Hallo energetic viewers, to today’s edition of Healthy Living featuring Part 2 of a two part series on the esteemed cardiologist from the United States, Dr. William Clifford Roberts. For more than 30 years Dr. Roberts headed the pathology section of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a division of the prestigious National Institutes of Health, the official medical research agency for the United States.

As a prolific author, he has published over 1,400 articles and authored or edited 24 books to date. He has served as the editor-in-chief of the highly regarded publication the “American Journal of Cardiology” since 1982 and is executive director of the Baylor Cardiovascular Institute in Texas, USA. Dr. Roberts says that a diet free of animal products leads to a healthy life and freedom from the devastating, chronic, so-called “lifestyle” diseases now prevalent around the world.

Cholesterol comes exclusively from animals and their products. In the USA, the majority of the cholesterol we take in comes from cows and their flesh, which we call beef to be nice, but it’s actually bovine muscle. It’s muscle we’re eating. Or milk, butter, or cheese, and then eggs.

Cholesterol is a soft, waxy substance found in the blood and cells. Our bodies naturally produce all the cholesterol we need for daily living, with the liver generating about 1,000 milligrams a day. Fruits, nuts, grains, seeds and vegetables contain no cholesterol. Excessive intake of cholesterol leads to hardening of the arteries or atherosclerosis.

Cholesterol is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease in both adults and children. In the United States, an estimated 80-million adults have one or more forms of cardiovascular disease, and one in five teens has unhealthy cholesterol levels.

So if we don’t eat animals and their products we don’t take in any of cholesterol. Actually most Americans now, at least those living in the USA, we average about 300 or 400 milligrams of cholesterol every day. It does an awful lot of damage.

Controlling one’s cholesterol level and blood pressure are vital to maintaining excellent heart health and achieving longevity.

Not eating flesh keeps cholesterol levels down. Now the biggest determinant of how long we’re going to live, in my view, is our cholesterol level and our blood pressure level. It’s very important for each of us to know those levels and keep them down. In the US, it’s been said for a long time that a normal total cholesterol is less than 200.

The average total cholesterol in adults in the USA now is down to 196 and yet 45% of the population is dying from cardiovascular disease. We need to get our cholesterol levels to total less than 150 and our bad cholesterol, the LDL (Low Density Lipoprotein) cholesterol less than about 70 at least, or 60. When we’re born our LDL cholesterol is 40, that’s maybe where we should go.

The second thing is to keep our blood pressure down. Now in societies that eat no salt, at least no measurable salt, blood pressure is generally about 90 over 60 their entire life. But in the US we eat about 10 grams of salt a day. If we don’t eat salt our blood pressure stays down. Our canned foods are loaded with salt. Everybody in the USA eats too much salt. I never add salt at the table. But that’s only about 15% of the salt we take in. Most of it’s already put in the foods.

As a general rule, the lower one’s fat intake, the lower one’s blood cholesterol level, and the higher one’s fat intake, the higher are one’s chances for obesity, cancer and heart disease. In particular, consuming saturated fats, found mainly in animal products, raise the risk of many diseases.

Fat is awful for us, because so much of that fat is saturated fat. There are three types of fats. They’re really called “fatty acids.” They’re the saturated fatty acids, the monounsaturated, and the polyunsaturated. All these fatty acids are carbon chains with hydrogen atoms attached to them. These chains may be 13 carbon atoms long, 27, 33 or whatever.

It turns out that the saturated ones are the ones that are bad for us. They’re the ones where every carbon atom has a hydrogen atom attached to it. There are no double bonds. If there is one double bond, that means one carbon has no hydrogen atom, that’s monounsaturated. If it’s more than one, it’s polyunsaturated.

It turns out that the monounsaturated fatty acids and the polyunsaturated fatty acids are not bad for us; indeed they are good for us. Whereas if every carbon atom is covered by a hydrogen atom (it) means it’s saturated. That’s very bad for us. In actuality, I worry more about the saturated fatty acids than I do cholesterol.

Diabetes mellitus, a chronic condition characterized by dangerous fluctuations in blood glucose levels, results from the body’s inability to produce or recognize the presence of the important hormone insulin. Diabetes can cause blindness, nerve damage and kidney failure and also fuels atherosclerosis. Following a plant-based diet helps prevent the disease, which afflicts nearly eight percent of the US population.

Now diabetes mellitus is skyrocketing in the USA, because so many of us are gaining weight. There are two types of diabetes. One is the genetic form that you get in usually under 20 years or at least under 30, often in teenage, seven, eight (years of age). And then there is the acquired form after age 50. Now the acquired form is an obesity-related problem. So if we keep our weight down, we don’t develop diabetes later in life. Diabetes is an expensive disease.

The number of diabetics who go blind, who need hemodialysis because their kidneys are no longer functioning, who are losing a toe, and then another toe, and then the lower leg, upper leg, amputations. Half of people in this country with chronic kidney disease have it because of diabetes mellitus. Diabetes is preventable in 90% of us. We have to control our weight.

Besides following a vegan diet, what are some other effective ways to maintain a safe body weight?

I know a lot of people say, “Well I need to lose some weight, I got to do some more exercise.” You have to remember, you’ve got to walk 35 miles to lose one pound In actuality, you have to do a lot of exercise to lose weight.

But exercise has many wonderful things. Number one, those who exercise go to sleep pretty quickly. They sleep better. Their mind is clearer as a rule. They don’t go to the psychiatrist as much as non-exercisers. Their body weight tends to stay down. Exercise is particularly good for maintaining an ideal body weight once you’ve reached it.

Generally speaking, the older we get, the more difficult it becomes to change our ways, so the sooner in life one starts to consume only animal-free products, the better.

When a little child goes off to school, and hollers back in the house, “Mommy, what are having for dinner tonight?” Well that means are we having chicken, steak, turkey? If mommy hollers back, “We’re having okra tonight,” the little child may not come home. We have to start early in life. I think the young people are going to be the ones to change. It’s very difficult to convince a 60 year old to change their eating habits.

We kill the cows, and then they kill us. That’s how the system actually works.

More than a billion people on Earth suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition, and globally, 90% of all soybeans grown go to feed livestock. If we instead stopped livestock raising and used all these crops to feed humans, food shortages and the inhumane, mass slaughter of animals for meat would end forever.

When we send grain, soybean, wheat, to Russia, for example, as we’ve done in the past, when their crops are low, most of that is to feed their cattle, not for human beings. There is a great abundance of potential food on planet Earth to feed the 6.3- or 6.4-billion people without any problem. But 80% of the oat crop in this country and 80% of the wheat crop approximately are used for the cattle. It’s a major problem, and, what it does is produce the atmosphere of killing, killing, killing.

In conclusion, Dr. Roberts strongly recommends following a compassionate, animal-free diet to safeguard our health and save our planet.

So, in my view, the easiest way to stay healthy is to be a vegetarian fruit eater. It’s the most civilized way to be healthy, because we’re treating our animals decently. We’re treating our planet decently. We’re not eroding the topsoil to feed the animals. So what is good for human health is good for non-human animal health, and it’s also good for the planet.

I would say that my philosophy is similar to yours. Be Veg, Go Green, Save the Planet.

We respectfully thank Dr. William Roberts for promoting humanity’s adoption of a plant-based diet and for sharing how this compassionate way of eating can prevent a wide range of serious health conditions.

For more information on Dr. Roberts, please visit www.Baylor.edu/Biomedical_Studies

Wonderful viewers, thank you for joining us today for Healthy Living on Supreme Master Television. Up next is Enlightening Entertainment after Noteworthy News. May we all always enjoy the best of health and the highest of spirits.

The Cikananga Wildlife Rescue Center in Indonesia looks after highly endangered species confiscated from wildlife traffickers. For its caring service to animals, Supreme Master Ching Hai has honored the Center with the Shining World Compassion Award.

We take good care of them so that they can recover. After that, we schedule them to undergo rehabilitation and at the last stage they will be set free into their natural habitat.

We would still like to see Indonesian wildlife existing in the future for our children and grandchildren. That is our goal.

Come, share the dream and spirit of the Cikananga Wildlife Rescue Center, this Thursday, February 18, on Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants.