Slaying the Paper Tiger of Heart Disease with Plant Based Nutrition | PBNOW

hey welcome everybody to the April meeting of our nonprofit plant-based nutrition organization of Wisconsin group or we like to call ourselves PV now I'm your host Terry Lynch the mission of our nonprofit group is to educate Inspire and support each other on an evidence-backed full plant food based nutritional path for a healthier happier life our group is open to everyone those plant-based and those just curious about it it's meant to be a non-judgmental place to get information inspiration and support if you like more information about our group our upcoming meeting dates speakers and resources or to check out videos of our past meetings just Google us at pbn oow uh as we do each time can I see a show of hands by either raising your hand or using a thumbs up re reaction I can on the bottom of your Zoom screen to show how many of you are currently following a plant-based lifestyle well we see a lot of thumbs popping up there oh that's great thank you very much for doing that um as we mentioned at the beginning of each meeting uh the evidence to the benefits of plant-based nutrition and improving health and quality of life for people of all ages as published in non-biased medical research is quite striking whether it's improving Health through increased energy weight loss uh strengthening our immune system preventing slowing stopping and reversing problems like allergies digestive problems diabetes heart disease and early dementia or increasing our Quality of Life by helping us feel better quickly um increasing our endurance improving athletic performance speeding recovery from exercise reducing joint pain clearing thinking or reducing the physical emotional and financial side effects of the illnesses drugs and procedures often recommend to treat the conditions plantbased nutrition can help us avoid the research shows our bodies do a wonderful job of healing themselves if we stop damaging them daily with poor nutrition and start giving them the nutrition they need to heal and function optimally so we have a better chance to enjoy each day of the rest of our lives it's truly remarkable uh now let me tell you what's in store for you tonight tonight we're going to hear from three speakers our first speaker will be our medical director Dr Joshua liberman with some comments after Dr liberman plant-based coach and physical therapist Michelle Stam will briefly speak to us and following Michelle will be our featured speaker and giant in the plant-based nutrition Community Dr Caldwell be esselman Jr we hope to have time at the end of Dr R since talks for you to be able to ask him questions and him to give us some answers tonight T's program should end about 7:30 p.m. as a reminder we have meetings every month usually on the second Thursday of the month at 6: PM Central Time next month we'll hear from Denver cardiologist Dr Andrew Freeman and in the future we'll be hearing from Dr Michael Gregor Dr NE Bernard Dr Michael Clapper Ann and Jane esselon and Brian Hart among others we'll post more information about our upcoming meetings on our website at pbn now. our or I'm sorry p out.org not.com but.org uh if you register on the website or or are already registered you'll receive email reminders of of our events as they approach last a quick technical note during the meeting everyone but the speakers will be muted and we ask that you stay muted to avoid background noise and allow everyone to hear the speakers with that let's begin with our our first Speaker tonight is a fellow ship trained cardiologist he is president and CEO of Wisconsin Cardiology Associates and is past president and current Trustee of the Wisconsin chapter of the American College of Cardiology he's a member of the American College of Cardiology National nutrition and lifestyle work group whose membership includes nationally known Physicians such as Dr Dean ornes Dr Neil Bernard and our featured speaker tonight Dr Elon as a matter of fact last weekend our our first speaker uh was spoke on a panel that included Dr Bernard at the annual uh American College of Cardiology National Conference in Orlando that that attracts something like 50,000 cardiologists each should he's an advocate for the use of plant-based nutrition to help improve heart health General Health and quality of life and has seen the benefits of plantbased nutrition in both his personal life and that of his patients we are fortunate to have him here in Milwaukee and as our PV now medical I'm happy to welcome Dr Joshua liberman Dr liberman thank you Terry thank you for the introduction as kind kind as usual hopeful that everybody can hear me okay and glad to see such a huge crowd to uh to listen to myself and Michelle teach you guys about plant-based lifestyle I know you guys all came for us to uh no other reason to be on the call tonight especially um uh for those of you who are new welcome we we love having everybody here and you're welcome to to join us uh the second the second Thursday of every month uh and as as Terry said we have a great lineup of speakers not just tonight of course we have a great you know great lineup tonight but but every every uh every month we have different perspectives uh on how you can get healthier through plant-based diets and through like you know through Healthy Lifestyles um for those of you who don't uh who have not been here before as as Terry said I'm the medical director I'd like to introduce the conference by or the the meeting by talking about two general things one is uh you know sometimes a patient case for my practice and the next is just a little bit of you know a factoid or tidbit from the literature that's uh sometimes recent sometimes something I just learned as well and then uh and then we can move on with the rest of the speakers so um I guess we'll start with a patient I actually just saw about uh let's see about two hours ago my last patient in the day uh came to see me 59-year-old man uh who about eight years ago had a calcium score test done we've talked about that in these meetings before but basically it's a test to look to see if somebody has uh evidence of heart disease already and and so at the time he was in his early 50s um and it showed that his calcium score was in the something in the 90th percentile so it was a lot uh it was a very high burden for a fairly young age um and we kind of did typical things talked to him of course about diet lifestyle and for him because his score was so high put him on some uh medication and we've been working with him since then and he's done he's done pretty well but he's never really bought into a plant-based diet as much as you know as much as he comes to see me regularly not everybody not everybody uh is ready to make that decision but the last time I saw him uh his numbers had gotten a little bit worse I saw him it was a I think it was December the last time I saw him his numbers had gotten a little bit worse and we were at the point where I said you know this is this is not a range where I think it's healthy to be with kind of your burden of heart disease so I think we have we have a cross we're at a Crossroads we have a a you know a decision make either we add more medication or I think you know you really got to tighten up the diet uh he' already been exercising he runs you know something like five miles three times a week and does a bunch of other exercise so it wasn't really that it was clearly the diet that I thought he needed to clean up and he said all right I don't really want to be on more medication let me let me try this right and so he came back to see me today and we had labs done last week and sure enough his his his LDL his bad cholesterol had dropped from 96 down to 66 so 30 % drop um and his other numbers were all great his triglycerides were great his HDL was great his uh his marker of inflammation the CRP test was great and everything was great and so I talked to him I said all right so this is great what did you do and and the funny thing is he didn't even completely commit to a plant-based di he he moved in a much more plant-based Direction he said okay I I gave up my Burgers I I I gave up eggs um and I I'm now using almond milk uh instead of cow milk in my cereal now he he it's not like he's eating chicken every night or anything like that I mean he he already had moved in that direction but he gave up just a few things just a few things and then his numbers got dramatically better and I I was able to use that as as you know as as a learning opportunity I said listen look you didn't even do that much in the greater scheme of things and look how much better your numbers got just imagine how much better you could do if you moved even more in that direction and maybe then you can even think about decreasing or or potentially even getting off medication I suppose uh so it was a really nice conversation it was a really nice uh m mosm of of you know what we do in this world every day um and it really again was one of those teachable moments where uh for me too to see how powerful I mean it's it's it's it's just it's interesting obviously we I lecture about this I talk about this I'm on this meeting I I I talk to other professionals about it it's part it's part of my life but on a daily basis uh I get reminders of how powerful uh nutrition is and and and just the role of nutrition in our health that even small changes can lead to dramatic benefit and of course the more you change the more dramatic your benefit is and as um ter as Terry said I was at the American College of Cardiology conference this past weekend down in Atlanta it's a big deal as Terry said it's you know it's like something like 50,000 cardiologists from all around the world descend upon uh you know wherever the conference is this time it was in Atlanta so don't have a heart attack at home when you're when you're in this conference because there's no cardiologist around just kidding there's plenty still on call wherever you are but in any case um it's a it's a very safe place to be surely um but uh it's good there's a lot of science that gets presented there's a lot of conversations there's a lot of panels there's a lot of everything and I was on a panel uh talking about Healthy Lifestyles uh it was a bunch of different toxic within Healthy Lifestyles but surprisingly there wasn't a lot of plant-based research that came out of this conference I surprisingly or not surprisingly I mean there's been more and more coming out in recent years but there wasn't any Earth shattering or or or or science changing healthy lifestyle stuff uh in this uh in this conference but there's conversations that happened and so I was able to talk to some of my mentors some of uh some of my idol Dr Barnard of course but I was also able to talk to Dr Kim Williams who's talked to us before um he's a you a very prominent cardiologist he's now in Louisville Kentucky and we were able to catch up and we were talking and we were talking about um you know just approaches to prevention in general and there was one thing um you know that that we were talking about and that that that was a big Topic at at this conference was um this protein this risk factor that we know about called lipoprotein a so I don't know that I've ever talked about it on this on this uh meeting before on on these zooms before but lipoprotein a is a protein that is is increasingly identified as being um a major factor in risk for heart attack and stroke the problem with lipoprotein a is that it doesn't show up on normal test I mean so you have to actually specifically order it but the bigger problem is that it is genetically determined and so when people talk about having a family history of heart disease or stroke sometimes we find what they really mean is that they have a genetically High lipoprotein a it's being passed down from generation to generation to generation the problem is we don't have anything to treat it there are no medications that affect it um estrogen can lower it a little bit there is some uh there's some research that shows that high dose vitamin B3 niin can lower it but unfortunately that research didn't show that it actually led to reduced heart attacks or strokes but in any case so we know that there's this risk factor this this this um this uh lipoprotein out there that that leads to higher rates of bad events but we have no way to treat it right and so we were I was talking to Dr Williams he said actually there is some evidence that there is a way to treat it uh and he pointed to me this journal article that I missed it was years ago it's from 2018 in in a journal called clinical Cardiology where they did look at putting people on a plant-based diet to see if it would affect lipoprotein a and sure enough it did um they did it after just four weeks they took 30 people so it's a small study and honestly really should be done on a on a on a higher on a higher scale on a larger scale but they put people on a defined plant-based diet for four weeks and they saw that the lipoprotein actually decreased by a very significant amount by 32 points which is a very very significant amount and it was statistically significant even though it was a small study and of course the plant-based diet reduced bad cholesterol bad cholesterol particles small particles which you know some people think are are even more Dastardly and devious uh reduced apil apolipoprotein B which is another way we can measure bad cholesterol plant-based diets reduced markers of inflammation which we kind of expect to know but um uh they also um um um uh highly oxidized lipoproteins too so really everything that you would want to be reduced got reduced uh with a plant-based diet but this is the only thing that I that I've come across and again it's in published research uh that can lower lipoprotein a and that sure enough is the plant-based diet which we all know and love so every conference I learn something every time I talk to you know Dr elstein or Dr Barnard or or Dr Williams or any of these people I learn something but this time I learned something that was in research from you know six years ago uh but certainly uh I think it's going to inform my practice and moving forward so with that being said um thank you all for being here uh welcome uh and I'm Gonna Give It Up to Terry and Michelle thanks so much Dr liberman that's that was outstanding very interesting and extremely encouraging right so let me quickly go to Michelle here and uh our second speaker tonight is a certified plant-based health coach and physical therapist based here in Southeastern hon she's the founder and owner of Wellness empowered where where she teaches people through virtual appointments how to incorporate plant-based eating into their daily lives increasing their chances of successfully reaching out or reaching their goals and reaping the many benefits that plant-based nutrition has to offer I've asked her to put up her contact in information at the end of her brief uh remarks here Michelle well thank you so much Terry and thank you everybody for being here tonight uh tonight I find myself in kind of an interesting situation sandwiched between two very smart Physicians so I have chosen to not even try to share anything sciency with you and instead I'm going to share some encouragement with you tonight and in true Michelle fashion I'm going to do it with a story and it's probably not the story you expect me to share but a few weeks ago I was attending a marketing conference you see I'm a pretty good health coach but I still have a lot to learn about marketing my business and one of the things I learned at this conference was that I should integrate my landing page with my website and oh yeah I needed to integrate those things with my YouTube channel as well now all of this sounded like a really good idea to me and I could easily see how it would work well for what I am trying to accomplish the thing is how I had those things set up none of it was integrated at all so when it was suggested to me to integrate those things I'm telling you guys my brain nearly broke this led me to maybe 10 days or so of thinking things like I don't even know what all this means I can't do this and I don't know where to start and overarching all of those thoughts was the big one I am so overwhelmed now maybe that is how some of you guys feel when you walk away from these PB now meetings you hear a lot of Science and you think to yourself I don't even know what that means eating a plant-based diet sounds like a really good idea to you you could easily see how this would work well for your health and help you to accomplish the wellness goals that you have to improve your health but then you think I can't do this I don't even know where to start and then as you try to figure out how to make a plant-based diet actually work in your life you feel like your brain might actually break and you tell yourself I am so overwhelmed if that's you let tell you what happened next for me I decided that it was time to stop allowing myself to spin in and indulge myself in overwhelm so I put on my big girl pants and I made a decision to not be overwhelmed anymore now once I had made made this decision I spent a few minutes looking up how to integrate those things and honestly I had everything set up in less than 30 minutes yep less than 30 minutes of work after 10 days of allowing myself to be overwhelmed how foolish of me and what a waste of time just think if I had decided to not be overwhelmed 10 days earlier I could have avoided so much stress and would have had all of this set up so much sooner which is why I want to encourage you guys tonight to make a similar decision for those of you who have not yet given plant-based eating a try I want you to decide to not be overwhelmed and instead just get started with a plant-based diet I think it's going to be a lot easier than you think it's going to be one of my clients told me that she has realized that cooking plant-based really doesn't take any longer than how she used to cook and this was just a fallacy that she had believed another client had another client commented to me that cooking plant-based has actually been fun and not stressful and she said she was also surprised to find out that it hasn't been time sucking like she thought it was going to be a couple that I'm working with told me that one of the best and most surprising things of going plant-based is how easy it has been for them to find foods to eat and actually enjoy and one more client I want to tell you about one who I will tell you was very overwhelmed when she started on the plant-based Journey uh she told me that she just doesn't see this as hard anymore and can't believe how easy it is and that she can't stress the ease of this enough I know that's a lot because she's now so excited about how easy plant-based eating is and how great she feels she just can't stop talking about it by the end of our time working together she told me that she just doesn't think about it anymore because eating plant-based is just part of her life now not only is it easier probably than you think it's going to be the results you're going to achieve in your health are absolutely amazing now for the sake of time I'm not going to share all the details but that small handful of clients I just told you about let me tell you a few things about them they've lost so much weight collectively and one of them has lost 35 pounds already in 2024 and you guys it's the beginning of April that's amazing they've lowered their cholesterol a couple of them lowered their cholesterol by 50 points in just six weeks they've decreased their joint pain and inflammation so much so that they're like moving and exercising and climbing the stairs without pain now and one of them was able to stop taking prazone for the autoimmune condition that she has one of the women that I work with her PMS has improved so much that she no longer has uh monthly migraines and she's feels like she's off that emotional roller coaster that so many of us know um so much so that one of her kids commented she heard him talking to somebody and said yeah my mom's not so cranky anymore so a big deal um and one of these people is in the process of reversing his diabetes and there's more and I'm going to stop there though all of these wonderful things are happening to these wonderful people because they made a decision to not be overwhelmed and to instead just get started with eating a plant-based diet now when I allowed myself to be overwhelmed for that period of time with my technology setup I experienced some unnecessary stress and you know just didn't get the job done as quickly as I should have but when you guys are allowing yourselves to be overwhelmed about trying a plant-based diet the stakes are so much higher because you're delaying something so much more important your improved Health all the amazing results that I just talked about and Dr liberman talked about and the ones you're going to hear from Dr elstein as well um so as you continue to listen on tonight I really encourage you to make that same decision I made do not allow yourself to be overwhelmed and instead just give plant-based eating a try I really think it's going to be easier than you think it's going to be so okay I'm going to share my screen here um hopefully you can see up on your screen you can still see me um see all the technology I'm figuring out you guys um up there on the screen there's a QR code and if you want to sign up for my Weekly Newsletter you are invited to do so I would love to have you join my community um what do I share in there I share yes things like my favorite plant-based recipes and my favorite plant-based resources um I share encouragement like the stuff you just heard tonight and my favorite thing to share is my client testimonies I'm going to you know you get even more details about how great these people are doing which I find can be so encouraging to hear other people's fantastic plant-based stories um I want to tell you I'm currently working on a road map that is meant to really help people get started on a plant-based diet if you want to hear all about it be on my mailing list you'll learn about it there but I'm not going to just talk about you know 10 steps to give up dairy or something like that I'm going to talk about the these mindset pieces these social pieces that really trip a lot of people up love to love to share all that with you and if you are still feeling overwhelmed at the end of the night I get it believe me I just share it I've been there pretty recently myself so if you're feeling overwhelmed you're exactly the kind of person that I I love to help get you past that overwhelm and get you onto experiencing those great results so please email me and we'll set up a time to talk and get you started so all right guys thanks for listening and um I'll I'll throw things back to Terry thanks thanks Michelle great stories and uh and I know there are a lot of people who have unfortunately probably not gone plant days because they did feel overwhelmed and it's it helps to it helps to relax a little bit and and and give it a shot and it really helps to have a guide too so I encourage people Michelle does an excellent job thank you Terry you're welcome now now for a featured speaker tonight who is both a Pioneer and a legend in uh in the field of plant-based nutrition and lifestyle medicine he has saved literally thousands of lives through his work as a surgeon researcher author and plant-based nutrition Advocate Yale grad with a medical degree from Western Reserve University he won a gold medal as a rower on the US Olympic team he he was Award of Bron Star as a surgeon in Vietnam he practiced surgery for over 30 years at one of the top two hospitals in the in the world and the number one Heart Hospital in the world the Cleveland Clinic he risked his professional reputation by conducting and Publishing research and a new way to address the number one killer of men and women in the developed World cardiovascular disease Dr T colen Campbell professor professor Merit of Nutri of nutritional biochemistry Cornell University and co-author of The China Study has said of our featured speaker quote his determination to pursue this research and to teach the rest of us what he has learned against formidable opposition in the medical establishment is a testament to his personal and professional courage and integrity unquote the Pioneer pioneering research our speaker undertook and our speaker tireless advocacy teaching the rest of us what he has learned has not only already saved thousands of lives it is likely to save Millions more lives in the future but farbeit from our speaker rest on his Laurels at age 90 he's still kicking it he continues to enthusiastically commit himself to helping others among other things he directs the cardiovascular prevention and reversal program at Cleveland clinics Wellness Institute he continues to speak to medical professionals and the at public and and the public at conferences and through his eslon family Foundation he and his family get the life-saving word out showing people how to take control of their own he and live long and vibrant lines he and his wife Anna followed a plant-based diet since 1984 together they ra raised four children have 10 grandchildren all of whom are plant-based it's my distinct honor and privilege to introduce to you our featured speaker Dr calwell eson junr Dr Elon Terry i g to say thank you for those kind words and I look forward to uh being with you and your team today to see if we can't uh throw a little more light on what's uh going on in the world of whole F plant-based nutrition the thing that I want to talk about tonight is really uh it will replace what I think is a a black eye and the medical profession both in New Zealand Australia Cal South Africa Europe and the United States what do I mean by the black eye we have known for probably over 90 to 100 years that there are mle many many actual cultures throughout the planet where cardiovascular disease is virtually non-existent and yet in that 90-year period have we brought the information from those cultures where heart disease is non-existent have we brought that to this country no we have devised drugs stance and bypasses none of which have one single solitary thing whatsoever to do with the causation of heart disease so let's see if we can't uh thank you Brian and here are some of those cultures which to 90 years ago cardiovascular disease was very infrequently seen why because they're thriving on Whole Food plant-based nutrition now this is the oldest slide in my presentation and I sh share it because it reminds me that uh when we autopsy our young GIS who died in combat in Korea for example 80% of those average 20y olds already had gross evidence of coronary arter disease not enough uh you know to have a heart attack or a significant clinical event but there the disease was already established now this re I should give you a little background this slide actually comes from as I was leaving Vietnam having spent a year there as a combat surgeon uh it uh really was rather an exciting moment because we were coming home after a year now now that study that I just mentioned was repeated 45 years later uh and this time uh looking at young women and men between the ages of 17 and 34 who have died of accidents homicides and suicides and now in these young people the disease is ubiquitous everybody so if any of you are in the audience who were over 17 and you've been eating the typical West diet know that you're already starting to lay down the foundation of plaque through your coronary arteries and perhaps some other arteries as well now this is just the study that I mentioned in jamama in 1999 but now here's where we had a chance to absolutely get it right and this was in uh World War II when the Axis powers of Germany overran the low countries of Holland and Belgium and they took away their livestock for their troops so their cattle their sheep their goats their pigs their chickens their turkeys were now gone and these Western European nations were now becoming plant-based this included Holland Belgium Denmark and uh and Norway now the interesting thing was that Dr St and Jansen decided to look up in Norway the number of deaths from heart attack and stroke during this time period and lo and behold uh if we start together here on the left you can see that deaths from heart attack and stroke going up in 1927 going up in 1930 going up in 1935 in 1939 39 income the Germans and whoop yeah down goes the death from heart attack and stroke who knew the Germans were these great Public Health Educators but look what happened in 1945 with the death of adal Hitler the cessation of hostilities in the European theater back comes the meat back comes the dairy back come The Strokes and back come the heart attacks sadly we didn't understand or get it right now we're going to shift gears here a little bit obviously on the left you can see a one wonderful normal artery on the right an artery obviously is terribly diseased and you're probably saying to yourselves when that small little remaining open in the middle when that closes there'll probably be a heart attack well interestingly enough only about 10% of heart attacks come from something like this yes it's going to cause you shortness of breath and some chest pain and angina but what happens is these are that these lesions that are we are looking at on the right hand side are really quite slow growing and as they are slow growing the downstream heart muscle recognizes that it is it is being deprived of its normal blood flow with oxygen and nutrients and it often will build a little threads around it we call collaterals those that you can see on an angiogram are tiny little blood vessels that the body has built so that when that small opening finally does close off there is still enough blood supply through the co through the collaterals to sustain the downstream heart muscle uh viability but now let's go a moment to the artery on the left and you will notice a tiny even those of you in the back of the room there's a tiny little dark line on the innermost lining and that's the endothelium which I'm going to have a fair amount more to say tonight but that's anatomically where this endothelium resides that I'll be talking about now when we in the states begin eating the milkshakes the pizza the cheeseburgers the first thing that happens is our cellular elements get sticky sticky sticky our white cells get sticky our endothelial cells get sticky our platelets get sticky and now I'm going to share with you a slide that I borrowed from Peter Libby of uh Harvard and the area that is blue is where the blood is flowing and what separates the flowing blood from the artery are these tiny single little endothelial cells that are painted purple in this side now let's do this together let's go to the upper leftand corner and there and their painted orange is your LDL your bad cholesterol but you've been eating these nasty food the pizza and the uh milkshakes and what happens is those substances create a lot of inflammation especially from what we call free radicals and so the inflammation begins to actually oxidize that LDL cholesterol and this LDL cholesterol that is oxidized can now migrate through the cliffs or narrowing in the uh between the endothelial cells so that now you've got this bad oxidized Lal cholesterol in your subendothelial space which your subendothelial space does not like and it begins to call for the SWAT team that is to say our blue macrofagos that you see coming from the bloodstream also finding its way through the uh endothelial layer into the subendothelial space where it now beames behaves like Pac-Man going from left to right gobbling up gobbling up gobbling up all these small hard dense LDL particles now when that gets all the way over to the right and it is absolutely now chalk full of all these LDL oxidized particles we in medicine do what we do so often we change the name this is now called a foam cell and the foam cell is nasty because it produces these substan we call Metallo Metallo proteinases like strosin elastase collagenase and myop peroxidase what do they do that is so bad they progressively erode as you can see in the figure on the left they progressively erode the cap over the plaque the cap over the plaque becomes so eroded that the sheer force of blood racing over that thinned out cap ruptures breaks and now we have the extravasation or the oozing out of if you will of plaque content into the flowing blood which behaves making everything sort of thrombogenic wanting to clot activates our platelets and sure enough in the middle of the slide you can see there is a figure where at the point that the plaque has ruptured the clot is now forming and that clot is in and of itself self-propagating until in a matter of further minutes we get all the way over to the right hand side and that is 90% of your heart attacks when you rupture your cap over the plaque and you develop this thrombus and clot now if I do my job correctly today hopefully all of you and maybe maybe maybe your friends and relatives will recognize that they can make themselves heart attack proof how you going to do that we not going to do it with a stent or a bypass or with drugs we're going to do it by changing your biochemistry how are we going to change your biochemistry by changing your food so that when we change your food the all that really that Telltale that I've just shared with you that series of of worsening events is not going to happen you do not you will not you will not have an LDL cholesterol getting oxidized you will not have the development of the foam cell or metalloprotein Asis therefore you will not weaken the cap over your plaque you will actually strengthen the cap over your plaque and when you strengthen the cap over the plaque it cannot rupture and when it cannot rupture you have made yourself heart attack proof how long do you think that'll take I should try to give you evidence tonight that 3 weeks should get it done if you're 100% committed to Whole Food plant based nutrition now you can forget the X-ray here but I want you to look at the opening of the artery and here the artist has drawn for us an opening that is half filled by plaque and you can see that the part that is open still is nicely lined by that single layer of endothelial cells now we used to think of the endothelial cells for many years as these cute little red bricks that were sort of lining our pipes but that all changed in 1980 in 1980 Dr fcot working on his laboratory in Brooklyn was taking the largest blood vessel in the rodent the aorta and he would do this sort of elliptical spiral staircase cut around that aorta injuring the endothelium then he would immerse it in Saline and it would constrict however one day Dr fcot decided no cut no cut and he immersed the aort in the saline and it dilated so he did it again and it dilated again now suddenly the race was on globally what was the edrf that Dr fcot had uh discovered and it was called the uh the uh endothelial derived relaxation substance now thank heavens that ter was not with us for very long when at eight years in 20 that is in 1988 three men Dr F Scott Dr Murad and Dr luo discovered that the EF indeed was a gas nitric oxide and Nitric o side interestingly enough in 1998 10 years later those three men received the Nobel Prize and you might be saying to your to as what is it about uh nitric oxide that makes it deserve a Nobel prize Well mainly it's because of the functions that nitric oxide has for example nitric oxide will keep all the cellular elements within our bloodstream flowing smoothly like Teflon rather than vcro number two nitric oxide is the strongest blood vessel diary in the body when you climb stairs the arteries to your heart the arteries to your legs they widen they dilate number three nitric oxide will protect the wall of the artery from becoming thick and stiffer inflamed and protect us from getting high blood pressure or hypertension number four is the absolute key a safe a normal amount of nitric oxide will protect us all from ever developing any blockages or plaque so literally everybody on the planet Earth who has cardiovascular disease has their disease because by now they are so sufficiently trashed and injured their endothelial cells that they no no longer are able to make enough nitric oxide to protect themselves from making blockages or plaque but the good news is this this is not a malignancy it is a f completely benign foodborn illness and once you can get patients to understand that never ever ever again are they to pass through their lips those foods that are going to further injure and already train wck endothelium now at this point there are are some other things that I think are so important and that is usually I look out at the audience about this time and the audience will I can see them scratching their head wondering what is my level of nitric oxide well we really don't have a good way of doing checking that out in the office yet although hopefully it will be coming eventually and the thing that is interesting is that you can measure this on a research basis and I I want to share with you how that's done if you take an ultrasound probe and place it over your brachial artery at the elbow and measure you will see what the diameter of your brachial artery is then for five minutes you will encircle the upper arm with a blood pressure cuff and that blood pressure cuff is then inflated above systolic blood pressure so that for five minutes you did not have any blood flow to your forearm and hand yes I've done that and it's not exactly habit forming but then you release the cuff you release the cuff and what happens next is you would then re examine the braul artery with this ultrasound probe and in the normal individual it'll be 30% greater because of all the outpouring of nitric oxide the last thing that I think is kind of key with this is for people to understand what happens when people eat certain food so Robert vogle took a group of healthy young subjects uh to a fast food restaurant that is characterized by arches which are golden and half of the group got Corn Flakes and had the brachial Ary T Test boom normal and the other hand uh the other half of the group had sauce H sa hash sausage and hash browns there we go and after after 120 minutes after ingesting that meal they were no longer able to dilate the artery because of the influence of that meal of hash browns and sausage so compromised the and injured the endothelial cells that they were unable to make nitric oxide however being young and they followed them into the late afternoon and early evening they began to recover but you and I know you and I know that the next morning for breakfast it's most houses it's going to be scrambled eggs and bacon and then again at lunchtime we will have hash brown no at lunchtime we'll have uh what do we have at lunchtime that this terrible anyway also in the uh and then obviously that evening we're going to have a baked potato with sour cream lamp chops vegetable soaked and butter and and of course ice cream for dessert the point I'm making here is that all of these patients who have this and eat in this way throughout the United States think of how common it is to have uh to have this kind of food and literally so we start in childhood beginning to injure and compromise our endothelial cells so now we know that even by age 10 or 12 people the young youngsters already have Progressive and early disease in their arteries now just just for a moment we're going to summarize again nitric oxide functions one prevents stickiness strongest phasal dilator avoids arterial thickening prevents blockages prevents smooth muscle migration that can destroy Darth Vader the fo the foam cell now although on this slide you will see four powerful defense mechanisms that we have too many to discuss tonight but the top one the endothelial cell we are going to get into a little bit further and now this is of course where the rubber hits the road this is the first uh actually this was the first study that I did uh back in 1985 and it was really a because of my surgical obligations the study was small and didn't and although it didn't have a lot of women in it our subsequent study did have and the key here was to see if I could get them not to eat any foods that were going to actually injure the the endothelial cell so I eliminated all oil olive oil corn oil soybean oil safflower oil sunflower oil coconut oil palm oil oil and a uh oil in a cracker oil in a oil in salad dressing and anywhere we wanted to have them eliminate the oil the same was true of animal protein meat fish chicken fowl turkey and eggs I also wanted to be sure they got rid of the dairy because of the milk cream butter cheese ice cream and yogurt and I don't like them to have caffeinated coffee there is this wonderful Italian study showing how caffeinated coffee injures the uh endothelial cell now for those of you who are a little bit nervous about what what I just said about uh oil here's one of multiple uh peer-reviewed scientific studies showing as you see here Olive soybean and palm oil intake have a similar acute detrimental effect over the endothelial function in healthy young subject now shifting gears just for a moment yes all those listed that you see here are animal foods that are are consumed by omnivores and it was Dr Stanley Hazen at the Cleveland Clinic Department of cardiovascular research who looked at the metabolism that omnivores possess that is to say they possess bacteria in their gut that will metabolize the molecules of lesin in carnitine that are seen in these animal foods and the result is T trimethylamine which is rapidly oxidized in our liver the trimethylamine oxide but one of the more exciting things that he found was the trimethylamine oxide would injure blood vessels and he took it a step further and he looked at people who were totally plant-based and when people are totally plant-based they do not possess in their gut bacteria that can convert letin or conine into uh into uh tmao so another enormous Advantage for being uh plant-based and here is a sequence going from lesian incarnating the molecules found in the animal world that when they hit the the the bacteria in the gut of the omnivore be gets converted to tmao which contributes to vascular disease now there's one slide and this is it then the entire presentation tonight that has nothing whatsoever to do nothing to do with cardiovascular disease it was a remarkable moment in October of 2015 when the World Health Organization imagine it really representatives from countries throughout the world were able to come together and agree that red meat and processed meat had the same level of carcinogenicity as smoking cigarettes pretty powerful so what did we want them to eat we wanted them to eat all these marvelous whole grains for your cereal bread pasta rolls and bagels 101 different types of legumes Nettles and beans all these marvelous red yellow and green leafy vegetables and some fruit no oil I want to share with you now just a few angiograms in this group and I should share with you that all these angiograms were reviewed in triplicate in the Cleveland Clinic angiography core laboratory and so when I tell you a certain degree of disee of disease reversal I know that it's accurate what you're looking at here is the left anterior descending coronary artery of a 67 year old retired pediatrician and from the arrow on the left to the arrow on the right it was uh it was defined as a 10% Improvement now this is obviously as small of improvement as your naked eye can see a little easier in this circumflex artery to the back of the heart in a 20 a 58-year-old factory worker and from the arrow on the left to the arrow on the right was measured as a 20% Improvement here we're looking at the right coronary artery in a uh 54y old security guard and from the arrow on the left to the arrow on the right was described as a 30% Improvement now this young surgical colleague and friend of mine Joe Crow it was in 19 96 that at age 44 he began to get chest pain now he was not diabetic he was not H did not have Hy blood pressure his cholesterol was not particularly elevated uh he was act act he was athletically active and he had no strong family history finally in October of 1996 he saw Cardiology for an evaluation and the workup was negative a month later he finished his surgical schedule and sat down to write post-operative orders when suddenly the elephant was sitting on his chest pain in his left shoulder and arm Joe was having a heart attack and he was whipped down to the catherization laboratory where the catherization was started he had Cardiac Arrest resuscitated finished the catherization one more cardiac arrest and then sent to the floors where he stabilized and was able to be discharged four days later but was very depressed and the reason he was depressed was at the time uh of his uh anagram the entire lower one-third of his left anterior descending coronary artery was all moth eaten and disease over too long a segment uh to get uh too long a segment to get you can't Ram in St after St and it was too far down the artery for the bypass so Joe was really depressed about this and so an and I had him he and his wife out for uh suffer two weeks after his heart attack Joe look you've got the typical me Western disease you've been eating the typical Western diet we've got 10 years of data why don't you think about trying plant-based nutrition so he said s okay I'll give it a try they couldn't offer me anything else but I'm not going to take those statin drugs I don't trust trust them there's too many got a company in ear there's too many side effects so uh he decided he would really become the personification of commitment to Whole Food plant-based nutrition and over the next two and a half years his total cholesterol plummeted uh his LDL went from 98 to 38 and then he had two and a half years after his heart attack another angram now our offices are together up in the surgical office area and on the day that I knew he had earlier in the the morning had his followup anagram I went over to his office opened the door said uh listen Joe I understand you had that follow-up anagram can you share with me how did it go well he got up on his desk came around put his arms around me and said I think we're doing okay and I said well any chance that I could see the follow-up anagram and he said sure and that's pretty exciting for us we Sly when you think about it there if the PL is Young and the patient seems to be young and the plaque is made of inflammation fat and cholesterol the body has an extremely powerful POS capability of getting those cells out of there in Reverse as we see here now here's another gentleman uh well 45 years of age from Florida who uh in July of 2017 as you see here uh he had a heart attack and then he had the angiogram and you can see the arrow is pointing to a blockage that is 80% blocked in a I guess this is an obtuse marginal branch of the circumflex artery and uh he had other arteries that were involved with blockages such such that the cardiologists ad strongly advised him to have bypass surgery the patient said no I've got this book prevent and reverse heart disease and I'm going to try to do it with nutrition and the cardiologist scoffed at him and said that'll little it work well a year later he came back and they had another anagram and what formerly was 80% blocked was now 40% block now at this point point there was a change in cardiologists but the new cardiologist wanted to get it idea of how this was working out so he got another anagram a year and a half later after this one and as you can see now it's completely gone now we have to take a minute here and really raise a question this man had an extremely safe procedure of Simply changing his food there is no risk and no added expense and nothing could be more powerful and you really have to begin to question what why it is that every patient with this disease at least ought to be offered uh the option of plant-based nutrition the reason I got the uh angiograms is that the patient sent them to me when he was at the same time he sent sent a letter thanking me for writing the book all right now uh so when these when the when the study really like was initiated we had 24 patients but we were promply lost six nice guys but I had very little money for the study and uh they just didn't quite quite get it but there were 18 who stuck with us for the entire 12 years and it was interesting that uh was 18 that stuck with this I wanted to know in the eight years prior to coming into our study while they were in the hands of expert card ologist how many events of progressive disease did they experience there it is 49 disease events in that eight years prior to coming into our study however once they entered entered the study 17 of those 18 had no further events there was one little sheep who had six years wandered from the flock got into the wrong Foods more angina ended up with a bypass but he's now back with a block but it proves the point of how powerful Whole Food plant Bas nutrition could be now as proud and as excited as I was to see this uh this approach actually working documented with the angram angiographic disease reversal uh not everybody was excited about this and I said drelon that's a small study what makes you think you can repeat it again Dron that was not not randomized it was small so we did another study and this time that uh was interesting that we had 200 patients so two were lost to follow up 198 patients of those 198 177 followed our program and that was 89.3 almost 90% now you might say well because one of the criticisms I get of our study is that other Physicians will say well we can't get patients to eat that way well if you're going to have patients make a lifestyle change I think it's absolutely essential that to show the patient uh respect and the only way that I know to show a patient respect is to give them our time so under our present format our present setup when we are when we we're asked to see patients we have about once every 6 weeks a 5 and a half to 6 hour intensive seminar where these patients are going to learn all about how they created their disease and precisely how we're going to empower them as the locus of control the Halt and to reverse their disease now the other aspect of this study is that since I guess I'm a little old fashion anybody who's going to come to our seminar beforehand I like to call them so that I can get my arms around their story and at the same time provide them an opportunity to ask questions of me so that coming to this seminar we have a strong platform from which we can all move forward now uh you working yeah it's working I think it's working there there we go so what about the events in the patients that were adherent there was one out of the 177 who did have a small stroke but he had the stroke while he was vacationing in China totally abandoning the the the the nutrition the totally abandoning a whole food plant based nutrition and he had a tendency to have hypertension anyway so although I've included there uh my other co-author said no that that that patient actually the should not be included there because 100% of the people who were compliant did not have a further events the 21 patients who were not compliant 62% had additional events now I wanted to sort of compare our results with some of the larger cardiovascular studies in this country and one overseas and compare to see how we were doing on now if you look on the far right that's the Leon diet heart study which after four years 25% of the participants had a major cardiac event or stroke we go one story to the left natural history of coronary artery disease this is a Col a study out of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital New York City 20% at the end of four years heart attack stroke and death let's go to the left one more Bill bowden's kurage study at the end of four years 19.4% heart attack stroke and death now we go to the left and there we are 610 of 1% that one patient if we included what was the difference we were treating the cause and really there's been a basic Covenant of trust between the patient and the caregiver ever since the days of hypocrates that whenever possible the caregiver will share with the patient what is the causation of the illness all right now so we summarize no mortality from the diet no Mor no morbidity from the diet no added expense and benefits improve with time and when you think about it presently when patients have a heart attack they are sadly having to walk around all day long carrying the really the the like the dle sword hanging over their head wondering when it is that they're going to have their next uh their next event now here on the left you're looking at the pulse volum on the ankle of a 54 year old patient with heart disease who in addition had a partial blockage of an artery in his thigh so that when he came to my office and crossed the Skyway he had to stop five times waiting for the discomfort and pain in his calf to go away as additional blood finally flowed into it and I really totally forgot about his leg when about 10 months into the program when he came for an office visit he said Dr estelon do you recall when I first started seeing you that I had to stop five times crossing the Skyway your office yes he said doc I want you to know in the last month I no longer stop the pain is gone I said well then let's do this let's repeat pulse volume and you can see on the right the pulse volume was now absolutely doubled we suddenly had now absolutely irrefutable Rock Solid scientific proof that food and food alone could absolutely reverse cardiovascular disease and somebody's going to say well wait a minute what about what about the statin drugs well look at the dates it was 1986 there were no stout statin drugs now here another one we have this is a I get this there what you're looking at here is the image of a 78-year-old retired high school chemistry teacher who in his retirement he and his wife love to enter square dance contests but during this the fast squared dance he was getting bilateral calf pain and he saw some vascular surgeons who got these images and you can see this absolute uh ravaging disease but he came to see us and uh because he didn't like the idea of the big operation that was being proposed and he said Dr eselon if I choose your method how long will it take me how long will it take me to get rid of my calf pain so I looked at him with great wisdom in my face and I said probably about 9 or 10 months 3 months later I got a phone call Dr esselon you do not speak the truth the pain is gone now I don't know quite uh what it's like in Wisconsin for you all you folks but when here in Cleveland if you're watching a sporting event on television or a mystery just before the uh advertisement comes on you will hear the m of his tones that the announcers say something like when the moment is Right will you be ready now we all know that the penal artery is much smaller than the coronary artery and not infrequently before somebody comes down with heart disease they'll find that they're no longer able to uh raise the flag shall we say but all is not lost and when I get a phone call uh from somebody it goes a little bit like this doc this is Dr this is Mr so and so yes nice to see hear you again yeah doc I said I really ought to thought I ought to call you because once again something has come up and I think I I owe you another check all right what you're seeing now is a pet scan now this is going to take a little bit of explanation so I'll go slowly on this one but it's it's it's very important the pet scan on the left if it's orange or yellow it means this is of course a configuration of of heart muscle and if the heart muscle is reflected as orange or yellow the circulation is quite good but you can see on the one on the left on the right hand side it's green and it's green because it's a poor blat surise so I celed the patient on that day and 10 days later his cholesterol had fallen from 248 to 137 and then three weeks later we repeated the Pet Scan and now you can see the area that was green is now totally restored so what's going on here this really had me puzzled and so I talked to uh because how can you how can you in three weeks how are you going to remove something that's a blockage like that so I spoke to Rodriguez who is the chairman of cardiovascular path uh cardiovascular cardi cardiovascular pathology at the Cleveland Clinic and he he probably uh he dissects $200 hearts of year from those who are obviously deceased and I said how often do you ever see blockages or plaque in those hearts once those three major arteries have dived into the heart muscle and his answer never so look here here you are looking at a heart that is really nothing but all of its blood vessels you have the three major arteries the right coronary artery the left anterior descending and the uh circumflex and what do they do they all dive as you can see here into these thousands and thousands of intramuscular vessels which do not have plaque as Rodriguez said however now I knew the answer because what occurs when these patients come in to see us and they're really quite sick they're barely making any nitric oxide or endothelial prod produced nitric oxide it's very modest and also when your arteries are that sick your endothelial cell is now your enemy it is making two molecules of endothelin and thromboxane and endothelin and thromboxane are what we call vasoconstrictors they narrow these arteries so all those thousands and thousands of tiny little blood vessels that you see there uh are pinched and narrowed not because they have a blockage but because they're sort of as for lack of a better term they're a little bit in spasm but they have so deprived the heart of oxygen and blood supply and the lack of nitric oxide that it's is always to me very stunning especially with people who have stable angina chest pain often with often you can see within two 4 6 eight or 10 days when they completely change their diet and do it correctly their pain is gone why well when you think about it looking at those thousands upon thousands of intramuscular tiny vessels are no longer narrowed they all suddenly become dilated and if you recall in physics P's law a flow through the hollow viscus is related to the fourth power of the radius radius transl a tiny increase in diameter a huge increase in flow and this is why it makes me confident that that how how rapidly aggressive this change can occur within uh literally days or weeks uh so if we measure the way of disease reversal that proves it we've seen it by angiogram we see it by stress test I've shared the pet pet scan reversal with you we've seen it with cultra kateed ultrasound reversal of the disease and the kateed going to the brain I've shared with you pulse volum and the three symptoms that go away are angina clarication and erectile dysfunction now for those of you who actually have not gotten to Cleveland very often and wonder what's going on but and that is a building called the a building that I uh worked for eight years no I wor I worked for many years on the eighth floor as a surgeon the other thing that I think you like to I'd like you to see in this is what the trees look like in the in Cleveland in February however I after I retired from surgery and I got involved with heart disease reversal I was hired by the wellness Institute and all the budget is more modest there the morale is quite high and one thing thing that I've learned in some 60 years since Medical School brains are important but nothing nothing nothing is as important perhaps as persistence persistence persistence best exemplified by this young Damsel in Life Magazine 1939 trying to learn how to do the splits but it is tough to do the splits but she stuck with it and sure enough the other day in uh in Wisconsin somebody spotted her and she had got it right and I want to thank you for your patience and uh and your willingness to listen thank you thank you so much Dr eston my goodness you have taught uh I've been doing this for a long time now or been plant-based and and have heard presentations from you there's always something new and I was surprised how much uh that I had forgotten that you reminded me of here but my goodness what and what a marvelous thing you found what a wonderful thing you're let you you continue to do letting us know about how this works and what a difference it can make in our lives and the lives of our loved ones well I'm g i you have any questions i' to answer on the other hand I I do want to add one one thing that sometimes people forget about when they think about whether they change their food or not remember this every single patient that I have ever seen with heart disease or that anybody in Wisconsin has ever seen for heart disease or Missouri or Utah or whatever anybody who has heart disease at one time did not have heart disease right that's right yeah it's one of those things that you you don't step to think about and when you do you it's it's pretty powerful all right there's some questions you want to put in the chat uh yep and and Brian have you looked at the chat yeah I've been looking at the chat and thankfully some other people have been answering the questions um and so uh some people who obviously know what they're talking about so they're they're answering the questions very well um I thought that um here someone says Dr eson is there a limit on the amount of green leafy vegetables that can be consumed along with cholesterol drugs since vitamin K can clot the blood yeah I I wouldn't I wouldn't worry about that clotting we've been doing this now for really a number of decades and uh I I didn't go into it because we had a little bit of a Time crimp but I want to uh address the the green leafy vegetable thing because by now I hope that everybody from what I have said understands that heart diseas is caused as you lose nitric oxide as a protection we don't we just that that it seems to be quite uh quite absolutely important and the uh is what was that the question so the question was about like uh leafy greens can they be consumed with cholesterol drugs you wor about vitamin K yeah so what's your take on vitamin K well my I want to finish on nitric oxide for a minute yeah now there are two ways that we get nitric oxide and I made a major change in our program about a decade ago for this and that is that that when you have uh healthy endothelium it's really making the the nitric oxide that you need but the other thing is that when your endothelium is no longer healthy we have we have embraced there's a newer method or newer knowledge that mankind has an alternate pathway for making additional nitric oxide so I want to spend just a moment on that and that is when we get people to chew a green leafy vegetable roughly the size of 1/3 of a cup after it has first been steamed or boiled 5 and a half to six minutes so it's nice and tender then you must anoint it with several drops of a delightful balsamic or rice vinegar why because the acetic acid from those vinegars has been shown to restore the the the the vinegars so that what happens is that those vinegars will affect the nitric oxide synthese enzyme which is contained with within the endothelial cell and responsible for making additional nitric oxide so we ask people to chew this alongside your breakfast cereal again as a midm morning snack again with your lunch and sandwich that's three midafternoon 4 dinner time 5 and of course I adore it when they eat that evening snack of arugula or kale now so what about Vitamin K Vitamin Vitamin K is without without without that healthy ingestion of greeny vegetables does has not been a problem yeah spinach Swiss CH beat greens yeah we get that what are the top five the top the top six are kale Swiss Shard spinach arugula beat greens and bees but not too much all spinach now the other uh the other way that green leafy vegetables Works a green leafy vegetable uh will the second to benefit from it it will restore the capacity of your bone marrow to once again make the endothelial progenitor cell the endothelial progenitor cell will replace our ccent injured worn out endothelial cells and the third benefit when you're chewing a green leafy vegetable you are chewing a green nitrate as you chew that nitrate it is going to mix with the facultative anerobic bacteria that reside in the GPS and grooves of your tongue those bacteria are going to reduce the bacteria that you've been chewing to from nitrates to nitrites and when you swallow the nitrite it is now your own gastric acid which is going to further reduce the nitrite to more nitric oxide which can enter your nitric oxide pool so think about it what you're doing for minimal expense and no hideous 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's a caveat to this that toothpaste with fluoride public drinking water with fluoride and mouthwash will injure the beneficial bacteria in your mouth and I do not like ant acids because ant acids will decrease your gastric acidity and you will be unable to reduce the nitrite to more nitric oxide and uh if you want to listen into all the vegetable I give you the top six but if you want the whole list it goes like this box Choice F chart K collge coll green beet greens mustard green greens nappy cage bu barbecue cifl cilantro parsley spinach and asparagus and the reason I do it that way is because you have to know how powerful it is for restoring your memory that's excellent I love somebody has a question about can your LDL be too low theoretically it it it could be but I I don't know this person says they have a 62 LDL is that too low yeah well let's let's see what it's like without medication yeah are they on what if they're on medication if any if anybody gets rid of their medication I think eating eating normally without drugs you're not going to have an LDL is too low so this person says no medication so that's that's pretty amazing but how what was the cholesterol 6 oh What's the total cholesterol let's see what what was it LDL LDL was 62 that's well that's okay yeah that's okay that's good that's fine someone said is that too low no if you got get get that way naturally no it's not too low uh how about AR L Arginine would you recommend having patients take it the whole idea of AR arginine is to simulate the production of the body Mak and making more of this uh nitric oxide this is what the goal is but when there was a test when when you put it to the test in a large study there were men who had recently had a heart attack divided into two groups one was a control group and the other group continued to take the L Arginine they prematurely stopped the study after 6 months because they found there were six new heart attacks in the group that had previously had a heart attack who were taking the allinine and the control group that were not taking the allinine there were none no interesting wow so there seems to be uh a little bit more workout that has to be done to to try to spearhead that approach yeah um how about aortic aneurysms can you prevent or reverse aortic aneurysms no the diet will not do that once um the wall of the uh the giant artery the the aota once the wall which is made up of muscle and collagen once those fibers become separated in this High Press system there's begins to be this swelling because of that break breakdown and no no amount of Whole Food plant-based nutrition that I'm aware of can reverse that however uh there are uh obviously better ways to do that even from the surgical standpoint uh they can actually uh run up a uh sort of a Teflon mesh or w we weave that absolutely will take all the burden off the walls of of the aorta how about what's the safest way to reduce your Statin when you go Whole Food plant-based I know you always make great recommendations of working with people's cardio yeah I think you have to you have to work with the physician who is uh prescribing the statins for you and the important thing about the uh the Statin is it maybe it may be be helpful but if you want to modify it you really should talk with your your doctor and what'll happen when you start when you start to eat whole food plant-based nutrition even though you are taking a Statin your cholesterol will probably fall so profoundly that it will not be hard for you to get him to cut it in half and then you continue that and you may get him to cut it in half again but at all times I would I would you know I would respect your uh position and see if you can't do it with with their understanding yeah but they're never going to recommend it right they're always gonna want to be safe you have to drive the conversation yep um is there research about supplemental nitric oxide tablets have you seen any research on that uh there is preliminary research and I but uh I have not seen the one that I have to see before I will really commit to it and that is I need to see a study where the nitric oxide tablets have been used in patients who are seriously ill with heart disease and see if uh if that will get them to Halt and reverse their disease because right now doing this approach with green leafy vegetables uh I kind of feel we've we've got a winner and I'm and it's safe and it's inexpensive and I'm and it's also something that patients can understand when you get them to do this you define for them the entire mechanism of action yeah and now I think that this is that's that's what I would prefer until but I'm going to be completely open-minded if the that study comes uh comes out and it's safe how about omega-3 in patients who are plant-based do you ever suggest people take omega-3s like I suggest they they can get it drawn if it's optimal you're fine if it's borderline you might want to consider taking omega-3 algae yeah here's a great question we haven't had before what do you think are the next growing edges for research in Whole Food plant-based nutrition like what's what do you think's the um on the horizon certainly microbiome right no no question the microbiome will be studied more but uh I think that I'm I'm I'm deviating now to to what happens every 5 years when the United States Department of Agriculture puts out for the public a food list and not surprisingly I guess who it is that comprises the United States Department of Agriculture all these people who presently president of the hog board the Cattleman's Association Mars Mars uh candy bars yeah I mean just there is there is such enormous conflict that we we're never being told that these are the foods that will harm you that'll give you this disease by the time you're remember 17 years of age I mean this is this is crazy when you have all these cultures on the planet or did did have them until uh they switched to Western diet they all want to be the American diet and have meat five times a day because it's crazy um what do you think about recommending L citrine for potential increase of nitric oxide I don't have I'm GNA confess I don't have I I would rather do that and the and with the safe way that I using right now with the green leafy vegetables but I will remain openminded let's see how those how those studies with citrine work out all right I always want to ask you this question because I think everybody wants to know can you talk about alcohol and can you talk about caffeine well I think if you've got atrial fibrillation and cardiac arhythmia I'd certainly stay off the coffee with caffeine and there's also the reason I'm hesitant to use it or advise that is it there is a wonderful Italian study that clearly shows that when you're drinking coffee with caffeine you injure the endothelial production of nitric oxide what was it the question um what do you think about what about alcohol well alcohol is a toxin and for years there was all this sort of fumbling in the scientific Community about well maybe it's going to be a little bit will help but now every it seems that both in the United Kingdom and this country uh the word is out that uh it's it's something you don't want to do yeah uh it's toxic to your brain toxic to your heart toxic to your liver and for women of course it's it's a it's a serious risk factor for breast cancer but Bes because you're such an easygoing guy though what what do you usually say about Saturday night well if they're not looking the other way and they tell me and they tell me it wasn't Dr Elon said it you can have probably a half a glass of wine beer or similar on Friday or Saturday night um someone said can you comment on black seed oil for improving Nitro oxide production but I can't imagine you would feel good about any oil well I don't yeah and I'd have to see the study yeah um is it just caffeine or tea as well no caffeine tea with caffeine apparently and black tea and green tea are okay yeah any thoughts about Co and M RNA vaccines and their impact on cardiovascular health yeah that's an excellent question there are some suggestions that myocarditis can result hopefully that will remain in a small percentage of people but we have to really remain open-minded uh about this as a possibility of that the vaccine causes a myocarditis wow interesting I didn't know that well well we're bumping up against 7:30 here uh maybe one or two more questions if we've got them I don't see any right now it let me ask you were talking about the third a cup of of steamed or cooked greens a number of times during the day is microwaving okay sure yeah microw yeah get them we always say get them in any way you can fresh steam but the studies that have really looked at this in usually involve cooking them and using vinegar so rice vinegar or balsamic yeah balsamic or rice vinegar and you and one of the questions I was going to ask does it matter any what age you start on on a program like this and I think you pretty clearly said it's what did you say an 87 year old I think that did I tell you about him no Stanley tell them about Stanley oh this is a gentleman who came to me when he was 87 and uh he had been told he was from California he had been told that he had to have open heart bypass surgery and he was convinced that that would that would kill him and so he went for us with plant-based nutrition and every year year he call once or twice to let us know how he was doing and then last year when he called he asked for an and he asked for an because he wanted her to give him plenty of recipes because he was going to have a party finally and saidwell what's the party for and he saidwell I'm celebrating my 100th birthday very nice and this year when he called he called to remind us that he was now 101 that's outstanding someone has a question someone has a question about hemp seeds or chia seeds for omegas right like you're you're a fan of chia seeds and black seed meal you don't eat hemp seeds but they're okay is good for for Omega yeah hemp is good yep put him on put them on the cereal and I did see something here from Kevin asking you about the possibility of close captioning and I and Brett is on here our Tech person and uh I'll be talking to Brett afterwards to see if that's something that we can do yeah I I guess I could address it right now if you'd like uh once we upload this video to the YouTube channel um usually takes a couple hours to process but Clos captioning will be available on the YouTube video so oh excellent thanks Brett um just quickly everybody my name is Brian Hart I'm the executive director of the eleston foundation uh if you're interested in getting our Weekly Newsletter you can go to our website and sign up for it by just clicking on the contact button and then it gives you a chance to check a box and get the Weekly Newsletter we're uh 501c3 if you're interested in bringing some plant-based messaging to an organization that with whom you're Affiliated just reach out to us via email and uh it's on our website and we'd love to talk to you so thanks so much Terry for having us again you're welcome thank you the week newsletter is awesome turn turn the camera around so we can see yeah I think that is there she is that's hand there we go don't miss the Weekly Newsletter we've been hearing about you Terry how wonderful you are oh thank you an thank thanks Brian I imagine that was from Brian so I want to thank and an and Brian and Jane will all be speaking to us in November so we're looking forward to those to those recipes and I think a little I forgot what it was a you set a timer up and and oh yeah 15 minute meals yep oh so Dr llon thank you so much for taking the time to do this and so much for what you you have done for so many people and continue to do to this to this day you're a treasure all right all right have a great night thanks take care thanks and uh just for everybody very quickly our next monthly meeting will be Thursday May 9th our featured speaker Dr Andrew Freeman if You' like to receive notice of this or any of the upcoming PB now events and are not currently on our list just Google us at pbn and if you want to see past uh videos of our past meetings go to the video library section on our website or visit us on YouTube just by typing in pbn uh thanks again to our speakers Dr Elston Dr liberman and Michelle stamp for sharing their valuable time and knowledge with us tonight and thanks to all of you for coming tonight good night and we hope to see you again next time

Channel: Plant Based Nutrition Organization of Wisconsin

Views: 14,300

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Id: m8DEGVl8T1o

Length: 94min 26sec (5666 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024