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Thank you. For those of you unfamiliar with my work, every year I read through every issue of every English language nutrition journal in the world so busy folks like you Don't have to. So every year my presentations are new, because every year the science is new. I then compile all the most interesting, most groundbreaking, most practical findings to new videos and articles I upload every day to my nonprofit site, nutritionfacts.org. Everything on the website is free.

There are no ads, no commercial sponsorships, strictly non-commercial, not selling anything. Just put it up as a public service, as a labor of love. New videos and articles every day on the latest in evidence-based nutrition. Now, If you've seen any of my presentations in the past, you know that I have addressed some of the most pressing dietary issues of our time. Like, what's the healthiest variety of apple, for example?

Or the most nutritious nut? Or the best bean? Or the best berry? Or the best bowel movement? Who's number 1 and number 2?

Well, it certainly wasn't the New Yorkers here. Actually, the most constipated population ever described in the medical literature, outputting a measly 3 ounces a day, on average. Maybe if you'd all just eat a big apple once in a while. But this year, today, I thought I'd lighten it up and ask, what's the best way to prevent death. Every year the CDC compiles the top 15 causes of death.

I said, well, let's just go through the list. 1 through 15 talk about the role diet may play in preventing, arresting, and even potentially reversing our top 15 killers. Killer number 1 is heart disease. The International Journal of Epidemiology recently reprinted this landmark article from the 50s which started out with a shocking statement. In the African population in Uganda, coronary heart disease practically non-existent.

You say, wait a second. Our number 1 killer, practically non-existent, what were they eating? Well, they're eating a lot of vegetables, grains, greens. And their protein almost entirely from plant sources. And they had the cholesterol levels to prove it.

Actually, very similar to what you see in kind of modern day plant eaters. Wait a second. Maybe the Africans were just dying early from other diseases, didn't live long enough to get coronary artery disease. No. Here's age-matched heart attack rates in Uganda versus St.

Louis. Out of 632 autopsies in Uganda, only 1 myocardial infarction. Out of 632 age and gender-matched autopsies in St. Louis, 136 myocardial infarctions, more than 100 times the heart attacks are of the rate of our leading killer. In fact, they were so blown away, they went back to another 800 autopsies in Uganda.

And still, just that 1 small healed infarct mean he wasn't even the cause of death. Out of 1, 427 patients, less than 1 in 1, 000. Whereas here, it's an epidemic. Here's a list of diseases commonly found here and in populations that eat and live like the US, but were rare or even nonexistent in populations centering their diets around whole, unprocessed plant foods. These are among our most common diseases, like obesity, for example, or hiatus hernia, the most common stomach problem.

Varicose veins and hemorrhoids are 2 most common venous problems. Colorectal cancer, leading cancer killer here in the US. Diverticulosis, the most common disease of the intestines. Appendicitis, the number 1 cause of emergency abdominal surgery, gallbladder disease, number 1 cause of non-emergency abdominal surgery, as well as ischemic heart disease, our commonest cause of death here, but a rarity among plant-based populations, which suggests that heart disease may be a choice, like cavities. If you look at the teeth of people who lived 10, 000 years before the invention of the toothbrush, Pretty much no cavities.

Didn't brush a day in their lives. No flossing. No listering. Yet no cavities. Why?

Candy bars hadn't been invented yet. So why do people continue to get cavities when we know they're preventable through diet? Well, simple. Because the pleasure people derive from dessert may outweigh the cost and discomfort of the dentist's chair. And look, that's fine.

As long as people understand the consequences of their actions. As a physician, what more can I do? If you're an adult, you decide the benefits outweigh the risk for you and your family, then go for it. I certainly enjoy the occasional indulgence. I've got a good dental plan.

But what if instead of the plaque on our teeth, we're talking about the plaque building up inside of our arteries, another disease that can be prevented by changing our diet? OK, now what are the consequences for you and your family? Now we're not talking about scraping tartar anymore. We're talking about life and death. The most likely reason your loved ones will die is heart disease.

Now it's still up to each of us to make our own decisions as to what to eat and how to live, but we should make these choices consciously, educating ourselves about the predictable consequences of our actions. Atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, begins in childhood. By age 10, the arteries of nearly all kids have fatty streaks, the first stage of the disease. And then these plaques start forming in our 20s, get worse in our 30s, and then can start killing us off. Our heart is called a heart attack, and our brain, the same process, is called a stroke.

If there's anyone here this afternoon older than age 10, then the question isn't whether or not to eat healthy to prevent heart disease, but whether or not you want to reverse the heart disease you likely already have. But is that even possible? When research took people with heart disease, put them on the kind of diet, followed by populations that don't get heart disease. We were hoping to slow the progression of these, maybe even stop, arrest it from getting even worse. But instead, something miraculous happened.

The disease started to reverse. As soon as patients stopped eating an artery-clogging diet, their bodies were able to start dissolving some of the plaque away, in some cases even severe triple vessel heart disease. Arteries opening up without drugs, without surgery, suggesting that their bodies wanted to be healthy all along, but were just never given the chance. This improvement in blood flow on the left was after just 3 weeks of eating healthy. Let me share with you what's been called the best kept secret in medicine.

The best kept secret in medicine is given the right conditions, the body can heal itself. If you whack your shin really hard on a coffee table, you can get a red, painful, hot, swollen, but will heal naturally if you just stand back and let your body's magic work. But what if you kept hitting your shin in the same place every day? In fact, 3 times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It'd never heal.

You'd go to your doctor. You'd be like, oh, my shin hurts. The doctor would be like, no problem. Train for this. Whip out their prescription pad.

Write you a prescription for pain killers. You're still whacking your shin 3 times a day. Oh, it still really hurts like heck, but oh, feels so much better with those pain pills on board. It's like when people take nitroglycerin for angina, crushing chest pain. Tremendous relief, but you're not doing anything to treat the underlying cause.

Our body wants to come back to health if we let it, but if we keep reinjuring it 3 times a day, it may never heal. It's like smoking. 1 of the most amazing things I learned in all my medical training was that within 15 years of stock being smoking, your lung cancer risk approaches that of a lifelong non-smoker. Isn't that amazing? Your body can like get rid of all that tar and eventually it's almost as if you never started smoking at all.

And every morning of our smoking life, that healing process started until, wham, our first cigarette of the day. Re-injuring our lungs with every puff, just like we can re-injure our arteries with every bite, when all we had to do, the miracle cure, is to just stand back, stop redamaging ourselves, and let our bodies' natural healing processes bring us back towards health. Now, sure, you can choose moderation and hit yourself with a smaller hammer, but why beat yourself up at all? We've known about this for decades. American Heart Journal, 1977, cases like Mr.

F.W. Here, such severe angina, couldn't even make it to the mailbox, started eating healthier, and a few months later, he was Climbing mountains, no pain. Now, there are new fancy new anti-angina drugs out there. Cost thousands of dollars a year. And at the highest dose, can prolong exercise duration, prolong the period someone can stay on a treadmill as long as 33 and 1 1 2 seconds.

It does not look like those choosing the drug route are going to be climbing mountains any time soon. See, so plant-based diets can not only be safer, cheaper, but work better. Killer number 2 is cancer. What happens if you put cancer on a plant-based diet? Dr.

Dean Ornish and colleagues found that the progression of prostate cancer could be reversed with a plant-based diet and other healthy lifestyle changes, and no wonder. If you drip the blood of those eating the standard American diet onto cancer cells growing in a Petri dish, these are human prostate cancer cells, Cancer growth rates cut down by about 9%, but put people on a plant-based diet for a year, though, and their blood can do this. The blood circulating throughout the bodies of those eating plant-based diets, nearly 8 times the stopping power when it comes to suppressing cancer growth. Now this is for prostate cancer, the number 1 cancer killer specific to men. For women, it's breast cancer.

So researchers tried duplicating this study with women and breast cancer cells instead. But look, they didn't want to wait a whole year to get the results. So they said, well, let's see what a healthy diet can do after just 2 weeks against 3 different types of human breast cancer. This is the before cancer cell growth powering away at 100%, and then after eating a plant-based diet for 14 days. Here's a kind of the before picture, representative photomicrograph, photograph taken under a microscope, a layer of breast cancer cells, a confluent layer is laid down in a petri dish And then blood from women eating the standard American diet is dripped on those cancer cells.

And as you can see, even people eating pretty crappy diets have some ability to kind of break down cancer. But after just 2 weeks eating healthy, blood was drawn from the same women. So they acted as their own controls. Same women, 2 weeks later, and this is what you're left with. So the same confluent layer of the kind of carpet of cancer is laid down, and just a few cells remain.

Before and after just 2 weeks eating healthy. Their blood became that much more hostile to cancer. Now, slowing down the growth of cancer is nice. Getting rid of it is even better. There's what's called apoptosis, programmed cell death.

Our body's able to kind of reprogram cancer cells, forcing them into early retirement. This is what's called tunnel imaging, measures DNA fragmentation, cell death. So dying cells kind of light up as little white spots. And as you can see, you're not totally defenseless eating the standard American diet. But then you take these same, so her blood can kill off, a few same women 2 weeks later, 14 days of healthy plant-based living, and their blood can do this.

It's like you're an entirely different person inside. What kind of blood do we want in our body? What kind of immune system? Do we want blood that just kind of rolls over when new cancer cells pop up, or do we want blood circulating to every nook and cranny in our body with the power to slow down and stop it? The same blood, now coursing through these women's bodies, gained the power to significantly slow down and stop breast cancer cell growth after just 2 weeks.

Now, this dramatic strengthening in cancer defenses was after 2 weeks of diet and exercise. They had these women out walking 30 to 60 minutes a day. Say, well, wait a second. If you have 2 interventions, how do you know what role diet plays? So research has decided to put it to the test.

This is measuring cancer cell clearances, what we saw before, the effect of blood of those who ate a plant-based diet, in this case, for an average of 14 years, along with mild exercise, like walking every day. Compare that to your cancer stopping power of your average sedentary meat eater. You see a little burger there, which is essentially non-existent. All right, But this middle group, this is the interesting group. 14 years of standard American diet, but 14 years of daily strenuous hour-long exercise, like calisthenics.

They wanted to know if you exercise long enough, if you exercise hard enough, can you rival some strolling plant eaters? And the answer is exercise worked. No question. But literally 5, 000 hours in the gym appeared no match for a plant-based diet. So same thing as before, this is that tunnel imaging.

Even if you're a couch potato, eating fried potatoes, you are not totally defenseless. You can knock off a few cancer cells. If you exercise strenuously an hour a day, you can knock off cancer cells left and right. But nothing appears to kick more cancer tush than a plant-based diet. We think it's because if animal proteins, meat, dairy, egg white proteins, increase the level of IGF-1 in our body.

Insulin-like growth factor 1, which is a cancer-promoting growth hormone involved in the acquisition and progression of malignant tumors. But if we lower our animal protein intake, put people on a plant-based diet for 2 weeks, the IGF-1 level drops. Put people on a plant-based diet for years, it drops even further. And their levels of IGF-1 binding protein go up. IGF-1 binding protein, that's 1 of our ways our bodies protects itself from cancer, from accelerated growth, by releasing a binding protein in the bloodstream to tie up any excess IGF-1.

Sure, in as little as 2 weeks, you can drop, you can force down the production of IGF-1 in your body. But what about the IGF-1 you have for the bacon and eggs you had 3 weeks ago? Well, your liver releases the snatch squad of binding proteins to pull out any excess IGF-1 out of the system. It goes up after weeks, and benefits appear to continue to accrue over years, the longer you eat healthy. Here's an experiment that really nailed IGF-1.

It's the villain, same as last time, going on a plant-based diet. Cancer cell growth drops, cancer cell death shoots up, But here's the interesting column here. What if you add back to the cancer just the amount of IGF-1 banished from your system by eating healthy? You erase the diet and exercise effect. It's almost as if you never started eating healthy at all.

So the reason. The largest prospective study on diet and cancer ever published found that the incidence of all cancers combined was lower among those eating meat-free diets, maybe because they're eating less animal protein, so they get less IGF-1 in their system and less cancer growth. How much less cancer? Middle-aged men and women with high protein intake, 75% increased total mortality and fourfold increased risk of dying from cancer, but not all proteins, specifically animal protein, which makes sense, given the higher IGF-1 levels. The academic institution sent out a press release with a memorable opening line, that chicken wing you're eating could be as deadly as a cigarette.

Explaining that a diet rich in animal proteins during the middle age makes you 4 times more likely to die from cancer, which is comparable to smoking. What was the response to this revelation that diets high in meat, eggs, and dairy could be harmful to the health of smoking. But 1 nutrition scientist replied that it would be potentially dangerous to compare the effects of smoking with the effects of meat and cheese. Why? Because a smoker might think, Why bother quitting smoking if my ham and cheese sandwich is just as bad for me?

So better not to tell anybody about the whole meat and dairy thing. This reminds me of a famous Philip Morris ad, cigarette ad, that tried to downplay the risk by saying, look, you think secondhand smoke is bad, increasing the risk of lung cancer 19%, drinking 1 or 2 glasses of milk every day, maybe 3 times as bad, 62% increase in risk of lung cancer, or doubling the risk, frequently cooking with oil, or tripling the risk of heart disease, eating non-vegetarian, or multiplying your risk sixfold if you eat lots of meat and dairy, more than average. So let's keep some perspective here. The risk of lung cancer, maybe from secondhand smoke, may be well below the risk reported for other everyday activities. So breathe deep.

It's like saying, don't worry about getting stabbed, because getting shot's so much worse, right? How about neither? 2 risks don't make a right. Now, of course, you'll notice Phil Moore stopped throwing dairy under the bus once they purchased Kraft Foods. OK, just 13 causes of death to go.

Let me quickly run through the list. Top 3 killers used to be heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Oh, that's so 2007. Now it's heart disease, cancer, COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease like emphysema. Thankfully, COPD can be prevented with the help of a plant-based diet, even treated with plants.

If you want to check that, improving lung function over time, the only intervention that's been shown to do that. Of course, the tobacco industry view these landmark findings a little differently. Instead of adding plants to one's diet to prevent emphysema, wouldn't it be easier to just add them to cigarettes? And indeed, the addition of acai berries to cigarettes evidently has a protective effect against emphysema in smoking mice. Who would have thunk it?

Next, they're going to start putting berries in meat. And indeed, I couldn't make this stuff up. Adding fruit extracts to burger patties was not without its glitches, though the blackberries dyed the burger patties with a distinct purplish color, for example. Though infusing lamb carcasses with kiwi fruit juice before rigor mortis sets in evidently does improve tenderness you can even improve the nutritional profile of frankfurters by adding powdered grape seeds though there were complaints about grape seed particles becoming visible in the final product And if there's 1 thing we know about hot dog eaters, it's that they're picky about what goes in their food. Oh, pig anus, but grape seeds, eww.

Strokes are killer number 4. Preventing strokes might be all about eating potassium-rich foods, yet most Americans don't even reach the recommended minimum daily intake. And by most, I mean 98%. 98% of us eat potassium-deficient diets because 98% of us don't eat enough plants. Potassium comes from the words potash.

Take any plant, put it in a pot, reduce it to ash. Add some water, boil it off. You're left with a white residue at the bottom called potashium, potassium. That's how they got the name. It used to be called vegetable alkali.

But I just say that because that's a way to remember that that's where potassium is largely found. But who can name me a plant food particularly high in potassium? Anybody? There, look, hold it up. I don't know why that's 1 of the few things everybody knows about nutrition, right?

Bananas, good source of potassium. Chiquita must have had a great PR firm or something. Turns out Bananas don't even make the top 50 sources, coming in here right at number 86, right behind fast food vanilla milkshakes. It goes faster, and then bananas. In fact, when I was putting together the new book, I went back to see if the USDA had updated their database, and they did.

And now, bananas don't even make the top 1, 000, coming in at number 1, 611, right after Reese's Pieces. Serious. All right, bananas don't even make the top 1, 000. In fact, if you look at the next leading cause of death, but before the top sources, greens, beans, and dates, for those of you who really want to know where you find potassium, whereas Bananas

don't even make the top thousand. In fact, if you look at the next leading cause of death, but before the top sources, greens, beans, and dates, for those of you who really wanna know where

you can find potassium, whereas bananas don't even make the top list. In fact, if you look at The next leading cause of death, bananas, could be downright dangerous. You gotta watch out for them. Alzheimer's, now our sixth leading killer, staggering 4 million Americans affected. 20 years ago, it wasn't even in the top 10 leading causes of death.

According to the latest dietary guidelines for the prevention of Alzheimer's disease, the 2 most important things we can do is reduce our consumption of meat, dairy, and junk, and replace them with vegetables, legumes, which means bees, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils, fruits, and whole grains. This is based in part on data going back over 20 years now. Those that eat meat, red meat, white meat, didn't matter between 2 to 3 times more likely to become demented later in life, and the longer 1 eats meat-free, the lower one's risk appears to drop. Next on the list is type 2 diabetes, which can be prevented, treated, even reversed with a plant-based diet, something we've known since back in the 1930s. Within 5 years, about a quarter of the diabetics were off all insulin.

But look, plant-based diets are also relatively low-calorie diets. Maybe the diabetes got better just because they lost so much weight. In fact, stomach stapling surgery can reverse diabetes. So to tease that out, what we would need is a study where they put people on a healthy diet but forced them to eat so much food that they would not lose any weight. Then you could see if a plant-based diet had specific benefits beyond just all the weight loss.

We'd have to wait another 44 years, but here it is. Subjects would weight every day. If they started to lose weight, they were made to eat more food. In fact, so much more food, Many of the subjects had problems eating it all, like not another salad. But they eventually adapted, so no significant alterations in body weight despite restricting meat, eggs, dairy, and junk.

So with 0 weight loss, did a plant-based diet still help? Overall insulin requirements were cut about 60%. And half were able to get off of insulin altogether, despite no change in weight. How many years did this take? No.

16 Days. Average of 16 days later. So we're talking diabetics who've had diabetes for as long as 20 years, injecting 20 units of insulin a day, and then 13 days later, off all insulin. Here's patient 15, 32 units of insulin on the control diet, and then 18 days later on none. Actually, lower blood sugars on 32 units less insulin.

That's the power of plants. And as a bonus, our cholesterol dropped like a rock down to under 150 in 16 days. So just like moderate changes in diet typically only give us moderate reductions in cholesterol, how moderate do you want your diabetes? Everything in moderation is a truer statement than many people may realize. Moderate changes in diet can leave 1 with moderate blindness, moderate kidney failure, moderate amputation, maybe just a few toes or something.

Moderation in all things is not necessarily a good thing. You know that study that purported to show that diets high in meat, eggs, and dairy could be harmful to the health of smoking claims, that those who eat lots of meat, eggs, and dairy are 4 times more likely to die from diabetes. But if you look at the actual study, you'll see that's not true. Those eating lots of animal protein were not 4 times more likely to die from cancer, to die from diabetes. They had 73 times higher risk of dying from diabetes, though that's quite a confidence interval, as you can see.

Now, those who chose moderation, only eating a moderate amount of animal products only had 23 times the risk of death from diabetes. Killer number 8 is kidney failure, which can be both prevented and treated with a plant-based diet. And no surprise, why kidneys are highly vascular organs. Harvard research found 3 significant dietary factors associated with reducing kidney function, declining kidney function, animal protein, animal fat, and cholesterol. Animal fat can alter the actual structure of the kidneys, based on studies like this showing plugs of fat basically kind of clogging up the works in autopsied human kidneys.

And the animal protein can have a profound effect on kidney function, inducing what's called hyperfiltration, increasing the workload on the kidney, but not, interestingly, plant protein. So you eat a meal of tuna fish, and you can see increased pressure in the kidneys going up 123 hours after the meal. But if instead of a tuna salad sandwich, you had a tofu salad sandwich with the same amount of protein, no effect. No problem for our kitties to deal with plant protein. Why does animal protein cause this overload reaction but not plant protein?

Well, it appears to be due to inflammation triggered by the animal protein. We know this because you can give this powerful anti-inflammatory drug along with the tuna fish, and you can abolish that hyperfiltration, that kind of protein leakage effect, in response to meat ingestion. Then there's the acid load. Animal protein induces the formation of acid within the kidneys, which can lead to what's called tubular toxicity, damage to the kind of little delicate urine-making tubes in the kidneys. Animal proteins in general, animal foods in general, tend to be acid-forming, whereas plant foods tend to be relatively neutral or actually alkaline, base-forming within the kidneys to counter some of that acid.

So the key to halting the progression of chronic kidney disease might be in the produce market rather than the pharmacy. No wonder plant-based diets have been used to treat kidney disease for decades. Here's protein leakage on the conventional low sodium diet, which we physicians tend to put people on. But then if you switch them to a supplemented vegan diet, then back to conventional, then back to plant-based, and back to conventional, then back to plant-based. You can switch on and off kidney dysfunction like a light switch based on what goes into people's mouth.

Kidney number 9. Killer number 9 is respiratory infections. What possible role could diet play there? Here we are in flu season. Well, you obviously haven't seen my video, Kale and the Immune System, talking about the immunostimulatory effects of kale.

Is there anything that kale cannot do? Boosting antibody production sevenfold, but this is in vitro, in a petri dish. What about in people? Older men and women split into 2 groups right before their pneumovax vaccination, their pneumonia vaccination, and they split them into 2 groups. 1 group continued to eat as they always had.

The other group added just a few servings of fruits and vegetables to the diet. And you see a significant improvement in protective antibody response, just a few extra servings of fruits and vegetables. This wasn't cutting out meat or anything. Just adding some fruits and vegetables to their daily diet could significantly boost their protective immune function. Killer number 10 is suicide.

Now, we've known that people who eat healthier tend to have healthier mood states. Typically, only about half the levels of depression, anxiety, and stress using these kind of validated scoring systems. Researchers suspect that it's the arachidonic acid, This inflammatory omega-6 fatty acid found predominantly in chicken and eggs in the American diet. But you can't tell if it's cause and effect until you put it to the test. So they took people eating the standard American diet, removed eggs, removed poultry, as well as other meats from their diet.

It's got a significant improvement and moved within just 2 weeks, thanks perhaps to the removal of arachidonic acid from their diet, which they thought was adversely impacting their mental health via a cascade of neuroinflammation. They thought this arachidonic acid was inflaming their brains. But within just 2 weeks of cutting out egg, chicken, and other meat, you could clear up that inflammation. Now, am I just cherry picking? Though what about all the other randomized controlled clinical trials that showed different diets improved mood.

There aren't any. Recent review conclude that only the plant-based diet has ever been shown to do that. Only that 1 fit the bill. It's hard to cherry pick when there's only 1 cherry. Works in a workplace setting, too.

I was happy to see all the fruits and veggies as I walked around on the floors here. Significant increases in physical functioning, general health, vitality, mental health, not surprisingly, translates in improved work productivity. The biggest such study, which was at 10 corporate sites at Geico, found that plant-based diets could result in significant improvements in depression, anxiety, fatigue, emotional well-being, daily functioning, emotional health, et cetera. Lifestyle interventions such as exercise can help. But in terms of diet, plant-based diets appear to have the most data to support them.

Killer number 11 is blood infections. Now sure, foodborne bacteria can directly kind of burrow through the intestinal wall into your bloodstream, or women can creep up into their bladder. We've known for decades that it's bacteria creeping up from the rectum that causes bladder infections. But only recently did we figure out where this rectal reservoir of UTI bacteria causing infecting E. Coli was coming from, and that is chicken.

We now have DNA fingerprinting proof of a direct link between the foreign animals, the meat, and then bladder infections. Solid evidence that urinary tract infections in people can be what's called a zoonosis, an animal to human disease. Wait a second. Can't I just use a meat thermometer, cook the meat through? Unfortunately, no, because of cross-contamination.

We've known for decades, you give someone a frozen chicken, in fact you give 40 households a frozen chicken to prepare and cook in their own kitchen as they normally would, and a multitude of antibiotic resistant chicken bacteria jump from the chicken into the gut of the volunteers before they even eat it. So you could incinerate that chicken to ash. It doesn't matter. You don't even have to eat any. It's just handling it in the kitchen.

Within days, the drug-resistant chicken bacteria multiply to the point of becoming a major part of the person's gut floor. The chicken bacteria is kind of like taking over. Even if you follow safe handling practices, in addition to safe cooking practices, rinsing everything, this is the official recommendation, rinsing everything with bleach. And they went in and sprayed a dilute bleach solution and everything, you still may be leaving pathogenic fecal bacteria behind. This is Salmonella campylobacter, both serious human pathogens.

The reason people have more bacteria from feces in their kitchen sink than on their toilet seat is because people aren't rinsing their chickens in the toilet. They're rinsing them in the sink. So unless our kitchen is like some biohazard lab, the only way to guarantee we're not going to leave infection around the kitchen is to not bring it into our homes in the first place. But the good news is it's not like you eat chicken once and you're colonized for life. And in this study, the chicken bacteria only seemed to last about 10 days before good bacteria was able to kind of muscle it out of the way.

The problem is many families eat chicken more than once every 10 days, and so maybe kind of constantly reintroducing these chicken bugs into their systems. Wait a second, you can't sell unsafe cars. You can't sell unsafe toys. How is it even legal to sell unsafe meat? Well, they do it by blaming the consumers.

1 USDA poultry microbiologist said, look, raw meats are not idiot proof. They can be mishandled. When they are, it's like handling a hand grenade. You pull the pin, someone's going to get hurt. See, if we get sick, it's our fault.

Now, while some may question the wisdom of selling hand grenades in supermarkets, The USDA poultry expert disagrees. I think the consumer has the most responsibility, just refused to accept it. It's like a car company saying, yeah, we installed faulty brakes, but it's your fault for not putting your kid in a seat belt. The head of the CDC's food poisoning division famously responded to this kind of blame the victim attitude coming from the meat industry. Is it reasonable, she asked, is it reasonable that if a consumer undercooks a hamburger their three-year-old dies?

Is that reasonable? Not to worry though, the meat industry's on it. They just got FDA approval for a bacteria-eating virus to spray on the meat. Now, the industry's concerned about these so-called bacteriophages. It may present somewhat of a challenge to the food industry, so of course, I'm not going to label it or anything.

But if they think that's going to be a challenge, check out their other bright idea. This is the effect of extracted housefly pupae on pork. This is a sciencey way of saying they want to smear a maggot mixture on the meat. It's a low cost and simple. Think about it.

Maggots live off of rotting flesh. However, at the same time, there's no reports of maggots having any serious diseases. So they must be filled with some kind of antibacterial something, right? So let's take some magnets, grow them up, 3 days old, wash them off, towel them off, a little Vitamix action there, and voila, safer meats. We did kidney failure.

What about liver failure? We've known for decades that a plant-based diet can be used to treat liver failure, significantly reducing the toxins that would otherwise build up eating meat without a fully functional liver to detoxify your blood. 1 does have to admit, though, that there are some people eating plant-based diets with worsening liver function. They're called alcoholics, living off of potatoes and corn and grapes and barley. In fact, strictly plant-based, but not doing so well.

It's not clear what the. High blood Pressure is next, affecting nearly 78 million Americans. That's 1 in 3 of us. And as we age, our pressures get higher and higher, such that by age 60, it strikes more than half. So wait a second.

If it affects most of us when we get older, maybe it's less a disease and really just kind of an inevitable consequence of aging. No. We've known since the 1920s that high blood pressure need not occur. Researchers measured the blood pressure of 1, 000 people in rural Kenya, ate a diet centered around whole plant foods, whole grains, beans, vegetables, fruit, dark green leafy vegetables, our pressures go up as we age. And their pressures actually get better as they get older.

And the lower, the better. This whole 140 over 90 cut off is arbitrary. Even people who start out with a blood pressure of so-called normal, 120 over 80, appear to benefit from blood pressure reduction. So the ideal blood pressure, the no benefit from reducing it further blood pressure, is actually 110 over 70. Is it even possible to get pressures down to 110 over 70?

It's not just possible. It's normal for people eating healthy enough diets. So for 2 years at a rural Kenyon hospital, 1, 800 patients admitted. How many cases of high blood pressure did they find? 0.

Wow, they must have low rates of heart disease, right? No, they had no rates of heart disease. Not a single case of arteriosclerosis, our number 1 killer, was found. Rural China, too, about 110 over 70 their entire lives, 70-year-olds, same blood pressure as 16-year-olds. Now look, Africa, China, vastly different diets, but what did they hold in common?

The common thing, their plant-based day-to-day with meat only eaten on special occasions. Now, why do we think it's the plant-based nature of their diets, though? Because in the Western world, as the American Heart Association has pointed out, The only folks that are getting it down that low are the strict vegetarians, coming in at 110 over 65. Based on the largest study of those eating plant-based diets today, there's 89, 000 Californians. There appears to be A stepwise drop in high blood pressure rates is 1 gets more and more plant-based.

So this is starting out a regular meat eater. Actually, the control group was actually only about serving 2 meat a day. So kind of a low meat eater compared to a semi-vegetarian or flexitarian who only ate meat on a weekly basis as opposed to a daily basis, those that ate no meat except fish, just eggs and dairy, or those that ate strictly plant-based. See the same thing with diabetes, right? A stepwise drop in diabetes rates as one's Diet gets more and more plant-based.

And the same thing with obesity. Anything over 25 is overweight. Even vegetarians in the US are overweight. The only dietary group that met the quote, unquote, ideal body weight were those eating strictly plant-based. But as you can see, look, it's not black and white.

It's not all or nothing. Any steps we can make towards along that spectrum may accrue significant benefits. You can show this experimentally. You take vegetarians, you give them meat. What happens to their blood pressures?

They go up. Or you take some meaties, remove meat, and the blood pressures go down within 7 days. And this is after the vast majority had already reduced their blood pressure medications or eliminated them completely. They had to, otherwise their blood pressures would bottom out because you're actually treating the cause of their blood pressure. And so you can't be on blood pressure drugs if you have normal blood pressure.

Lower pressures on fewer drugs. That's the power of plants. So does the American Heart Association recommend a no meat diet. No, they recommend a low meat diet, the so-called DASH diet. Why not vegetarian?

When the DASH diet was created, were they just not aware of this landmark research done by Harvard's Frank Sachs? No, they were aware. The chair of the committee that came up with the DASH diet was Frank Sachs. See, the DASH diet was explicitly designed with the number 1 goal of capturing the blood pressure-lowering benefits of a vegetarian diet, yet contain enough animal products to make them palatable to the general public. They didn't think the public could quite handle the truth.

Now, but in their defense, you can see what they were thinking. Just like drugs never work unless you actually take them, diets never work unless you actually eat them. They're like, well, no one's going to eat vegetarian. So maybe on a population scale, if they kind of soft pedal it, then we'd actually save more lives overall. But tell that to the 1, 000 families a day that lose a loved 1 to high blood pressure.

Maybe it's time to start telling Americans the truth. Killer number 14 is Parkinson's disease. Does a plant-based diet reduce the risk of Parkinson's? Well, most studies to date suggest a link between dairy products and Parkinson's. But why?

Well, there's evidence that milk is contaminated with neurotoxic chemicals, high levels of pesticide residues, for example, found in milk and in the brains of Parkinson's victims. Talking about pollutants like tetrahydroisoquinoline here, which is actually what scientists use to induce Parkinsonism in primates in the lab. It's found mostly in cheese, actually, so maybe the dairy industry should require toxin screenings of milk. Good luck with that. You could always just not drink it, but then what would happen to your bones?

That's a marketing ploy. If you look at the science, milk does not appear to protect against hip fracture risk, whether drinking during your adult years or drinking milk during your teen years. It doesn't matter. If anything, milk was associated with an increase in fracture risk. Maybe that's why we see higher hip fracture rates among the populations with the greatest milk consumption.

So Swedish researchers decided to put it to the test. 100, 000 men and women followed for up to 20 years. And Milk drinking women had higher rates of death, more heart disease, significantly more cancer associated with each daily glass of milk consumption. 3 glasses a day was about a twofold risk of overall mortality, all-cause mortality, risk of death. And they had significantly more bone and hip fractures, too.

More milk, more fractures. Milk-drinking men also had higher risk of death. But For some reason, you never see milk ads like this. I'm not sure why. Finally, aspiration pneumonia, which is caused by swallowing problems due to Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or stroke, things that we've already covered.

So where does this leave us? Here are the 15 leading reasons Americans die. And a plant-based diet can help prevent. Nearly all of them can help treat more than a half of them. In some cases, even reverse the progression of disease, in some cases, including sometimes our top 3 killers.

Now look, there are drugs that can help too. You can take 1 drug, cholesterol lowering drugs every day for the rest of your life to help with your heart. It usually takes a couple families of blood pressure lowering pills, or you can take insulin injections or control your blood sugars. But the same diet, though, does it all. So it's not like there's 1 liver-healthy diet.

Then, oh, you want to go on the heart-healthy diet or the brain-healthy diet. A liver-healthy diet is a kidney-healthy diet, is a body-healthy diet. 1 diet to rule them all. And what about drug side effects? I'm going to talk about a little rash here.

Side effects kill. Prescription drugs kill more than 100, 000 Americans every year. Wait a second. 106, 000 deaths a year from adverse drug side effects. That means the sixth leading cause of death is actually doctors.

The sixth leading cause of death is me. Thankfully, I can be prevented with a plant-based diet. No, seriously, there's actually a study. 15, 000 American vegetarians, compared to them, meat eaters had about twice the odds of being on aspirin, sleeping pills, tranquilizers, antacids, painkillers, blood pressure medications, laxatives, of course, as well as insulin. So plant-based diets are great for people that don't like taking drugs, for the don't like paying for drugs, and don't like risking drug side effects.

Want to solve the health care crisis? I've got a suggestion. There's only 1 diet that's ever been proven to reverse heart disease in the majority of patients, a plant-based diet. So any 1 time anyone wants to sell you on some new diet they heard about, do me a favor. Ask them this simple question.

Wait a second. Has it been proven to reverse heart disease? You know, the number 1 reason me and all my loved ones will die. If the answer's no, then why would you even consider it? I mean, if that's All a plant-based diet could do, reverse our number 1 killer.

Shouldn't that be like the default diet until proven otherwise? And the fact that it would also be helpful in preventing, arresting, and reversing other leading killers like Type 2 diabetes and hypertension would seem to make the case overwhelming. Most deaths in the United States are preventable and related to nutrition. According to the most rigorous analysis of risk factors ever published is the Global Burden of Disease Study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, number 1 cause of death in the United States and number 1 cause of disability is our diet, and has since bumped tobacco smoking to number 2. Smoking now only kills about a half million Americans every year, whereas our diet kills hundreds of thousands more.

So let me end with a thought experiment. Imagine yourself a smoker back in the 1950s. The average per capita consumption of cigarettes was about 4, 000 a year. So the average American smoked half pack a day. Think about that.

The Media was telling you to smoke. Famous athletes agreed. Even Santa Claus wanted you to. I mean, look, you want to keep fit and stay slender. And so you make sure to smoke and eat a lot of hot dogs to stay trim and eat lots of sugar to stay slim and trim.

A lot better than that apple there. I mean, sheesh. Though apples do connote goodness and freshness, reads 1 internal tobacco industry memo, which brings up many possibilities for making a youth-oriented cigarette, like an apple-flavored cigarette for kids. Shameless. For digestion's sake, you smoke.

I mean, no curative power is claimed by Philip Morris, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So hey, better safe than sorry, and smoke. Blow in her face, and she'll follow you anywhere. No woman ever says no. They're so round, so firm, so fully packed.

After all, John Wayne smoked them until he got lung cancer and died. Back then, even the paleo folks were smoking, and so were the doctors. Now, this is not to say there wasn't controversy within the medical profession. Sure, some doctors smoked camels, but others preferred Lucky. So it was kind of, there was a little disagreement there.

The leader of the US Senate agreed. I mean, who wouldn't want to give their throat a vacation? Not a single case of throat irritation, because no surprise, cigarettes are just as pure as the water you drink. And look, if you do get irritated, no problem. Your doctor can write you a prescription for cigarettes.

This is an ad from the Journal of the American Medical Association. So when mainstream medicine is saying that smoking may be unbalanced beneficial, when the American Medical Association is saying that where could you turn back then if you just wanted the facts? What's the new data advanced by science? She was too tired for fun, and then she smoked a camel. Babe Ruth spoke of proof positive medical science.

That is, when he still could speak before he died of throat cancer. Now by some miracle, there was a smokingfacts.org website back then that could deliver the signs directly, bypassing commercially corruptible institutional filters. You would have become aware of studies like this. An Adventist study in California in 1958 that showed that non-smokers at least 90% less likely to die of lung cancer. But this wasn't the first.

When famed surgeon Michael DeBakey was asked why his studies published back in the 30s, linking smoking and lung cancer, were simply ignored. He had to remind people what it was like back then. Smoking was everywhere. It was in the movies. Medical meetings were 1 heavy haze of smoke.

Smoking was normal. So back to our thought experiment. If you're a smoker in the 50s in the know, what do you do? With access to the science, you realize the best available balance of evidence suggests your smoking habit not so good for you. So do you change or do you wait?

If you wait until your doctor tells you between puffs to quit, you could have cancer by then. If you wait until the powers that be officially recognize it, like the Surgeon General did in the subsequent decade, you could be dead by then. It took 25 years for the Surgeon General report to come out. It took more than 7, 000 studies. 7, 000 studies and the deaths of countless smokers For the first Surgeon General report was finally released in the 1960s.

You think maybe after the first 6, 000 studies it could have given people a little heads up or something? No, powerful industry. So 1 wonders how many people are currently suffering needlessly from dietary diseases. Maybe we should have stopped smoking after the 700th study

like this. So as

a smoker in the 50s, on 1 hand, you had all of society, the government, the medical profession itself telling you to smoke. And on the other hand, all you had was the science, if you were even lucky enough to know about studies like this. Let's fast forward 55 years. There's a new Adventist study out of California warning Americans about the risk of something else they may be putting in their mouth. And it's not just 1 study.

According to the latest review, TUM's total sum of evidence suggests mortality from all causes put together, including many of our dreaded diseases, stroke, cancer, etc., is significantly lower among those eating plant-based. So instead of someone going along with America's smoking habits in the 50s, imagine you or someone you care about going along with America's dietary habits today. What do you do? I mean, with access to the science, you realize the best available balance of evidence suggests your eating habits are not so great for you. So do you wait, or do you change?

If you wait until your doctor between bites tells you to change, It may be too late. In fact, the AMA actually went on record refusing to endorse the Surgeon General's report. Could it have been because they just got a $10 million check from the tobacco industry? OK, so we know why the AMA was sucking up to the tobacco industry back then. But why weren't individual doctors speaking out?

Well, there were a few gallant souls ahead of their time speaking up, standing up against industries killing millions. But Why not more? Because maybe it's because the majority of physicians themselves smoke cigarettes, just like the majority of physicians today continue to eat foods that are contributing to our epidemic of dietary diseases. What was the AMA's rallying cry back then? Everything in moderation.

Extensive scientific studies have proven that smoking in moderation is OK. Sound familiar? Today, the food industry uses the same tobacco industry tactics, supplying misinformation, twisting the science. The same scientists for hire paid to downplay the risks of secondhand smoke and toxic chemicals were the same paid for by the National Confectioners Association to downplay the risks of candy, and the same paid by the meat industry to downplay the risks of meat. Consumption of animal products and processed foods cause at least 14 million deaths around the world every year.

14 million people dead every year. Plant-based diets may now be considered perhaps the nutritional equivalent of quitting smoking. How many more people have to die, though, before the CDC encourages people not to wait for open heart surgery to start eating healthy as well. Until the system changes, we have to take personal responsibility for our health, for our family's health. We can't wait until society catches up to the science, because it's a matter of life and death.

Dr. Kim Williams became the president of the American College of Cardiology last year. He was asked, well, he follows his own advice to follow a plant-based diet. He said, I don't mind dying. Dr.

Williams replied, I just don't want it to be my own fault. Thank you. For any of you who would like to share this talk with anyone. I've got free copies of all my DVDs. So this is from an uprooting of the leading cause of death.

So please feel free to come take them. I also have, I go through the list of the most disabling diseases, the most common disease, the most dreaded disease, not just the ones that kill us, along with lots of other DVDs. And so happy to have my new book here, How Not to Die. 3 weeks of New York bestseller list, very exciting. All proceeds from the sale of my books and my speaking engagements and DVDs my whole Life all goes to charity, of course.

And all my work is available free at nutritionfacts.org. Happy to take any questions, sign books, anything. Yes?

Have there been any rigorous studies looking at

why, let's say, animal protein is causing things like inflammation and cascades, right? Because I'm interested in, we have this spectrum of the McDonald's hamburger versus perhaps the Joel Salatin-like pasture-raised, grass-fed beef, right? And we know that a lot of animal feed is

crap and contains sprouts up and whatever.

Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great question.

Do you have a sense of that? And is there a possibility that if 1 kept

eating animal-based foods but did it with, you

know, grass-fed, organic grass, sure. No, absolutely.

We might see lower levels of inflammation.

So for the inflammation, we think it's actually an endo... The current theory is that it's an endotoxin effect. So endotoxins are components of bacterial cell walls, essentially, that aren't destroyed by cooking, not destroyed by stomach acid, proteolytic enzymes in the gut. So it doesn't matter how much you cook it, but then you just have these kind of fragments, bacterial cell wall fragments. They get absorbed into the system.

Actually, fat helps kind of transmit it through the gut wall. So we get what's called endotoxemia. We get these endotoxin in our bloodstream. We've evolved for millions of years to think, ah, the bacteria in our bloodstream, that's a bad thing. So we get the spike of inflammation 234 hours right after the meal, and then that calms right down.

Because you can see such dramatic short-term acute effect, then we can put different meats to the test. And that's what was done. So study what was done actually in Australia. So they chose wild-caught meat, which there is kangaroo meat, like their venison basically. And they compared that.

They compared the spike of inflammation from kangaroo meat to retail meat bought off the supermarket shelves. And they found that the kangaroo meat caused significantly less inflammation than the retail meat, though 1 could argue that why have any inflammation at all, where eating plant foods, antioxidant-rich plant foods, you actually get it, or can be anti-inflammatory, actually. And so yes, less inflammation, so definitely a step in the right direction. Probably the greatest benefits to the organic meat movement is that it makes it really expensive. So people eat less.

And that's really what the recommendation is. Reduce meat consumption, Meatless Mondays, all these things. So if people really only go to restaurants that have that or really only buy. Then it's more like a condiment or a flavoring to a dish, as opposed to a big hunk. And so I would not be surprised.

If you studied a cohort of people out, people that really did eat that way would have significantly better. But it may be more tied to the quantity of meat that they'd be eating, because they're eating higher quality meat, than actually the meat itself. Because it's still saturated fat and all that.

Yeah? I had 2 questions, actually. Please. The first 1 is, is there a way to be a vegetarian in the wrong way? Like maybe you're, let's say, you don't eat enough protein or you don't get

enough weight.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you.

Yeah, no, thank you for that question. You know, a couple decades ago, if you were a vegetarian, then by definition, you had to eat healthy. Like you go to the supermarkets, like the produce, what are you going to eat, right? But now there's vegan junk food. There's literally something, there's a product called vegan bacon grease.

There's like, you can get vegan ice cream, You can get vegan crispy. There's the best donut in New York City was some Brooklyn vegan donut shop. I mean, those are, right? Yeah, Dunwell Donuts. OK, so you can eat.

It's like the gluten-free people. If you had celiac disease a couple decades ago, you had to eat healthy because you can eat junk food. Now you can get gluten-free junk food. You can get vegan gluten-free junk food. OK.

I mean, you can eat as an, in fact, the unhealthiest thing you can find in the store actually has vegetable in the title. It's partially hydrogenated vegetable like Crisco, like shortening. That's the worst thing. Trans fats, it's worse than saturated fats. It's worse than processed meat.

It's the worst thing we could possibly eat. It's made, it's plant-based. All right, so that's why I don't like the term vegan-vegetarian, because that tells me, as a physician, what you don't eat. It doesn't tell me what you do eat. That's why if you talk, oh, I eat a whole food plant-based, OK, you tell me, OK, you're eating whole food.

But you can still screw that up. And how do you screw that up? By not ensuring a regular, reliable source of vitamin B12. There's 2 vitamins that are not made by plants. 1 is vitamin D, which is made by animals, such as yourself when you walk outside and get some sunshine.

It's actually not a vitamin, it's a hormone created by sun. But no matter how long you sunbathe naked in Times Square on New Year's Day, the sun's rays are at such an angle at this latitude during the winter months, you're not going to make any vitamin D. January, February, no vitamin D production in New York City. They actually did these studies using human foreskins on the tops of buildings here in New York City. Because, hey, what, you need human skin?

And anyway, no vitamin D production whatsoever. So You need to get a vitamin D, depending

on where you're at.

I mean, we evolved running around naked in equatorial Africa getting baked in the sun all day. We're not used to living at this latitude and wearing lots of clothes. OK. And vitamin B12 is not made by plants either, not made by animals, made by little microbes that blanket the earth. So we get all the B12 we need drinking out of a mountain stream or well water or something.

But now we chlorinate our water supply to kill off any bacteria. So we don't get a lot of B12 in our water anymore. Don't get a lot of cholera either. It's a good thing. But now, because we live in such a sanitary situation.

So our fellow great apes get B12 from bugs, dirt, and feces. But let's see, I prefer supplemental sources. So I recommend a vitamin B12 supplement for people eating a plant-based diet. 1 2, 500-microgram tablet once a week costs less than $3 a year, all the B12 you need. There's also B12-fortified foods like this, soy milk and breakfast cereal and things like that.

But I encourage people to eat less of those processed foods. So probably the safest, cheapest way is

just get it. But I'm so glad you

brought that up Because that's critical. B12 is critical for neurological health and for blood health.

What about omega-3s?

Oh, yeah. So there are essential fatty acids. Omega-6 and omega-3 are essential fatty acids, meaning that our bodies can't make them. We need to take them into our diet. And so the current recommendation is we need to get basically about 2 grams of omega-3s.

And so you can get that in alpha-linolenic acid, like a tablespoon of ground flax seeds, all the omega-3s you dig for the day. So that's part of my daily dozen foods I encourage people to eat every day in their diet. 1 is a tablespoon of flax seeds. Why? You need to get your omega-3s.

You can also eat walnuts or dark green leafy vegetables or chia seeds, hemp seeds, lots of things. But you need to get those into your diet. And our bodies can take those short-chain omega-3s and elongate them into the so-called fish fats, like EPA and DHA. The question, though, is can we do it enough for optimal health? And that, I think, still remains an open question.

So I actually encourage people to take 250 milligrams of a pollutant-free source of long-chain omega-3s, EPA, DHA. And the only way you can do that pollutant-free is either yeast-based or algae-based EPA, DHA. That's actually where the fish get it from in the first place. We can kind of cut out the middle fish and go straight to the source. And not for heart health, actually, because the studies have shown, we now know that recommendations to increase fatty fish consumption to take fish oil capsules don't appear to help prevent heart disease or help treat heart disease, but for cognitive health.

There's a study linking kind of accelerated cerebral volume loss

with low omega-3 index, which is these long chain omega-3. So I encourage people to include that. Absolutely? Great. Good question.

Thank

you. So we talked a lot about nutrition with a normal level of extra-saturated fat that's up around

36.

How does the situation change when you're talking about more vigorous exercise, more like math-based and such, in particular concerning an a-cycle, 1 thing that comes to mind is iron and protein.

Sure. Sure. Or like, long-distance programming. Yeah, no, no, absolutely.

And so they actually take care of themselves because you eat so many more calories. And so you're just eating more food. So if you stick to healthy foods, you still can do all the math. And you can see that you're going to get all the iron you need, all the protein you need. We actually get about 70% more protein than we need, even people that are sedentary.

But right, so you absolutely have increased calorie needs. The only problem, any time you really run into problems is athletes who are trying to calorie restrict, who are actually trying to kind of lose weight, preserve the body mass, and if you're not eating enough calories, so they go on these like starvation diets, and so if you're not eating enough food, then you really have to be careful to make sure that food really packs a nutritional punch. So you've got to eat the most kind of nutrient-dense foods. So if you just lived off of iceberg lettuce and cotton candy or something, but even healthy, you could run into

some problems. But people eating enough food shouldn't be a problem.

Should we avoid potatoes, bread, rice, and pasta?

So it's interesting. So if you look at,

so I do encourage people

to, the bottom line is encourage people to stick to whole foods whenever possible. So encourage, so pasta is fine, but I'd like people to have whole grain pasta. And actually sweet potatoes I think are healthier than white potatoes and I give my kind of reasons why. And so, and in general flour products, even in whole, even when they're whole wheat, are not great because you actually starve your microbial self. If you actually eat, so they do this really neat studies where they basically give people the same diet, but they grind up everything beforehand.

So instead of beans, they give some people chickpeas, some people hummus. They give some people a bread, and some people like actually wheat berries. And you do that for grains. You chop up your oatmeal or steel cut oatmeal. And you can dramatically boost the weight of their stool.

And actually, most of the weight of a stool is actually pure bacteria, just trillions and trillions of bacteria. And so you are so much, because little pieces of starch and starch, no matter how well you chew, actually get down past our small intestine into our lower intestine. Actually, these are the prebiotics, fiber resistant starch, the prebiotics that feed our good gut bacteria so much so that you could, they go crazy when you eat, you know, kind of whole intact grains, not just whole grains. So whole intact grains are preferable because then we leave some for our gut bacteria. We're learning more and more about the benefits of the microbiome.

Whereas when you process foods into flour or grind them up, you actually, they become so efficiently absorbed that other than the fiber, you're not leaving anything. And we feed them, they feed us. There's really some cool stuff out there about the microbiome. Yes?

So

if you reverse amortize the effects of, like, say, eating bacon over the course of your life, you could say something like, every strip of bacon takes 17 minutes off the end of your life. And you could say this to someone. It should kind of show them the impact of their choices. And they'll say, well, yeah, but that's just the time at the end. So I was wondering if you had a response to that.

Yeah, no. I mean, that brings up an important point. So we're actually living longer lives, but shorter, healthy lifespans. So we actually live a year longer than we did 20 years ago, but we're actually 2 years shorter in terms of healthy lifespan without a major disabling disease like the ability to stand for a certain number of minutes without having to sit down and things like that. These kind of severe disability.

And so it's not just about adding years to your life, it's adding life to your years. So we want to be skydiving till the end. So that's why I have this talk about the most disabling diseases, too. So yeah, if you're crippled with arthritis, maybe you don't want to live an extra 10 years because you can't even move. And right, absolutely.

And I mean, spoiler alert, it's the same healthy diet. That does, yeah. And so, right, So they have all these neat metrics, like disability adjusted life years. So not just how many years you have, but how many healthy years. And you get the same kind of stats.

In fact, that's what the Gold Burden of Disease Study looked at dailies, looked at those disability adjusted life years. So it's not just, So we're extending healthy lifespan. That's really a critical key. Yeah, good point.

I've heard some things recently regarding benefits of alcohol, and then I've read things saying the opposite.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah. How does this play into it?

Yeah, yeah, So alcohol consumption decreases risk of number 1 killer heart disease, increases risk of 1 type of stroke, hemorrhagic stroke, decreases risk of another type of stroke, ischemic stroke, increases the risk of cancer. And so you could see how we could be flopping back and forth, but bottom line is these are in people eating the standard American diet. And people eating the standard American diet, adding alcohol to their diet actually does extend lifespan, because heart disease is killer number 1. But people who even have a modicum of healthy behaviors, and by healthy behaviors, they said a fruit or vegetable serving a day. Or, right?

Not currently smoking means you could have a lot of smoking past, but not currently smoking. I forget what the exact, it was like 20 minutes walking every day, something like that. If you fit those criteria, then the alcohol has no benefit. But it thins your blood enough that when your arteries are so clogged up, it can actually extend lifespan. And unfortunately, even light drinking increases the risk of breast cancer.

So the big Harvard Nurses study looked at women eating, even drinking less than a drink a day, 1 drink a day, had significant increased risk of breast cancer. So in general, I encourage people

to stay away from alcohol.

If you've heard of Soylent and Mealsquare,

what are

your opinions on those?

Yeah, so It's like if you pick up a package of mushrooms in the store. You look at it, you turn around, look at the nutrition facts.

It's like there's nothing in there.

A couple B vitamins, maybe a few minerals. But you're like, now they put it back on the shelf. And that's because They're listing the top 7 or so, vitamins, minerals. But what they're missing are the phytonutrients, or in that case, the micronutrients. There's literally tens of thousands of these phytonutrients, some of which we think may be the reason why we see some of these beneficial things.

And so you can hit all the RDAs, but miss out on all the phytonutrients, the tens of thousands of phytonutrients. And so whether it's the carotenoids, like beta-carotene, lycopene, leucine, which is associated with eye health and brain health and all these things were just not, it's difficult to capture it in a whole food. And there's been some real kind of cautionary tales. So for example, the beta carotene debacle, where researchers noticed that people who had high beta carotene levels lived longer, had less disease. I mean, it's a great indicator of health, how much beta carotene you have in your bloodstream.

If I wanted to place bets on somebody, I want to know their beta carotene levels. And so they said, aha, let's give people beta carotene pills. And so they took people at high risk for cancer, smokers, because then we'd only have to have a short study to get so much cancer, split them up into 2 groups, beta carotene pills or placebo, and beta carotene group got more cancer. They had more, and they had to stop the study. It was OK.

And then they went back and said, well, wait a second. Why did those people have high levels of beta-carotene in their blood? Because they were eating super healthy foods. Dark green leafy vegetables, what has beta-carotene? Sweet potatoes, right?

So it's like a marker for healthy eating. And actually, beta-carotene is kind of a wimpy antioxidant. So if you take beta-carotene, you kind of max out all your carotenoid receptors, and then you eat tomato sauce and have an even more powerful antioxidant like lycopene, it goes right through you. It doesn't get absorbed because you just took a beta-carotene pill. That's what we think the mechanism behind that is.

But so we just don't know enough about the biology to be able to kind of pick and choose which nutrient. And so, and then they tried vitamin E supplements, and we had increased mortality. People were paying to shorten their lives by buying vitamin E supplements for themselves. So it's that kind of data that any time someone tries to put these kind of isolated nutrients and think, yes, can it keep you going? Absolutely.

Is it great in a zombie apocalypse? Absolutely. Or the island, starving to death on that island. But in terms of maximizing health and longevity, sticking to whole foods would probably be a healthier option.

Do you have the same concern for something that's direct from whole foods, like meal squares?

So yeah, well, so you can actually buy fruit and vegetable extract pills, like powdered broccoli pills. And because 90% of broccoli is actually water, and so you get 10 times more broccoli in product, you know. But the pills are this big. So 10 times more broccoli is like this much broccoli. That's still your only engagement.

Now, I would not be surprised if people taking those pills actually had benefits, because that's that much more broccoli than most people eat. But you just can't get pounds of food in the same way. And once you get down to chemical components, doesn't really matter where it comes from. Vitamin C is ascorbic acid,

however you get it from, whether you make it synthetically in a lab.

Yes. So there's a practical component to all this, right? So as an example, here

at Google we get lots of great food. It's amazing. So I can go out and get a huge helping of like broccoli and carrots and you know kale and whatever and that's great and then my question is Hey

Hey, no, that's organic, okay Second like for instance here a lot of that's cooked with canola oil. And so do some of those pieces end up cancelling out?

Yeah, there's been some interesting computer modeling studies. So there's 1 famous 1, the Food and Chemical Toxicology, that suggested that if half of Americans ate a single more serving of fruits and vegetables, then we would prevent, every year, 20, 000 cancer deaths. Not just cancer cases, 20, 000 cancer deaths, people that would have died had it not been for half of America eating 1 more serving of fruits and vegetables. That's how powerful fruits and vegetables are. But because they were modeling conventional fruits and vegetables, that additional pesticide load from all that extra conventional fruit and vegetable consumption would cause, in their estimation, 10 cancer deaths.

So you only end up preventing 19, 990 cancer, but that should get this tremendous benefit and then a small bump in risk. Now sure, Why accept any risk at all? Choose organic. Great. But we should never let concern about pesticides prevent us from stuffing our face with as many fruits and vegetables as possible.

And what about the oil, Susan?

Oh, yeah. So if you're going to cook with oil, canola would be probably the best choice. So canola is a process. Obviously, it's a process. I think of oil as kind of the table sugar of the carb kingdom.

I mean, you take a sugar beet, super healthy food, you'd take out all the nutrition you left with table sugar. You'd take, well, you wouldn't take a canola plant. But you'd take a walnut, you remove all nutrition, and you're left with walnut oil, though it still has some fat soluble nutrients like vitamin E, et cetera. But someone just stole nutrition from you. And it's the most calorically dense food.

So 1 table spoon, like 120 calories? Like you ate 120 calories of oil, you wouldn't even feel it, right? You had 100 calories of broccoli? 100 calories of strawberries? 100 calories of tomatoes?

Like that's a plate of food, right? And so then, just in terms of weight loss, in terms of nutrient density in one's diet, you just wasted 5% of your caloric bank for the day on essentially nothing. Well, it has omega-3s. But you really want to maximize. Every bite of something has an opportunity cost.

It's a lost opportunity to eat something even healthier.

That's how I kind of think about it. Yes? We have time

for 1 more.

All right. So a lot

of vegetarians will look to things like shakes or powders to supplement their protein intake. Have there been any studies on whey protein isolate? And if it's the same kind of immune inflammation response, it's scary, like a glass of milk, maybe cheese.

Right. Yeah. So the biggest problem with whey protein is It's high in leucine content. So leucine is a branch chain amino acid that activates this kind of engine of aging enzyme called mTOR, which is a fascinating story. I've got a bunch of videos about it.

This is a really neat detective story. But basically, I mean, Milk has evolved to do what? To promote growth, right? So dairy milk, literally, to put a couple hundred pounds on a calf in a matter of months. And so it's supremely designed to boost IGF-1, boost mTOR signaling, kind of accelerate growth, which is not so great if you've already reached adult height.

And so accelerating growth, so having growth hormones and growth factors in your body, at this stage, not so great because many of us are actually harboring so-called occult tumors. And So even women by their 40s, if they actually do autopsy studies, if you get hit by a bus, they have microscopic breast tumors. Most men actually have microscopic prostate tumors. So for example, American men have the same rates of prostate cancer as Japanese men, but a tiny fraction of the death from prostate cancer. They die with their tumors instead of from their tumors, because there's a third stage of cancer.

There's cancer initiation, the first mutated DNA that creates the cancer cell. And then there's a promotion stage where it grows, can grow for decades. Epithelial tumors like colon cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer can take decades to grow, and then the progression stage where it kind of spreads around the body. But in that stage, I mean, it takes a billion cells to show, a billion cancer cells to show up on mammography. So early detection with mammography is really, really late detection.

And so it's all about slowing the doubling time. So breast cancer cells take between a few weeks to a few months to double once in size. But we love the mathematics of exponential growth. You double 30 times, and boom, we got a billion cells. But you don't care if you get breast cancer in a century from now.

You don't expect to be around that long. So it's not just about preventing cancer, but slowing down the growth of cancer. And so the reason we think that high GF1 levels, high TOR signaling, leucine intake is associated with these cancers is because it's not that they're causing the cancer, but they're speeding up the amplifying, the growth of whatever hidden tumors you have. And so they'll actually appear within your lifespan, which is something that we don't want to have happen. Happy to sign books for anyone.

Thank you so much. If anyone has any questions, please feel free. Hesitate to call me any time. My contact information is on the site. Oh, and take some DVDs if you're interested.