Dr. Greger visited Google NYC to discuss his new book - How Not to Die.

The vast majority of premature deaths can be prevented through simple changes in diet and lifestyle. In How Not to Die, Dr. Michael Greger, the internationally-recognized lecturer, physician, and founder of NutritionFacts.org, examines the fifteen top causes of death in America—heart disease, various cancers, diabetes, Parkinson’s, high blood pressure, and more—and explains how nutritional and lifestyle interventions can sometimes trump prescription pills and other pharmaceutical and surgical approaches, freeing us to live healthier lives.

The simple truth is that most doctors are good at treating acute illnesses but bad at preventing chronic disease. The 15 leading causes of death claim the lives of 1.6 million Americans annually. This doesn’t have to be the case. By following Dr. Greger’s advice, all of it backed up by peer-reviewed scientific evidence, you will learn which foods to eat and which lifestyle changes to make to live longer.

History of prostate cancer in your family? Put down that glass of milk and add flaxseed to your diet. Have high blood pressure? Hibiscus tea can work better than a leading hypertensive drug—and without the side effects. What about liver disease? Drinking coffee can reduce liver inflammation. Battling breast cancer? Consuming soy is associated with prolonged survival. Worried about heart disease (our #1 killer)? Switch to a whole-food, plant-based diet, which has been repeatedly shown not just to help prevent the disease, but arrest and even reverse it.

In addition to showing what to eat to help prevent the top 15 causes of death, How Not to Die includes Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen—a checklist of the foods we should try to consume every day. Full of practical, actionable advice and surprising, cutting edge nutritional science, these doctor’s orders are just what we need to live longer, healthier lives.

Moderated by Anthony V.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Maybe the Africans were just dying early from other diseases, didn't live long enough to get coronary artery disease.

Here's age-matched heart attack rates in Uganda versus St.

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.

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.

So why do people continue to get cavities when we know they're preventable through diet?

Because the pleasure people derive from dessert may outweigh the cost and discomfort of the dentist's chair.

As long as people understand the consequences of their actions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

American Heart Journal, 1977, cases like Mr.

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.

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.

What happens if you put cancer on a plant-based diet?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

It's almost as if you never started eating healthy at all.

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.

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.

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.

The risk of lung cancer, maybe from secondhand smoke, may be well below the risk reported for other everyday activities.

It's like saying, don't worry about getting stabbed, because getting shot's so much worse, right?

Now, of course, you'll notice Phil Moore stopped throwing dairy under the bus once they purchased Kraft Foods.

Top 3 killers used to be heart disease, cancer, and stroke.

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.

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.

Preventing strokes might be all about eating potassium-rich foods, yet most Americans don't even reach the recommended minimum daily intake.

98% of us eat potassium-deficient diets because 98% of us don't eat enough plants.

Take any plant, put it in a pot, reduce it to ash.

You're left with a white residue at the bottom called potashium, potassium.

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?

I don't know why that's 1 of the few things everybody knows about nutrition, right?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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