Okay, wonderful. Well, welcome everyone. I know there's people who are still entering the Zoom room here, and that's fine. Please continue to come in. My name is Natasha Lantz and I am the COO here at the Center for Nutrition Studies. And it is a pleasure to have all of you join us today. Just a few housekeeping items for our Fireside Chat with Doctors Caldwell Esselstyn and T. Colin Campbell. There is closed captioning available. You just need to click on the CC button at the bottom of your zoom screen should you need it. There is no chat available today, and there will be no question and answer session. This is a different type of webinar. This is the opportunity for you to sit back, relax, and listen to two great pioneers in the plant-based movement. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to today's host, Dr. Mike Hollie, who is the chair of the Medical Advisory Board for the Center for Nutrition Studies. Oh, and one more thing. Yes, there will be a replay of today's session and you will receive that approximately one week from today. So sit back, enjoy and relax. Mike, it's all you. Thank you, Natasha. To say it's a privilege would be an understatement to sit here in this virtual room, if you will, with two of the great Natasha used the word pioneer. I like that, I would also include icons, two of the great icons in whole food, plant-based nutrition and the approach that so many people around the world are starting to take. I wanna say good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, depending on which timezone you're joining us from. We are so glad that you're here for our Fireside Chat with Dr. T Colin Campbell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. Sponsored by the T Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies. Gentlemen, thank you both for taking time out to sit down with us. I know a Firesides Chat in June sounds a little odd, but maybe there are some people in climates that a fire would be appropriate at this time of year, but certainly not for most of us. But we envisioned sort of an informal casual chat with you all to really get, not only just your professional, but some of your personal feelings about where you've been on your journey through life. I know both of you have your wives nearby as well, so it's great. Dr. Campbell has Karen, and Dr. Esselstyn has Anne nearby, so we may, they may need to jump in here and tell us a few things as well. Before I get started, I want to read bios for both of our guests today and just give you a little bit of background. Some of this you already know, some of this you may not know. Dr. T. Colin Campbell completed his education at Cornell University earning his Master's and PhD. He was also a research associate in Nutrition, Biochemistry and Toxicology at MIT. He is the Jacob Gould Sherman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry in the division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. His research experience includes both laboratory experiments and large scale human studies. He has received over 70 grant years of peer reviewed research funding, mostly with NIH, and served on grant review panels of multiple funding agencies, and actively participated in the development of national and international nutrition policy and authored over 350 research papers most published in peer reviewed science journals. He is the author of several books, including the "China Study," from 2006, one of the most widely read and impactful books about nutrition and health in the 21st century. His other books include "Whole, the Low Carb Fraud," and "The Future of Nutrition." Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn graduated from Yale in 1956. And received his medical degree from Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1961. In 1956, he received a gold medal in rowing at the Olympic Games. In 1968 as an army surgeon in Vietnam. He was awarded the Bronze Star. He was trained as a surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic and has been associated with the Cleveland Clinic since 1961. He was President of the staff and a member of the Board of Governors. He was chairman of the Breast Cancer Task Force and head of the section of Thyroid and Parathyroid disease. His accolades are many and include, in 2005, he became the first recipient of the Benjamin Spock Award for Compassion in Medicine. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Cleveland Clinic Alumni Association in 2009. In 2013, he received Yale University's George Herbert Walker Bush Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2016, he received the case, Western Reserve Medical School Distinguished Alumni Award. Dr. Esselstyn has also received the 2015 Plantation Project Luminary Award. And the American College of Lifestyle Medicine 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award. His scientific publications are over 150. His pioneering research is summarized in his bestselling book, "Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease." And in July, 2014, his study of 200 patients confirmed an even larger group can be adherent to plant-based nutrition and achieve the same significant arrest and reversal of disease. Currently, he directs the Cardiovascular Disease Prevention and Reversal Program at the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute. Very, very distinguished guests that we have today. You know, both of you are in your 90th year and you've already beaten the odds. You know, I looked it up the other day. The life expectancy in the US has dropped now it's around 76 years. So you all are way out in front of that. And I think what's important is not just that you're in your 90th year of life, but the fact that you're living healthy, robust, active lives is really a testament to your lifestyle. And we'll actually address that a little later in our conversation. But right now I want to just start with like, how did you two meet? When did you meet? What were the circumstances and did you immediately agree? Because at the time you were coming from different backgrounds, Dr. Campbell an academian and Dr. Esselstyn in clinical medicine. But tell me about those early meetings and how it all came about. Well, I guess I can be the guilty one (laughs) (Mike laughs) That was in 1991 that I was trying to put together the first national conference on the elimination of coronary artery disease. This was in Tucson, Arizona. And then trying to put this faculty together. I had a really what I thought was a blue ribbon faculty of Ernst Winder from the American Health Foundation, William Castelli from Bob Boston, also Alexander Lee from Boston, Dean Ornish. And it was while I was reading the "New York Times," I happened to come across a sort of a, I think it was a op-ed piece talking about the Grand Prix of all nutrition studies, which was Colin Campbell's study in China. And I said, my gosh, that might be a very interesting fellow to have on this faculty. So I said, but you know, nothing ventured, nothing gained. So I gave him a call and Colin couldn't have been nicer, and he accepted. And so when he came to Tucson, I had a chance to meet him. And it was really quite spectacular to learn of his really studies, even back then of the reversal of cancer. And one particular observation he had when he was looking at death certificates in a county, in southern China. Of all the death certificates in that county, there were none for the coronary artery heart disease. Which was really quite striking to think that as you look back on it, multiple cultures on the planet earth. We knew that for over a hundred years, where literally cardiovascular disease was virtually non-existent. So I would have to say that I think we had a a great deal that was in common. And we had established our friendship at that time with I think, mutual professional respect. Colin, what do you remember about those early days? Well, just to pick up on what Dr. Esselstyn said, he called me and I was pleased and surprised, quite frankly with a very pleasant conversation at the time. And basically there was the "New York Times," article that came to his attention, I guess. And so he started telling me who he was and what he was doing and the fact that he had gotten involved in working with patients, of course, and possibly reversing their disease, if you will. I think that conversation came up at the time, and I thought this was really spectacular to say the least, because a few years before that. In the beginning of my research career at the time was children in the Philippines and then subsequently with experimental animals. We had learned something really quite spectacular. Namely animal protein, when it is an increased turns on cancer, it promotes the growth of cancer. That was to say that's unusual is it? It's unstated, be quite frankly. But in any case, he just said that he was doing this with people. I said, wow, we did it in experimental animals, you know, turning and reversing cancer, and here he is doing it with the real people, if you will, doing it with heart disease. So that caught my attention immediately. And of course then I learned about his own personal reputation as well. And then we got together because he invited me to speak to a conference he was organizing out in Arizona, having some funding from his late father, as I understood, who was a physician himself, a very renowned physician. So we did it in Arizona, talked there, and then later he organized another one in Florida at the Disney World that was exciting and back to the Cleveland Clinic and so forth. And so we had a lot of opportunity to visit with each other. And most importantly, from my point of view, I was organizing a course at Cornell University subsequent to that. And it was an unusual course in a way. And so we had some funding to invite guests then. And so I invited him to be a speaker in my class, and he did that for the next six years, every year. He was the most popular one. He really had an important message to say, and that was all very exciting that we did that. And so on that score, I mean, of course he's working with people, I'm working with experimental animals by this time and turning cancer on and off and getting some very exciting evidence. And then later we of course passed many times in the conferences here and there, and especially one in China as I remember, I can't remember how we ended up there, but we did that. And yeah, so it was all very exciting. I mean, it was exciting from the standpoint that he's working with real people and looking at the totality of the person and he's using a kind of diet that really reflected on what I was learning in the laboratory to. So, yeah and it could be nothing better than coming together just like one message. Exactly. I'm interested to step back a little bit further because Dr. Esselstyn. you went to medical school and if it's back then was the way it is now, there's not a whole lot of nutrition, if any, taught in medical school. Dr. Campbell, you were doing research, not looking so much at plants, but at other things in the animal world. How did you both get initially interested in your work and get into the plant-based approach to things? Well, I was, after I finished my tour of duty in the military, after I finished my surgical training, I was a combat surgeon in Vietnam for a year. From June of '67 to June of '68. When I returned to the Cleveland Clinic, I was offered a position in the Department of General Surgery. And it was by 19, what I say, the late '70s when I was chairman of the breast cancer task force, I became increasingly disillusioned, shall we say, with the fact that for no matter how many women I was doing breast surgery, I was doing absolutely nothing for the next unsuspecting victim. And that led to a bit of global research. And it was apparent that there were other cultures where breast cancer rates were 30 and 40 times less frequent than the United States, for instance, with Kenya. And breast cancer in rural Japan in the '50s was very infrequently identified. And yet, as soon as the Japanese women would migrate to the United States by the second and third generation, they now had the same rate of breast cancer as their Caucasian counterpart. And even more perhaps provocative, was when I went and looked at Japan, how many men do you suppose in the entire nation of Japan in 1958 were autopsy proven to have died from prostate cancer, 18. The most mind boggling public health figure I think I've ever encountered. And yet, by 1978, 20 years later, they were up to 187, which still pales in comparison to the 28,000 who will die from prostate cancer in the United States this year. But it was along around this time that I began to notice that there were multiple cultures that I was encountering where cardiovascular disease was virtually non-existent. And it just suddenly dawned on me, there perhaps would really be more bang for the buck. If we could look at the most common killer of women and men in western civilization, coronary artery heart disease. Because if we could get people to eat to save their hearts, they would markedly diminish the likelihood of having the common western cancers of breast, prostate, colon, and pancreatic. And that was sort of the background for getting a study started. It was a small study because I still had my surgical obligations, but in these 24 patients who were seriously ill with heart disease, when I was able to persuade them to eat plant-based, we began to get some exciting results. And that was really sort of the background on how I got involved with it. It was after I'd been at this for, I started back in 1985, and by the time it was 1991. In 1991 when I got so excited with the results, that I thought it was time to have this national conference on the elimination of heart disease with this blue ribbon faculty. That's in essence the background of how I got started. Great. Dr. Campbell. Yeah, as I mentioned before, I really got started almost accidentally. And the research that was involved in the Philippines with these children, the idea there was that these malnourished and even starving children, a big problem obviously in many parts of the world, that the idea that somehow they were more susceptible to something like liver cancer when they were fed more animal protein, not plant protein, animal protein was striking. Now obviously as I said before, I'm coming from a farm. I grew up milking cows and all that sort of stuff. And then I did my doctoral dissertation and advancing the consumption of more animal protein as a means of getting enough protein. And I was trained in that area. So to see this here, you can imagine, I didn't quite believe this. So we did it, we repeated a study that had been done sort of superficially in India at the time. But it was so striking this effect happened within days and we could turn on and off. I mean, it was just beyond belief. And so at a point you really have to come and sort of face it. And at that point in time because the biological effect was so impressive, obviously it occurred to me to at that time that this animal protein thing is kind of unique for animal protein, not plant protein. I became obviously curious about the idea that does this work on other diseases, chronic diseases, for example. And so when Dr. Esselstyn then called me and told me about what he was doing, that just kind of filled in a little link for me that, you know, if it's working on cancer, okay, it's so dramatic, so fast, and he's doing it with people and reversing the disease. I can't believe him, I can't quite even now believe it, that biology responds so rapidly in response to nutritional change. And I think I can speak for him as well of course, we see that now, you know, with people being able, when they change, we can see changes so fast. I'm sure Dr. Hollie you've heard the same thing. So just the idea of getting into questioning the most revered of all nutrients, animal protein if you will, and seeing as most feared of all diseases, also being a different disease at same time, cancer and heart disease. I mean that really opened up a huge door to inquiry. And of course at that particular point in time, and this is a little bit more (indistinct) but nonetheless, I became interested in trying to understand how does that work? I was at the time a a professional in a sense in professional society of pharmacology. So I was thinking like new people usually do in medicine, you see a problem, now let's find a solution, let's find a chemical, see if we can't deal with that. When in reality that's not the way nutrition works. It's that all the nutrients, endless, countless, millions, whatever are working together from a plant point of view and causing such a rapid change within days, if you will, in the case of humans. And so I think both of us are really kind of lucky to become aware, you know, what the other was doing, somebody's looking after us I think because it was like a hand and glove kind in consideration, not just a experimental animals, but you know obviously humans. And then eventually when I got involved in doing the study in China that at that point in time involved, you know, pretty large number of 6,000 and some people. And it was as Essy said, the idea, and I can remember this Ess at the time when you saw that, I think it was something like 365,000 consecutive death certificates. Only one was a cardiac CHD mortality. And that was so striking, my gosh. And so you could start comparing that kind of information then with other data in the world and seeing, you know, how does the rate of heart disease, how does the rate of heart disease mortality compare with various Sunday doctor practices? I don't know. I think something was looking over both of us kind of steering us into a common solution. So in your reference to your question, you know, why plant-based? Obviously it was an exciting development for both of us. And we came from different backgrounds. That was not what we grew up eating. In my case, professionally, I was being trained to believe in exactly the opposite. So it still, I find it still very exciting that something like this should come across our plate and be so spectacular and then come to realize to, why have we been so long trying to, you know, understand this, why hasn't it been known before? So yeah, it was that way. And say I had to invoke your name too, Mike, because you came into this as somewhat later and saw the same thing as well in your practice. All very exciting. Yeah. Yeah. I came into it later and quite honestly it was the China study that launched me into the plant-based approach and the science there. And speaking of the science, you know, just what you mentioned, Dr. Campbell, you were expecting something completely opposite, but the science showed you differently, and it's so great to see how you two took your backgrounds, academia, clinical medicine and brought them together and then started on this journey and path of plant-based nutrition to prevent, reverse and treat various diseases in particular heart disease. So this may be sort of a easy, obvious question 'cause you may say everything, but I wanna know, what have you two enjoyed the most about your journey? What have you enjoyed most about your life's work as you look back on it? Go ahead Ess. Well first I wanna back up a little bit, to the first conference because I should, I learned something more about Colin at that time down in Tucson. And everybody was making their presentations and obviously it was apparent that there was something to certainly be said for plant-based nutrition and heart disease and so I had organized as we finished the conference, those presenters who were still there, we all agreed to sort of sit down and we just sort of chatted about the conference and it was really rather like warm pablim. I mean, it was nothing, nobody was really striking the iron with what we had learned what we had talked about. And Colin stood up and showed me the fire in his belly, and he just really absolutely made it perfectly clear that we should actually move forward from what we had learned. And that was really rather striking. And so much so that I knew that when the results of this conference were just not as exciting as I wanted and I thought the world, I was so naive, I thought the world would change on the basis of that conference. Well, nothing really much happened. And so I decided I'd try it another time. And that this time we had over 500 doctors and nurses at Disney. And again, I asked Colin and Dean Ornish and a number of the other performers to come, and we really had a more robust conference. Yet one thing we'd learned, it's very difficult and we still experience it today. There's a tremendous inertia to get people to really to change their diet and how do you make this actually happen. So I think the question you asked Mike was what is it that keeps you going? Well, for me, what keeps me going is the fact that the patients who call and want to come and be counseled continues. And every month I conduct an intensive counseling seminar, that's run on a, you know, the virtual Zoom basis. We limit it usually to about 20 patients, all of whom come with some degree of heart disease. And it's so gratifying, especially the ones that come with the chest pain and angina. When suddenly if they do this right, they realize that within 4, 6, 8 or 10 days their angina is markedly diminished or in many cases it disappears. And there's really nothing more exciting and gratifying than here are patients often who had this kind of problem for years and they've been taking all kinds of pills, they've failed their stents, they failed their bypass, and suddenly they realize by getting rid of one pile of delicious food that is destroying them for another pile of delicious food that is going to enhance their health, it almost brings tears to their eyes to feel that they actually, they themselves are the locus of control for this hideous disease that is trying to take them out. And that's about as exciting and gratifying as it can get. Other than the fact that you can perhaps persuade other health caregivers to do this as well. Yeah. Colin, what keeps you going? Yeah, well the main thing for most of my years at least, it was my students. I loved working with students. I had quite a large group of graduate students at the time. And so we were into business of being skeptical, if you will, which scientists supposed to do. And I sure did have a skeptical observation in the very beginning. So it was an opportunity for me to arrange for my students, the doctoral students, especially, to do their dissertations on exploring the question of, you know, if animal protein turns on cancer like that, it's so striking, how does it work? I mean, everybody wants to know that kind of thing. And so it usually took two or three years per student because they had to develop methodology and it's that sort of thing to explore. And after about 12, 15 years or so, one student at a time looking for the mechanism to account for this effect, mind you, as you well know, both of you know this of course, if we can understand the mechanism for something like this that we don't like and we want to keep on eating the food, the idea is well, let's find a drug to block that thing, you know, so we can keep on doing what we wanna do. So we started look for mechanisms and just to illustrate a couple of points, what I mean by mechanisms, when we eat animal protein for example, it increases the rate at which chemical carcinogen does go into our cells. And then it turns around and increases the enzyme that have metabolizes it to lead to mischief. And that it decreases a couple of mechanisms that are there to protect us, on and on and on. And so I just saw this again and again, after about 12, 15 years, I said to myself, I said, you know, I don't think there's a mechanism here. That was the most fundamental thing I ever ran across in my life just to come to that realization. There's not one thing like that can count for this big effect. And I became aware of the fact that all these mechanisms changed together without exception. So when we consumed, for example, in my hands at the time, it was animal protein. The increased animal protein reminds you, this is experimental animals at that time. But it also proved to be the extent to which we could do this kind of thing in humans to. As soon we start eating that kind of food and not consuming the food we should be eating like antioxidants and fiber and so forth and so on, plants. All this stuff went to hell on a hand basket in a sense. It was just like, and what's happened within well I don't know, milliseconds I guess, that's the way the body works. And I just became so fascinated with that concept that I eventually called wholism with a W on it. That somehow it's just a remarkable thing because it begs the question, how does that happen? I tend to think this is a illustration, this an image of mother nature. And so then coming back to what Dr. Esselstyn said, was his patients, he's working with all patients using whole food. He's not using individual (indistinct). And so once again, it kind of dovetailed, as what you were doing, you were getting such remarkable results so fast. I mean I saw the same thing in the laboratory. And so eventually, I'm now in a place where I'm very comfortable with redefining nutrition. Nutrition is not about single nutrients doing their thing, one at a time especially or independently. It's all of them working together as long as from the right food. If it's been basically plants and basically in a whole food form, if you will. Eventually mother nature gets a chance to look at all that stuff and we consume it. We started absorbing it and it starts doing its work. So that observation of that query that I got involved in and trying to understand how does this animal protein affect cause cancer? Then it was heart disease. And I got involved in literature, I mean in the history because I thought at that time, you know, where did we go wrong? And I started looking at the history and now I have to say one of the most exciting stories that I find is going back into history and learning, where did we go wrong? Why haven't we known this before? It's so spectacular. Of course, I was remembering that study Ess that you did, Dr. Esselstyn, but in any case, that study that you did with your patients, 200 patients. I remember that so well, because what you did, and you went back and you found, you checked on them three to seven years later. I know the numbers. You checked on them and found out how they were doing, were they staying with it? And you learned that you found 178, I think by phone call at that time, and only one of them passed away. I knew him, he was a friend of mine, but I'd learned later from his wife who wasn't quite doing it well, but set that aside, what happened was that 178 patients you called and you talked very personally about this, and you learned that all of them, 178, every single one of them survived and did well. A 177 outta 178, it's amazing. And so that idea of seeing such a rapid response like that in humans is what I was seeing in my laboratory involving a whole bunch of stuff. It was once again, it was kind of a dovetail kind of thing. What you looking at humans. And so I have this whole different idea of nutrition now myself, that there's nothing in animals, there's nothing protein especially that's gonna do us any good. And so, you know, eating plants and lots of different kinds of plants and that is the same time we can talk about heart disease you and I and cancer, gosh, you are a friend, Dr. McDougal and others have, you know, sort of gone down this path bit to. And we see people being able to recover all kinds of illnesses. Whether it's chronic kidney disease or even osteoporosis or diabetes, et cetera. So I don't know, I do get excited about the concept that nutrition is the way to go. It's the right centerpiece for our future in this world. Anyhow, said enough, It's not an exciting, that's what kept me going. Was having students, I love students, you know, you're the young people. They're curious, they don't quite know what they're doing when they come in, of course. And we, you know, we take them through some training and learn something about the concept of science and the concept of research and just discovery. That's what it's all about. Nothing more exciting than a way of making a discovery. Nobody's seen before putting it together. It's just really nice. Dr. Esselstyn, were you gonna say something? Well, it was just a, yeah, I've been wanting to say that one of the criticisms that has been offered for as long as I can recall since being in this research business with heart disease. One of the stumbling blocks is that with physicians will say that, okay, you've got that data, but it's really not gonna apply to most people because really it doesn't, you know, they're not gonna eat this diet change it's too radical. And I think that Colin sort of reviewed a little bit of our study there, why was it that we had close to 89.3, almost 90% adherence. Close to three and three quarters years to this program. Why did they adhere? Because if you're gonna have a patient in your office for 10 or 15 minutes and ask them to make this significant lifestyle change, and it is significant, no question. It's not gonna work. The only way to make this work is that you must show the patient respect. And the only way that I know to show the patient respect is to give them our time. So on our present format, when we see these 20 patients once a month or when we have that conference, the seminar. These people are going to have a five hour conference. Five hours a single day. And they're gonna learn all about how they have created their disease and precisely how we are going to empower them as the locus of control to haul it. And in addition, my secretary will give me the phone numbers of the 20 who are attending. And about two weeks before the seminar, I guess I'm a little old fashioned, I personally call each of them so that I can get my arms around their story and at the same time give them an opportunity to ask questions of me. So that when they do come to the seminar, we have a strong platform from which we can all move forward. Because really the other reason that I think it's successful is you're willing to share with the patient what is the causation of the illness. Really have them get their arms around what has caused their disease and how they have caused it. Because there's been a basic covenant of trust. Ever since the days of Hippocrates that whenever possible the caregiver will share with the patient what is the causation of the illness. And sadly, today, in all due respect to my cardiovascular colleagues, that's not being done. And I think that's such an actually powerful tool that is being avoided. And really it's not entirely the fault of our colleagues, but because they never get any nutritional training in medical school and none in their post-graduate years. And I think that's still a hurdle that we have to overcome. Why don't we have this kind of eating in schools? Why don't we have a teaching in medical schools? Why don't all doctors and nurses become intimately aware of this? Those are the sort of the challenges that are ahead. I didn't mean to go sideways on you, Mike, give me your question again. Well, no, you answered it. I was looking for, you know, what has stood out to you as something you've enjoyed about your work. And along with that, I'd like to know if there's like one thing as you look back that you say, you know, that was a really satisfying moment, a really proud moment in my life's work that stands out. Is there something for. Oh, sure, yeah. When you see the actual reversal of disease, I mean you see it reversal can be identified by a repeat angiogram, an angiogram at baseline that shows the blockage and angiogram later that shows it going away. Or you can show it reversing with ultrasound, as you can see in the carotid artery of the brain, you can see that blockage going away. You can see the same thing happen in the legs so that you get these symptoms of claudication going away, of angina going away. And of course erectile dysfunction going away. That seems to be one of the popular results that we get. (mike laughs) Yeah. For the men anyway, right? So yeah. Oh no it's for the women as well. Oh, that's true (laughs) Yeah, Colin, is there something, I mean you've had many years of research over 350 papers, the cancer one you mentioned turning on, turning off. Is there another one that stands out to you as, wow, that was a aha moment, a satisfying moment in my work? Yeah, they all seem to be very excited because one after another and finally, you know, you get to a point where you start taking all these threads and weave them together. And that concept of sort of getting a feel for, oh my gosh, this is different than what I had been taught, what we tended to believe, what I taught. I taught nutritional biochemistry myself at Cornell for many years. And you look at one thing at a time and trying to fill in all the rights of details, but the idea of webbing it together, that was very exciting. I would like to return to another comment though to, about that I found something really intriguing I think is good for this conversation. I've been quite a number of times to Italy working with some folks there who were having an enthusiasm for this kind of approach. And they learned something that I'd like to relate because it was so germane, I think to an explanation or that has an explanation. The question that oftentimes arises that when we take a group of people and put them in a so-called jumpstart program, you know, 10 days or something, like maybe two weeks and just change them just like that. I'm sure you've probably done that yourself, Mike, in any case what we know from that, even people who are ill and they see the benefits within 10 days, they tend not to stay on it. It's puzzling. So I hear this a lot. I'm not, I, okay, I see it, but I can't quite do that kind of thing. Well, I think we have an answer to that, quite frankly. Coming from my colleagues, my friends in Italy, namely what they did, they organized a nine day session with a group of folks. They felt good. Then they turned around and ask them at that point in time, would you like to do it another 15 days? Well see it by that time, in their mind frame, they're kind of liking it. Yeah I'll do it for another 15 days. And they did that for three successive times. And by the time they got to, so like 60 some days, everyone, a hundred percent they're on board. Which reflects something I think that we'd like to mention I'd like to mention here, namely, change in diet is difficult. We all know that. Very difficult. But when people give their bodies enough opportunity to become adjusted, like knowing taste preferences, for example, when we get to that point, you have to work at it a little bit obviously in the beginning, stay with it, we finally get to the point. And then our bodies are talking to us through our minds. Say, you know, I'm already there, now I enjoy it. I'm not going back. So I would just for the sake of this discussion, suggest that adjusting to taste preferences, which we've had a whole lifetime doing all of this Eating the wrong food perhaps, but when we give her a chance, enough opportunity to really get used to it and feel it We're in, we're already there. And so I see that I can during time here, but I like to be able to bring it back to, you know, explaining it in a sense of the holistic idea of nutrition. Everything working together is a very responsive, very rapid changing kind of thing. One more thing you mentioned too about school lunches. We had a marvelous student at Cornell who did a doctoral dissertation on this of actually, and Dr. Esselstyn is on her committee as well as myself. And she did a study for her doctoral dissertation on taking a bunch of school children, teaching them in various interesting ways and getting to change. Unfortunately, she ran a bit of a snag because these ideas, challenging a school lunch program is not very easy. But nonetheless, it was a marvelous I thought attempt by a very accomplished woman at the time. To really, you know, get people educated. and that included, you know, having experience with international students and had experience with preparing food and you name it. It was the whole package put together. And I was suggesting what we're talking about Dr. Esselstyn of course talking about a lot about heart disease and his work with his patients and he'll talk about, you know, the science behind it and stuff like that. That the idea is big that you talk about so well yourself, Mike, when you're talking to patients (indistinct) I've been there heard you say it. The whole idea of what I'm trying to say here is some of this whole idea of medicine, I'm biased maybe, but I think it starts with the food we put in our mouth. How do we prepare, you know, how do we make it tasty? How do we stick with it? You kind of thing. How do we get our kids to do it? This is such a big issue and for me, and I think for many now, it also touches on something else in our society. It touches on the way we prepare food, it touches on the way we create food sustainability systems. So that we don't tear apart our environment apart. I can see we're sitting here right now at the bud stage of a beautiful blossom, it seems like to me. And once it flowers, once it comes out, there's so many things that just touches on, not just our personal lives and the cost of healthcare and all that sort of stuff. It's total, total, so I think, and just to come back to the metaphor, I guess you could say, of what Ess and I discovered between ourselves, we're good friends. And what he did, what he did, he was doing, you know, really well, with his patience and seeing a result, what I was learning in the laboratory. It just came together like a just a really neatly woven web that can't be taken apart. And so, I don't know, I just, there's so many stories here we could talk about, spend some time on, focuses on some details. Yeah, those are excellent, excellent points Colin. And I know one of the things that you've struggled with is this concept of reductionism and the fact that, you know, in medicine we're sort of trained to, you know, drug does this, so we study it this certain way and you know, you pointed out many a times that it's not just one nutrient or two nutrients, it's the totality, the whole, the whole approach to nutrition. And that's sometimes a little hard to share with doctors sometimes. We don't always think that way. We're trained differently in medical school. So yeah. Excellent. Let me ask you both this, you know, Dr. Campbell, you wrote a book entitled "The Future of Nutrition," published about three years ago. Can you both comment on how you see the future going forward? What do you see for the future of nutrition in medicine, in the world? You touched on sustainability, just kind of how you would all envision and maybe what recommendations you have for us all going forward with nutrition. Well you mentioned that one book, "The Future of Nutrition," I actually wrote that with my grandson, it's been three generations now. What I was interested in talking about in that book was thinking about the future, of course. And the future relies on the past. We all know that, those who don't observe history are bound to repeat it in famous old statement and, you know, for a long, long time. And so this thing that we're talking about here does have a long tail back into the past and it has the future. And what I was trying to tell in that book was not only the past and some lessons learned, but also how the mistakes we've made during our lifetime and perhaps two or three before. The kind of mistakes we've made to get us into the position we now are, I'm not very happy. And I suspect, you two aren't either in many ways. We've made mistakes. We're living with the mistakes. And so we try to illustrate in that book, you know, some of those mistakes. How can we correct them and tell why they are mistakes if you will, based on history that preceded it. And then move forward because it's hard to move forward unless we know well where we get our biases from, where we get our habits from. And so to me, knowing the future, you know, you have to draw on, well the present and the past in a sense and look at it from, you know, multiple perspectives at the same time. That is fascinating. I think we do have an opportunity for the future. But we've got at first, we've got to really understand, when I say we, you know, the totality of the human race if you will, We gotta know the totality of the problems we have created. Not accident, I mean, not purposely. We're just kind of mindless. We do our things and then we just just end up with these problems. Now we have them, now we gotta solve them. And so I just really, I'm still really loving this idea that what the two of us together did in a sense was very special. It's almost beyond beyond me, I guess, beyond Esselstyn. And we saw what we saw and it was so convincing. It was so convincing, so critical, so critical to personal health. And it's the weaving things together in a sense, building a sort of a consensus, knowing where it starts and knowing where it can go to if we don't do it right kind of things, I dunno. Dr. Esselstyn, how do you see the future of nutrition specifically? Well, I really think that compared to where we were 34 or 35 years ago, I kind of see a seismic revolution. But before I mention what the seismic revolution will be. I wanna just share a story that often patients will call, often it's the daughter who will say, my father is you know, deep into his eighties, you know, how old in a patient will this work? So I will share with you that the oldest patient that I've ever started with was 87. And he had been told at that time that he was a candidate. He had to have coronary artery bypass surgery where they have to sort of saw you in half and take veins from your leg and put them on your heart to bypass the blockages. But Stanley was really convinced that the operation would kill him. So he came and he was an absolute marvelous student. Of whole food, plant-based nutrition. And he was from the West coast, California. But he would call me at least twice a year with a progress report. And it was interesting that last year, about June he called, but he wanted to speak with Anne because he wanted to get a recipe because he was having a dinner, for really about I guess it was about 80 and 90 people. And she gave him a vegetarian menu, which he served. And then she asked, what's the party for? Stanley replied, well, it was my 100th birthday. Wow. Now the interesting thing of what reminded me of this was that this had just so happened that yesterday Stanley called and he reminded me that it was now his 101st birthday. Wow.
So I have to revise when somebody says, who's the oldest patient that you've ever worked whole food, plant-based nutrition for? Stanley comes to mind. Now back to the seismic revolution. I think the seismic revolution in health that is really at our doorstep is really never gonna come from an invention of another drug, another stent, another bypass operation. But the seismic revolution in health will occur when we in the profession have the will and the grit and the determination to share with the public what is the lifestyle, and most specifically, what is the nutritional literacy that will empower them as the locus of control to absolutely eliminate chronic illness. 'Cause it's not just heart disease, right? You can include cancer, you can include strokes, you can include diabetes, you can include hypertension, you can include Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, allergies, and asthma, and the list goes on. This is perhaps the greatest gift that medicine has had in hundreds of years. Yeah, that's great. You know, when I first started doing all of this and I was putting together my various presentations on heart disease and diabetes and cancer and weight loss and all of that. And I was, you know, I was naive to a lot of this, I thought, well, there's gotta be a certain diet for heart disease and a certain diet for this and a certain diet. When I put it all together, I said, it's the same diet for everything. And that gets back to Dr. Campbell's comments about, you know, the whole picture and not trying to reduce it down to this supplement or that supplement. Yeah, exactly right. And what I hear you both saying is that it's the science is important that's how the two of you got going. But then Dr. Esselstyn, you commented on how it takes time and it's important to give of your time to your patients so that you can educate them and help them to understand, and Dr. Campbell, you pointed out it's getting used to those tastes. It's changing your tastes and all those things. So it's not just educating the people, it's also showing them like Anne and Karen do, show them how to cook, what recipes are needed and that sort of thing. It's a very complex but doable approach. You know, both of you are well into the blue zone range and I mentioned earlier that, you know, you're not just living, you're living robust and active lives and healthy lives. So if you were to give some take home messages to our audience, what sort of, you know, drawing on your wisdom, your scientific background, your practical experiences. What would you share with people going forward? Maybe some of those that are struggling a little bit to make some of these changes? What sort of advice would you all give, take home messages and whoever wants to jump in first, go for it. Ess right. Well, yeah, I, this may take a minute or two. Yeah, that's fine, we got it, we got the time. I think the message is so important is to have patients understand the mechanism. And I'm gonna take a moment to explain what I think is the understandable mechanism about heart disease. For example, I think all experts would agree that where this disease has its inception, its beginning its onset, is when we progressively injure the life jacket and the guardian of our blood vessel, which happens to be that delicate innermost lining called the endothelium. And the endothelium manufactures a truly magic molecule of gas called nitric oxide. Which is responsible for the salvation, preservation and protection of all of our blood vessels because of its remarkable functions. For example, nitric oxide will keep all the cellular elements within our bloodstream flowing smoothly like Teflon rather than Velcro. It keeps things from getting sticky. Number two, nitric oxide is the strongest blood vessel dilator in the body. When you climb stairs, the arteries to your heart, the arteries to your legs, they widen, they dilate. That's nitric oxide. Number three, nitric oxide will protect the wall of the artery from becoming thick and stiff or inflamed, and protect us from getting high blood pressure, hypertension Number four is the absolute key. A safe and normal amount of nitric oxide will protect us all from developing blockages. And so literally everybody on the planet earth who has cardiovascular disease, whether they're from London, Berlin, Chicago, New York, or St. Louis, it's because in the previous decades, they have so sufficiently trashed, injured, compromised, and turned their endothelial system into an absolute train wreck that they no longer have enough nitric oxide to protect themselves from making blockages and plaque. However, the good news is that this is not cancer. This is a benign disease. And once you can get patients to understand that, never, never, ever again are they to pass through their lips a single morsel that is gonna further injure an a ready train wrecked endothelium because then the endothelium recovers, makes enough nitric oxide. So we can not only halt disease progression, but we often see elements of disease reversal. So what are the foods that every time they pass our lips, we injure the endothelial cells. They are any drop of oil, olive oil, corn oil, soybean oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, coconut oil, palm oil, oil in a cracker, oil in a chip, oil a piece of bread, oil in the salad dressing. Also, we wanna eliminate animal protein, right? Meat, fish, chicken, foul, turkey and eggs. Also, we wanna eliminate dairy, milk, cream, butter, cheese, ice cream, and yogurt. Also, we wanna be very careful about sugar. Go very easy on the sugar. And now you really have it. So what are you gonna eat? You're gonna eat all these marvelous whole grains for your cereal, bread, pasta, rolls and bagels, 101 different types of legumes, lentils and beans. All these marvelous red, yellow and green leafy vegetables and white potato, sweet potatoes and some fruit. And now you've got it. And there are wonderful books out there that now tell us exactly how to do this. But the other change that I've made really in the last decade. Is that a change that was in recognition of the fact that the endothelial production of nitric oxide is age dependent. For example, you never heard about an eight year old boy or girl having a heart attack. They have nitric oxide coming out of their ears, but by the time they're beautifully healthy at age 50, they now have 50% of the nitric oxide they had when they were age 25. And by the time you're 80, you've lost 70%. So the change that I made was a greater stimulation of the endothelial production of nitric oxide. And we embraced the newer research that shows us. That mankind has an alternate pathway for making additional nitric oxide. So let's take a look. I need these patients six times a day to chew, not smoothies, not juicing, to chew a green leafy vegetable that's approximately the size of one quarter of their fist after it has first been steamed or boiled five and a half minutes so it's nice and tender. And then they must anoint it with several drops of a delightful balsamic or rice vinegar, why? Because research has shown us that the acetic acid from those vinegars can restore the nitric oxide synthase enzyme contained within the endothelial cell that is responsible for making nitric oxide. So they're gonna chew this alongside their breakfast cereal again as a mid-morning snack, again with your lunch and the sandwich. That's three mid-afternoon for dinnertime, five. And of course I adore it when you have that evening snack of arugula or kale. Now second benefit that comes from chewing the green leafy vegetable, it restores the capacity of your bone marrow to once again make the endothelial progenitor cell. Which will replace our senescent injured, worn out endothelial cell. And the third benefit from chewing a green leafy vegetable is the third benefit, when you're chewing a green leafy vegetable, you are chewing a green nitrate. As you chew this green nitrate, it is going to mix with the facultative anaerobic bacteria that reside in the crips and grooves of your tongue. Those bacteria are going to reduce that nitrate to a nitrite, when you swallow the nitrite, it is your own gastric acid, which is going to further reduce that nitrite to more nitric oxide, which can enter the nitric oxide pool. So think about it, what you're doing for minimal expense, no side effects all day long, dawn to dust, morning to night, you are absolutely restoring nitric oxide, the very molecule, the deficiency of which gave you this disease in the first place. Now there is a caveat to this, toothpaste with fluoride, public drinking water with fluoride or mouthwash can injure the beneficial bacteria in your mouth. And I do not like antacids because antacids will be will lower your gastric acid, and you will be unable to reduce the nitrite to more nitric oxide. Now the question this is, what are the top six vegetables? They are kale, Swiss Chard, spinach, arugula, beet greens, and beets. However, if you want the entire list. Yes, please. Ox choice, Swiss Chard, kale, collars, collard green, beet greens, mustard green, turnip greens, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cilantro, parsley, spinach arugula, and asparagus. And the reason I go through that with you have to know how whole food, plant-based nutrition can also enhance your memory. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Thank you, Dr. Esselstyn That was excellent and beautifully said. And thank you for listing the full list of vegetables for us, the greens. Dr. Campbell, what advice would you give for those that are trying to make all this work? Yeah, well first off I have to preface make a comment. Dr. Esselstyn and I are good friends and so we don't think exactly alike on some things. And that's what makes a friendship really work in my view. And so, you know, I understand what Ess is saying, and we've talked about this before. I've heard him say it many times. The only thing Ess I would say, okay, I understand that's a good way to convince patients and tell them here's all the science and this works. And you know, people have shown such, et cetera. But the one thing that concerns me about too much focus on one or two or three things like that, even though they may sound fancy and nice. Is that it tends to open the door for the opportunity to find simple solutions. Especially in the name of the individual chemicals like drugs and so forth and so on. And so I would suggest there' a risk of maybe narrowing the message down too much, and instead of the whole. And I'm wanna offer, now it's gonna sound like I'm sort talking your story quite frankly, but I wanna say it in slightly different way, namely it's this, there was one nutrient that started out our modern day conversation for the last 200 years that really has stuck with us. And it's so prominent and it's also so controversial. I paid a price for even saying this, but I'm gonna say it anyhow. Namely, it has to do with protein. You know, protein was discovered in 1839. At that time, it was discovered as a substance in the meat of dogs, and it kept them alive. So once they isolated it, they had to have a name for it. So they thought around about a name, and they took the word from the Greek language, proteios P O T E I O S, which means first or prime importance. So they called it protein after proteios. And then at that particular point in time they had another thought. That disease is best described as a local disease. That was what they said instead of a constitutional disease. That's one of the really major parts of history of the 1800's. And it kept crept into the 1900's So we ended up with so much focus on one thing at a time, may sound great and it may be true, that's not the issue. And we may see results. So I've tried to work from that model in a sense, in history to recognize, you know, what that led to. And I come away with all these things working together, you know, in marvelous ways. which leads me the wholism thing. So I guess what I'm saying is that it's a little bit risky sometimes for me to focus on one thing, you know, or too much of one thing, even if it's nitric oxide. Yeah, sure I understand it sounds good, but if we come away from this worship, which of what it's been, worship of protein because it's a such a revered nutrient. And I think of it, you know, the most revered of all nutrients, in fact have an effect on the most veered of all diseases cancer in a sense. That combination that shows, I think illustrates how we tend to go down this path sometimes we have historically tried to explain things in a very detailed way like that, which sounds great, but I think for the message for the public at large, I kind of like the idea of the very generalized statement, don't eat animals. I mean, I would've never said that when I started coming from the background that I had and the education I had. We don't need to eat animals, number one. Number two, when we're eating food from the plant kingdom obviously we try to eat them with all their contents as much as possible, intact. We can dice them up, cut them up, we can cook them we can do this and that don't add a lot of stuff. Back to your point as well, taken there, by the way, you know, on the added oil, because the added oil in a chemical sense is oxidizable, that's one of the really key components of that idea. So we don't need to add oil, we don't need to add refined sugar and salt anymore than, you know, we can get away with. But in the meanwhile, just eat animals and then you're nitric oxide your TMAO you know, and all the not only heart disease and the endothelium and so course will work. But also have an opportunity for all these other things to come in and say, hey, I got something here to. And then actually create a physiological condition, especially as endothelium you know, this lining the vessels. I mean, but we can also talk about others. Like said, we come away with I would suggest a fairly simple message but a controversial one, I will have to confess. 'Cause I've known that firsthand, start talking about animal protein, then have the properties it does, which I'm convinced it does it's a tough one. But somehow we've gotta gotta face that proposition. And to back to your point, Mike. What can we do in the future? I sort of think there's spent a lot of years in policy and that sort of stuff and trying to figure out, you know, what do you say to the public and so forth and so on. We get too complicated in that whole process. We talk about two things and we could talk about the exact amounts, this and exact amounts of that. and from using the concept of dietary guidelines we do in the United States. I don't get too excited about those things. But nonetheless, you started talking about the wholeness of foods divided into a couple different groups. You know, we don't need any animal proteins. That's it, we eat plant foods, and a big variety, lots of different plants. And we don't dump a lot of stuff back on and make them taste good. to make us addicted to whatever it is we're trying to get unaddicted to. And so anyhow, it's a couple of different perspectives Mike I think we have, and, but yet, you know, we're going to exactly the same well water, I think we are. And I think you probably would've agreed we've been doing this for how many years Ess? 32? 32, yeah at least. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been fun. It's been great. Great fun. Yeah, and you know, you mentioned controversy, but I've never seen either one of you really shy away from controversy. You speak the truth, you speak the science. And I appreciate that about both of you. So unfortunately, as I look at my watch, our time has just like flown by. But I do want to give you each, a minute or two to give your, your closing thoughts or anything that you wanna share, whether it be about each other or about nutrition or whatever you want to share. Maybe it's about your wives. I don't know Anne and Karen, you know, but just what are your closing comments? And we'll start with you, Dr. Esselstyn, and then Dr. Campbell, you will have the last word, so to speak. I'm gonna be very brief. Colin (laughs). (Mike laughs) It's been 31 years and I guess what I admire so much is that you are who you are. Okay? I'm gonna say something, something very similar. I am saying this from the heart. I've watched this, I've watched this happen. Do you know when we, I watched Dr. Esselstyn, the way he would have come, we'd be together talking about this and that he'd get a phone call. He always picked a phone call up. If it was a patient, he always answered the phone. And so he really gave his a 100% attention. And the way he did it, the way he did it, it was great deal of pleasantness in his voice. A great deal of caring, you know, and he did it in such a nice way. If only we could have doctors like that around. Of course, Mike, I see you doing most the same thing. So the two of you have that in common. But I will say that one of the things about Dr. Esselstyn that I really appreciated in the very beginning was his thoughtfulness, his caring. He did, and, you know, sort of gathered up whatever information he had and so forth and so on. Look what happened. Look what happened. They reversed their heart disease. Yeah. Oh and Mike one one more thing. I had a note to myself here. This can't be forgotten. I'm glad you said it, Mike. You know, both of us have kingdoms behind us. We have a backstop, and I think Essy agree to this, Anne and Ess have been fantastic. I've been married, what, 61 years and he's, what are you, 62 years Ess something like that. Yeah. Yeah, so if we didn't have those two partners, I'm not sure we'd have been doing what we're doing. It's that simple. Amen.
Yeah, Yeah. Thank you for mentioning Karen and Anne. Both are just amazing. I haven't had the privilege of meeting Anne, but I have Karen on numerous occasions and I would agree and, you know, hearing you Dr. Campbell talk about Dr. Esselstyn, you know, as I look back over his accolades, it's not a surprise at all that he's received awards for compassion and medicine. I think that's remarkable and I'm learning from both of you. And I just appreciate your brilliance and your humbleness as you continue to move along in this whole world of science and medicine and nutrition. We've been blessed with a lot of wisdom that you've shared with us today. And I know our audience has gleaned lots of different things to take home today. And I just appreciate you all taking the time. I will mention again that this has been recorded, so if somebody needs to share, like, hey, I saw this great interview Fireside Chat with Dr. Campbell, Dr. Esselstyn, it is going to be available, should be available at about a week. So yes, Dr. Esselstyn Just simply, I wanna be sure that, you know, that I think, I know that Colin feels the same way. Neither of us could ever have made this happen without the support of Anne and Karen and also we can't forget both of us we're very blessed to have wonderful children who have absolutely stood by us, through this adventure. Their part of the pillar. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, thank you both for your time. I think maybe we probably ought to do this again sometime. it's been a lot of fun and Dr. Esselstyn is going, no, don't put me through this again. The next 90 years (laughs) (laughs) No, no, we won't wait 90 years to do it again. We'll do it much sooner. But thank you both again and we look forward to chatting again on behalf of the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies, we appreciate your attendance today. And by the way, I just wanted to mention that over 6,000 people registered for this. We've never had anywhere close to that for a webinar. So you all were very popular and drew a lot of people from around the world. So it's exciting. Thank you so much, and we will sign off at this point, unless Natasha's gonna jump on and tell me anything differently. Thank you. Goodnight.
