's what for dinner.
Got milk?
Ahh, the power of cheese.
Eggs, incredible energy for body and mind.
Well, I grew up in Texas eating meat four, five times a day?
You know, and I liked it.
I ate a high salt, sugar, fat, processed food,
pizza, ice-cream, candy kind of diet.
I was pretty much a standard cholesterolholic
that grew up on a dairy and a beef farm.
We loved our cheese,
we loved our ice-cream and yogurt, and
steaks, and hamburgers on the grill.
Grew up on a dairy farm, actually milking cows.
Believing along the way
that the good old American diet was as good as it gets.
Certain foods are essential,
we must have them daily for the sake of health.
Meat, cheese, fish, poultry. Vegetables, green and yellow.
Fruits, two or more servings daily,
at least one raw citrus fruit or tomato often.
And eggs, three to five a week but one a day preferred.
Cereal and bread, rich golden butter and milk,
at least one quart of milk a day.
I've come to see aging in America
as a function of accumulated abuse
of the human body.
And everybody gather around and dig in to those
sizzly, juicy, Armour star franks.
Hot dog diggity, are they good?
Armour star franks.
Because wonder soft whipped bread
is made from batter not dough.
It has no holes, get wonder soft whipped.
One of the main reasons
that we started eating processed food
was it encouraged the shelf life of the product.
We were taught that
this package foods were healthier
and they were easier and they made our lives better.
And many times it was a white refined food.
But of course, refined means about 97% of the fiber
is gone and enriched means
most of the nutrients have been stripped out
but we've sprayed a few synthetic chemicals
back on for you and now we call it enriched.
Our parents, you know, God bless them,
they didn't know any better.
The information wasn't out there.
Meat and potatoes, that's how you lived.
This summer try our
new grilled chicken margarita pizza.
Who knew crab goes with everything?
Whoever put crab on the salmon, on a burger
and don't forget the bacon and onions
seared inside fresh ground beef.
Introducing grill dogs, flame grilled to perfection
and made with a 100% beef.
Get them now, only at Burger King.
The standard American diet is not working,
it's not good for us.
I think we haven't really focused on the quality of food
that we take, we're more interested in convenience.
I mean the whole fast food thing on television,
you know, all the pizza commercials,
burger commercials,
just fast food that you make at home,
stuff that you take off the shelf
and you pour it out of the box
and put some water in it, you got a instant meal here.
It's like oh, my God, we're killing ourselves.
Early on in this process, it was kind of confusing
because I would read a study that would say,
this is good for you
and then other one would say no,
that's actually bad for you, something else is good for you.
So the industry just has to keep the public confused
which they have been doing a very good job at.
I was so misinformed as a young adult
that I didn't know how to eat properly
and I didn't know how to balance my diet.
I was, you know, eating what I thought was health food,
you know, salmon, big hunks of salmon.
I think it can get confusing to the general public
because all they hear
sensationalized headlines about,
oh, this fat is good for you, this fat is bad for you.
You want a high protein diet, stay away from carbohydrates.
We don't need food like that. We eat food.
All that we need is enough confusion
and then people will throw up their hands,
you know. Oh forget it, I'll just do whatever I want to do.
Drink your milk for strong bones and teeth
and it turns out to be exactly the wrong way around.
And almost a little betrayed
that we've been told our whole lives
that we had to eat,
you know, animal protein and drink milk
in order to be healthy.
But that's what we grew up with us as a culture
so we can't be blamed for it
but we have to break those habit patterns.
I wasn't born obese.
I was fit and healthy as a kid.
Up until I was 24 years old, but from the time,
the age of 24 to the age of 30,
I got up as heavy as 518 pounds.
I would love to say that, you know,
I know why or how but I don't.
All I know is that I got there and it was extremely difficult.
In June of 2013, my wife Iris and I
decided to take my then six year old son
for his birthday to Florida.
Two weeks prior to the trip
my son and I went through online
and looked at all the rides
and he decided that the Harry Potter ride
was the most epic ride in the history of rides
and he wanted me to ride it with him.
And if you ever been on the ride,
they have a sample of the seating
as you approach the ride platform.
One of the people who worked there
asked me to step out of line to try the seating.
As soon as I sat down, it was apparent
that this wasn't gonna happen. It was his birthday.
Sorry, he begged...
he cried but I couldn't fit.
My wife practically drug him on to the ride
and in that moment I realized
that I couldn't live like that anymore.
Eating to excess.
You've got far too many sausages Billie
will you put some back?
There are fresh concerns about
our globally expanding waist lines.
Experts had thought the obesity rate had leveled off
and they don't know why it's rising instead.
The new report also shows
women have a higher level of obesity than men.
The reason people get fat is because they eat fat.
You know, from my lips to my hips
the fat you eat is the fat you wear.
There is unfortunately been a lot of articles
written recently
mostly by non physicians and non scientists saying,
you know, Americans have been told to eat less fat,
now they're eating less fat, they're fatter then ever so,
you know, low fat has failed, bring out the bacon and eggs.
Well, I went to the US department
of agriculture database
and said I know that Americans have been told
to eat less fat but what have we actually been eating?
Well, that turns out that every decade since 1950
we've been eating more fat, more meat,
more sugar and more calories.
So not surprisingly we're fatter.
The biggest portion of Americans
are in the obese category now.
It's unbelievable,
There are a very small minority of people that
Just goes, it goes from the spoon
right to hips and belly
and actually it goes there so effortlessly,
you can take a needle and suck the fat out,
take it to the lab, analyze it
and you can tell what people like to eat.
You suck their belly fat out
and is full of monounsaturated fats
then they£re into olive oil.
If it£s full of trans-fats
they're into margarines and shortenings.
If they£re full of omega three fats then
People worry about if their 10 pounds too heavy,
50 pounds too heavy,
but they're not thinking about the impact of the weight
as it pertains to their actual health
and well being and their risk for disease.
I want to enjoy my kids, enjoy my grandkids.
I cannot imagine missing one thing.
Going into this massive change,
of course I'd love to lose weight,
but more importantly, I just want to be healthy.
When they say, "Doctor, I've tried everything,
I'm miserable."
I'll go, "Well, have you tried eating something different
or tell me what you've done with your nutrition?"
I'm changing what I put in my body,
but that's what I've known for 36 years.
So, it's very scary.
Up until recently, we didn't really think of nutrition
as being a very strong force.
Eat a little bit less carbs and nothing much happens
or you count calories for a few weeks
and you lose a few pounds then you gain it all back
and I think people have gotten used to the idea
that food doesn't make much difference.
My family surrounds celebrations,
sad things, bad things,
everything revolves around food.
You know, you go to a funeral
and after a funeral people get together, eat
and they eat same kind of things
that helped put the person in a casket
in the first place.
So, it's really part of who we are.
The thought of giving up sugar,
not being able to eat my waffle with syrup
and a side of bacon that is,
I mean, that just makes my stomach turn.
It's that nervous feeling of like
when you are starting a new job or you're going from
elementary school to middle school.
That's how I feel about changing my food.
Because food is something primal.
It's the first bond and love we create
after we've been born,
and looking into old age for many of us,
it's the last pleasure we are left with on this earth.
I think you could save all the testing people do
by taking a tub of movie popcorn
and putting it under someone's nose
and saying does that smell good?
And if they say yes, you need to get them to the hospital
and save their lives.
And if they say no, they're healthy.
I think that's all you got to do,
that's all you got to do.
I think a lot of people understand
fruits and vegetables are good for you,
but they don't know how good the good stuff is
and they have no idea how bad the bad stuff is.
I think the addiction to food is bigger
than the combination of the addiction
that people have to cigarettes,
alcohol, coffee, drugs.
I truly see how food
can completely control someone's life.
That you literally obsess over it
and it's understandable when you get in your car
and you drive somewhere
how many fast food places you go by?
How many billboards do you see?
You are bombarded all day long
and just filled with temptation.
It's like an alcoholic, I can't have one drink.
I can't have that one candy bar a week
because I didn't have an off switch.
Most of the restaurants have very easily figured out
that if you add cheese and butter
and salt to everything, it tastes good
and so you come back over and over again.
And the same thing is true
for a lot of snack foods and candies,
they're just perfectly tweaked to be delicious.
So, if we just look at like the average American diet,
when we put in sugar, fat and salt into our body,
a couple of things happen.
First, it triggers the reward system in our brain,
the dopamine reward system just like nicotine,
methamphetamine and cocaine.
So they have the same effect creating some dependence
or food addiction.
Drug addicts often have this thing
where they call "chasing the dragon."
it's the illusive first high.
No, other high is as good as this first high
and so they're constantly chasing it
and I've experienced that with food
like the first bite is so amazing
but the second isn't as amazing
and the third isn't.
But I just keep eating it, whether it's the Oreos,
or the chocolate chip cookies or the ice-cream,
just trying to get back to that first bliss.
What sweet out nature? Sweet potatoes, berries fruit,
healthy foods, right? And so but now the industry
uses that natural healthy urge against us, right?
There are chemists that spend their whole lives,
working on the bliss point.
The ripest peach in the world
is not as sweet as fruit loops, right?
Within just a couple of hours of eating these foods,
it's absorbed into the bloodstream
and then it penetrates our cells.
Sugar causes measurable inflammation
inside of our artery walls
causing damage to the lining of the artery,
the endothelial cells,
making us more susceptible to atherosclerosis
and even more susceptible to inflammation
that can lead to cancer.
We also know that
within a couple of hours of eating sugar,
it suppresses our immune system
and it's specifically the natural killer cells
that help us to fight infections
and that can suppress your immune system
for four to five hours.
So, if we kind of understand this,
you know, Americans having sugar based breakfast,
sugar based lunch and sugar based dinner,
they're suppressing their immune system
throughout the course of the day
making themselves more susceptible
to these infections that we encounter.
Realize, that we are going to go
through a chemical addictive withdraw
for probably three or four days
depending on the food and the frequency
and the quantity at which you ate it.
If you feel a little bit bloated or little gassy or a lot gassy
or you're going with more frequency,
it's not to be concerned about. Let it pass,
let your body sort of work itself out.
I know, it's tough in the beginning.
I know food addictions
and I call it toxic hunger can make you feel bad,
when you're kind of like breaking those addictions,
you could feel fatigue,
you could feel weak and headache-y.
You could feel like
you're emotionally attached to those foods
and having almost
a feeling of anxiety giving up the foods
you've come to love.
Oh, I can't live without meat.
Well, yeah, I can.
I always say, go cold turkey,
even if it's just for a short period of time.
Go cold turkey for 21 days,
because the whole tapering off thing,
it doesn't work with addiction.
We're addicted to meat, we're addicted to dairy.
There are opiates in cheeses and things like that.
Plus, we're just addicted to our habit patterns
that we grew up with.
Imagine you're back in the 1950s,
before the Surgeon General report on smoking came out
and one doctor is telling you to smoke camels,
the other doctor is saying no, smoke luckys instead.
So in 1964,
when the Surgeon General report came out,
they cited 7000 studies about the dangers of smoking.
7,000, now look, 6,000 should have been enough, right?
But I mean, it had to get to that point
before it could tip.
And how many people had to die until that happened?
And so, I think
we're in a very similar situation today.
My story starts a long time ago,
with a lot of issues with overeating
and it escalated many, many times up and down,
lot of yo-yo dieting, finally at 380 pounds
and diagnosed with type-2 diabetes
and hypertension on medication,
I decided to make a commitment
to a completely different lifestyle of eating.
I was, in my 49th year and it occurred to me,
I wasn't gonna see 50.
It was a lot of sitting on the couch,
watching a lot of television and eating
and everyone didn't always see the eating
because I did that
after they left for school or before,
you know, in the car
there was a lot of secretive eating going on.
You want to believe that there is no addiction
that this is a metabolic thing
and that, you know, this can be fixed, but,
you know, when you start to find
you know, the trappings of wrappers
I knew, I mean, it's, you know, I knew what was happening.
I knew about all the things that they didn't know about.
You know, you say to yourself, okay,
at this time maybe I'm 40, something years old and,
you know, okay I'm gonna have all these kids,
gonna have to do something, you gonna take care of them
if she is not around.
Every day, I though that,
they we're gonna find me dead in the parking lot,
because I was out of breathe
just walking from my car to my office, every day.
There were lot of things that I didn't know,
I didn't understand, you know, I'm like,
oh, if I could just do the math on this,
it'll be better but there is no math to this.
I couldn't do many things and I didn't do many things
because of the shame and embarrassment,
I didn't want to embarrass my kids.
People make fun of them, like they don't exist, you know,
and they do exist.
I was morbidly obese my entire adult life.
Being obese sucks.
You know that people are looking at you.
You can only imagine
what they're thinking about you,
even though they're too polite.
I was eating what most American's consider
to be a healthy diet with lean protein.
So, I was pretty much down to chicken and salmon
as my protein.
But we were cooking those proteins
in butter and olive oil
and obviously it was not working.
I had tried every fad diet that there was low carbs,
south beach, atkins, weight watchers
to try to lose weight
and I discovered what a lot of people have,
which is as long as you're doing these diets,
they work great, the problem is when you stop dieting,
all the weight comes back
and often more then you were in the first place.
Wisdom is the process of finding out
that your intuition is wrong.
It's not easy to have to learn something
that goes against your instincts.
For example, people have the feeling
when they're sitting in a car
that they're not in danger
if they don't have their seatbelt on.
That was sort of the way people felt
in the 1950s and '60s.
So your intuition doesn't understand
that you're sitting in a two ton vehicle
going 50 miles an hour
and that you are actually helpless.
I thought I ate super healthy.
The truth is that I was completely wrong,
but the type of information
that I could find available to me
said that these foods were actually good for me.
I thought I was healthy
because I didn't have meat in my diet,
I didn't have milk in my diet, I didn't have eggs,
I didn't have cheese.
But I was eating all this other junk
full of oil and sugar and salt and all that.
I filled my body with protein and calories.
Little did I know what it was doing to my body at that time,
but I continued to eat that way all the way up
through the '94 Olympics when I was competing.
And thought nothing of going to a fast food restaurant,
eating two hamburgers and a couple orders of fries
and a chocolate milkshake.
I had the idea that it had no consequences for me
to eat this kind of food because I looked and felt great.
Well, I'm thin, I don't really need to think about that.
I don't need to think of plant based.
That's for someone who's, you know, obese or over weight.
But the reality is that
it's not so much about the weight
because the weight is really a symptom
of what's happening on the inside
and many times that symptom goes unnoticed.
I was just kind of your typical kid,
I was on the year book,
I played volleyball, so we really had no idea
that anything was coming or that,
anything was wrong.
When I was 16 years old, I was told
that I had six months to live.
So the first clue
that something was actually wrong
was one weekend I had gone to the Jersey Shore
with my friends.
I remember we went to a diner
and I had these pancakes
and I literally, I could not get the pancakes,
to my mouth, it hurt so bad. And the next morning I woke up
and this excruciating pain that felt like
it would take weeks to heal was gone.
But the strange thing was
that same exact identical pain was in my left shoulder
and after a couple of days
it disappeared from that arm too.
Not long after that migraines started.
I had this huge rash across my face
going from one cheek across my nose
to the other side.
My blood test showed that my kidneys were in trouble
so they sent me in for kidney biopsy.
So next thing I know I'm going in to surgery.
So it's just kind of,
it was just so chaotic and then, you know,
the doctor told us what happened and they said,
you know, you are in stage four kidney failure,
and you got six months if we don't do
something really, really aggressive.
Six months, you'll be on dialysis
or you'll be dead.
So I was put on high dose steroids,
it was about seven different pills
I had to take every day.
And I also was put on experimental chemotherapy
to try to save my kidneys.
I was told I couldn't have kids,
I was told I probably wouldn't live past my 50s.
I'd probably be handicapped by my 30s.
Well, with lupus
your immune system's attacking your own body
and so my immune system had suddenly stopped
recognizing my kidneys as my own
and were attacking my kidneys trying to kill it.
I'd also developed blood clots
that had happened when I was in medical school.
And so I was taking blood thinners
because I had experienced a mini stroke,
a transient ischemic attack
and thankfully I didn't damage my brain
but I was in a lot of danger of dying at that point
if I didn't use this blood thinner
for the rest of my life.
Otherwise, you know, I was trucking through,
I was two months away from graduating medical school
and then I met this most amazing person,
Thomas Tadlock and he just changed everything for me
and I went from only dreaming about a white coat
to dreaming about a white dress.
The hardest thing I ever had to do
was to tell him about my illness
and the fact that marrying me was,
you know, not going be long term.
And he, you know, it was hard for him to hear
but he just said that
he'd rather have a short life with me
than a life time with someone else.
So he would take care of me.
If you need a surgery or if you're in an accident
and you need diagnostics,
the United States is the place to be.
But if you want to prevent chronic disease,
we're near the bottom of the list.
We are taught to trust the medical field
and take the medicine they prescribe to us.
Really, I grew up thinking that drugs,
things like that from the doctor
were the normal thing to do
and that, that's what would cure you.
And unfortunately the pills aren't the answer.
Because if they were the answer
we've never had more pills in human history.
And yet we've never had more chronic disease.
We need education more than medication
and our doctors are not getting this in medical school.
And if they are not, then you're not getting it.
We are very focused on procedures and medications.
Medical school is pharmacology.
In fact we even learned about pharmacology during lunch.
We get take out, what are called drug lunches
by pharmaceutical reps.
Pharmaceutical industry is like any other industry in America.
They're there to make money and produce profits.
They fund medical education, that's what you learn about.
These medications, you don't get them for free.
You pay a price for using medications.
And they work as a permission slip.
They enable people to think
because their numbers look better they're okay,
while the underlying pathology advances day after day.
So in a sense, they give people a false sense of security
that leads them to, give them permission
to keep eating the same diet
that cause the problem to begin with
and the inevitable consequences,
their disease gets worse and worse and worse.
But don't take it if you or if you and it might cause,
you know, rectal bleeding and your eye might fall out
and hey, you might even want to kill yourself.
It's kind of like, really?
But, it's gonna make me feel better
but I might want to kill myself?
I think I feel the way I'm feeling, I'm okay.
Look big pharma is,
one of the most profitable industries,
the reason they're not researching to antibiotics,
things that we need
is because you take it for ten days.
That's not useful. No we want drugs
you take every single day for the rest of your life, right?
And what are those? Those are chronic disease drugs, right?
High blood pressure medications for example, right.
You have to take them everyday for the rest of your life
because they don't treat
the underlying cause of the disease.
The pill companies don't make money
when you're healthy.
They make money when you're sick.
There is no profit in health,
they need to keep you in that kinda zombie state,
in between where you're just
shoveling more and more meds until you basically tap out,
that's how the game works
and that's whats stacked against you.
I'm skeptical about the medical community
because I know they're pill pushers
and it's just part of what they do,
the pharmaceutical community has their hooks way to deeply
in the government, in the regulatory system.
Approximately, 106,000 people die
from drug side effects.
And now that's just in hospitals
and that's just one year
and these are drugs that are properly prescribed
and taken as directed.
These are not medical errors, these are not suicide attempts,
these are not mistakes.
These are drugs
that were prescribed exactly right
and taken exactly as ordered.
And we're killing 106,000 a year
and that's a lot.
That's a million people in ten years.
When you're young, you think you're invincible.
You don't think what you're gonna eat's,
gonna really hit you down the road.
Really didn't start thinking about that much
until my dad had a heart attack
and then had quadruple bypass
and then, you know, you start thinking well, uh-oh
you know, he's got a problem so
So, today we're gonna see Andre with high cholesterol,
his cholesterol report shows
that his total cholesterol is 189 on medication.
With a whole food plant based diet,
we can take that cholesterol level
below a 150 without medication.
And that's gonna be one of our goals.
I'm controlling my cholesterol now
and my triglycerides with medication.
But a lot of the research I've done on the medications
I'm on is not very positive and they have side effects
and I've suffered some of the side effects.
If I'm going to be on this for a long time,
is there a better way?
If I can do it through a dietary means,
which would allow me
to get off of these drugs completely,
that would be the optimal goal.
For me to change anything,
I'm gonna have to have that proof
to where through this diet,
it will put me, my triglycerides in the safe range,
my cholesterol in the safe range
and hopefully
the cholesterol ratios good to bad,
within an acceptable range.
I'm open minded to see what happens,
give it a shot, see if it works,
I mean what do you have to lose?
Pythagoras and Socrates was talking about this
and Hippocrates 2,500 years ago.
The healthiest cultures on the planet without exception
were plant based.
I don't think it's an accident that the information on this
has been known and is now just bubbling up.
Then you have to ask the question, you know,
why are we so oblivious to all of this?
That gets you to questions concerning
obviously governance,
the US Department of Agriculture
whose mandate is to promote agricultural products.
I mean, that's what they do.
At the same time we put them in charge
of protecting public safety by meat inspections and,
you know, nutrition guidelines.
How the government is telling us what to eat,
is through what they subsidize and so that's what people eat
because people eat what's inexpensive.
What foods are subsidized?
Well, we're going broke
so shouldn't we be subsidizing healthy foods,
so are we making apples cheaper
are we out making kale cheaper?
No subsidies to the sugar industry
and goes to feed crops, primarily to feed livestock.
So you can actually get kind of a low cost of production,
thanks to our tax dollars!
We are giving billions of dollars
to livestock industry,
so you can make Dollar Menu burgers.
In 2014, I had the privilege to be invited to testify
in front of the USDA Dietary Guidelines
Advisory Committee in Washington DC.
Out of the 46 speakers invited,
42 represented industry.
Americans who consume
the recommended amounts of dairy foods
are better able to meet
key nutrient recommendations
including calcium, vitamin D and potassium.
In fact, it's difficult for most Americans
to meet these nutrient recommendations
without consuming at least
three servings of dairy foods daily.
We know quite well that
a lot of these policy decisions and political decisions
are being made through financial considerations
with people with big money, big companies, big CEOs
and big Washington connections.
And so, when it comes to eat more messaging,
like eat more fruits and vegetables,
they come out and say it.
When it comes to eat less messaging
well, then there's a conflict, right.
So what do they do?
They don't actually mention foods,
god forbid, they say,
you know, eat less saturated and trans fatty acids.
Now that's wink, wink, nudge, nudge,
code for eat less,
you know, meat and dairy. That's the sources
particularly cheese and chicken in this country.
But they can't come out and say eat less cheetos.
They can't come out and say eat less meat, eat less dairy,
they would get hammered.
Dairy is one of the strongest lobbies
as far as food production in this country goes.
They have the most money
and they will use it ruthlessly.
There is not an asparagus lobby
that I'm aware off.
There is no money in telling people
to put the burger down and have a broccoli spear.
The USDA had a internal news letter
that promoted meatless Monday.
So, once a week for your health,
for the environment consider, you know,
reducing meat consumption
and there was such a political firestorm
to that radical proposition
that it was retracted within hours
and you know,
I think that was just a lesson that you can't even go there,
doesn't matter what the science says,
you know, money talks in Washington.
The dogma in the nutrition industry,
if you open up the fitness magazine
and if you open up the body building magazines
especially like you will never succeed
unless you eat as much animal products
as you possibly can.
So, I was terrified at first, I was like,
okay, I wanna be healthy
but I don't know what's gonna happen.
That's the first question anyone asks when you tell them
that you're a plant based athlete,
is like where do you get your protein?
It's funny that protein is an issue,
because number one, people don't know what it is.
Number two, they don't recognize it in food.
The whole protein thing is such a myth,
it's a mainstream propaganda thing
by these dairy and animal companies
that throw this thing out there that,
the amount of protein you need in your body.
Standing in front of you is obviously not a hindrance
in bodybuilding to eat whole plant foods.
So what's the problem with so much protein?
It can damage our kidneys.
Some even cancers will grow or exacerbate
because of high levels of protein.
And for somebody
who is absolutely stuck on protein,
that's their big issue.
I'm not sure I'm gonna get enough.
Get in your car, go to the nearest rural area,
pick out the biggest bull that you can find,
then go to the nearest racetrack,
find the fastest, biggest, most muscular stallion.
Go to the zoo, look at the tallest giraffe,
the biggest elephant and all those animals
with rippling muscles are vegans,
they're getting all the protein they need
entirely from plant sources and you will too.
If you go back 10,000 years,
you look at old skeleton's fossils,
people had no cavities, people had these perfect teeth.
You go back, you think wait a second,
they never brushed a day in their lives,
no Listerine, no water pick, no flossing.
Yeah, but no candy bars.
Before the invention of the candy bar,
they had perfect teeth, I mean...
you think,
our bodies would have evolved to like
have our teeth fall out? Doesn't make a lot of sense.
Okay, but so,
cavities are completely preventable through diet.
We say, wait a second,
if they're completely preventable
why do people continue to get cavities?
Well, people like dessert that kinda out weighs
the cost and discomfort of the dentist chair.
And look that's fine, right.
Look, I enjoy the occasional indulgence.
I got a good dental plan, right?
All right, but what if
instead of the plaque on our teeth,
we're talking about the atherosclerotic plaque
building up inside of our arteries, right.
Then what are the consequences for you and your family?
Now, we're not talking about scraping tartar anymore.
Now, we're talking literally life or death.
If you had told me,
the stuff I know now affects my health,
I would have thought you were crazy.
I was 57, I thought I was too young to have a stroke.
When Pam and I got married, I weighed 140.
As I got older that increased about,
I don't know, 10 pounds a year or so
when I had my stroke, I was at 240...
almost 250.
He didn't know how to do anything.
He didn't know me as his wife.
According to my wife,
I had the mentality of about a three year old.
Even to go to take a shower or bath,
he wasn't sure what to do.
He'd just go in there and he'd stand.
When I had my stroke
they diagnosed that I had diabetes
and I was untreated for approximately 10 years.
Pretty soon the doctor set me down,
he tore off my chart
after my stress test was going on and he says,
you see anything wrong with that?
And handed it to the doctor.
When that was done, they came out and said,
"We need to do immediate surgery."
I was pretty high risk,
because I'd had a stroke and the way I looked at it,
if I didn't have surgery I was gonna die anyhow.
He came through the heart surgery,
he did good but he...
he still never got any better.
I had a stroke, I had to live with that.
I was diabetic, I had to live with that
and I had a basket of pills I had to live with that.
Every 34 seconds someone in the United States
has a heart attack,
and in case you haven't heard one in three women
will die of heart disease.
I didn't go into medicine
to help people get a little bit better here,
little bit better there.
I really wanted transformational change
and I was becoming disillusioned.
It's the whole mindset of our medical culture.
We're taught as medical students and physicians
to treat the bad outcomes of our horrific health habits.
I used to work every Christmas and Easter.
Six to eight hours after that big holiday meal,
we would see the strokes, we would see the heart attacks.
It was just amazing.
Nobody puts these things together
and says, "Dear Lord,
people are eating themselves to death."
My blood sugar west 441, I had five blockages,
two of 'em were 100 percent,
two was 80 and one was 70 percent.
I was on 13 pills a day and two shots.
I had seven stents
in my original right coronary artery.
They just kind of dismissed
that it was anything to do with food
that it was more family genetics
that I had a double whammy, because I was diabetic.
Since the days of Hipocrates,
there's almost been a basic covenant of trust
between the caregiver and the patient
that were ever possible.
The caregiver is going to share with the patient,
what is the causation of the illness.
And today in Cardiology,
generally, that's just not being done at all.
Not at all.
We cut people open.
We'd bypass their clogged arteries.
We'd tell them they were cured
and more often than not, they would go home
and do all the things
that had caused the problem in the first place.
You know, smoke and eat junk food
and more often than not, the bypasses would clog up
and we would cut them open again sometimes
two or three times.
And so for me,
we were literally bypassing the problem.
We weren't really treating the underlying cause.
If you had a nail
stuck in the bottom of your shoe
and every time you stepped down it hurt your foot
because that nail's poking your foot.
I could give you some tylenol or advil and say,
"Well, just keep going on."
Or I could say, "I believe we've found the cause,
let's remove that nail from your shoe
and you don't need any medication."
That's the way it is
with the whole food plant based diet.
As a youngster,
my own family had a lot of health issues,
and as a kid I remember my two favorite uncles
having to have bypass surgery.
And these were people who I loved
and they were never the same after the surgery.
And then one day, I start waking up
with the most severe pains in the morning.
I jut knew something was really bad
but I kept thinking, maybe It'll just go away.
You know, I just wanted to believe anything
but, oh, my goodness, I've got some heart issues.
I went to the Cleveland Clinic.
I had a 100 percent on my right artery blocked
and two at 65 percent.
I had a hardening
on the right side of the artery.
I also had left bundle block,
I had an enlarged heart, I had leaky valves,
I was a real mess.
Even though we tend to think of advances in medicine
as being a new drug or new laser
or something really high-tech and expensive.
In our studies over the last, almost 40 years now,
we've used these very high-tech expensive
state of the art scientific measures
to prove how powerful
this very simple and low tech
and low cost interventions can be.
And we found for the first time
that not only can you help prevent disease,
but you can actually reverse it in most cases.
What Ornish showed in 1990
in the most prestigious medical journal in the world,
he could measure and show that the arteries
were opening up without drugs, without surgery
just, you know, plant based diet,
and other healthy lifestyle changes.
After that publication,
no one else should have died of heart disease.
We had the cure.
We've had it for decades
yet hundreds of thousands of people continue to die
from this preventable, treatable, reversible disease.
The catheter is again in the aorta now, in the left main,
an injecting dye in the left main
and if you look very closely, I'll slow it down,
you can see there is a significant
narrowing of the vessel right here.
See this is a normal vessel here,
this is a circumflex vessel and if you look right here,
it's very hazy and so that's the cholesterol plaque,
that is limiting the flow significantly down this vessel,
so the patient comes in with a heart attack
or comes in with chest pain.
Most of what I do are coronary bypass grafts
and Oklahoma is number two in the nation
for death from cardiovascular disease
and it's because the way we eat.
There is no question about it.
About six years ago, I woke up with left arm pain.
I went to my cardiologist, my cholesterol was 494,
my triglycerides were over 3200.
I had a stress test, it was abnormal.
I had a 85 percent blockage of my left anterior descending.
An 80 percent a little further down stream
and a 70 percent of my right main coronary.
And he said that it was too big to stent
so he recommended I have a triple bypass.
It was like a slap in the face
'cause it just never crossed my mind
that that would happen.
So many of our friends had,
you know, had this happen
and they went in and they had the stents
and they were fine
and that was what we were gonna do, you know.
So, it was, it was a real wakeup call.
One of my partners recommended that I read the China Study.
I had read that the Saturday before they arteriogram,
and in that book is mentioned
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease
by Dr. Esselstyn and so I found that book,
read it literally that day,
called my cardiologist and said,
"I think I wanna try diet before I have bypass."
And it literally scared him to death.
Don't let your culture hold your heart hostage.
Hey, it's in the family genes, I'm gonna get it,
I'm gonna die of something,
why not let me eat what I wanna eat
and enjoy life.
I hear that all the time.
It's very common for people
who have a family history of heart disease
to have a family history of eating
a very poor, low nutritive quality diet,
high in junk food, high in salt, sugar and fat.
One of my sites that I work at is a heart hospital.
I see patients that come in there, not infrequently,
who are about my age, built like me,
they come in with heart attacks.
They're thin and healthy on the outside
but on the inside their arteries
are filled up with saturated fat and cholesterol
and inflammation.
They're very surprised by it when it happens
but I see how my friends eat after a bike ride for instance.
Exercise is great for many different reasons.
But exercise alone is not enough
and a plant based lifestyle is incredibly beneficial
because it reduces the risk of so many diseases
that affect us.
The whole truth will come out one of these days.
Truth cannot be suppressed for too long.
Erectile dysfunction to a urologist is ED,
but when a cardiologist hears ED,
that's early death.
Erectile dysfunction is sort of the bad boy in the block
'cause nobody wants to talk about it.
But in general,
statistics are pretty earth shattering, right.
Roughly, 40 percentage of men at age 40, 50 at 50,
60 at 60 and then by the time we are 100,
we're all in trouble.
The problem is when person develops ED,
that's the first sign
that there is some problem in the blood vessels.
The pathophysiology is the same as coronary artery disease.
The obstruction of the arteries
to the penis by plaques that develop in there.
They're much smaller arteries going to the penis
than to your heart and that's what why
we typically see those symptoms develop first.
Most people don't realize
that cardiovascular disease is a systemic disease process
that means if you have a heart attack
you're at risk for ED and peripheral arterial disease
and stroke and dementia
and so in short people need to realize that
when they have a stent and they fix one little area,
it does not cure the problem.
It simply solves one little spot
and so ED is no different.
It's kind of a warning signal that
well, that's not working well.
And if that's not working well
we know you're not getting the oxygen supply
to your brain and to your heart.
Where cardiovascular disease has its inception
is when we progressively destroy
the capacity of our lifejacket and our guardian
which is the inner most layer of the artery,
the endothelium.
The damage to the endothelium begins
when an excess LDL cholesterol is absorbed
The resulting inflammatory response
triggers immune cells called macrophages.
They enter the vessel wall
and begin to gobble up the excess cholesterol
creating these foam cells.
Now, these large cholesterol laden foam cells accumulate
resulting in plaque build up from the inside out
causing a pimple like area
to bulge into our artery passage ways.
Over time, the covering of these pimples can rupture
triggering a blood clot
that can block normal blood flow
to an area resulting in a heart attack or a stroke.
Back in 1900, we consumed about 4 pounds of oil
per person per year, currently 74 pounds.
So, we have added a tremendous amount of oil to our lives.
All oil is a 120 calories a table spoon,
and most Americans consuming
between 250 and 700 calories of oil a day.
You're taking the oil,
removing it from the original item
whether it be an olive, whether it be a Soy bean,
whether it be a coconut
and you're isolating that oil out.
When you isolate that oil, you have 100 percent fat.
Fats in oils are a major contributor
to blocked heart arteries,
high blood pressure, high cholesterol,
heart attacks, heart failure.
Oil injures endothelial cells.
Olive oil, corn oil, Soy bean oil, safflower oil,
sunflower oil, coconut oil, palm oil, oil in a cracker,
oil in bread, oil in a salad dressing.
So I have a number of people even on a plant based diet,
that will come in and say
Dr. Stoll, I'm eating really well
but I'm still gaining weight.
And my first question to them
is well, how much olive oil, coconut oil etc
are you using in your diet?
When they start to add it up,
sometimes they're adding five, six, tablespoons a day.
So, here we are, you know, 600, 700 calories
they're adding to their diet and they don't realize it
because they're adding in oils that they assume are healthy.
There aren't some special oils you can buy
that are health promoting.
They're all processed foods
with almost no levels of micronutrients
and phytochemicals in them, with no fiber.
Coconut oil is 90 percent saturated fat.
Lard is 43 percent saturated fat.
The coconut oil miracle
is that it's still on the market.
And so when we just
hear little clips on the news,
maybe on the internet, it says olive oil is the way to go.
We grab on to that
and unfortunately it's bad information.
Here I am, I'm just out of recovery
from my heart catheter
and he looks at me and says, you know,
"I think I'd like you to meet Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn,
he was my mentor at medical school.
Sure enough the next morning, he gave me a call,
he said, "I want you to read this book,
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease
and call me back."
There is hard science out there
that you can halt and reverse this disease with nutrition.
There is a common feeling
that, oh well patients won't do that.
Well, nothing is further from the truth.
I read it, within a few days I called him back
and I said, "I'm in.
I'll do whatever you want me to do."
When folks are willing to change their,
you know, 50, 60, 70 year old worth of habits,
it's amazing watching cure
for the first time in my career.
I really believe that diet is the primary way
that we need to change things.
I've been now plant based for almost three years.
What it's done is at that time my cholesterol was 310,
today it's at 143.
Plant based nutrition
has allowed me to have more energy
than I've ever felt in my life.
The body is a natural self healing machine
and disease in unnatural, avoidable
and in most cases reversible with superior nutrition.
What I thought I knew about healthy eating
almost killed me.
One moment, I was eating meat with every meal.
The next moment, whole food, plant based.
A very drastic change overnight.
Within six months my cholesterol was down to 115,
my LDL was 15, which was as low as they can measure.
My triglycerides had fallen to a 175.
The last time I had my cholesterol checked,
it was 96 and my triglycerides were 97.
And there's not a drug on the planet that can do that.
That is solely through diet and I'm just utterly amazed
that the human body has the ability
to heal itself so quickly.
You know I abused my body for 53 years,
I'm currently 59 and I feel better now
than I felt when I was 35.
Genetics is not our destiny.
Our genes can be directly affected by the food we eat.
We know that you can reverse heart disease
with plant based diet, we know this,
you cannot do with medication,
but you can do it with a plant based diet.
And when they ask doctors,
"Why don't you teach people this?"
They say, "They don't think
people are going to want to do it,
it's too difficult" Well,
let them be the judge of that.
I think it's too difficult to go under the knife
and have my chest cracked open,
you know, but give people the chance,
the opportunity.
Two weeks after starting
the whole food plant based diet with no oil,
my angina had all of a sudden stopped.
By the time I went back to my internist,
my hemoglobin A1C was coming down.
They took me off the shots,
they took me off of the starlix pills.
Within a couple months later I went off the metformin.
The doctor said, I don't think you're diabetic.
I don't have any arthritis anymore.
I'm enjoying life,
I love the food that I'm eating,
I would say the bottom-line to all of my health issues
is you don't have to suffer
with heart disease and diabetes,
because it's food borne illnesses,
and if food is what got you into this mess,
food can get you out of it.
By definition, a mammal makes milk for its young,
and so a horse makes milk perfect for its foal,
and a human being makes milk perfect for the infant,
and a cow makes milk perfect for her calf.
The thing is that we have different nutritional needs
when we're young than a calf has.
They grow real fast.
A little baby calf grows from 60 pounds to 600 pounds
drinking milk.
If you fed a baby calf human milk,
the animal would starve to death.
So when people eat baby calf food
designed to accelerated growth
they grow, people get fat.
We know the protein from dairy casein
is a cancer promoter on the DNA level.
It actually tells your DNA go ahead and make some cancer.
The earlier you introduce young children to dairy,
the higher their risk, about 14 fold higher
to develop a devastating disease
called diabetes type 1, which is an autoimmune disease
that destroys the pancreas irreversibly.
Dairy calcium is kind have been made into a myth
that if I eat cheese or I drink milk
and have a good calcium intake from dairy
that I'll have strong bones
and that's actually not been proven
in the literature at all.
When I look at people,
and they're drinking all this milk to try to combat
the osteopenia and osteoporosis,
I tell them that the countries
that consume the most dairy have the weakest bones.
And they're like, what do you mean,
I say "Well, most of Asia didn't have osteoporosis
up until recent times
and they didn't drink milk at all."
If you don't drink milk,
where are you going to get your calcium?
Where do you think the cow gets their calcium, right?
They have a thousand pound skeleton, that's a lot it,
they get it from plants, right.
Start everyday
with milks' protein and milk life.
The dairy industry says, oh, milk does the body good.
We're believing advertising, we're not believing truths.
In 1999, I had that wake up call.
I was diagnosed with both breast and cervical cancer.
So the doctor said
you've got to have a mastectomy next week,
you got to have a hysterectomy immediately,
you got to have chemo, you got to have radiation.
And I was like a deer in headlights
and I was like, there's no way.
All of the doctors were pretty clear
that they felt that
I probably wouldn't live longer than a few months,
because I had cancerous fluid
that had metastasized from my ovaries,
all the way up the pleural cavity,
on my right lung.
Until you've seen
a loved one get sick and die in a hospital
or walk through the halls
or been to an intensive care unit,
people don't know. I mean, you drown death,
when you die with lung cancer,
I mean horrific, horrific deaths.
The war on cancer under President Nixon
started in 1971.
The incidents rate that is the number of people
that get cancer was one in eight.
The survival rate was about 27 percent, 28 percent
which means a little more than
70 percent of the patients died.
Just a couple of years ago,
the National Cancer Institute published their latest figures,
the incidents as much higher and the survival rates
are basically unchanged around 31, 32 percent.
It's a travesty
that people continue to suffer and die
when we have the tools, we have the knowledge,
we just the system is such,
it just doesn't reward that kind of behavior.
It doesn't make anybody money.
I think that the assumption there
is that there is a rational helpful benign process
that's running the show in government
and there isn't so what's running the show
is a vicious free for all
and that nobody is really interested
in helping Americans get healthy.
Nobody makes any money sending you home
to eat your vegetables and drink your water.
And I think that's probably
the base root of the whole problem.
In our morning rounds, how where you live
affects your odds of surviving cancer.
New government data shows people in the south
have the highest risk of dying from cancer.
Kentucky ranks number one.
Cancer defined by modern medicine
is essentially a wild, erratic cells
that's growing without control.
And it's very active metabolically.
First up, chemotherapy is standard
for most breast cancer patients.
I think the whole chemotherapy industry
is very sad.
It's based on an assumption that I find to be flawed.
The way that cancer is assumed to work
is once started progressively gets worse
because of certain events to come along like mutations.
Therefore, that leads to the idea,
well, how do we treat people with cancer.
We can't get those cancer cells to go back to being normal.
What are we going to do?
We're going to kill them.
And how best to kill them
except to have created some chemical
that can zap those tumors.
That's called chemotherapy,
but chemotherapy is not working for the most part.
The focus on cancer seems to be
early detection, early detection
and we have breast cancer awareness month.
I would like to see, breast cancer prevention month.
And that could be for all types of cancer,
not just breast cancer.
My mom and aunts had had breast, cervical,
uterine or ovarian cancer.
They did the surgery,
the mastectomies and the hysterectomies.
They did the chemo.
They did the radiation, and I really saw what that did.
I saw that not only did it not heal,
but it made the situation worse
and I was convinced that many of the people
that I loved the most in the world
had actually died
not as a result of being diagnosed with cancer,
but as a result of all of those treatments.
Why do chemo surgery and radiation
not do well for the most part?
because they do nothing to change the root cause,
the biological terrain
the culture medium if you will that,
any disease will grow in as not functioning properly
it's conducive to growing a cancer cell for example,
conventional medicine looks at the tumor and says,
okay, that's the disease.
I don't, I look at the tumor and say,
that's the symptom of the disease.
In our research, for example, we showed 40 years ago,
we could have a model
and we could turn cancer on and off.
And it doesn't have anything to do with mutations.
I went to see Dr. Joel Fuhrman who...
to my good fortune was my primary care physician.
And he examined me
and we talked and I just decided,
well it's not gonna hurt to ask another person,
you know, if there is a chance that I'm gonna get through this
and I said, "Do you think I'm going to survive this?"
And he said, "Yes, I do."
And I said, "That's wonderful,
because you are the only one who has said that."
You don't have to be sick.
You don't have to wait in line for a terminal illness.
There is something you can do about it,
and the time to start is now.
The motivating factor for me
to adopt a whole food plant based diet
was I didn't want to die.
My wife had adopted the whole food plant based ideology
for at least two to three years.
And I did it really purely as for health,
I had dragged family along fairly successfully,
my husband was good when he was at home,
and I was cooking for him.
We hear the term always committing,
committing to something 100 percent.
And I think for me
adopting a whole food plant based diet,
I wasn't fully committed.
He was diagnosed in November of 2013 with kidney cancer,
turned out to be stage four cancer.
I think at that moment
I never had to nag at him again,
I never had to convince him, he was completely onboard.
We were told that given what it was
and the type of the cancer, renal cell carcinoma
in a fairly aggressive one as to what they were seeing
on the tests taken.
That it would be probably a matter of months
that I had to live.
He went through a major surgery to have the kidney removed
and many of the lymph nodes around it
and you know, they were pretty brutal
and they said that, you know,
that he might not even survive the surgery
because it has gone up his venae cavae
and they had to clamp that off and he could bleed out
and so that was devastating in itself.
And they explained that
chemotherapy and radiation was not effective
in controlling or healing
or working with renal cell carcinoma
and they said there was current research being done
with respect to immunotherapy drugs.
He recovered really well from this surgery,
rather quickly,
he was accepted into a trail study
and it was an immune boosting therapy
and we went down to Vancouver for that,
and after the third treatment, it attacked his liver.
So they explained to us that this liver attack,
the side effect from the drugs
and the rates that my liver was battling right now,
it could be a fatal episode.
So he was dismissed from the study
because it doesn't look good to kill your trial patient.
So they basically sent us home to recover from that.
There is no way. I'm not gonna do surgery,
chemo or radiation.
He said to me, "What do you mean, no,
you don't have a choice?"
He said, "You'll be dead in six months."
I said, "Well, I'll tell you what,
if I'm not dead in six months, I'll come back to see you."
Conventional medicine uses
the term a five year survival of a cancer
without a recurrence of the same cancer,
you might have another one.
But, without a recurrence of the same cancer,
is considered a cure.
For me, it really isn't.
For me, a cure is
when a patient lives the rest of their life,
as along as they don't mess up
and start doing the bad lifestyle choices
that they had.
We did a national wide survey of a total of 6,500 families
and what came out of that
was supporting what we had done initially.
And that was the moment, in that process
we turned away from vegetables, and fruits, and grains
which we learned how to be the whole form,
the entire kind of form.
And we put in all the animal foods
and all the processed foods.
We're making a big mistake.
Animal protein can turn on cancer
and the protein that we were using primarily
was the main protein in cow's milk.
When you are eating super inflammatory foods,
you're eating dairy products, you're eating meat,
you're eating eggs,
you're eating all this inflammatory foods,
processed foods,
all these oils you shouldn't be eating
and then you add to that pesticides
and all these chemicals
that we know can potentially cause cancer.
Now you're in the perfect storm.
So, I continued on
with our whole food plant based diet
and he just got better and better
and with each scan things were reducing,
lymph nodes were shrinking in size.
And initially they had said it would be naive
to think that this would not spread,
and it didn't spread and it reduced.
And it kept reducing to the point
where it was radiologically undetectable.
At this two year period,
where you're told plain and simple that
you're probably gonna die, if you make that outset date,
you're probably got to get sicker and sicker.
And I didn't.
And I got healthier and healthier and healthier.
And at two years, when he should have died
according to them,
he went back to work, full-time.
I've never been this healthy in my whole life and I just,
I'm carrying on,
what has brought me here this far, this healthy
and the way I am,
has been adopting whole food plant based,
there's no two ways about it.
My friends and family didn't believe me,
they didn't approve.
My doctor didn't like it.
But when that six month mark came,
I made that phone call.
I want an appointment.
When they ran all the tests
and I was completely cancer free.
Some of the things that I found
from those tests he ran, not only did I not have cancer,
but rheumatoid arthritis
that I was diagnosed at the age of 27 with,
that the doctors had told me then,
"You could be crippled by this,
you could end up in a wheel chair,
you're going to have to take drugs
for pain management on this."
It was gone.
I had always had these problems with eczema, psoriasis.
My skin looked better than ever and from a little girl
I was diagnosed with all kinds of allergies.
For the first time in my life
that I could remember I had no allergy.
Like this is really something.
I realized that this lifestyle had healed my body completely
from the inside out.
I'm Pamela Swallow, I just turned 70 this summer,
but I've been 18 years cancer free.
I was diagnosed in 1997
with metastatic stage four ovarian cancer.
My prognosis was horrible,
but not everybody is right all the time
and I was determined to live and I have and so could you.
I have a major blockage in my right thigh.
I have a lot of plaque in, I guess in major artery.
I was trying to find solutions.
When I was shooting Captain America in Cleveland,
I was going to the Cleveland Clinic
and while I was there
the doctor asked me about the blockage,
she started telling me about this doctor
that could possibly help me
and we went to have lunch with Essie and Ann
they're just such enthusiastic and healthy people.
I had already read his book.
I was convinced that I need to try this
and I decided I was gonna jump right in.
I was little daunted by the okay, no oil, no dairy,
no nuts, no sugar, no, the nos.
But I got to it and I started it,
I was getting along fine with the diet.
I was doing great.
In the middle of all this,
the movie that I was preparing to do
in the spring, the director wanted to see me,
because he heard I was back in town,
and he wanted to talk to me about the film.
When I left, I got a call later on that evening
from my agent.
He was like, you know,
director was very concerned about you, and they said,
"If you don't gain like, 20 pounds
between now and the time that movie starts,
they're gonna fire you."
So, contrary to my health needs,
I went back to flesh and not just plant based diet.
I gained weight by like wham,
it just came right back just the way, I lost it.
My leg cramps came back. I started to snore again.
I don't pop up out of bed
as energetically as I used to,
my regularity changed,
my susceptibility for catching things
changed drastically.
I get tired after I eat which is really trippy,
you know, it's the food supposed to give you energy.
I eat now and it's kinda like, I need a nap.
So my digestive process is very different.
I know that at some point, I'm gonna go back to it,
because I know how to do it,
and I know how I felt when I was doing it.
Mainly because I know, I could do better from myself.
Everything that I was ever taught,
everything I'd ever read, basically it was telling me,
"Hey Hispanics have a high percentage of diabetes."
I was also lead to believe it's in your genes,
it's just part of who you are.
I was a fast food junky.
My body was telling me, you need that sugar,
you need that fat, you need that salt
and so I was going
through the drive-through all the time.
My family has been devastated by chronic disease.
My mother was diabetic.
She had a kidney transplant. She was legally blind.
Many, many years of dialysis, many, many years of shots,
injections and pills and ultimately passed away
at the young age of 61 years old.
My oldest brother,
he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer,
he passed in 2002.
My twin brother Joe,
he's been diabetic over a decade
and just about four months ago he had a heart attack.
And then the youngest brother is Martin,
he was diagnosed with diabetes at a young age,
in his early teens 13 or 14 years old.
He has had his right leg amputated.
He has had a kidney and pancreas transplant.
He's legally blind.
He does dialysis three times a week,
and he takes 25 medications every single day.
I was headed down that same path,
at the age of 43 taking two insulin shots,
two oral medications for diabetes,
a high blood pressure medication
as well as a high cholesterol medication.
I even asked my doctor, I said
"Will I ever get off this insulin."
And he flat out told me,
"No, you're gonna be on insulin
the rest of your life."
I was very upset,
I was actually quite pissed off,
because I'd seen what this had done to my family
and now here I was.
Up until fairly recently,
people had a completely wrong view of diabetes.
They thought diabetes is caused by eating sugar
or eating starch and eating bread.
And that was somewhat logical,
because the carbohydrate in the bread
does release glucose, it releases sugar.
And so it will make the blood sugar rise,
but it turns out that was never the cause of it.
Type two diabetes is caused by the build up
of tiny microscopic fat particles
in the muscle cells, and what happens is
as the fat builds up in the cell,
the insulin can no longer bring the glucose inside.
So what's the answer,
the answer is get that fat out of the cells,
the diabetes will improve.
Most of us have no idea, where our food comes from.
I started to question, where that food was coming from
and how that food was raised.
I never made the connection
really between what was on my plate
and then that was once a living, breathing animal.
Once I made that connection
I didn't want to have any part of it.
I don't see animals as food anymore,
I see it has complete suffering and I want people to know that,
that animal didn't just naturally die,
and then they package it, and it becomes food.
That's not how it is,
the animal suffered everyday of its life,
it was beaten, it was tortured,
and then it became food for you.
The plight of farm animals is more than ever something
that really matters to me.
But what also surprised me
was how many basic human rights violations exist,
with humans in addition to what's happening
to the animals.
A lot of milk that we drink actually has a lot of puss
or white blood cells in it.
Largely because a lot of these animals
are not treated as well as they ought to be.
You don't have to take a life in order to sustain yours.
Every time we're purchasing something,
we're voting with our dollar.
So, if you choose to eat animal products
and you choose to take your dollar
and vote for cruelty,
and harmfulness and death you're part of the problem,
then you're not part of the solution.
I knew right then, and the other day
I didn't want to be part of anything
that promoted cruelty.
Informing the public to the truth
about what humans are suppose to eat
is going to be vital for the future of our health,
the future of the environment, the future of animal welfare
and the future of the finances of this country.
Sustainability is becoming more and more an issue.
So it's not just the health of people,
not just cruelty to animals and what not.
It's actually an issue of survival.
People are not making the connection
that what they're eating
is really affecting the environment.
Over a third of the landmass in the world
is taken up by livestock, agriculture.
If you look at all of the animals
that are being raised for consumption,
it totals around 70 billion.
Livestock are basically
black boxes of inefficiency, right?
You pour in huge amounts
of feed, of protein, of energy, water,
and these animals have the audacity to breathe
and move around and waste energy
and like, you know, live their lives
and then only about half of them
you can eat the rest is the skeleton and skin.
I mean it's just like, huge amount of resources
to get these tiny kind of scraps from them
when we could just be eating the food directly,
you know, cut out the middle moo.
We're having a big water shortage in California,
now they're rationing water.
Long showers 40 gallons of water,
short showers 20 gallons.
One burger is 4,000 to 18,000 gallons of water
to make a third of a pound burger.
75% of the deforestation taking place in the Amazon,
is because of animal agriculture.
We're raping the land,
is really what we are doing.
We are taking everything out of the dirt
that we want to have in the dirt,
the microbes, the organic matter.
We are headed towards our dirt not being viable
to grow anything.
Most people don't understand that,
the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases
more than all transportation combined
planes, trains, boats, automobiles
is animal agriculture.
We need to do something right now
to start reversing global warming.
Well I can do something about that right now
I can just stop eating, stop eating animals.
So, when he start thinking of world hunger,
and you start thinking about
all the water that's being wasted,
and transportation, not to mention the cruelty.
You start looking at it from a bigger picture
and realizing that your dollar
that you're voting with doesn't just affect you,
it affects not only your fellow human beings,
but also your planet.
So when you start to educate yourself
not just about the way that you feel,
and about the way the people around you feel,
but when you really start to take it all in,
and you've just started to lean in,
oh, you're in all the way.
The formula is clear,
you want to eat the foods that promote good health,
you want to avoid the foods that contribute to poor health.
Basically we don't eat anything with the mother or a face.
Like most people like, kind of walked away,
from there going, what do you eat? you know.
So what is whole food plant based?
It's a food that comes from the ground,
it's less altered by man, it's less processed by man.
Like fruits, vegetables, whole grains and beans
you know, and nuts and seeds to a lesser extent.
We're not talking about unhealthy plant based eating.
We're talking about whole foods.
I take away all their meat, and all their dairy,
and all their oil, and they look at me,
they go "Dr. McDougall, I got nothing to eat,
there is nothing for me to eat at all, nothing."
I say, "Yes, there is."
And then I show them the key which
you have to know, or you'll fail."
I show them the starch.
I say, "Well, do you like potatoes?"
"Oh, I love potatoes."
Beans, and lentils, and vegetables
you didn't even know existed
and even fruits from other countries.
Turnip, collard, mustard, kale...
Greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries and seeds.
Black beans, brown rice, salsa, avocados, quinoa.
Bok choy, swiss chard, kale, collards, collard green,
beet greens, mustard greens, turnip greens, napa cabbage,
brussels sprouts, broccoli,
cauliflowers, cilantro parsley,
spinach, and arugula, and asparagus.
You got it.
Always eat too much,
stuff yourself on those berries.
They feel good, they feel good in you,
they give you energy,
you don't have to drink anything,
they got so much liquid in them, they feel great.
That's one food I love.
Spinach or collard greens, you ever think
you'd ever say collard greens? I say collard greens.
Mustard greens.
Where's Jeb? Where's granny?
All of a sudden, Elly May Clampett.
You start saying things like that, Clampetts,
when you eat like this, you know,
I'll have some mustard greens, some collard greens,
three pounds of those steamed
and then like this much apple cider vinegar.
The first thing people say is, I don't have time.
When somebody says to me, I don't have time,
what I really hear is, I don't want to.
If tomorrow I'm going to be diagnosed with cancer,
I don't have time for that,
but I will have time to do chemo, radiation,
surgery, recuperation.
The hardest part about changing your diet and your health
is just deciding to do it.
Oh, plant based diet, I don't think I'd like that.
Well, you think that long enough,
you probably won't try it.
Don't you remember when you were little
and mom put something on your plate
and said, well just try it, "No, I don't want to try it."
Well, just try it.
It's like riding a bike, you know, you like the idea,
you want the outcome,
you can read about the technique
all day long but at some point you just got to get on the bike
and find your balance.
And once you find your balance
you just glide and it's so freeing.
So, I started and I started very seriously.
I started every meal, three meals a day,
which consisted mainly of fruits and vegetables,
some nuts and seeds, and it just worked.
And in about six months I lost 120 pounds
and then over the course of maybe another six months,
I lost another 100 pounds, so I lost 220 pounds.
The diabetes went away within weeks
and the hypertension also went away.
I started to feel great.
I can't she's got so much energy today,
I can't really keep up with her, to be honest with you.
Recently I was lucky enough to have an echo
done by my coworkers,
and she was overwhelmed
by what she saw on my echocardiogram.
There were no blockages, there is no plaque,
the elasticity in my heart is excellent and she said,
"We don't really see hearts like this."
The number one thing that she said was,
"Susan, I'm convinced.
I see what you eat everyday,
but this for me as a echocardiogram sonographer
this is what sells me."
I have reversed disease,
the damage that hypertension does to your heart,
and type two diabetes,
it was reversed in the last five years from eating this way.
The first thing I noticed was
that I didn't have all those greasy dishes,
and then I noticed that my food bill was lower,
and then I noticed that I felt better.
After all if you have all those greasy dishes,
think what the inside of your intestine must look like.
The vast majority of the world subsists on rice and beans
for fractions of what we pay for food.
The thing people have to understand
is that it is not expensive
to eat a healthy whole food plant based diet.
Sure if you go out to restaurants
or buy vegan processed food, it is
but where I live in the ethnic markets,
in the area of Los Angeles a pound of beans are $0.49.
And you get it, put it, cook it in your pressure cooker,
you're done in 10 minutes.
For me I'm not buying meat anymore,
I'm not buying dairy anymore.
When in season, I can go to my local farmer's market.
And when I explained to them they asked for like,
how can I do this really.
And I say well, you can actually buy a 25 pound bag
of brown rice for 25 bucks.
You can buy a 20 pound bag of whatever your favorite bean
is for 20 bucks, and a bunch of fresh frozen vegetables
for $0.99 a bag and you have meals for a month
for two people for 60-70 bucks.
And they look at me like, "Oh, I never thought of that."
You're not eating the cheeses, and the meats, and the eggs
and so the average family is gonna save a lot of money,
plus you're not gonna be in the line
at the pharmacy counter as much,
and if diet changes can start to cut that down,
you're saving serious money.
We went in and ransacked our pantries,
our refrigerators, our freezers. Started emptying things out,
taking out all the things with the oils, the sugars,
the processed foods, got rid of the meats.
From one day to the other,
our lifestyle changed completely.
We threw away everything we had,
and we went to the store
and bought new food and we started.
By the time we got
from the TV room into the kitchen, he said,
"We shouldn't have anymore animal products in our house."
I was like yay.
We just switched like that and then there was a moment
where we said, "Well what about the children?"
I said, "It's not a democracy."
They're just along for the ride.
I want to feel better.
Looking back at where I was just 11 months ago,
I don't even recognize that person.
I could not imagine the drastic changes
that we've seen in less than a year,
not only the physical changes
of the weight loss, but coming off medication,
I feel good on the inside, I don't hurt anymore,
my knees don't hurt.
I feel better now than I did when I was in high school.
Making this lifestyle change
to a whole food plant based way of eating
is the absolute best decision I've ever made in my life.
It's not so much about trying to invent a new way of life,
but rather discovering the foods that are right here
in front of you.
So it's about shopping in the produce department.
It's literally about knowing which aisles to walk down
in your supermarket,
which stuff to grab and which stuff to just keep
walking right past.
The first priority is to eat whole unrefined plants
and to avoid animal sourced foods
and foods that are processed.
A fresh roasted beet,
I get really excited about produce.
The foods that don't require a label tend to be the highest
in nutrients and most beneficial for your health.
Things like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, lentils.
However there are a lot of foods
that do have labels,
I'm talking about your frozen pizza
that's got a dozen ingredients in the crust
and a dozen more in the toppings.
My God, there are paragraphs of ingredients.
You don't want that, especially you don't want the mono
and diglycerides, you don't want the added oil,
and there are usually four or five or six different ways
that they're stuffing sugar at you.
For example, we'll pickup raisin bran,
and I'll show folks,
okay, "Tell me how sugar is in that per serving?
And how much fiber is in that per serving?"
They very quickly realize that often they may be eating
for breakfast something that is a bowl full of sugar.
You can pick up a jar of spaghetti sauce
and it will have sugar in it.
Now that being said, there are a plenty of packaged foods
that can be a part of a healthy diet,
for example canned vegetables, frozen fruits and vegetables.
However, the way they're packaged
matters a great deal,
and the way they're processed matters.
So in teaching people about label reading, I tell them,
if it has a package,
turn it over and look at the label.
So let's take a look at this one,
'cause it looks really promising,
it says 100 percent whole grain,
it also says heart healthy, and good source of fiber.
So let's take a look at the ingredients
just to make sure.
Whole wheat flour, water, sugar,
sugar is the third ingredient.
It's also got soybean oil in it, and those mono
and diglycerides that we don't want.
So again, it's so important to read those labels.
With nothing to lose, we decided to just try it out
and see how things went,
and so we decided to do it for a month
and the pounds just started to fall away,
I think I lost 14 pounds that first month.
So over the course of the next 18 months,
I proceeded to lose half of my body weight
for a total of about 130 pounds.
It's never too late to feel young, to lose weight,
to feel energetic, to enjoy your family, your children,
your grandchildren, your great grandchildren
and be able to help heal yourself with food.
I eat amazing food that tastes, smell, and look amazing.
I'm not eating grass.
I am so satisfied, I love my food.
I just, I eat so many different things now,
and I try new things
like I never would have tried Indian,
or Ethiopian, or Thai, and they're my favorite.
And I would have missed those had I not become plant based.
With plant based cuisine, we can create all the flavors,
textures, satisfying, feelings
that you always want from a meal.
Let's demystify this notion
that if you are a plant based eater,
you are giving up everything.
If food tastes good, food tastes good.
It's because of what it's made of.
Hi, good morning. Hey, doc.
Good to see you, welcome back.
- Hi, how are you, Yvonne? - Good.
When I first heard about this,
I thought it was a bunch of malarkey, you know.
And then the challenge was made, you know, try it,
what does it hurt?
So I tried it.
Without medication your cholesterol was 300 range.
Yes, previously.
Okay, and now, without medications
and making some changes in your diet,
your cholesterol is at 171.
- Really? - Yeah.
So it's almost half of what it was before
on no medication.
Your triglycerides have dropped another 20 points.
Both your cholesterol and your triglycerides
are safely in the normal range.
Sweet.
On no medication.
That is proof to me.
You can't lie in the numbers
and you can't lie with shedding the weight,
and I felt great.
So we kept on going with it and it's working.
I was told, and I was convinced by my doctor,
you're gonna be on this for the rest of your life,
cause you're just genetically predisposed to be this way.
And it took this to prove to me that's not true.
I'm eating plant based whole foods
and my cholesterol is no longer an issue.
I feel as good as I did when I was 20.
A lot people think that when they go plant based,
it's gonna be really difficult
and the cooking is going to be really involved
and involve 15 to 20 ingredients, but it's not.
One of my favorite things to make
is my garlic alfredo sauce.
It's just seven ingredients,
basically just start out with chopping some onions,
chopping some garlic,
throw it in a little bit of vegetable broth
on a pan,
sauté it for about eight minutes
until all the broth is evaporated
and then you just add it to your blender.
And you're gonna want to add the cooked vegetables...
the remaining broth which is another cup.
I have a half cup of cashews.
Now if you don't have a high powered blender,
you're gonna have to soak your cashews
for about five to six hours,
otherwise, they're gonna turn out gritty,
and you don't want that in your sauce,
you're gonna want it thick, and creamy, and smooth.
A quarter cup of nutritional yeast,
that's gonna give it a depth of flavor
and a little bit of cheesy undertone,
quarter teaspoon of black pepper,
a half a teaspoon of salt
and one tablespoon of lemon juice.
Blend it up and you got some delicious alfredo sauce.
You can pour it over some cooked pasta,
and everybody is gonna be shocked
that there is no dairy,
and there is no butter or cheese in it.
It's really, really delicious,
it's just as rich as traditional alfredo sauce,
but it's actually good for you.
It's about just being creative,
it's about not so much seeing road blocks,
but rather seeing the opportunities
that come with these new aspirations
that you may have.
There are three reasons to eat out.
One, you don't have to do the dishes, two, the ambience,
three, companionship.
You never go out to eat
to further destroy endothelial cells, okay.
Everybody says, well, gosh doctor,
Dr Esselson it's so hard.
Aren't they gonna have,
some of these places, have oil?
Yeah, all of them.
When the waiter or the waitress comes to your table,
you turn in your seat, take your glasses off,
look them squarely in the eye.
You must understand
that I'm deathly allergic to a single drop of any oil.
Now you get creative.
Can I have part of this item on the menu
mixed with part of this and put it together?
Then the chefs are really actually,
if you just ask the question,
they're very excited to create something for you.
We have to be that change, we have to be the ones to ask,
and hopefully soon enough demand that we have organic,
plant based foods in restaurants
across the country.
We'd adopted this lifestyle on December 3rd of 2011.
Within days, three to four days
I start to see my sugars plummet
and I'm seeing my weight drop anywhere
between five to seven pounds per week.
My psoriasis went away, my heart burn,
I've not had heart burns since I adopted this lifestyle
and I'm Mexican, I love spicy food,
I eat jalapeños and spices, Indian food.
And lo and behold, by the end of January 2012
so not quite 60 days later,
I was off all five of my medications.
Four to five months in,
my erectile dysfunction went away,
so here we are three and half going on four years later,
my health continues to be normal.
My A1c levels, my cholesterol levels,
my blood pressures,
I'm healthier than I was even 20 years ago.
So when my wife and I adopted
a whole foods plant based lifestyle,
we basically changed
the trajectory of my family's future.
So we're gonna make the cauliflower hot wings,
which you're just gonna love, they're really easy.
So you start with a head of cauliflower,
or you can cheat like me and buy pre-cut florets.
Just set those aside and whisk together
one half cup of plant based milk,
such as soy milk or almond milk,
one half cup of flour, I'm using chickpea flour today,
but you can use any flour that you happen to have,
whisk in some garlic powder or some onion powder
or even cayenne if you want it to be hotter,
or little nutritional yeast,
then pour your almond milk into your flour
and mix it so it forms a batter.
Take each floret and dip it into the batter
and shake it off just to coat it.
Put it on your baking sheet, bake it for about 12 minutes
at 450 degrees, just until it's golden and fork tender,
and then when you're done, toss it with some hot sauce,
or teriyaki sauce, or barbecue sauce.
Just mix it together
and then you have your hot wings ready to go.
When we're looking at this plant based nutrition data,
it's more than heart disease and risk factors,
it's actually a lot of cancer, lot of inflammatory diseases,
such as lupus and Sjogren's syndrome,
and rheumatoid arthritis
and so you know plant based nutrition
and good lifestyle are good for a variety of things,
not just heart disease.
At the time my husband was working for MTV,
and he was helping recording artist,
get really fit for videos, you know,
and I said I want to look like one of them.
It was purely vanity. We're gonna go to Maui,
we're gonna get married and I just want,
I want to look as good as I feel emotionally.
And I want to do it in a healthy way
and that's what he did.
It wasn't about starvation,
it wasn't about hurting your body,
it was about learning how to take care of your body,
learning how to nourish my body in a way that would
cause me to have a fast metabolism.
And most people think about fuel in terms of,
these big building blocks
like protein and carbohydrates and fat,
but that's not what it's about.
It's about vitamins, and minerals,
and phytonutrients, and enzymes,
and things that your cells actually need.
I had to eat so much food, more than I'd ever eaten before
and drink all this water and take, you know,
do all this, eat more than I ever had before,
and he told me that was going to make me
actually lose weight.
So even though I was skeptical I did it,
and in the four months not only did I go
from the size 10 to a size 3 but I was really fit
and I felt the best I'd ever felt in my entire life.
I had no more aches and pains, my joints felt great,
I was energetic.
When it was time to get my blood test and everything,
I didn't really think it was going to affect them,
because that was impossible,
I just, you know I thought this was just something
that improved how I felt.
And so I told my husband, well, whatever this is that you did,
I'm gonna eat this way from now on,
because I feel so good.
When I got my next round of blood test a few months later,
all the lupus indicators were negative.
The doctor had a medical student with him and he said,
this woman alleges to have lupus,
but we are not finding any evidence of it.
Maybe there is just an error in the test.
Go have your wedding, come back and we'll test again.
And we tested again few months later
and now even the antibodies
for the clots were completely negative.
And my blood pressure was coming down
to that of an athlete, and my "genetically high cholesterol"
that I was told that I could do nothing,
but blame my parents,
that's what my doctor told me as a kid,
that was completely normal and in fact optimal.
And that's what's happened ever since then
and right now I'm sitting here
and it's been 10 years since that first negative blood test,
and there has been no sign of lupus coming back,
in spite of me continuing to go on and not only expose myself
to those things they said I shouldn't like
going out in the sunshine but also having two children.
I have continued to actually get healthier and stronger
as the years have gone by.
You know, I think we all love process food
for their convenience.
But what if you could have the convenience
without the processed food part.
You know, one of my favorites is macaroni and cheese in a box
which I grew up with like everybody else
and used to love.
So I've come up with a vegan version that's whole foods.
It's something you can keep in your pantry in a jar,
pull it out and take a little cup of it
and just mix it up with some non-dairy milk
and just pour it over some noodles
and you got an instant easy dish.
Comes together in about 30 seconds,
so you better watch carefully or you'll miss it.
All right, first I've got a cup of cashews,
they go right into my food processor,
along with some nutritional yeast,
and some herbs and spices.
Put it in your food processor,
you just let it whirr for about three minutes
and that's it, that mix is ready,
good to go in your pantry,
ready for you anytime you want it.
Free.
At 43 years old, I am free.
I spent a decade and half trapped.
My body I thought was my tomb, this is where I'm gonna be.
I have no way out, there's no escape. And then to find out
that not only can I escape
but I can come out on the other side,
like a whole different person.
This doesn't take a lifetime.
You can fix you.
In the first three months, I lost 70 pounds.
I was too big to do any kind of rigorous exercise,
I was 15 minutes on a flat slow treadmill,
because that was all I could do.
By the six month mark, I was down 107 pounds.
If you'd told me from 60 plus inch waist to 30 inch waist
in less than two years.
I had to say no way.
I didn't just lose weight, I'm not just thinner,
I'm healthier, completely healthy.
The thing about Dr. Stoll that set him apart
from every other doctor, he sat me down and said,
"Let me write you some recipes"
and him writing those recipes,
he was more willing to write the recipes first
before the prescriptions
and it changed everything.
There are doctors that are waking up,
because you can't deny
the result, I'm just one person,
but there's millions of me out there,
that are experiencing the same results
that we didn't receive on meds.
I look in the mirror now and I think that
we're not talking ten years ago.
We're talking 20 months ago.
And I don't even know that person,
when I see those pictures.
It's a lifestyle. And that's the key thing.
People ask me all the time, so how long are you gonna do this.
And I tell them, planning on living to about
Because I'm never going back, I'm never going back.
After about two weeks the things I noticed was I had
a lot more energy, I could walk a lot further
and I could walk a lot faster.
I dropped a bunch of weight.
My cholesterol dropped like a rock.
Everything seemed to come back into line.
He now rides a bike.
I mean we go for long bike rides.
When I got out of the hospital,
I don't know how many medications I had,
and I'm off all that now.
He walks miles and it's giving Greg back to me.
There's all kinds of diets, but this is a way of life.
Most wives take for granted what a gift a husband is,
and to be able to do those things with their husband,
and I'm telling you, I'm so thankful.
Doctor called me at home
and he says, "Hey, I just got your blood work
back from the lab and I was reviewing your results,
and you are no longer diabetic."
That was really good.
Sorry.
We've had this astonishing experience
that we've lived through
and it's kind of shaken us awake
as far as what's important in life.
That's what so many of us in healthcare want
is to make these changes in peoples' lives.
It's the most effective and powerful way
to treat the broad range of illness
that a primary care doctor confronts.
It's just a easiest thing you can do to have better health.
It's low hanging fruit literally and figuratively.
I did not know how bad I felt, until I felt good.
I'm sure there are times in my life
when I was younger that I felt better,
but there is no time I remember feeling better.
You will lose weight,
you will lose your high blood pressure,
you will lose your diabetes, you will feel better,
you will lose your risk for stroke,
you will lose your risk for dementia,
so there are side effects.
Dr. Esselstyn entered in my life
at the worst time in my life.
And I felt like he was a God send.
My life changed,
it's the single best thing I've ever done, by far.
I believe that my chance
of getting coronary artery disease is zero.
Whole food plant based nutrition
is indeed the answer
to the healthcare crisis in America.
It's all about sustainability of the mind, of the body
and of the planet.
Change doesn't come from the leadership down,
leadership only changes
when people wake up and demand it. Demand that change.
You know today is a different day,
today is a new opportunity
to live the life that you want to live.
Not just the one that you're living,
but the one that you truly really want to live.
Two weeks, three weeks, all you got to do is try it.
There are people in the world that do it for ethical reasons.
There are people that do it for health reasons,
and there are people that do it for environmental reasons.
And ultimately it doesn't matter
why you do it, because it's a win, win, win.
Finding the plant based diet gave me freedom.
Freedom that all the other fad diets and gadgets
and even my doctor didn't give me.
I've been on medicine for over 30 years,
and for the very first time,
I can truly look someone in the eye
and I can say, I can heal you.
Realize that there are people who love you,
who need you to do this,
because they need you in their life as well.
It's the best thing that ever happened to me,
it saved my life, it saved my marriage.
I am very proud of her.
This is progressive medicine, this is correct medicine.
This is where medicine should be.
The vegetables, and the fruits, and the whole grains,
and the beans,
those foods have power that you never imagined.
And It's time to put it to work.
Come on, what's on your plate?