Healthy Lifestyle Solutions with Maya Acosta
The Healthy Lifestyle Solutions podcast is dedicated to empowering everyday women to make healthier lifestyle choices. Host Maya Acosta, a health and wellness educator, has improved her quality of life through a vegan, plant-based lifestyle and other healthy options. After battling various health issues, Maya turned to whole, plant-based foods and experienced a transformation in her health. The podcast motivates and educates vegans, pre-vegans, and plant-curious women looking to adopt a healthier lifestyle. Maya invites health experts in lifestyle medicine to discuss how women can prevent, halt, or reverse chronic conditions. Join us on the journey to a healthier, happier you! IG: https://www.instagram.com/healthylifestylesolutions_/Website: https://www.healthylifestylesolutions.org/
Healthy Lifestyle Solutions with Maya Acosta
373: The Healing Power of Plant-Based Nutrition: Unveiling the Science Behind Disease Reversal | Dr. Michael Klaper
In this enlightening lecture by Dr. Klaper, he delves into the transformative potential of a whole food plant-based diet in preventing and reversing chronic diseases. Dr. Klaper illustrates how dietary choices play a pivotal role in determining our health outcomes and explores the mechanisms through which plant-based nutrition can lead to remarkable improvements in various medical conditions. This lecture serves as a clarion call for both healthcare professionals and individuals to harness the healing power of plant-based eating.
Key Takeaways:
- Food as Medicine: Dr. Klaper emphasizes that the food we consume profoundly impacts our health. Shifting from an animal-based diet to a whole food plant-based diet can prevent and reverse many chronic diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, and autoimmune conditions.
- Reversibility of Disease: One of the key insights is that many chronic diseases, often viewed as irreversible, can be healed through dietary changes. Dr. Klaper shares compelling evidence of individuals who have experienced significant improvements and even complete remission of conditions such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes by adopting a plant-based lifestyle.
- Empowerment through Nutrition: Dr. Klaper empowers healthcare professionals and individuals to recognize the potential of plant-based nutrition in promoting health and well-being. He advocates for a shift in medical practice towards addressing the root causes of disease, which often lie in dietary choices, ultimately paving the way for a healthier and more peaceful world.
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Dr. Michael Klaper 00:00
What a wonderful conference peaceful planet. Boy, if there's anything this planet needs, it's a big double arm full of peace. And in plant based nutrition is a ticket for all of us to become more healthy and for this planet to become more peaceful. So thank you for the invitation to be here. Thank you for putting on this conference. Thank all of you for devoting some of this beautiful day to to opening your heart, your mind, and advancing on your own journey towards towards better health. I'm gonna see if we can get my presentation here. Tonight. Okay. All right. So, what I want to make that go away, excuse me, we are for folks who are not at work who do not disturb here for at least till this evening. Thank you. Okay, don't bother me. I'm doing some righteous work here. And now let's go back to this. Great. Okay, so, so I'm the guy to talk a little bit of science with you. As far as why this works. We it's not enough to just take our word for your eat healthy. Eat a lot of plants, and you're gonna get healthier. Yeah, okay. But we see it. And as the physician, I have to ask why, what are we looking at? Why does a plant based diet make people healthier? So let me share that with you. So you've got even more conviction, as you push that cart down the supermarket aisle or you order your meal in the restaurant, you'll know why dine on whole plant foods really is the best for your body. So what I'm gonna be talking about here is some of the improvements that we see in, in chronic disease. What are we talking about when we talk about a whole food plant based diet, I think all of you know well, but we'll just show you some pictures. To understand why a plant based diet helps. So we have to talk about why the current Western diet is so bad, and so disease producing so we'll drill a little bit on that, then we exactly what happens in the body when we adopt a plant based food stream, and then zero in on two particular diseases, the most common health problems that most folks in this room have to deal with those clogged arteries in the form of atherosclerosis, as well as type two diabetes. And then to take a quick trip through the literature to show you there is a growing body of scientific validation. On so many diseases that we were totally had nothing to do with diet. Well, actually, a plant based diet is the key to reversing so many of these conditions that some of you may be struggling with on this day. So that's going to occupy the next 40 minutes. I learned how the plant based diet can produce these remarkable changes while serving on the staff at True North Hills Center in Santa Rosa, California, about an hour north of San Francisco. I was privileged to be on that staff for almost nine years. And what I saw there changed my whole view of medicine and the human body. The diseases that people bring to TrueNorth are the same diseases that most every family physician who opens the door or the waiting room, plus every emergency room doctor looking at who's waiting to see them every surgeon and surgical outpatient, pick a disease, pick a specialty pharmacy, dentistry, nursing, they're all dealing with the standard Western diseases that most western folks in that diet lifestyle, find themselves struggling with. Most of our patients are true north were either clinically overweight or actually obese. We saw clogged arteries showing up as high blood lipids high blood pressures, angina claudication of leg pain when you're walking, we saw ramp and type two diabetes and inflammatory conditions of every organ in the body, lungs, intestines, joints, immune system. This is Western medicine in the 21st century. This is what all physicians are struggling with now and and it pains me it's it's exquisitely discomforting to know that the solution to these doctors is as close to their patients dinner plates and we're trying through our moving medicine forward initiative to get that message across. So when people came to true north and when they still got into North it's certainly still functioning. We do not do the usual treatment of raising their dosage of insulin and beta blockers and and prednisone. Instead, we give them a diet based on whole plant foods. What does it look like? It looks like this every morning. There's a big pot of oatmeal porridge of Those folks not raising us here. The there's plenty of fruit and sunflower seeds and slivered. Almonds to put on the, on the oatmeal. And every lunch I have a big hearty green salad and, and a nice vegetable filled stew or vegetable soup. There's always big plates of steamed green and yellow vegetables, that and a and a host of hearty main dishes curries and stews and soups and casseroles and no cheese burritos and no oil stir fries, and plenty of food for desert. This is the food stream that we want these folks to run through their body, meal after meal day after day, week after week. This is what does the magic. This is what our body is looking for. And this is the secret sauce if you will, that produces these fabulous clinical improvements in our patients. And what we see is truly astounding and things that I thought never happened happened right before my very eyes. The obesity begins to melt away on day one or doesn't instantly vanish. But folks, especially as the water and bloat leaves their tissues though they'll lose three four pounds in the first couple of days. Now but then it averages to three pounds a week steadily. The blood vessels the arteries begin to relax and dilate a bit that lowers the pressure in the system. So high blood pressure starts going down we can lower the dosage of medication people run inflammation all over the body starts to subside and inflamed joint skin lungs start getting better. I was making rounds one morning a woman had been there for a good couple of weeks. And she had had rheumatoid arthritis and I walked into tears going down her cheeks and I said Good Heavens are you okay? Are you in pain? She said no. This is the first time I've been able to make a fist and 10 years I've never seen my hands work like this. And and again I know medication just healthy plant based food. Constipation. These people have the first good bowel movement in years and it does wonders for their entire outlook, let alone their digestive system. We see eczema acne psoriasis are getting better day after day. You see these plaques of psoriasis that in outpatient medicine takes weeks and months to disappear in days, especially on a water fast you see these plaques fading right before your eyes. And now I've never thought that I would see that. The asthmatic folks stop wheezing so much they stopped using inhalers the migraine headache folks, gee, I haven't had a headache since I've, since I've come through the door here. That's right. And the the sleep becomes more restful. And we find the medications that folks came in with or high blood pressure for insulin for their blood sugar. They're too strong. And the they're standing up and getting lightheaded and passing out because their blood pressure pills are too strong. So I say those words I was told never to say stop your blood pressure medication. And as soon as I said those words, the first time I expected to see a puff of smoke. And the ghost of my internal medicine professor showed up what do you what do you say? Stop medication. Nobody stops blood pressure these electro medication Give me your stethoscope. You're no longer a doctor for transgressing this sacrosanct device? Well, of course no, no puff of smoke happened. And same when I said those same words to my patients with diabetes, stop your insulin, yeah, looked around and no puff of smoke and they didn't didn't eat the insulin anymore. They weren't diabetic. This is disease reversal. I practiced medicine for 30 years before anybody put those two words in a sentence for me that these are reversible diseases. I wish someone had told me that in medical school that hypertension is reversible, that type two diabetes is reversible. It changes everything. And and I'm trying to get that message into the minds of the medical students we talked to before pharmaco sclerosis sets into their brains and
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they think that drugs and surgery are the only treatments for these. These conditions. What are we talking about disease reversal, two things we're talking about remission of clinical symptoms, their joint stop hurting their lung stop waiting, their body gets better, but also their laboratory results that were terribly, too high, too low. They normalized as well. So when we talk about disease reversal, it's not a woowoo, California concept here. We're talking about remission of clinical symptoms in normalizations of laboratory results. And we see this on a consistent basis. So as I became a student of the benefits of plant based nutrition, I began seeing journal articles showing up consistently focused on these nine major conditions. And we'll be visiting them again and, as I said, spend the most time on reversing artery disease and type two diabetes. But all these conditions and we're going to do just a quick hop skip through the literature showing you some of the studies showing how reversible with plant based nutrition these serious serious conditions are. So the question is, why does it work? How does it work? How does a plant based food stream work? Its magic. Well, to understand an automotive analogy might help if you are driving your Honda Civic or some other gardens that has a nice gasoline burning engine in it. And you notice that the gas gauge is saying you need to fill up and you pull into the gas station. But as you pull in to the service station, you notice that the diesel fuel is six cents a gallon cheaper than the gasoline and you say move I could save some money here and you decided from now on when it's time for fill up, I'm gonna fill a two thirds up with gasoline. But the last third on top of diesel fuel and a boy I'm gonna save some money as the years go by surely. Well, diesel fuel is kerosene basically it's oily does not burn cleanly in a gasoline burning engine. And you put mix your winter diesel fuel into your gasoline burning engines gas tank and the results are predictable. You're going to have a whole bunch of black smoke coming out of the exhaust and unburned fuel, you're going to be black carbon deposits kicking up on your spark plugs, the exhaust manifold is going to clog up and the catalytic converter will be fouled. And pretty soon you open the hood and you got the situation this woman is facing. And at this time she in the classic American medical rationale, she reaches the logical condition. My car has developed a disease card and develop a disease that engine malfunction precisely predictably as it will malfunction by putting the wrong fuel in that it was not designed to run up, if you will, there has been a transgression of natural law. The natural law in this case, is that gasoline burning engines are meant to run on gasoline, that's law you transgress that law with kerosene fuels, and there's going to be dysfunction and eventually damage to the machinery. Hmm. Is there an analogy with our body's metabolic engine here move? Well, what is the natural fuel that our bodies are supposed to run on? When I have that question I in my mind consult of my foremost expert and authority on plant based eating Professor Rwanda here. And because basically, we have essentially the same digestive systems that are gorilla and bonobo cousins here, and they're up in a tree shoving leaves and fruit and vegetation into their mouth all day they they live on a high fiber, high carbohydrate, plant based diet. And guess what happens to these folks? Well, what doesn't happen to them is developing clogged arteries. These gorillas in the wild do not develop atherosclerosis, they do not develop Type Two Diabetes, they do not develop ulcerative colitis, they die of trauma and infections and parasites, the that's gorillas life's challenges there, but they don't develop the so called diseases of civilization that we do. So do we take the lesson from these stalwart exemplars of plant based eating and fan eater whole food plant based diet not so much. We get seduced by the salty, sugary, meaty textures in our mouth from the standard Western diet. And so a steady stream of meat and cheese and oil and sugar and processed foods and fried foods goes down in our gullet meal after meal month after month, year after year and our metabolic machinery suffers similar damage. So I wish when I was a medical student some professor some chief resident sat me down and said Listen, before you go out and deal with these river of patients in outpatient clinic here let's talk let's get real about why Mr. And Mrs. America is sitting in front of you overweight, diabetic, hypertensive, clogged up and inflamed. It's from their what they're running through their arteries every four hours. It's from their frickin diet. When you eat a diet based on standard Western fare a bacon eggs for breakfast cheeseburger for lunch, chicken for dinner, ice cream for dessert, and I know not all of you are eating in this style, but Most Americans eat one or more of these kinds of meals once a day. And many of them this is their standard fare. What happens when you eat a meal like this? Well to contrast it if you eat a meal based on whole plant foods like we are suggesting, and you have that nice salad and bowl of vegetable soup and steamed veggies and fruit for dessert, you have a meal like this. And if an hour later, I were to sneak up on you with a needle in a syringe in my hand. And when you weren't looking, I drew five cc's of blood into a glasstop. To let the blood clot, put it in a centrifuge and spin it down and have a look at it, what we would see as the tube on the left here. This is how your blood should look after after a meal. And you can see the serum that rises up to tops crystal clear. You can read newsprint through normal Serum. This is what your blood should look like after you eat a meal. But you have a standard Western meal full of meat and dairy and eggs and oil etcetera. And if an hour after one of these meals, I sneak up on you with a syringe and draw five cc's of blood and spin it down to centrifuge. What I would see is blood that look like this. This cloudy material here this is fat in the blood. The technical term is postprandial lipemia. postprandial means after reading their lipid EMIA is that in the blood, this is fat in the blood that shows up after a fatty meal. And this is basically triglyceride saturated fat and cholesterol it's the fat of the of the animals person ate. Now granted not everybody shows the fat this optically densely, but everybody has a wave of fat that goes through your bloodstream when you eat a fatty meal. How can you not Where else is it gonna go of course, and your blood stays steady for a good five count in five hours. This is koulos classic study. They gave someone a fatty meal at our zero and they drew blood once an hour for six hours. And they took those six blood tubes and put them one after another into an instrument that measures how fatty the blood is getting. Then you can see the blood getting fatter and fatter and fatter takes deliver about five hours to begin begin to clear the fat out of the blood. So bacon and eggs for breakfast keeps your blood fatty all morning the cheeseburger for lunch keeps your blood fatty all afternoon chicken for dinner keeps getting fatty all evening and ice cream for dessert sends you to bed with with your blood filled with fat. And when your blood is running thick with fat, your lipids are getting worse your bad LDL is going up the blood is getting thicker, the red cells start sticking to each other, the blood becomes more of a viscous more thicker, and it's harder to push viscous blood through tiny capillary beds. So oxygen delivery goes down, nutrient delivery goes down. As the fat in the blood goes through the abdominal fat stores it sticks there and abdominal obesity increases. The and this in turn is I'll show you later
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leads to insulin resistance and high blood sugars. And the saturated fats are pro inflammatory, they found inflammatory reactions throughout the body. So for five hours after every fatty meal, your lipids are getting worse, you're getting more obese and inflamed and more insulin resistant meal after meal day after day, month after month, year after year. So I've focused on the fat because it's the most physically apparent that lets you know how long the effect is having on your on your body. But there's more than just fat in that blood if you're eating a standard Western diet. It's a high salt diet. There's salt in the meats and salt in the cheese song a soft assault on the fry salt in the chip salt in the spaghetti sauce, Italian restaurant. It's in the process foods and you can't do anything about it. It's already in these processed foods. And we know of course from long experience that high salt diet penetrates into the walls of the arteries and stiffens them and makes the kidneys retain water that increases the blood volume the both those effects will raise the blood pressure that sets up the person for heart attacks and strokes and congestive heart failure. But also it's come to light in recent years. That high salt diets stimulate th m T helper cells. And these are immune cells that opened the door to autoimmune diseases like lupus. Who knew that a high salt diet invites autoimmune diseases in but we now know that and as a recovering salt a Holic myself I have to find new ways to entertain my tongue with non salty flavorings. So I become adept at using lemon juice and balsamic vinegars and non salty seasonings and pass that along to you. Because you don't want to be in a high salt diet either. Most American Enzi twice as much salt as they should, on a good day. Then there's sugar. Everybody's got a sweet tooth, and we all liked that flavor on her tongue and I'm not talking about a half a teaspoon of sugar in your tea as a flavoring. That's how sweeteners are supposed to be used as a flavoring. I'm talking about eating sugar as a food. When you are eating a doughnut a cupcake up is a coffee cake, a candy bar, you drink a colada, you are flooding your body with grams and grams of fructose maltose dextrose. And the sugar stick to proteins all over your body and like constantly, it's the proteins and the sticky proteins then oxidized in your body heat and produce what's called advanced glycation end product. Don't worry about the name. Remember the acronym these products age you this is these again are the the sugar laden proteins that get oxidized by your body heat or get oxidized in the preparation by making potato chips drop potatoes into hot boiling oil and you're going to create lots of these advanced glycation end products. And, and again, eating sugars you as a food produces these ag E's and tissues throughout the body. You don't want to run this ag e producing reaction in the Crystaline proteins of the lens of your eye is a great way to open the door to cataracts. You don't want to run the a GE reactions in the elastin fibers of your skin. Great way to turn your skin into an old suitcase. And you sure don't want to run the the Ag E reaction on the inner lining of the blood vessels of your brain. And here's why. These are the art brain arteries of two men who died at the same age. The man in the upper panel did not have Alzheimer's dementia. The man down here did have Alzheimer's dementia. And you can see the arteries to this man's brain are thickened and swollen and Dimittis and inflamed. And if you stain for these ag ease you find that these arteries are filled with Alzheimer's disease has a major blood vessel venger vascular component to it. Now Alzheimer's is not something that falls out of a tree on you at age 80. This is 80 years of running the meat and dairy oil and fried foods and sugars in process chemicals through these arteries bringing blood to your brain. It's there's a huge vascular component to Alzheimer's. No one really should get this disease. You look at the blue zone, folks, I hope you've seen Dan Buettner Z TV series. And you see these lovely 100 year old women in in Okinawa and they're laughing and working in the garden and everyone treasures them as members of the society. They asked what aging is supposed to look like. They don't have arteries that look like the man below here because they've taken care of them to their lives. So I paused here to just to emphasize that vegan junk foods, all the sugary snacks and the salty snacks and the oily snacks even though they're vegan. And they're plant based or they originally came from plants to oh, I'm eating I'm vegan, I'm healthy. No, not necessarily. This is why we're using those terms whole food plant based diet. You want foods that you could recognize if they were growing in the garden. Oh, there's a cucumber Oh, there's a strawberry. That's what you want to be eating. Nothing on this slide here is a whole food plant based food even though it's all vegan and this is what trouble looks like without animal products. So that said most people and in this country certainly most Americans that come to their doctors are not vegans. There's a piece of animal flesh in the middle of every meal that they eat. If there isn't, you call the waiter over and today where's my protein? And and as a result the again the bacon and breakfast the burger at lunch the chicken for dinner? What does this put through the bloodstream after every meal I showed you the how long the fats effect? Well, what's in that blood besides that? Well, I'm gonna quickly run through this. These nine issues with meat. I know time is of the essence here. First of all, no one eats raw meat the very act of grilling the burger broiling the steak frying the chicken oxidizes the cholesterol in the animal's muscle, and it's the oxidized cholesterol particles that go into the walls of the arteries setting off atherosclerotic plaque formation. You boil that state grill that burger you're going to be oxidizing the glycogen and nucleic acids in the animal muscle that turns in turn makes these reactive aldehydes like AquaLine gland so these are mutagenic they damage your gene These are the genes in your DNA they call forth the enzymes in your cells that do all your biochemistry. Well, these these aldehydes damage your genes after every meal Why eat a food that floods through your tissues and damages the cells in your the genes in your cells, new 5g See this is a sialic acid that only animals make and it sets off inflammatory reactions throughout the body and our paleo friends are given themselves a shot in New 5g see with every meal endotoxin comes from the gut bacteria in the in the carcasses the animals that spill out during the processing at the meatpacking plant and the bacteria coat every steak and chop and chicken breast that leaves the meatpacking plant and, and in the in the meat case at your supermarket the ultraviolet light shines down kills these bacteria their cell walls break apart and release this nasty chemical called endotoxin makes your blood clot depresses your heart releases histamine releases free radical really damaging stuff and makes your gut leaky lid and lets food proteins leak into your bloodstream. And endotoxin is heat stable grilling the burger does not carry the endotoxin and boiling hot dog doesn't give you the endotoxin and again our paleo and our keto friends are giving themselves a shot of endotoxin three times a day. T Mao is a molecule that the gut bacteria that grow in response to meat and eggs in the diet. They produce this molecule that drives cholesterol into your artery walls.
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Grilling that burger from boiling the steak inevitably produces carcinogenic cancer causing chemicals that smear on the stomach wall giving gastric cancer smear on the colon will give colon cancers when you eat meat and all the amino acids flit up into your liver. Your liver responds by putting out a surge of IGF one insulin like growth factor one. This is one of the most powerful growth promoting hormones in the body. And it's great if you're an 11 year old growing girl or a 12 year old boy. But if you are an adult woman with an early breast cancer, or you are a guy with a big prostate and some malignant cells in the middle of it, the last thing you want is a diet that makes you walk around with high levels of IGF one but that's exactly what a meat based diet does. He mired makes red meat red it also increases the risk of strokes and cancers and it's time to get into the mechanism. And finally the animals being fattened for slaughter in the feedlot are fed bushels of grains that are sprayed with herbicides and pesticides. They're given antibiotics and growth promoters to make them fatter. They drink water with lead and cadmium and mercury. All of these toxins accumulate in the animal's muscle. And when you bite into that burger, that chicken breast and reading all the bio concentrated contaminants that animal consume. This is what floods through the the tissues with every meal I call it the postprandial red tide. And, and it's these just some of the components. I could spend two lectures going through this list. It's a fatty tide. It's a salty tied to sugary tide. It's antigenic, so immune reactions, it's full of phosphates and sulfates that produce acids in the body. It damages your genes it sets off cancer as it clogs your arteries sets off inflammation, disrupts enzyme reactions throughout the body. This is what the a meat based diet surges through all your tissues hour after hour. No wonder people come to the doctor overweight diabetic hypertensive, clogged up and inflamed. By putting this diesel fuel if you will, in their gasoline burning engines. You eat three times a day, that's these kinds of meals, it's over 1000 times a year you are flooding the red tide through your tissues. And the food effects over time equal the health effects. Within minutes of eating anything. Molecules of bad food are flowing through every cell in your body where your DNA lies and folded and your genes are exposed. And the food molecules wash over your DNA and they play your genes like a piano and they turn genes on they turn genes off they induce enzymes they shut enzymes down. Every meal brings in not only nutrition and nutrients, it brings in information and every meal changes us on a genetic molecular level. And you don't need to be a geneticist to understand that the genes can be turned on by this broiled steak with all the endotoxin and new VITC and ag ease and all of that the genes going to be turned on by these toxic molecules which we know are the genes that drive aging and inflammation and autoimmune disease and cancers. Those genes turned on by this boil piece of animal must So are going to be a totally different set of genes that are those that can be turned on by this green salad. And that floods the tissues with these phytonutrients that are antioxidants that are stabilizing that promote tissue repair that promote membrane stabilization. They give the chemical message to your tissues. Down, everything's okay, this is what you're supposed to be running out. Your genes may load the gun, but your diet, your lifestyle, pull the trigger, you may have a genetic propensity towards a disease in your family. But whether that disease actually manifest in your body, largely not completely, there are other factors but largely depends on what you're flowing through your cells every four hours, month after month, year after year. And to see how dramatic this effect is, this this is a genetic readout of a man with early stage prostate cancer, this left hand panel when the prostate cancer is active. Now all these red dashes here, these are active oncogenes, these are genes that promote cancer growth. And you can see how many of them are bright red and actively promoting his prostate cancer. Man goes on a plant based diet, and week after week of salads and soups and steamed veggies and unhealthy colorful fruits, etc. And six months later, they do another biopsy, same man, same prostate, same genes, but look and see how many of these red angry oncogenes have now turned green have been silenced. This is epigenetics at work. This is just because you have these genes is Are they active or not? That's determined largely by the food that you eat. So this should be empowering to you and every doctor should be sharing this with their patients, you have the power to change your very genetic expression, given the foods that you eat. And again, Professor Rwanda doesn't have to deal with all these red angry oncogenes. Food changes us in two ways, either directly the way new 5g See turns on inflammation, but also the food we eat, changes the microbes in our gut and they will change us by their byproducts of neurotransmitters and inflammatory mediators. Food is so powerful, we use it as a recreational activity but the truth is, it's a tremendous determiner of what we are seeing as far as health goes. And I tell the medical students when you open the door in the to the exam room in the patient's sitting there and the man with chest pain from his angina, the lady wheezing with from her asthma the man with diabetes injecting insulin, the woman and grieving over acne scarred skin. You asked the professor's what are the causes of these diseases, you run into two words who etiology unknown we don't know the cause of high blood pressure. We don't know the cause of type two diabetes. And it's true. We've not teased out every last genetic enzyme interaction. There's a lot to learn in that world. But to say that we have no idea what is driving these diseases. I think it's a gross misrepresentation and is ethically unfair to the patients to say the least, the food effects over time equal to health effects, and yet, it's never mentioned in medical education. We're trying to change that through moving medicine forward. So of these conditions here, I want to focus on a couple of them. But before we do, let's talk about how a plant based diet actually works. Its effect why does it work? How does it work? Well, here we are, the man or woman is still eating the standard American diet the burgers and buffalo wings and pepperoni pizzas. And finally they get out of the shower morning they look catch a glimpse of themselves in the mirror, and they don't like what they see. They don't like what they feel. They don't like their medicine cabinet full of pills. They don't like their big belly they don't like where their body is going. And they reach that point like the heroin addict who's found themselves on the bathroom floor too many Sunday mornings finds I got I got to change something here and they go to that Doc tell me what to do. I got I can't do this anymore. What what's my first step and physicians like we have some number of them here know just what to say. Well first square one Dr whole food plant based diet stuff the animal Polish stuff the processed food, you want eat only things that grew out of the garden and the person says okay Doc, I'm committed boots in like they say in New Zealand, and and he doesn't and the salads and the soups and steamed veggies now make up the bulk of what he's eating. Look what happens. First of all, this constant stream of red tide Marauder toxic molecules gone. There is respect every cell every tissue Your body knows how to heal itself. Do you know you have DNA editing enzymes, proteins that go up and down your DNA strands looking for damaged genes and mismatches, they know how to repair your DNA. But they can't do that amazing repair job if every four hours you're running meat and oil and dairy and, and salt and sugar and processed foods through
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it that that Forte's this wonderful healing mechanism that we have. Well, now this cellular healing can begin. And now look at what happens instead of the red tide flowing through the tissues. Look what happens. First of all, it's a high water content diet, all the soups and the salads and the steamed veggies and fruits, the full water. And so with every meal, now there's this surge of water that goes to your tissues. And it really it flushes out impurities flushes out all oxidized starches and junk proteins. It's like taking your cells to the carwash and and you wind up cleaner on a cellular level. And but not only that, with all the water in the blood, the blood becomes less viscous, it's flows more easily. And more and less viscous blood can now serve through the title capillary beds, bringing oxygen and nutrients to the tissues. And, and coupled with the less viscous blood is the fact that all these dark green leafy vegetables, you're now eating increased production of nitric oxide in the walls of the arteries. And that produces a very subtle dilation of the arteries as they relax and open up. Well this not only lowers blood pressure, but thanks to a law in physics called Boyle's law, that says that even just a small increase in the diameter of the blood vessel means a big increase in blood flow goes up by the fourth power, the increase of the radius. So now there's this huge surge of blood of let's discuss blood flowing through all your capillary beds in your brain, your heart, your muscles, your kidneys, that alone is healing. When you go from an animal based diet to a plant based diet, you're pulling out the arachidonic acid This is the major molecule that drives inflammation throughout the body, poof, gone. Now all the fats in your diet are coming from plant oils, and many of them are in the Omega three category that are anti inflammatory. So you've changed the entire inflammatory balance and all the tissues of your body. Were first it was a seething cauldron of inflammation now is a sedate green pasture with blue skies and butterflies. As far as inflammation goes, all the fried foods and sugars produce a lot of free radicals is RLS here well all these colorful fruits and vegetables are full of antioxidants that quench to free radicals so the oxidative damage in the tissue subside. Change the food stream, you're going to change the microbes in your gut. If you're eating meat and eggs, you are fostering the growth it's a really nasty pathogenic microbes from the bacteroides family will pull out the meat stop feeding those guys. And now you're putting in the beans and lentils and chickpeas and the greens and the fruits. And now you're going to promote the growth of the Prevotella microbes. These are much friendlier fellas, and their byproducts are anti inflammatory and they stabilize the cells instead of promoting cancer. When you stop eating the cholesterol of other animals, your own cholesterol is going to get better so blood lipids get better and chances of promoting plaque formation goes down. Your skin is going to change the fans in your diet works their way out to your skin oils. And guys who eat a lot of meat, find their body odors reminiscent of the Green Bay Packer locker room at halftime. The well many you guys have come to me and said gee daggers and said when plantbased my wife says I don't smell anymore. Yes, that's true as one of the things that happens. It's another validation of what is changing in your body. hormone levels normalized. You know, the cows in the dairy are now all pregnant. They're sucking the milk off. pregnant cows didn't used to be that way. But they can't afford to have their best milkers go off their line for nine months while they're carrying their cows. So now they've genetically modified the cows. So they're they're still carrying their next calf but now they're still given milk and they're sucking the milk off. So the milk is full of estrogens and these are not the puny little phyto estrogens and soy these this is the estrogen estradiol s trial pregnant dial progesterone. These are official mammalian estrogens that drive breast lump growth and women prostate cancers in men will stop the dairy and prostate and hormone levels normalized kidney function gets better. high protein diets you A no not to yay, as far as your kidneys go, high protein diets are stressful to the kidneys, all those amino acids slam into the filter membranes and it puts them in a state of what's called hyperfiltration. And and that is the months and years goodbyes leads to kidney failure. The asthmatic folks don't we So Western, their lung mucus gets thinner. white blood cell counts go down for good reason not from from disease, but their white cells who can just eat up germs more efficiently. These are just a modicum of the changes that happen in all the tissues of the body. And if the students asked me, without what changes in your body, when I go from an animal based diet to a plant based diet, in a word, what changes everything changes it you are and the birth is an entirely different metabolic creature, every pig pick a parameter, whether it's their oxidative stress, their inflammatory markers, blood viscosity, everything changes. No wonder we as the ship starts metabolically writing itself, how we see these wonderful improvements in these conditions. So I could spend two lectures just going through each of these organ systems. Talking about the the improvements on a plant based diet, where you get enough protein Absolutely, there's plenty of protein in the beans and peas and chickpeas and lentils and seeds and nuts. A day of eating these kinds of foods can easily give you a good 80 grams of protein. Protein deficiency really should not be a problem. You want extra protein have another homeless sandwich or another scoop of lentil stew. Silver we're getting to the end and I may not be able to get through all of this. I was going to drill down on on how the plaques will melt away. This is what usually happens in America 1000 times a day Americans drop with the dead with heart attacks. And their artery linings are getting damaged from the from the
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from the from the cooked meats and the fried foods and the fryer oils and the uric acid etc. And the oxidized cholesterol that I mentioned from cooking the animal muscle it gets into the wall of the artery and and the plaque is produced. Most cardiologists say Oh, this is relentlessly progressive. Once you get angina, there's nothing but a stent or bypass for you, because that's what they see. And God forbid they actually talk to their patients about changing their diet, but they don't ever do that. And so yeah, all their patients need stents and bypasses, but actually can be reversible diseases. Dr. Esselstyn has made very clear and remarkable study that he did, he took those 200 Men, every one of them were all clogged up. They all had angina they had they had heart attacks, they all had stents. These were all severe vascular disease patients, put them on a whole food plant based diet and lots of green vegetables and over 40 and he washed him for four years. During those four years statistically, 60 of these 200 Men should have had a major adverse cardiac event, a heart attack of stroke, etc. None of them after four years had any one of these events. And the folks who had bad chest pain, angina and walking. Nine out of 10 of them angina improved or went away. This is so profound every cardiologist is a stop depresses tell me more about this, but we hear crickets from their community unfortunately. Love to green vegetables he wants you to eat because the green vegetables seep into the wall of the arteries neutralize the free radicals, the foam cells making up the plaque they out, migrate and leave and the plaques get smaller and smaller and smaller. And the endothelial lining reestablished itself not by magic but because the bone marrow is constantly putting out showers of stem cells that re upholster the artery walls. And these you've probably seen this classic angiogram This is the artery in a man's heart left anterior descending artery. It's filled with with angiography dye, the entire dye column should be about this wide all the way down. But this red hidden portion here this is these are atherosclerotic plaques encroaching into the blood flow channel. He had severe angina when he walked, did not want statins couldn't be bypassed were whole food plant based diet, month after month of salads and soups and steamed veggies. The plaques melt away and 29 months later, this artery turns into this artery. Same on same patient, same artery. Look at the reversibility of this disease. Absolutely stunning. little balsamic vinegar In dilates the arteries of and again, police's law kicks in, and you wind up getting perfusion scans. This is a heart scan, read has good blood flow, you can see how choked off the blood flow is here. Two weeks on a plant based diet, the arteries relax, push those law kicks in. And this perfusion scan turns into this perfusion scan this is how quickly you can get this kind of response. And, and saw this study in 1977, a man with severe angina went on a plant based diet six months later, he's climbing mountains in the Lake District, New England. This is how profound and quickly a plant based diet can exert its beneficial effects. And arteries all over the body open up much, much to the most of the delayed of people at home. So just a quick literature survey, there's getting to be a vast literature documenting the reversibility of these diseases with plant based diet, high blood pressure, heart failure, kidney failure, they can all improve with a whole food plant based diet when you stop injuring them every four hours, and forces the doctor DOE to learn this lovely skill called D prescribing you got to these drugs are now too strong for the patients and gotta get them off their blood pressure pills and their statins. And there's an art to doing that. That lifestyle doctors know. And Dr. chollas know well how to do this. Anyone would like to my four page handout that I give to all my patients on healthy eating. Go to my website, Dr. klapper.com, go to answers and download the hill supporting eating plan. Dr. Cholas have this link here. Diabetes, same way. In 1927, Dr. Sweeney at Yale showed the cause of type two diabetes, people think ooh, sugar, sugar, don't eat sugar. That's true. If you have diabetes, you don't eat too much sugar. But that's not the cause of the high blood sugars. The problem is the fat in the diet. And it was showed by this study, he took two groups of medical students one he put on a high carbohydrate diet for two days. The only thing he let them eat. Were white sugar, Candy pastries, white bread, baked potato syrup, bananas, raisin oatmeal, a high carbohydrate diet. After 48 hours, two days of eating that high carbohydrate food he gave me did a glucose tolerance test he gave him 100 grams of glue glucose to drink. And two hours later check their blood sugar. If everything's functioning normal, the blood sugar should be back down in the 100 110 range, the non diabetic range. And indeed after eating all that sugar for two days, these young men students, the vast majority of them were back in normal blood sugar range. But if the other group, you put on a high fat diet for two days, the only thing they ate was olive oil, butter mayonnaise with egg yolk, and 20% cream. Two days later, he gave them that 100 grams of glucose and every one of them had elevated blood sugars, they all have went in the diabetic range. It's the fat clogging up the insulin receptors that caused the problem, keep your blood fatty all day, and the fat oozes into your blood as intramyocellular lipid oozes into your muscles. And what happens. And this is not theoretical. Here's what it looks like under the microscope. This is striated muscle in your arm. And this black stuff, this is fat and the muscle cells should not be there. under the electron microscope again, fat and the muscle cells should not be there. And what it does is clog up the insulin receptors on the inside is a simplified version of it. And if you happen to have and there's getting to be a literature supporting this, but if you happen to have an obese abdomen that's making things worse, because the fat in the abdomen is putting out these inflammatory molecules and inflammatory cytokines. And it's a real thing obesity related inflammation. People say well, I'm obese, but that's your problem, Doc I'm I'm body positive and don't talk about my weight because you're fat shaming. And that's a whole issue. And I honor the difficulty of that. But the but the issue is obesity is a state of inflammation and the inflammatory markers interfere with the insulin receptors in the outside. No wonder so many obese people develop Type Two Diabetes. It's a reversible disease. You go on a plant based diet you burn the fat in the muscle cells and the cytokines go away and people improve. We all have patients like Jim who shakes his diabetes we get rid of the diabetes happens. Obesity melt away the students mostly fiber and water and inflammatory diseases get better again there's a whole literature autoimmune diseases get To better like lupus, if you have lupus get Dr. Brooke Golders book, good by autoimmune disease. Learn how she reversed it on a plant based diet. Crohn's disease and colitis gets better as well. Asthma gets better psoriasis and other skin conditions. And just medical school never mentions this we just blow right past it, what drug what surgery? Disease reversal is where healing begins. And the doctors Chawla here know all about it.
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So I urge you to take advantage of this brilliant guidance that you're going to get in their program. There are plant based dieticians all over Houston who will also help you get on the right plant based journey. So it's the most powerful modality that any physician can wield. It beats any drug or surgery that they're ever going to learn about. People do change despite the cynicism of my profession. So I mean, at the end, they say once you look behind the curtain, you can't pretend you don't know what's behind the curtain. And when I go talk to the medical students as part of moving medicine forward, I said it's it's the food or patients or eating. I asked him a provocative question, knowing how reversible these diseases are that you're going to spend your majority of your career treating, want to heal these patients who just want to manage their chronic disease, want to heal these people and get real about why they're sitting in front of you doctor from what they're pouring through their arteries every four hours. And I'm considering me to scout from the frontlines sending the message back to the troops. It's the food. It's been the food oh Lord. And that's what moving medicine for it is trying to get across because otherwise the doctors like the blind men and the elephant and each specialist is treating their own little disease. But the truth is, they're all treating the same disease. They're all treating their patients diet, and a plant based diet will deliver true health. So last slide. A new era in healing is open to all of us and it begins with recognizing the power the foods on our plate. The plant base wave is breaking up, line up your surfboard, start eating plant based. Healers in this room start utilizing the power plant based nutrition. Medicine will get fun, your patients will get healthy, and this whole world will become more peaceful. So thank you for the invitation. Thanks for your attention.