- [Announcer] Support for the Preventive Medicine Lecture Series is provided by Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, the Wright Center, and valued donors.

- [Narrator] Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine in historic Downtown Scranton in partnership with WVIA and the Wright Center present the Preventive Medicine Lecture Series, featuring Dr. Michael A. Klaper.

Disease Reversal with a Plant-Based Diet.

(gentle music) - Hello, everyone.

We're so glad to have you here.

My name is Julie Byerley, and I have the honor and privilege to be the President of Geisinger College of Health Sciences and the Dean of Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine.

Dr. Klaper is an internationally recognized teacher and speaker on diet and health.

Dr. Klaper served as the Director of the Institute on Nutrition, Education, and Research from 1992 to 2015, where he conducted a study that focused on people who ate a completely plant-based diet.

He practiced acute care medicine also in New Zealand and served on the staff of TrueNorth Health Center, which is a nutritionally-based medical clinic that specialized in therapeutic fasting and health improvement through a whole-food, plant-based diet.

In addition to his clinical practice, Dr. Klaper is a devoted educator of physicians and other healthcare professionals about the importance of nutrition in clinical practice.

He has produced numerous videos, articles, and webinars for both scientific journals and, of course, the popular press as well.

Dr. Klaper contributed to the making of two PBS television programs, one "Food For Thought," and the award-winning movie "Diet for a New America."

He currently serves on the advisory board for the Plantrician Project and the International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention.

Dr. Klaper once said that practicing primary care medicine has taught him many things, but chief among them is that health comes from healthy living.

And tonight, he will talk with us about healthy living and how to make choices that improve our health and wellbeing.

Thank you.

Dr. Klaper.

(audience applauding) - Well, thank you, Dr. Byerley.

Thanks to everyone at Geisinger for inviting me here, Dr. Naismith, Dr. Byerley, and the entire family at this noble institution.

And thank all of you for coming out on this lovely Scranton evening in the springtime.

I've been a primary care physician for the past 50 years.

Boy, they sure went by fast.

And for the past 35 to 40 years, I've been using whole-food, plant-based nutrition to reverse the most serious and lethal diseases that physicians deal with on a regular basis, clogged arteries, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and a host of inflammatory diseases.

And for the past several years, I've been trying to communicate this very powerful reality to young medical students and young physicians before they go out into the world to practice medicine and while they are still getting their training in medical school before, what I call, pharmaco sclerosis sets into their brains that they think that drugs and surgery are the only treatments for the diseases they are seeing.

As Dr. Byerley mentioned, in the midpoint of my career, I spent eight years on the medical staff of TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, California, about an hour north of San Francisco.

And at TrueNorth, America comes in all its infirmary-ridden diseases.

Here, they bring the standard Western diseases.

Most of them are overweight, if not clinically obese.

We see clogged arteries manifesting as angina and small strokes, as well as elevated blood lipids, high blood pressure.

We see rampant type 2 diabetes and a host of inflammatory diseases affecting every organ system, lungs, heart, joints, immune system, et cetera.

This is Western medicine in the 21st century.

No matter what specialty a physician goes into, pediatrics, internal medicine, emergency medicine, gastroenterology, rheumatology, orthopedics, anesthesiology, any of them, when they look in the waiting room who's waiting to see them, this is the disease spectrum that they're gonna have to be dealing with.

At TrueNorth, people would come in with these diseases and instead of increasing the dosage of beta blockers and insulin, which was our usual go-to response, instead, we put them on a diet based of whole plant foods.

Morning would be oatmeal with fruit for breakfast, and then lunches and dinners would be colorful salads, hearty vegetable soups, big plates of steamed green and yellow vegetables, and a host of colorful delicious main dishes, stews and curries and lasagnas and casseroles and no-oil stir fries.

And people are encouraged to eat all they want.

There's no portion control, no calorie counting, et cetera.

And the responses we would see in people's bodies were nothing short of spectacular.

They would come to the clinic and stay there for a couple weeks, eat these meals day after day after day, and within days, the obesity begins to melt away.

We see the weight drop showing up on the scale.

Their arteries begin to dilate and open up.

That lowers their blood pressure.

We can start reducing the medications they're on for high blood pressure.

It's an anti-inflammatory diet.

They notice, "Gee, doc, this is first time I've been able "to move my fingers without pain in years."

Their joints hurt less.

They have their first good bowel movement they've had in years, and that certainly brightens up their outlook on life in general.

(audience laughing) Type 2 diabetes starts getting better and better.

We reduce the dosages of insulin and metformin that they are on.

Happy to get off those.

The folks with the eczema and the psoriasis know that their skin starts to clear up.

The asthmatic folks wheeze less.

They use less inhalers.

And everyone's sleeping better in general.

And we see transformations, like Emily here, one of Dr. Fuhrman's original patients, on the same kind of plan.

And she started plant-based eating like this.

She was on two medicines for high blood pressure and 30 units of insulin.

11 months of soups and salads of steamed veggies and casseroles and chilies, et cetera, turned this Emily into this Emily.

Normal blood pressure, normal blood sugar, off her medications.

I tell the medical students, "Isn't this why you're going into medicine?

"What greater gift could you give your patients "than to help them make this transformation "so they don't need you anymore?"

I tell my patients, "I wanna see you in two places, "two places only, on the bicycle path "and in the health food store buying your tofu.

"Other than that, I don't wanna see you.

"Go live your life.

"Do not be a professional medical patient."

And Emily certainly personifies that.

So I'm telling you that a whole-food, plant-based diet can reverse these fearsome powerful diseases that take up the majority of every doctor's daily work schedule, as well as costing this nation trillions of dollars in band-aid medicine, trying to repair the damage that is inflicted by these conditions.

I'm telling you a plant-based diet will reverse these conditions.

The topic for this evening is exactly how does it do that, and why does it do that?

And I wanna make this very clear and very evident.

Now, one thing that should be clear to all of us is the damage done inherently by a diet based on what most Americans eat.

These are representative of the standard Western diet.

Not every person eats every meal like this, but this food permeates the Western food stream.

And it's not just Americans, the Canadians, the Australians, the Brits, anyone who's eating in the Western style.

More than just fat in that blood, even though we're focusing on that, but it's a high-salt diet.

Salt in the meat, salt in the cheese, salt in the fries, salt in the chips.

And the salt stiffens the arteries, raises blood pressure.

And actually, now, we're finding out high-salt diets trigger lupus and autoimmune diseases.

So a high-salt diet is not our friend, neither is eating sugar as a food.

Not a half a teaspoon of maple syrup in your tea.

That's a flavoring.

That's okay.

I'm talking about eating sugar as a food.

When you eat a cupcake, a donut, drink a cola drink, eat a chocolate bar, you're eating sugar as a food.

It was never meant to be eaten as a food.

And when you eat that, grams and grams of fructose and dextrose and maltose flood your tissues, they stick to proteins all over your body, and your body heat turns it into what's called advanced glycation end products that damage proteins all over the body.

The proteins in your eye can become opaque, giving cataracts.

The glycation end products attach to the elastin fibers in your skin, turn your skin into an old suitcase.

But then, once you add meat to the diet, a whole new level, whole new tier of marauding molecules that cause damage throughout the body.

I won't have time to go through all of these.

But cooking the animal muscle creates oxidized cholesterol that works its way into the artery walls, opening the door to plaque formation.

Cooking the nucleic acid produces aldehydes that damage your genes.

It's mutagenic.

Neu5Gc is in all meat products.

It sets off inflammation throughout the body.

The gut bacteria from the slaughtered animals coats the meat that's leaving the slaughterhouse.

And that meat, those bacteria break down into stuff called endotoxin that makes your gut leaky.

Eating lots of meat and eggs makes the bacteria in your gut produce trimethylamine oxide that further damages the artery walls.

Cooking animal muscle creates cancer-causing amines that rub on the colon wall and the stomach wall, giving cancer to those organs.

When you eat high-protein diets, like meat, the liver puts out this hormone, IGF-1, that stimulates growth all over the body.

And if you're a woman with an early breast cancer or a guy with a big prostate with malignant cells there, that's the last thing you want is a diet that makes you walk around with high IGF-1 levels.

This is what floods through the body.

I call it the postprandial red tide.

Postprandial means after eating.

So this is the red tide that sweeps through every tissue in the body after every standard Western meat-based meal, but also has the dairy and the oils and the sugars and the high temperature byproducts.

And the red tide, it's a fatty tide.

It's a salty tide.

It's a sugary tide.

It's antigenic.

It sets off immune reactions.

It's full of phosphates and sulfates that turn into acid that your bones have to neutralize in your kidneys.

It's mutagenic.

It damages your genes.

It's carcinogenic.

It sets off cancers.

It's atherogenic.

It sets off plaque formation in artery walls.

It's certainly pro-inflammatory, makes all the inflammatory reactions worse.

And it disrupts enzyme reactions in all the cells of the body.

This is the reality of the red tide that Americans and Canadians and all Westerners inflict on their body with every meal, and it inflicts its damage for hours.

And if you eat three times a day over the course of a 365-day year, that's over 1,000 times a year, you are flushing the red tide through your tissues.

So, how does healing happen?

Well, the owner of that body comes to a lecture like this and gets the message.

And at that point, the light goes on.

And the person reaches a point where, "I gotta do something.

"I gotta change something here."

They're tired of looking in the mirror, seeing themselves obese and in pain.

And it's not a matter of just obesity.

But just, "I'm tired of my sore joints, my skin broken out.

"I'm tired of getting short of breath when I walk.

"I'm tired of getting a lousy night's sleep.

"I'm tired of having to run to the bathroom "every 10 minutes.

"I'm tired of the way my body's working.

"I gotta change something."

And they hear about a whole-food, plant-based diet, and they decide to make the change.

As soon as you or your patient or the person makes that commitment, and they jump onto the plant-based train, as they say in New Zealand, boots in, man.

They just make the commit.

Let's just do this.

When that happens, and the food stream changes from an animal-based diet to a plant-based diet, here is what happens.

We must not underestimate the power of that one move.

And you have it in your hands to do.

First of all, here is the red tide marauders.

Here is what flushes through all our tissues, all our cells when we're eating the Western diet with every meal.

As soon as the person says, "I'm done.

"I'm a plant-based eater from this point on," the first thing that happens and the most powerful is all these marauding molecules that are damaging so much of the tissues, they're gone.

The onslaught stops.

There is time.

There is respite.

There's time for healing to happen.

Every cell, every tissue in your body knows how to heal itself, but it can't do it if, every four hours, the red tide is sloshing through the cells and damaging membranes and damaging enzyme systems.

Healing can't happen.

But as soon as we are putting a plant-based food stream through the body, healing can happen.

First of all, this is a high water content diet.

All the soups and the salads and the steamed veggie, full of water.

So you're eating a lot of water.

That water gets into your bloodstream.

Good things happen.

First of all, it flushes through the cells.

With every meal, flushes of water wash through your tissues, like taking your cells to the car wash. And a lot of the molecular debris, the oxidized starches and things that build up in the cells, whew, they get flushed out of there.

You are cleaner on a cellular level.

But that water also has a profound effect on the blood itself.

It makes the blood less viscous.

It flows more easily.

There's more of a higher water content.

When you eat a fatty meal, you eat that cheeseburger or that fried chicken, the fat in the beef and the chicken sticks to your red blood cells.

They become stickier, and your blood becomes more viscous, thicker, harder to force viscous blood through tiny capillary beds, so you need a higher pressure to do that.

That's one reason why people get high blood pressure after a fatty meal.

Well, that's the opposite of that now.

All the green vegetables you're now eating increase the amount of nitric oxide in the walls of the arteries.

And nitric oxide causes a dilation.

It causes the arteries to open up, just a little bit.

It's subtle, just a millimeter.

But you'll see in a minute how much that makes a difference.

Because now that slightly dilated artery, well, first of all, it lowers the blood pressures, you can start getting folks off their medications, but also that increases the blood flow to the capillary beds.

Now, this less viscous, more free-flowing blood filled now with oxygen and nutrients surges through the capillary beds all over the body, in your muscles, your nerves, your brain.

It brings a rejuvenating flood to all your tissues after every meal, as opposed to what the red tide was doing.

When you pull out the animal fat and plug in plant foods, you're pulling out most of the arachidonic acid.

And this is the main substrate for a primary mover of inflammation in the body, primary driver, prostaglandin 2.

When you pull out the arachidonic acid, prostaglandin 2 decreases in the tissues, and now all the fats are coming from plant oils.

And some of those plant oils are in the omega-3 family with an anti-inflammatory property.

So you've changed the entire inflammatory balance in all the tissues in your body, in your nerve tissue and the brain and the muscles and your liver, et cetera.

So it's a different inflammatory state, much less inflamed all over the body.

And because all these colorful green and yellow vegetables are full of antioxidant molecules that donate electrons and they quench free radicals.

Free radicals are atoms that are short of an electron.

And they are molecular atomic terrorists.

They rip electrons off any passing molecule, including your cell membranes, your DNA.

You don't want free radicals loose in your cells.

But cooking animal muscle, frying anything, eating these processed foods unleashes free radicals.

These AGEs are teeming with free radicals, and they cause a lot of oxidative damage in your body.

If you change the food stream going through the gut, you're gonna change the bacteria that live in that gut.

If you're eating meat and eggs, you are promoting the growth of microbes from the Bacteroidetes species.

These are nasty bugs.

Their byproducts increase inflammation in the gut wall.

They increase gut permeability.

They set off inflammation, like colitis and Crohn's disease, and they make the gut more leaky, so food proteins start leaking out in the bloodstream.

Not friendly guys the Bacteroidetes.

Well, when you pull out the meat, and now you're putting that healthy plant-based foods with all these lovely plant fibers, all the resistant starches from the beans and the peas and the legumes and all the fiber from the whole grains and the vegetables, now, you're gonna pull out the meat and eggs, so the Bacteroidetes species start to recede, and these healthy fibers are now going to promote the growth of Prevotella microbes.

They're much friendlier guys.

They put out anti-inflammatory molecules.

They'll suppress inflammation in the gut wall.

They are anti-cancer in their byproducts.

And the Prevotella also put out byproducts, molecules like serotonin and norepinephrine and dopamine.

These are neurotransmitters that get into your brain, make you feel better.

And many people report that, "Gee, I went plant-based.

"I'm just feeling better, feeling more positive."

That's not a placebo effect.

That is a gift from the new microbiome organisms you have in your gut that are sending feelgood molecules up to your brain.

Hormone levels.

If you are a cheese eater, a dairy eater, you should know the cows in the dairies are all pregnant these days.

Unlike in the '50s and the '60s when I grew up, the cows are all pregnant.

And so they're sucking milk off these large pregnant bovine.

And so there's estrogens in the milk and in the cheese made from them.

It gives women breast lumps and fibroids.

Gives guys man boobs and prostate cancers.

Well, when you pull that out, and you realize you're not a baby calf, hormone levels go back down to normal, where they belong, so does cancer risk go down.

High protein diets are not friends of your kidneys.

All those amino acids in the meat slam into the glomeruli in the kidneys, and they force them to go into the state called hyperfiltration that, when sustained over time, is very damaging to the kidneys, opens the door to chronic kidney failure.

The asthmatic folks know that their mucus in their lungs are less viscous, so they wheeze less.

And people's white counts start going down, not because they've developed aplastic anemia or some immune problem, but when you're not pranging your bone marrow with endotoxin three times a day, the white count goes down to 2,500, 3,000.

That's what it's supposed to be, not 5,000 from the current diet.

And month after month of this food stream creates tremendous changes in your own body that turn out to be beneficial if you're trying to live a long, healthy life.

I could spend two lectures on going to every one of these organ systems and how they benefit from change to a plant-based diet.

We don't have time to do that.

But over the years, as I've become a student of the effects of plant-based diet on the body and medical conditions, it's clear that there is now a growing literature, and I will share this with you towards the end of the talk, of the major diseases that physicians spend their time treating.

All of them have been shown to respond positively to a whole-food, plant-based diet.

And I'll share some of those references with you.

So let's talk about the major killer in America today, and this is artery disease.

Every 40 seconds, someone in our country grabs their chest and falls over with a heart attack and dies because a plaque in the wall of their artery has torn open here and has set off a blood clotting episode, and the blood clot grows and obstructs the entire blood flow in the artery wall.

If this happens in the coronary system in the heart, whatever heart muscle downstream was dependent upon this blood flow is now choked off its blood supply and dies.

That's what a heart attack is.

Plays a major role, and hundreds of thousands of people, 500,000 who die every year in this country from heart attacks, and this is usually the terminal event.

But it certainly has an effect on our brains as well.

And the vascular dementia that so often is diagnosed as, "Oh, he's got Alzheimer's," is really a series of tiny strokes.

These white areas are scar tissue from small strokes here.

And as they pile up over the years, they certainly contribute to dementia.

And who has atherosclerosis?

If you've been eating the American diet for more than 45 or 50 years, you have this disease.

It is essentially ubiquitous in Westerners eating the Western diet.

And for the marathon runners, "Well, I'll just go out and run 20K after my cheeseburger, "just burn it off the walls of my arteries."

Doesn't work like that.

How do we make sense of this?

And where does a plant-based diet come into play here?

Well, we have to ask one of my esteemed professors in plant-based eating, who I look to as an ultimate authority.

(audience laughs) The reality is, we are basically plant-eating hominids.

And we've got basically the same digestive system that our gorilla and bonobo cousins have.

And they're up in the tree, shoveling in leaves and fruits and vegetation all day.

This is what they do year after year after year.

And surprise, surprise, they do not develop atherosclerosis in the wild.

They do not develop type 2 diabetes.

They do not develop colitis.

They die of trauma and infections and parasites.

And yes, it's not easy being a gorilla.

But they don't die of clogged arteries.

They don't die of type 2 diabetes.

I've never had a gorilla in the office saying, "Doc, I can't keep my hands off the cheeseburgers."

They know what to eat.

Atherosclerotic plaque formation in the walls of the arteries is a disease.

This is not normal aging.

It's not a matter of what your LDL is.

This is a disease.

Does not develop in these creatures, eating a high-carb diet.

Why does it develop in us humans?

They do not develop 'cause your LDL is too high.

These are inflammatory lesions.

This is an active inflammatory process.

What sets off the inflammation?

These arteries are being injured.

This is artery abuse, meal after meal after meal.

It starts with damaging the delicate, one-cell-thin endothelial lining that lines all the arteries in the body.

Here, we see a nice pristine artery here with a nice intact endothelial lining here.

But it's time for lunch.

And let's go to the restaurant here and let's eat some cooked animal muscle.

Most Americans eat a piece of cooked animal muscle three times a day.

Bacon for breakfast, beef for lunch, and a burger or chicken for dinner.

And if you don't have a piece of cooked animal muscle on the plate, you call the waiter over and say, "Hey, where's my protein?"

Man, we eat that cooked animal muscle.

Well, the very act of cooking animal muscle, putting that steak under the broiler, putting that hamburger on the grill, dropping that chicken carcass into the boiling oil fat, what does that do?

Well, it oxidizes the cholesterol in the animal muscle, oxidizes the fat and the protein, and generates a slew of advanced glycation end products.

That starts damaging the artery walls.

You want fries with that?

You like onion rings?

When you eat the fried onion rings, you are eating sponges of the fryer oil that's been sitting there all afternoon in the fast food restaurant, bubbling and churning, generating free radicals in this stew of oxidized vegetable oil.

If you're eating meat, you're generating uric acid.

If you got a sweet tooth, you're consuming refined fructose.

Both of those molecules cause inflammation in the artery walls.

And if you like cola drinks, what gives coke the bite on your tongue is it's a dilute solution of phosphoric acid.

And phosphoric acid damages the inner lining of the arteries.

This is what sets off atherosclerotic plaque formation.

And as I mentioned, just cooking the animal muscle oxidizes the cholesterol.

So that's what these yellow dots are representing.

And here, the oxidized cholesterol molecules are now finding their way into the artery wall because the endothelial lining that was keeping them out has been damaged by all the molecular marauders here.

And once the oxidized cholesterol gets into the artery wall, it's engulfed by these macrophage cells and get taken up into the plaque.

And the plaque formation is the artery wall's response to the oxidized cholesterol and other toxic molecules coming in through the damaged endothelium.

Question's not, how high is your cholesterol?

The question's, how healthy are your artery walls?

What's going on in there?

Do you have that inflammatory fire of atherosclerosis burning in your artery walls or don't you?

Because I've got lots of plant-eating folks.

I got lots of vegans in my practice.

"Doc, I've been vegan for 20 years.

"I had my lipids done, and my cholesterol is 232.

"My doctor wants to put me on statins.

"Does he have to do that?"

No.

Cholesterol is not an evil molecule.

Your liver's making it as you're sitting here right now.

Why is your liver making it?

Because your adrenal glands use that cholesterol to make cortisol, an essential steroid.

If you have a pair of ovaries, they take that cholesterol and turn it into estrogen, an essential female hormone.

If you're a guy with testicles, you turn that cholesterol into testosterone.

Your liver turns that cholesterol into bile so you can absorb your fats.

It's not an evil molecule.

It's not a matter of knocking on that cholesterol at all costs.

That's not the problem.

The problem is what you're doing to your artery walls and what you are eating after you have abused them.

And if you are eating the standard Western diet, if you're eating your burgers and buffalo wings, then every third molecule in your bloodstream of cholesterol is cow cholesterol.

It's chicken cholesterol.

It's pig cholesterol.

It's fish cholesterol.

And it comes in with the saturated fats and the AGEs and the fryer oil and the high-fructose corn syrup and all the other molecular marauders that are in that burger and the coke and everything else that you ate with that meal.

But my long-term vegan with the cholesterol of 232 says, "Doc, I just eat rice and beans "and greens and fruits and veggies.

"That's all I've been eating for years."

Then every molecule of cholesterol in her bloodstream was put there by her own liver for its own reason.

And I tell her, "Trust your liver.

"It knows what it's doing.

"At that moment, that needle was in your vein "when you were at the lab and had blood drawn, "at that moment, if your liver needed to keep 232 milligrams "of cholesterol in your bloodstream, "'cause that's what your ovaries needed "and that's what your adrenals, fine."

Trust your liver.

It knows what it's doing.

As long as you're not eating anybody else's cholesterol, it's not the disease of atherosclerosis.

Elevated cholesterol in and of itself in a plant-eating person is not diagnostic of atherosclerosis.

So it's a physiologic hypercholesterolemia, if you will, but it's not the same as the disease of atherosclerosis.

But to the cardiologist, the community cardiologist who walks out in his waiting room, who's sitting there?

Mr. And Mrs. America, overweight, diabetic, high cholesterol, grease on their face from the bucket of KFC they just ate.

And in those folks, those high cholesterol is indicative of atherosclerotic disease.

And you can't blame the cardiologist for reaching that opinion.

But they never see the vegans in the waiting room.

And so, when one does show up for an insurance physical, "Oh, my cholesterol's up."

"Oh, you've got atherosclerosis."

"No, she doesn't, doctor.

"Check out the health of her arteries, "and we'll show you how to do that."

The truth is, this is a reversible disease.

I wish somebody had told me that in medical school.

It would've changed the entire course of my medical career.

And Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, who spoke here, certainly made it very clear that this is a reversible disease.

And here is his program to melt these plaques away from the inside.

What does he recommend?

He recommends two things.

First of all, get on a low-fat, whole-food, plant-based food stream.

Stop the animal flesh.

Stop it.

The other thing that he wants us to do is eat a helping of dark-green leafy vegetables, kale, broccoli, at least three times a day.

Have a fist-sized helping in the morning.

Have one mid afternoon.

Maybe have one in the evening.

Here we are down in the artery wall.

These red balls, these were the oxidized cholesterol coming in and being engulfed and being pulled into the plaque.

But guess what?

Run Dr. Esselstyn's program.

The red tide stops.

There is no more oxidized cholesterol coming in.

If you're eating a fist-sized helping of greens three times a day, that means that you always have in your small intestine a supply of dark leafy greens that are constantly releasing these antioxidants that quench free radicals.

It's like a time-release capsule of medicine.

So this is constantly in your blood releasing antioxidants.

And as a result, as the days go by and the weeks go by, the antioxidants that are always in your bloodstream start seeping into the artery walls.

And there's not a lot of activity going on down here because we stop the oxidized cholesterol from coming in, but whatever's left, whatever free radicals are still burrowing away in the wall of the artery, the antioxidants neutralize them.

And with no more free radicals to deal with, these foam cells that engulf them, they leave.

They out-migrate.

The adhesion bonds that hold them to the artery wall break, and the macrophage, they leave.

You can see it on the electron microscope.

They out-migrate.

And as a result, the plaques get smaller and smaller and smaller, and that endothelial lining reestablishes itself, not by magic, but because the bone marrow is constantly putting out showers of stem cells that reupholster the artery walls, like new paving stones.

And as a result, we get dramatic improvements like this.

Many of you probably seen this arteriogram already.

This is the dye-enhanced x-ray of a man's heart arteries.

This is the left anterior descending artery in his heart.

The entire blood flow channel filled with dye should be approximately this wide all the way down, but this rat-eaten portion here, these are atherosclerotic plaques that are encroaching into the blood flow channel.

And this man had severe angina.

Every time he walked, he got crushing chest pain.

He'd already had one heart attack.

He did not want statins.

He did not want surgery.

So, what's to do?

He went on Dr. Esselstyn's plaque reversal program.

Boots in, man.

He just really committed to it.

29 months.

Over two years of salads and soups and steamed veggies and chilies and curries and all the good plant-based meals, and the plaques melt away, and this artery turns into this artery.

Same patient, same artery.

Look at the difference, okay?

This is a reversible disease.

I wish someone had told me this.

And I'm hoping that the word's getting around the cardiology community how reversible this condition is.

Dr. Esselstyn also wants us to put a little bit of balsamic vinegar on the greens, why?

It increases nitric oxide production that dilates the blood vessels.

And that's really important due to a law in physics that we learn in high school called Poiseuille's Law.

And basically, as the diameter of a pipe gets wider, the blood flow increases tremendously.

And so just a little melting away of the plaque and a little dilation of the blood flow means a huge increase in blood flow.

It goes up by the fourth power of the increase of the radius.

And so the result of that increased blood flow.

Here's a cardiac perfusion scan.

This is a heart.

Red is good blood flow.

You can see how choked off the blood flow is.

A patient goes on a whole-food, plant-based diet just for two weeks, and the plaques melt away a little bit.

The arteries dilate a little bit.

But thanks to Poiseuille's Law, that's enough to dramatically increase the blood perfusion.

And so this scan turns into this scan in just two weeks of a plant-based diet.

And I read this study in 1977.

A man with severe angina.

We had to stop every nine or 10 patients, went on a plant-based diet.

Six months later, he's climbing mountains in the Lake District, England with no pain.

This is the power of plant-based foods to reverse clogged arteries all over the body.

(audience laughs) Much to the delight of people at home.

His retinal arteries are open.

His renal arteries are more open.

Not that that's the main focus of his wife at this point.

So I'm gonna be showing you slides like this.

If you wanna take pictures, great.

This is being recorded.

Go back and watch this video and stop the video here if you really wanna track down these studies here.

There are getting to be more and more of them in the medical journals every week.

Other aspects of artery disease get better.

High blood pressure, heart failure, kidney failure, they all get better on the diet that every gorilla knows well.

Now, if you are a plant eater with a high cholesterol, if you wanna know more about this, and you wanna know what test to order, what you want your doctor to order to check for inflammation in your artery walls, go to my website, doctorklaper.com, and see my little 20-minute video on Beyond Cholesterol, and it'll show you what test to order.

And Quest does these, Labcorp.

These are not exotic tests.

Medicare pays for 'em.

These are regular blood tests at Quest and Labcorp.

All right, let's talk about diabetes, and then we'll start wrapping it up.

Diabetes is becoming rampant, type 2 diabetes, and when people hear that word, "Oh, sugar, sugar, sugar.

"Don't eat sugar.

That's the problem.

"We're eating too much sugar."

Is that really the problem?

The answer is a resounding no.

Too much sugar's not the problem.

Now, you shouldn't be eating sugar.

It causes HGEs and all bad stuff.

Don't be eating sugar as a food.

But it's not the cause of type 2 diabetes.

What is the cause?

Was demonstrated in 1927 by a Dr. J. Shirley Sweeney.

And Dr. Sweeney asked for volunteers.

He was teaching in med school.

So he got two groups of med students.

All young men at this time in 1927.

Weren't a whole lot of women in the med school class.

They took these groups of two young men, two groups of young men, and put half of them on a high-carbohydrate diet.

They only eat for two days.

The only thing they ate were sugar, candy, pastries, white bread, baked potatoes, syrup, and bananas and rice.

This is a high-carb diet, no question about it.

And then, after two days, he did a glucose tolerance test.

And so he gave them all a drink with 100 grams of sugar in it and checked their sugar two hours later.

If you've got normal pancreas function and insulin function, that sugar will go up.

But two hours later, it should be in the range of around 100 or less.

And indeed, those guys ate all this sugar for two days, and they wound up absolutely normal.

These are normal glucose tolerance curve.

One little outlier here, but, by and large, they had no problem going back to normal and dealing with carbohydrates.

But the young med students fed a fat diet of olive oil, butter, mayonnaise with egg yolk and 20% cream for two days.

He did the glucose tolerance test on them, and look what happened.

Every single one of them wound up in diabetic range for just two days of a high-fat diet.

It's the fat that causes the insulin resistance.

Why does that happen?

'Cause if you're keeping your blood fatty, day after day, burger after buffalo wing, the fat eventually is gonna ooze into the muscles as intramyocellular lipid, that means fat in the muscle cell, and it starts causing damage there.

This is fat in the muscle cell.

This is not theoretical.

Here's what it looks like under the microscope.

This is striated muscle from an arm or leg.

And all this black stuff, this is fat in the muscle cell.

This is intramyocellular lipid.

Under the electron microscope, doesn't look any better.

This is fat in the muscle cell.

This is what a high-fat diet does to your liver and your muscle cells.

Well, that causes a problem because, normally, when insulin locks onto the surface of the muscle cell, it activates enzymes that pulls sugar into the cell.

But if you're all loaded up with fat, then free radicals build up and inhibit these enzymes.

So insulin knocks on the door, but nobody answers.

And the sugar builds up in the bloodstream.

And people go, "Oh, high sugar.

Don't eat sugar."

But the sugar's the tail of the dog.

The problem's the fat this person was eating.

That's why the sugar is piling up out in the bloodstream.

If you wanna read about it, just Google intramyocellular lipid insulin resistance.

You'll see it's the main driving force.

And if the person happens to be obese, they add another layer of problems because the fat in the abdomen puts out inflammatory cytokines, like interleukin 1 and 6, and they inhibit the insulin receptors from the outside.

So between the intramyocellular lipid interfering with the insulin receptor on the inside and the inflammatory cytokines from the obese abdomen inflicting dysfunction on the outside, no wonder so many obese people develop type 2 diabetes.

Well, the good news is this is reversible.

When one stops eating all of the fat and the meat, et cetera, et cetera, and goes to a high-carbohydrate diet, not just salads there, but a clean-burning, high-carbohydrate diet.

It's clean-burning.

It turns into carbon dioxide to breathe off and water to pee out.

It's a clean-burning fuel unlike fat.

And as a result, the muscle cells with no more fat coming in or very little, it looks around, "Hey, we got all this fat already in here.

"Let's burn this for energy."

And so the intramyocellular lipid is metabolized.

It disappears.

As the obesity begins to melt away, the cytokines that are interfering, they recede.

And a result, the insulin receptors start opening up and blood sugars come down, and they don't need their insulin anymore, and they don't need metformin anymore, they don't need Jardiance anymore, and the diabetes is reversible.

I wish someone told me this.

Here's Barnard's classic study.

They compared a low-fat, plant-based diet and the Diabetes Association diet, and the folks in blue here on the vegan diet, they had, even at a year and a half, they had their A1Cs are better.

They lost more weight and sustained it.

Their LDL is better.

All the way around, their body responded beautifully.

And isn't this why we're going into medicine?

How can we withhold this from our patients?

You just wanna give 'em more Jardiance and more Ozempic and say, "Come back in a month."

That's a dismal way to practice medicine.

We learned the lovely art of de-prescribing, where you learn how to unprescribe these medications and back them off when they don't need 'em anymore.

So there's getting to be lots of studies starting to build up in the literature.

You can go back and watch the video and stop it if you wanna learn more about diabetes and plant-based diets.

Obesity melts away.

A whole-food, plant-based diet is mostly fiber and water.

I mean, what's in a salad?

What's in a mango?

It's mostly fiber and water.

And so, how much salad can you eat?

How many apples can you eat?

A stomach only holds a quart.

If they're whole plant foods, it's mostly fiber and water.

The calorie density is so low, obesity melts away.

You can't really hold an obese body on whole plant foods.

If you're stuffing yourself with dried fruits and peanut butter, yeah, that'll keep you stuck.

But if you're eating whole plant foods, should not happen.

It's an anti-inflammatory diet, so sore joints, inflamed tissues often respond beautifully, very dramatically.

And if you got full-blown autoimmune disease, I urge you to get this book by Dr. Brooke Goldner, an MD who put her own lupus into remission with a whole-food, plant-based diet.

But it's clear that it's the therapeutic, go-to diet for autoimmune diseases.

Crohn's disease, colitis, if your gut looks like this.

I asked a gastroenterologist at the University of Texas last week, "Do you think food makes any difference?"

"Nah, it doesn't make any difference.

"Never been any studies."

"Doctor, are you telling me "that if someone's got a gut like this, "and it doesn't matter if you smear with every meal, "chili dogs, black coffee, and beer on this membrane "versus melon chunks and blended squash, "you're telling me there's no difference between the two."

Well, of course, there is.

And the red tide as it sloshes through the intestinal tract is not gentle with the walls of the intestinal tract, setting off these inflammatory diseases and changes the gut microbe, while it changes for the better on a plant-based diet.

And there's patients with Crohn's disease put in remission.

If they just ate meat once or twice a month, a semi-vegetarian diet, they stayed in remission for over two years.

It's clearly the diet of choice.

The asthmatic folks breathe easier on a plant-based diet, especially when the dairy protein is pulled out.

And the folks with the eczema and the psoriasis do better as well.

They're starting to show up in the literature as well.

And so this is our current approach to diseases that should have a nutritional treatment.

And it's a tragedy to keep on doing business as usual.

These diseases would essentially drop to insignificant.

We would save trillions of dollars and the suffering and human and animal misery would decrease tremendously.

And it doesn't cost anything to choose the bean chili instead of the beef chili.

There is just no cost for us choosing as a society a healthier diet that would help the whole planet.

People are calling for action for change.

Here's Congressman McGovern from Massachusetts calling for medical schools and residency to provide nutrition education, yay.

And so we wanna spread the concept of disease reversal.

Here is the International Journal of Disease Reversal.

It's a thing now.

Here's Wayne State University requiring their first-year med students to take a course in plant-based nutrition.

Yay, Wayne State.

That'd be great to have that here as well.

I urge doctors to learn the basics.

Go on the website, University of Winchester, and take their six-week course in optimal plant-based nutrition.

There are now residency programs in plant-based and lifestyle medicine.

And here's a free course of five hours of lifestyle medicine, focusing on food as medicine, that any doctor can take.

There's wonderful books showing up here.

"Plant-Based Nutrition in Clinical Practice."

Dr. Saray Stancic shares her experience with multiple sclerosis in the plant-based diets.

Good books for people to read, like "Nourish" and "The 30-Day Alzheimer's Solution."

People go to my website and download my four-page eating plan on health-supporting eating plan.

And there's lots of recommendations for books and websites to visit.

Here's Geisinger making this plant-based information available to anyone on their website.

They're clearly pro plant-based diets.

They asked me in here to talk to you.

There's some good videos around.

If you haven't seen "Forks Over Knives," definitely see it.

It will change your life.

And then go back to their website.

They have a transition plan that will make it easier for to make that transition.

Do you have to be completely plant-based?

Do you have to be 100% vegan?

No, you don't.

But the more you change the foods based on whole plant foods, the better your health's gonna be.

Your body is never not looking, okay?

There's no fooling it.

You know, who you kidding?

Look over here.

Have a cheeseburger there, you know.

(audience laughs) What was that?

I didn't do anything.

Who are you kidding?

Your blood knows.

Your liver knows.

And I'll just make a moderate change.

Well, you want moderate improvement.

You want moderate diabetes.

You want moderate amputations.

You know, just a few toes.

People say, "Well, there's ethnic reasons."

But most ethnic groups have a long plant-based tradition.

Well, it's expensive to eat this way.

No, it is not.

The staple foods that provide the calories and the protein, the grains, potatoes, they're cheap, especially when you buy 'em in bulk.

You can buy a 10-pound bag of rice for a little over six and a half bucks.

10 pounds of lentils, a little over $12.

So two cups of rice, two cups of lentils will give you 46 grams of protein in a day.

That's less than 20 bucks a month for a month's supply of healthy staples, and the support programs pay for this.

So when we come down to call for action, stop kidding yourself that in any way the American diet is healthy for us.

Stop kidding yourself about the salt and sugar and the meat in your diet.

Stop skimping on the fresh.

Have a good salad every day.

Stop eating all this fat.

It's what's making you obese and diabetic and type 2 diabetic.

Alcohol is a toxin in every organ in the body.

Drink enough water.

Stop cheating on sleep.

Keep moving, or at least do some stretching, a little yoga every day.

Get outside in the green world as often as you can.

Release those toxic, the resentment and the jealousy and the fear and the anger.

And hopelessness and fear just leads to more of that.

Get yourself healthy.

You can do this.

This is my patient.

Ken came in way overweight on two meds for diabetes and two for blood pressure.

12 weeks, dropped 25 pounds.

He got off his meds.

You can do this.

So we're 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 my job is to rip down the curtain and say that, what's behind the curtain of plant-predominant eating?

Just a lifetime of better health.

That's all, okay?

So I've been trying to get this message across to the med students and young docs through our Moving Medicine Forward presentations.

We're a nonprofit.

If you wanna find out what we're doing, go to Moving Med Forward, and you can help us if you choose.

So that is the story of plant-based, reversal of disease through plant-based nutrition.

And if you have the time, I got the answers here, so I'll be glad to open it up.

Thanks for your attention.

(audience applauding) - As a medical student, I really understand the weight of everything that you're saying.

What role do you think omega-3, long-chain omega-3 fatty acids play?

And how do you advise to your patients who are on a whole-food, plant-based diet to adequately get enough?

- Good question, so he's asking about omega-3 fats.

These are long-chain vegetable oils that are essential for your brain and all the cells in your body to have.

We can make these long-chain fatty acids, but we gotta give the body the baseline substrate, the basic food to make these long-chain fatty acids.

And these fatty acids are called linolenic acid, they're 18 carbon atoms long, and they are in nuts and seeds.

They're in walnuts and flax seeds and hemp seeds and chia seeds.

All dark-green leafy vegetables have a little bit of omega-3.

Do not skimp on these omega-3 containing foods.

The omega-6s that work against you are in all the vegetable oils, all the fried foods, all this stuff.

It's safflower oil, sunflower oil.

You don't wanna be eating that stuff.

But get your fats out of, as I said, walnuts, flax seeds, chia seeds, hemp seeds, dark-green leafy vegetables.

- Thank you so much for blessing our institution, Dr. Klaper.

- You're welcome.

Other questions?

(audience applauding) Yay, good question.

- Hello, Doctor.

Thank you very much.

Should a person still be on a multivitamin if they're eating a plant-based diet, like a B12?

- Good question.

Okay, so she's asking about multivitamins.

And ideally, in the ideal world, if we're all back in the Garden of Eden, and we're eating all these lovely fruits and vegetables all day, no one should need any supplements.

That's true.

But nobody I know is eating in that manner.

We're all living busy lives, and we've got the cans and bottles in the fridge and the cupboard, et cetera.

So, are there any things that a complete plant eater may run short of?

Yes, and we gotta talk about that.

First is vitamin B12.

This is an absolutely essential vitamin.

You need it to keep your brain and your spinal cord healthy.

You need it to keep the stuff called homocystine from building up in your bloodstream, which can hurt your arteries.

So you need vitamin B12 couple times a week.

Our body stores it.

Where does it come from?

Yes, it's found in meat.

Animals do not make it.

It's made by soil bacteria.

The cows and pigs and turkeys have B12 in their tissues because they're eating grass all day, and they're pulling up shards of grass that have soil particles clinging to the roots.

And in those soil particles are these B12-producing microbes.

And so, when the deer and the antelope eat the B12-producing organisms, in their gut, the B12 is produced, they absorb it into their muscles, and you can kill the animal and eat the flesh and get your B12 that way.

But the animal didn't make it.

It was microbial B12 all along.

For that reason, if you are completely plant-based, twice a week, have something with some vitamin B12 in it, 500 micrograms.

You can take fortified soy milk.

There's veggie burgers have B12 in, and there are multivitamins.

You don't need a zillion micrograms of it.

250 to 500 two, three times a week should be plenty, okay?

- Thank you.

One more quick question.

Organic versus non-organic.

- [Michael] I'm sorry.

- Organic versus non-organic.

- Yes, when I came into this movement in the 1970s, organic was this fluffy thing, very expensive and California woo-woo, and it's just a nicety.

Now, it's not just a nicety anymore with what we've done to the soils, all the glyphosate that's in the soils, the toxins that we've put into our food processing activities here are really worrisome.

And so I have no problem paying the extra buck a pound for the organic broccoli.

One, the food is cleaner than I'm eating, and I'm happy to pay those farmers who are taking care of the soils and trying to care for the Earth here.

So if you're not putting out money on steaks and premium Ben and Jerry's ice cream, you got a few pennies left over for the organic broccoli.

So yes, if money is an issue, the most important foods to get organic are, one, foods you can't peel.

If you can peel it, if it's an orange or banana, not so important because the pesticides, most of them are sprayed on the outside.

If you can peel it, not so important that be organic.

But the foods you can't peel.

You can't peel kale.

You can't peel broccoli.

The greens, pay for the organic foods there.

And the root vegetables suck up what's in the soil.

So the beets and potatoes, you want those organic as well, and the carrots, et cetera.

So that's what to buy organic, but if you can, get it all organic these days.

It's getting spooky out there.

- Thank you.

- You're welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you, everyone.

(audience applauding) (gentle music) - [Announcer] Support for the Preventive Medicine Lecture Series was provided by Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, the Wright Center, and valued donors.