A hundred years ago in America, less than 4% of the population died of heart attacks, which is now close to 40%. And even in the UK today, more than 50% of the population is dying of heart attacks and strokes, and these diseases of nutritional ignorance. And more people are dying of these diseases of nutritional excess compared to people that are starving from not enough calories. So you can just look at this slide, the prevalence of diabetes worldwide, and how it's exploding - and it doesn't have to be.

We're eating too many calories. And fat is a biological living mass that produces hormones, that accelerates the rate at which heart disease develops, and increases your risk of cancer. Fat on the body is dangerous, and one of the themes of this presentation right now is that the micronutrient deficits from eating processed foods and animal products, with the insufficient consumption of plant-derived phytonutrients from natural, whole plant foods, drives overeating behavior. Let me say that one more time. I'm claiming here, that the lack of proper micronutrients, by multiple mechanisms, fuels the body's cravings, addictions and drive to increase it's caloric intake, leading to the obesity epidemic.

So as we eat more foods that are rich in micronutrients we automatically and naturally desire less food. So we're talking about people requiring less and desiring less as a means of controlling their health and their weight, and that when you choose to eat a diet of predominately processed foods and animal products, you desire more, and you often can't control your desire to over-consume calories, because you feel ill if you don't over consume calories, because that's what the word “addiction” means.

Addiction means that you feel okay when you're doing it, but you try to stop it and you feel uncomfortable or get pain. You might get shaky, weakness, headaches, confusion, fatigue, stomach cramping, but you feel ill unless you keep eating. So we're going to discuss that briefly okay? So, the cost of dietary related disease in the UK alone is predicted to be over 19 billion pounds over the next 10 years.

And all this money is potentially saved, obviously, by the healthcare system; so 7 out of 10 deaths now are caused by chronic diseases directly related to what people eat. Now, we can group both heart disease and cancer together, because it's not one diet that causes heart disease and strokes and another diet that causes cancer. The same diet that leads to the reversal and protection from heart attacks and strokes, is the same diet that can prevent people from getting cancer, right?

And we know that if we look at a lot of the studies, we're finding out when you're having the food served to you, all the cupcakes and all the white flour and sugar you're eating, those aren't just micronutrient deficient, they cause the body to build up toxic waste products, like free radicals, like advanced glycation end products. You're eating foods that cause obesity, diabetes, and cancer. You're eating yourself on the way to a shortened lifespan.

We have to recognize that the proper diet here to prevent disease has to be rich in natural plant foods, and we have to understand plant foods help give us the most protection. Right, so we're talking here about eating a diet rich in natural foods, and vegetables of course afford the most protection, and the foods that are highest in micronutrients, of course, are green vegetables, right?

So what's the food that's most powerfully linked to the protection against heart disease? In other words, what's the food that if you ate, we need the most of, to reverse and protect yourself from heart disease? And the answer is: green vegetables, the foods that have the highest micronutrient per calorie density. What's the food that would offer you the most protection against cancer, of all foods? And the answer is? Green vegetables, right?

The foods that mostly the primates eat. If you followed a primate, like a monkey, around in the woods with a telephoto lens, looking for everything they ate for the month - and scientists do that, go back to the laboratory and calculate exactly what they eat - they find they consume 15 times as much of the micronutrients compared to the RDI's that Americans and people are not consuming and are not even meeting those basic requirements set by governments. We're not even meeting those requirements, anywhere near meeting them. Yet the wild animals in the woods consume 10 to 20 times that much, because their diet is so rich in these very high phytonutrient green vegetables.

And, of course, we're talking here about the power of seeds and berries and mushrooms and onions. To have factors that actually prevent the expression of the gene defects that could lead to cancer. When you have a diet rich in mushrooms and onions and green vegetables, those gene defects that may increase the risk of breast cancer or colon cancer or prostate cancer are suppressed by the high intake of the phytochemicals.

The human body has been designed in a manner to protect itself against these diseases. It already has the right mechanisms. We are a miraculous, self-healing, self-protecting machine, designed to live essentially from birth until an uneventful death. And we could live 15 to 25 years longer than we're living today by putting into action these advances in modern nutritional science. One advance here, again, is the fact that seeds and nuts protect against sudden cardiac death.

Most people consume 400 calories a day from oil. Now I'm saying here that walnut oil is not the same thing as a walnut, and almond oil is not the same thing as an almond. When you eat the whole food, when you get your fats from the whole food, like nuts or seeds, it has marked effects to stabilize the heart against irregular heartbeats, as opposed to gaining weight with oil, because that 120 calories a tablespoon gets absorbed very rapidly and stored away in the body as fat. When you take the fat from a whole food, like an almond or a walnut or a sesame seed, all those calories aren't biologically available.

The sterols and stanols, like a sponge, bind the fat in the stool, so it is excreted. And it actually sucks some of those negatives fats, like LDL cholesterol, out of the body from the bloodstream back into the digestive tract for removal in the stool. We're saying here that nuts and seeds actually help prevent and reverse diabetes, and help prevent and reverse heart disease and have beneficial effects in both morbidity and mortality. So one key element here is getting less fat from processed food, and more fat from whole, natural plant foods like seeds and nuts.

Now, one of the recent findings in the modern nutritional science is that we shouldn't eat excess macronutrients, like fat, carbohydrate, and protein, right? But one of the most critical nutrients to focus on here is protein, because we've been brainwashed or educated with wrong information. For some people, they kind of thought that protein was to be held in such high esteem, because it facilitates growth and promotes growth hormone, right? But now we're finding that the more growth hormone, and especially IGF1, the insulin-like growth hormone that's produced by the excess consumption of animal protein, is one of the primary factors leading to the tremendous increase in risk in breast cancers and prostate cancers and colon cancer.

In order for people to maximize their opportunity for longevity, we have to make sure they don't consume too much of High Biological Protein. Because the more high biological protein you eat the higher your insulin-like growth factor 1 will be, and the stronger the risk of breast cancer and colon cancer, and it's this factor alone that accounts for some of these major explosions in the rates of breast cancer and prostate cancer in the last 50 years in modern countries. Because protein was brainwashed or advertised to us as being a favorable nutrient, and we thought it represented wealth and health, and we try to consume more of it and we've wound up causing a sparking, an epidemic of cancer because of it. So animal protein raises cholesterol, and plant protein lowers cholesterol, right?

Animal protein promotes cancer, and plant protein, of course, reduces the risk of cancer. And also, when you get your protein from plants, especially green plants that are largely protein, right, then you're getting a high package of high antioxidants and phytochemicals and fibers that are so protective against disease. The ANDI scores - the ANDI stands for “Aggregate Nutrient Density Index” - is a tool to help direct people to easily recognize what foods have the most micronutrients.

So all I did here, to devise the ANDI scores, was to add up 23 nutrients that are well studied, right, nutrients like vitamin E, vitamin C, selenium, zinc, B12, right, folate. We took the 23 nutrients and we added them up to give each food one number, so people could easily see one number, instead of 23 different numbers, to get an overall feel, right, for how much micronutrients they contain. And the nice thing here about the ANDI scores is that the foods that are rated highest in the measurable micronutrients; because, don't forget, there are thousands of un-measurable micronutrients - we can't measure all of the - but the foods that are highest in these measurable micronutrients are also the highest in the ones we can't measure as well. Now, of course, it shows that, you know, comparing white pasta and white bread to a vegetable, it's not that vegetables aren't 10 times as much nutrients, they're a hundred times as much nutrients. Right?

And you could see that animal products and processed foods are relatively low, and I think that's the main focus here of the ANDI scores. And the main benefits are to show and demonstrate how powerful vegetables are at earning people the micronutrients they need to fuel, not just adequate health, but excellent health. Right? And the ANDI facts, these are the 23 parameters which the ANDI scores measure, so we can help direct people to make better food choices. Now, putting together a food pyramid for nutritional excellence, and I call it a nutritarian diet, or nutritarian food pyramid. I coined that word, “nutritarian,” to help people distinguish the type of food they're going to be trying to strive to eat. I'm claiming here that it's not just the explosion of animal products, though that's a big part of it, but it's also the tremendous explosion of processed foods, that comprise such a large percent of modern diets that is accountable and resulting in this epidemic of chronic disease we see in the modern world.

So if we're going to make a pyramid for people who want excellent health, what shall we put at the base of the pyramid? Shouldn't we put the foods that have the best association with long life? Shouldn't we put the foods at the base of the pyramid we want people to get the most of, the foods that have the most micronutrients in them? And so, therefore, what happens when you design a pyramid, don't you put vegetables at the base - fruits and beans, nuts and seeds, whole grains - and we restrict the amount of processed foods, and we restrict the amount of animal products to very small amounts in the diet or not at all?

We see, then, miraculous things happen to people. We see people lose weight and get their health back. After people have suffered for 20, 30 years with diseases, they adopt this type of diet and they stop desiring excess calories, and they lose weight almost effortlessly, right? So, let me describe for you for two minutes how this works, and how it prevents the drive to overeat. The human body cycles between anabolic phases and catabolic phases, right? Anabolic and catabolic: “anabolic” means you're building your body up; “catabolic” means you're breaking it down, right? In the anabolic phase, you're eating and digesting, right? In the catabolic phase, you're living off of what you stored when you ate. Like you went to the gas station and filled up your tank, and now you're driving it around, you're burning up the tank.

Well, in the catabolic phase, you're burning that glucose and burning off those fats that you stored when you ate, and absorbed it. Okay? Now, what happens though is that when you eat a diet low in nutrients, you build up certain toxic waste products in your body, like free radicals, like advanced glycation end products. You build up toxic waste products because you're not taking in the phytochemicals and antioxidants you need for normal function. And then, when you stop digesting and you enter the catabolic phase when you've finished digesting a meal, your body starts to go into an enhanced stage of repair and self-cleaning and detoxification.

And if your diet was unhealthy, if you were eating a diet, like most of the modern world is eating today, with lots of processed foods and lots of animal products, you're going to have lots of nitrogenous wastes and lots of free radicals and lots of toxins build up in your tissues. And when you try not to eat and you go into the catabolic phase, you're not going to feel well.

You're going to feel shaky and weak, confused and fatigued, and you're going to have to eat again. You're forced to eat more food than your body requires. If you ate a healthy diet, and you were well nourished with micronutrients, and you went to the catabolic phase, you would feel nothing - you wouldn't even feel like eating. I'm making
a tremendous claim here.

I'm saying most people cycle from anabolic phase to anabolic phase: the minute they finish digesting, they want to eat again. They want have a snack, they want to have another meal, they want to put something in their mouth, they want to have some...right? They can't stop eating. They've lost their connectivity. Their natural instinctive drives that tells the amount of calories they need to eat to maintain a lean body mass are lost, because they become food addicts, because of lack of micronutrient quality in their diet. I'm saying the lack of micronutrient quality drives addictive sensations to overeat, that when you see the curve goes down, that glucose curve drops and you enter that catabolic phase, you get what I call “toxic hunger,” the need to eat again.

And most people that become overweight, they become overweight because they don't feel well unless they almost constantly consume calories to prevent the detoxification. It's as if they were trying to stop drinking 10 cups of coffee a day, or trying to get off cocaine, because they feel too uncomfortable if they try to stop eating or don't over-consume calories. They can solve the sensation of toxic hunger by either eating too frequently or eating a big, heavy meal with too many calories to keep the digestive track busy in the anabolic phase, until it's time for their next meal.

A healthy person, though, doesn't feel the detoxification stress. Most of you sitting here in the audience today, you could have even skipped lunch. If you were eating a healthy diet, you would feel nothing. You wouldn't have to overeat food. Your body actually develops more metabolic efficiency when you eat a diet rich in micronutrients, and you can maintain your lean body mass with less calories. It enables people to eat less and not feel hungry. And then when the glycogen is burnt off and you've gone through your catabolic phase, before you would burn lean body mass, your body would get a clear signal to eat.

That, I call “true hunger,” and true hunger is mostly felt in the throat and the mouth, and it's accompanied by dramatic enhancements in taste. So, true hunger marked at the end of the catabolic phase directs people to the exact amount of calories they require to maintain a long, healthy life, and to keep their stable weight for their whole life, without gaining weight or losing weight. It helps protect your lean body mass.

But here's the point: you can't become overweight, you can't get fat on your body, unless you have eaten outside of the demands of true hunger. In order to have gained weight, you had to have eaten recreationally, or because of the demands of toxic hunger or addictive… And also, there's a feedback loop to the brain that signals the brain to have to increase the desire to consume more calories when you're not meeting your micronutrient needs.

So, what if society learned about modern nutritional science, and what if 50 to 80% of our population, of our elderly population over the age of sixty, didn't have to go on medications for diabetes and high blood pressure and cholesterol lowering? Right? The prescription pads are like permission slips. We've evolved into a society where the medication takes the place of teaching people how to live in a healthy manner, right?

And by the medication lowering their blood pressure, lowering their blood sugar and lowering their cholesterol, people are absolved of this personal responsibility to take care of their health, and inevitably, they follow the same diet that caused the problem to begin with. So the disease process inevitably advances until they die a premature death. Right? So what if there were a way to lower cholesterol and drop blood pressure and prevent heart disease that was more effective than taking medications? What if people actually wanted this knowledge and information so they wouldn't have to have happen to them what maybe happened to their father or to their neighbor? Right?

What if you could actually, not just control diabetes, but if you could reverse it and make the diabetic non-diabetic, without the cost of drugs and without the tragic consequences of diabetes that leads to amputation and blindness and kidney damage and heart disease? What if you could avoid angioplasty and bypass surgery, which the meta-analysis show, do not extend lifespan anyway? Right? Angioplasty and bypass surgery, which could relieve chest pain, find that years down the road these people who're-, who undergo those procedures don't have less chest pain than people who weren't treated with those interventions, and they don't live longer either. They're just temporizing measures.

But, what if you can reverse those disease and keep a person out of pain and back to a normal functioning life again, without these futile and expensive medical procedures? And, of course, that's what we see happens, not just in one case, but in thousands of cases. And in my presentation later on this afternoon, I'll describe a lot of those cases.

But in this presentation, I wanted to highlight one. Ronnie suffered, about five years ago, with bypass surgery due to crushing chest pain, and he weighed over 300 pounds. In four years' time, the bypass failed and he had chest pains again, and he couldn't even walk one block. He was rushed back to the hospital and they put stents in, three angioplasty stents in his heart. Within a month his stents had restenosed and he was back having chest pains again. On more than $600 out of pocket medical expenses a month and three medications to lower his blood pressure which couldn't get his blood pressure down, and three medications to lower his cholesterol, which couldn't get his cholesterol down adequately, and medications to reduce chest pain that still didn't enable him to walk. He was literally sent home to die.

I never met Ronnie, but through the Internet he found my work, he read my information, he got Mikey communicated, and he got educated as to how he could reverse his heart disease. He lost 140 pounds in 12 months. But the story here isn't the weight he lost. The story is that Ronnie doesn't have high blood pressure anymore; he's on no medication. He doesn't have high cholesterol anymore. His LDL cholesterol is 60 on no medication. His total cholesterol was 230 on three cholesterol-lowering drugs. He doesn't have chest pain anymore. He plays tennis. He runs. He works out. He has a full life. He's not sick anymore. He doesn't have heart disease anymore; it melted away. Nutritional excellence does what medical intervention doesn't have the power to do.

My mission here, of course, is to let people know that that they have an option, that they don't have to have happen to them what happened to Ronnie Valentine. Right? And Ronnie said, “I wouldn't want anyone to go through what I had to go through in my life,” Right? before he learned this information about good nutrition.

The study, this high micronutrient diet - we call it a high-nutrient density diet, in the medical literature, obviously - and it published in the medical journal Metabolism. It showed that this plant-based, high nutrient diet lowered LDL cholesterol 33%, which is more powerful than medications. But when you lower for the nutritional excellence, you don't get the same effects of lowering cholesterol with a drug, because your cholesterol level is just one of many factors that create heart disease. It's not the only factor, it's not even the most powerful factor. When you lower your cholesterol through excellent nutrition, you drop your body weight down, you get the fat off your body,
you profuse your body with nutrients that have anti-inflammatory effects. And when you profuse your body with those nutrients, it activates systems, like the Nrf2 system in the blood vessels to protect plaque from building up and actually to accelerate the reversal of heart disease.

The nutrients have beneficial effects, and it lowers your blood pressure of course, too, but then these micronutrients have beneficial effects way and above outside of what can be accomplished by cholesterol-lowering medications. Because you can't equate the degree of protection you get, because if you really wanted to take me up on that promise, that guarantee, not to have a heart attack or a stroke, it's not good enough to lower your blood pressure with drugs. You have to lower your blood pressure with good nutrition, because you earned it. You have to be physically fit. You can't be overweight, and you have to have a good cholesterol that's not forced down with drugs.

You have to have earned it through excellent nutrition. That's how you get the 100 degree of protection. Drugs and medications don't give you that degree of protection that nutritional excellence can, that Ronnie Valentine earned, of course.

So, heart disease, high blood pressure and even diabetes are diseases that are preventable and reversible, right? Nutritional studies, population studies, epidemiologic studies, right, all support the effectiveness of a healthy plant-based diet to arrest, prevent, and reverse diseases, like heart disease. And I've been in practice more than 20 years, treating hundreds and hundreds of patients, not just with diseases of high blood pressure and high cholesterol, but people who had high blood pressure and high cholesterol with advanced heart disease, people who had chest pain, people who were told they needed to have urgent bypass surgery or urgent angioplasty, who instead chose the nutritional approach, and within months their pains melt away as they lose weight, as they eat healthy. Right?

In the same amount of time this person could have been evaluated with a stress test, with the angiogram or catheterization, and then go through bypass and rehab after that expensive and invasive procedure. In that same amount of time, a few months later, the people are already feeling better and their chest pains are going away, and they're well without those invasive and expensive procedures. So, nobody needs die of a heart attack. You don't have to have strokes. Dr. Esselstyn, a very renowned physician in the United States, did a series where he followed over 50 people for 17 years, and he followed these individuals who had very advanced heart disease. They weren't just regular people with high blood pressure, these were people who had heart attacks, who had blockages. And he followed them for seventeen years, who ollowed excellent plant-based diet, and he found that in this group, these people didn't have future heart attacks.

Likewise, a similar group of people, followed for that same amount of years, had multiple cardiac events, emergency room visits, expensive medical care, going back to repeat surgeries and interventions. Likewise, Dr. Ornish's work showed the same thing, that as these studies are done we find that heart disease is not only preventable but it's reversible, and it's reversible to the extent that you use modern nutritional science to have the most optimal diet style possible.

And if you have a disease like diabetes or heart disease or high blood pressure, my question to you is: How excellent is your diet? Are you taking advantage of modern nutritional science, do everything you can? Or are you just relying on popping a pill, as your disease is likely to continue to worsen? A nutritarian diet is vegetable-based, not grain-based, not based on oil and white flour. It's based on, of course, green vegetables, mushrooms, onions, lots of fruits, beans, seeds, nuts, oils used sparingly. Animal products? Could be done on a vegan diet, or one you use very tiny amounts, like a condiment, but your animal products have to be dropped down dramatically to get the full benefits and lifespan advantages that are available to people today. It's focused on nutrient-dense calories.

And the question is: Our best minds, our best chefs, can we make nutrient-rich food taste fantastic? Can we make eating pleasurable, more pleasurable, and protect our health at the same time? Why not? Right? Why not have great taste, great fun and great health together? Why not take advantage and have the best health possible? Right? Well, it seems as if people, they're so addicted, they're so afraid of food being taken away from them, that they'll shovel things in - processed meats, barbequed, luncheon meats, fried foods, white flour products, sugar, cupcakes, doughnuts, crackers, any kind of thing in their mouth - regardless of the effect on its health. The most important knowledge that people could have to control their personal health destiny, more important than wealth, is your health. What good is wealth if you don't have your health?

The fountain of youth, of course, is in the plant-based diet containing high micronutrient-containing foods - vegetables, beans, mushrooms,onions,!! You know, what if there was a medical study that showed that women who ate mushrooms on a daily basis had over 60% lower risk of breast cancer? What if there was such a study? Wouldn't women be running out to eat mushrooms? Shouldn't that be on the front page of the New York Times? What if there was a study that showed that people who ate onions on a regular basis had a 50-80% lower risk of cancers. Wouldn't people be putting onions all over their foods every day? What if there was a pill from a drug company that can do that? Wouldn't that drug company be making billions of dollars? Every person would be paying a thousand pounds a month to consume those pills to prevent cancer? What if there was a study that showed people that ate green, cruciferous vegetables, like broccoli and bok choy and kale, had dramatically lower rates
 of cancer, even better than mushrooms and onions? Well, these studies exist. These studies are true. Right?

We have the evidence right now that natural plant foods have dramatic and powerful effect to afford people a unique opportunity to win the war on cancer and to win the war on the chronic diseases that afflict the modern world, that afflict the world today. All right? So we are talking here about grossly limiting, significant limitations, on eating foods that are detrimental to our health. The point here is that we have to change the way we see food, and we have to recognize that natural foods, whole, natural foods grown by the Earth, already have been designed with the perfect substances to fuel human species with the ability to live a long, protective, and disease-free life. So I'm offering you that opportunity. Thank you.

MC (m): Thank you. And, Joel will be speaking again later this afternoon. And Joel just referred to Caldwell Esselstyn in his talk.

Dr. Esselstyn made medical history by going to cardiovascular surgeons and gathering up a group of men for whom medical science could offer no solutions. They went through five years of a vegetarian diet, followed by fifteen years of a vegan diet. During and since that time, not one of the men has had any heart problems. Now Dr. Esselstyn can't be with us today, but he has sent over a video message, which we're going to play. That will be followed by another short video message. 

Dr. Esselstyn(m): My name is Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., and I welcome this opportunity to share my research and some of my thoughts on heart disease with this global warming conference. It's interesting that coronary artery heart disease is a leading killer of women and men in Western civilization.

However, even today if we were to look at certain cultures, like the rural Chinese, the Papua highlanders in New Guinea, central Africa, the Tarahumara Indians in Northern Mexico, coronary artery disease is virtually non-existent. These are plant-based cultures. And if the truth were known, coronary artery heart disease which wreaks such havoc is nothing more than a toothless paper tiger that need never, ever exist, and if it does exist, it need never, ever progress. Now, the question that remains is: Can people who are living in a Western society where there is rampant cardiovascular disease, are those persons who have cardiovascular disease willing to commit to a type of plant-based culture or plant-based nutrition? And if they do commit to this plant-based nutrition, can it halt or reverse their disease?

Well, there's a very, very powerful example, sort of from a historical standpoint. If we were to look at what happened in World War II in Norway, it was characteristic of the conquering Axis powers that when they overran Holland and Belgium and occupied Denmark and Norway, that they would take away their livestock for the troops. They would take away their cattle, their horses, their pigs, their chickens, their turkeys and so forth . And it was interesting that if we looked at deaths and cardiovascular disease in Norway in 1927, going up 1930, going up 1935, going up 1939 away goes the meat and the dairy, and down suddenly.

Time of greatest personal stress, deaths from heart attack and stroke are plummeting right through 1945 when, with the cessation of hostilities, there was a resumption of meat and dairy, and immediately we again had an increase in deaths from circulatory diseases, heart attack and stroke.

I'd also like to try to share with you a patient with coronary artery disease. This was a young, 44-year-old physician and when he had his heart attack, I think you can see this angiogram here clearly shows where the artery is so diseased and narrowed. And he also was rather weary - this was in 1996 - he was rather weary about taking any statin drugs, and I said, “Fine. Let's just be sure that you eat totally plant-based.” And he did. He was totally committed, and about 30 months later, he had another angiogram and sure enough, as you can see, it went from this diseased, narrow artery in 1996 to this one, which is now fully wide open, again, demonstrating proof of concept because he had been reticent to take any cholesterol- lowering drugs, that what was responsible for reversing his illness was his willingness to totally partake of plant-based nutrition.

This has been certainly confirmed, multiple times over the last 20 years, and the literature is really quite solid on the fact that I think it is time that physicians really grasp the concept and the idea that plant-based nutrition can accomplish some really almost miraculous type of goals where the patient's with significant cardiovascular disease.

Well, we have now gotten experience with well over 250 patients that, indeed, I find that patients rejoice when they are fully educated about what has been the causation of their illness and what they can do to absolutely turn it around and reverse it. I think it's important for us, in order to make this happen, to give a great deal of respect though to patients and it may take me upwards of 4 or 5 hours in a single sitting with a group of patients who have the disease to have them have this seminar of counseling which achieves these goals.

Now, I don't expect this to be the responsibility of the cardiologist or their treating physician because they will not have this kind of time in their practice. But I think we are at a time where this disease is so significant and the treatment of it is so powerful when it is plant-based nutrition that we're going to have to develop apprenticeships where either nurse practitioners or physicians, who have this passion, who have this skill set, are willing to commit to show patients how to do this because the answer to this disease has certainly not been a pill, it's not been a procedure, the stents and the coronary bypass surgery just don't get the job done.

I mean, even those who do these procedures recognize that they are but stop-gap patch jobs. If we're going to end the disease, we have to actually treat the causation of the illness. This is a food-borne illness and it can be stopped. But there is even a bigger message beyond the mere treatment of coronary artery disease, because if we look at these common chronic killing diseases, I think one can make a very strong argument: Do we have multiple common chronic killing diseases or do we have one that has multiple manifestations?

For example, suppose I start treating a patient who weighs 250 lbs, definitely overweight, who's had a heart attack. He is obese - or she is obese - diabetic, hypertensive, and interestingly enough, they just get it and they get it right. So now, let's say it's 9 or 10 months later and they don't weigh 250 lbs; they now weigh 175 or 180 lbs. They're no longer obese, they're no longer hypertensive, they don't have any more high blood pressure. Their diabetes has resolved, their risk of a future heart attack and stroke are gone, and also markedly diminished is the likelihood that they'll have one of the common Western cancers of breast, prostate, colon, and pancreas; and also the likelihood of their having gallstones, diverticulitis, osteoporosis, asthma, allergies.

So many things are tied up with what could be this tremendous seismic revolution in health that will never come from a pill or a procedure. But it will come when we in the medical profession are willing to have the grit and the determination, the patience and understanding, to try to show patients what is the optimal lifestyle that they can follow. Finally, may I say to the conference on global warming: I wish you every success. I certainly appreciate the opportunity to participate. I'm also confident that the more persons that we have who are willing to participate in the health benefits of plant-based nutrition will go a long ways towards helping with your goals. Thank you.

Dr. Carl RobertsHigh Commissioner for Antigua and Barbuda to the Court of St. JamesAmbassadorSupreme Master TV(m): So, focusing on short lived greenhouse gases like methane and black carbon, which were suggested earlier on, do you believe that a shift towards more of a plant-based diet would help to insure this in a quicker way?

Dr. Roberts(m): From what was said in the presentations it is quite clear that once we can move towards that focus we certainly would be able to see the benefit we're looking for in a much shorter time frame. And for us in the Caribbean, certainly if we can move away from the meat based or animal based consumption to greater consumption of vegetables that we would be able to grow rather than have them imported in, certainly we would see a more rapid benefit to the quality of life and also to the negative effect of climate changes.



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Be Veg, Go Green 2 Save the Planet

Supreme Master Ching Hai