Hallo, esteemed viewers, and welcome to Healthy Living on Supreme Master Television. Today, in the first of a two-part series, we meet Dr. Michael Klaper, a physician and nutrition expert who is based at the TrueNorth Health Education Center located in California, USA. He is also the author of “Vegan Nutrition: Pure and Simple” a book which explains how to transition to a plant-based diet and has tasty recipes.

My real passion is keeping people healthy enough to stay out of hospitals and off our operating tables. So in the last 20 years or so my focus has really been on nutrition and lifestyle medicine. That’s my real love of life.

Dr. Klaper is a strong advocate of the vegan diet for treating health conditions and maintaining one’s well-being. In the 1980s, he realized that many chronic diseases are caused by the high-fat and overly processed foods of the standard American diet or SAD. He then became a vegan and implemented nutritionally-based therapies in his practice. With Dr. Klaper’s help, many of his patients have regained their health and become more energetic by following a plant-based lifestyle.

My own evolution to a vegan diet and lifestyle and vegan brand of medicine was a kind of convergence of a number of courses that happened to me in the early 1980’s. I was practicing medicine in Vancouver (Canada). I was doing a residency in anesthesiology and day after day I was watching surgeons open up people's chests and open up their hearts and pull out these gobs of fatty, waxy material and I realized that this is largely the fat of the animals these people are eating.

And my dad died of clogged arteries; I knew I was at risk for this. One day I was going to be laying on that table with that Stryker saw going up my chest and I said, "Hmm. I don't think I want to do that." These people are very uncomfortable when they wake up so already I realized that an animal-based diet was not a healthful thing no matter what I had learned in school and our farm growing up.

And shortly after that, I read a remarkable book by an author, John Robbins who later became my friend and colleague called, "Diet for a New America.” And in it, this remarkable book, John Robbins first presented the animals and all their glory and their cleverness and their beauty and their wonder. And they said we don't treat animals very nicely and they outlined the reality of modern factory farming.

Then the second part was what an animal-based diet does to our health. And I'm a physician, I knew that as well, but I was impressed for a non-physician that he lays this out, all the effect on our arteries, our bones, and our diabetes risk very well. And I was impressed with that, but what I hadn't realized was in the third chapter of his book, he laid out what the realities of what a meat-based diet does to the environment.

And I'm a passionate environmentalist. And I grieve when I see the rivers running brown with topsoil, and the forest disappearing and the animals that I loved as a child disappearing. For what? To make room for feed grain fields and cattle grazing and our waters disappearing, our waters becoming polluted. And finally, it became so overwhelming there's no way I could walk into a fast food restaurant and order a cheeseburger.

After deciding to consume only animal-free foods, Dr. Klaper lost 10 kilograms without calorie restrictions and his cholesterol level dropped from 242 milligrams per deciliter to a healthy 140 milligrams per deciliter. The good doctor then also started asking his patients to alter their diets as well.

Well now I knew what to tell them. Stop running all that fat through your arteries and get yourself leaner. And amazing what happens, they start experiencing the same thing! They get leaner, their blood pressure comes down, their diabetes gets better. "Doctor, you're so smart!" I'm not smart, I just put the right fuel in.

What does the Standard American Diet consist of and why is it not healthy?

The diet that Americans are currently eating, that has become the Standard American Diet, has changed radically in the last 50 years, actually in my lifetime. I remember when I was a kid in the 1950s and the 1960s my mother would bring home food and prepare it in the kitchen. In the intervening 40 years or so we have seen the emphasis change from quality of the food to convenience. Especially the younger generations, really subsist on fast food, convenience foods.

And though they’re very convenient, their nutritional profile has changed. A lot of the vitamins and minerals are processed out of them, the natural fiber of fruits and vegetables being removed. The reality is that the American Diet has become a food stream of high fat, high sugar, high protein, and overly processed foods.

And these substances leap into the blood stream and the result you can see walking down Main Street or going down to any classroom. It’s made us obese, especially among adults, but disturbedly now in children. It’s given us an epidemic of diabetes, high blood pressure, various types of arthritis, and autoimmune diseases.

After this message, we feature more of Dr. Klaper’s insights on nutrition and maintaining a balanced diet. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

We knew it all the time, plant-based diets are the healthiest. Take away the subsidies from the meat industry, take away the sugar subsidies, all these things that perpetuate this type of pathogenic diet and instead hand out vouchers to make fruits and vegetables cheaper.

Welcome back to Healthy Living here on Supreme Master Television where we are talking with Dr. Michael Klaper, physician and nutrition expert at the TrueNorth Health Education Center, located in California, USA. He is also the director of the non-profit Institute of Nutrition Education and Research, which offers continuing education courses to health professionals on therapeutic uses of nutrition in medical practice as well as a member of the Nutrition Task Force of the American Medical Student Association.

I remember a T-shirt from the 1960s where it says, “Question Authority,” and I was never one really to do that. Especially when it came to medical authority and what I read in Harrison’s textbook of internal medicine, or in Robbins’ pathology book, well that’s the way these diseases are, and you just have to work within those parameters.

And it was exciting back in the early 1980s to read the work of these few nutritional pioneers, Dr. Dean Ornish and others, to even see the words printed there: “Arteriosclerotic plaque that clogs arteries will melt away on a low fat plant-based diet.”

When I encountered the work of Dr. John McDougall and others I remember the dogma that was taught to me: “You have a diabetic patient. Once on insulin, always on insulin, nobody gets off insulin injections.”

And to hear Dr. McDougall say “We get them off insulin all the time. In fact we have to get them off insulin; these people get low blood sugar reactions if you don’t get them off insulin.” Wow, never thought of that. Sure enough people get leaner and these diseases go away, so many of them.

An autoimmune disease is caused when one’s immune system mistakenly attempts to eliminate healthy cells within the body. There are approximately 80 different types of autoimmune diseases.

These terrible autoimmune diseases, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, and scleroderma, the thought that what people are eating had anything to do with these diseases, that would get you laughed out of the clinic if you had mentioned that.

And yet indeed people come to TrueNorth here, we get them on a very clean plant-based diet, occasionally we’ll give them a brief fast on just water. And it’s amazing, those hot swollen joints cool off, and blood pressures come down as their kidneys heal. It’s a remarkably powerful healing modality.

A Harvard University, USA study found that eating meat increases the risk of colon cancer in men and women by 300%. One of the best favors we can do our body so that it can repair itself and keep strong is avoid animal products and strive to consume plenty of fruits and vegetables.

It's just a tribute to the healing power we all have within our bodies. We're constantly subverting that power by putting these floods of fat and sugar and chemicals through our body, hour after hour, day after day. And no wonder, the derangement happens, it’s like putting the wrong fuel in the car. And we are this engine, this machinery of a body we have.

It's a plant burning organism and you put in this nice, lean light fuel without all these saturated fats and sugars and amazing, health emerges here. And, then again, when there's terrible advanced disease, it doesn't mean everything is magically going to be restored and repaired to normal.

But if there's anything the healing forces in your body can do, then this kind of whole food plant-based diet will let those healing forces do the best they can do and what they can do is just remarkable. It's exciting to see.

If you keep your stomach full of vegetables, wonderful things happen: high blood pressure goes down, people get leaner, they get healthier, plaque melts away, these fearsome autoimmune diseases melt away. It’s quite remarkable as a healing modality. I wish someone had told me in medical school how effective a plant-based diet would be for real life diseases.

Dr. Klaper feels that health professionals are becoming increasingly aware of the need to keep a diet free of animal products to assure well-being and this trend will help to constructively transform public health in the future.

The truth of this is so powerful; it’s starting to show up in the medical literature. Everybody knows somebody who’s benefited from changing to a plant-based diet.

Every physician is starting to run into one of their patients or an office nurse or somebody has made this transition. Where it’s starting to percolate upward, and it’s hopefully going to reach that stage, we knew it all the time, plant-based diets are the healthiest.

Please join us next Monday on Healthy Living as Dr. Klaper will share more of his inspiring messages about the vegan lifestyle.

For more details on Dr. Michael Klaper, please visit www.VegSource.com/klaper
The book “Vegan Nutrition: Pure and Simple” and other media by Dr. Klaper are available at the same website

Loyal viewers, thank you for your presence on today’s edition of Healthy Living. Up next is Science and Spirituality, after Noteworthy News. Through Heaven’s grace, may humanity always be united as one.