Forks Over Knives (5 page)

Animal-based foods are full of fat and cholesterol and leave us marinating in the very worst building blocks for heart disease. These foods contribute to the buildup of plaque along the sixty thousand miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries through which your blood must travel freely to keep you alive.

Plant-based foods, on the other hand, don’t promote the accumulation of plaque and contain nutrients that can actually improve the health of your arteries and reverse the progression of heart disease.

Why? First and foremost, a healthful plant-based diet minimizes fat and cholesterol—the key components of artery-clogging plaque. With these dangerous plaque building blocks no longer inundating arteries after every meal, the body’s natural healing processes are able to stabilize the plaque that has already built up, reducing cholesterol and allowing blood passageways to relax naturally.

Further evidence comes from Colin Campbell’s China Study, a thirty-year investigation of the health and nutritional habits of 6,500 Chinese in sixty-five rural villages. After compiling their data, the researchers concluded that American men were seventeen times more likely to die from heart disease than rural Chinese men. In certain pockets of China where plant-based diets were most common, researchers could not find a single person out of more than 100,000 who had died from heart disease. While the average American’s total cholesterol level is well over 200, the levels of the participants in the China Study averaged between 81 and 135. Dr. Campbell ultimately concluded that people who maintain a whole-foods, plant-based diet can minimize or even reverse the development of chronic diseases.

Still more evidence: Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s twenty-year study at the Cleveland Clinic, which he wrote about in his book
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease,
showed that a plant-based, oil-free diet will not just prevent heart disease but can even reverse it. Says Dr. Esselstyn, “Plaque does not develop until the endothelium, or the lining of the arteries, is injured—and it is injured every time people eat meat, dairy, fish, and chicken. This cannot be emphasized enough.”

Plaque can build up over time in the blood passageways leading to the brain as well as the heart. Even a momentary clot can deprive the brain of vital oxygen, which can result in permanent impairment. Every year, 700,000 Americans suffer a stroke, and for more than one-quarter of these victims, it proves fatal.

A whole-foods, plant-based diet has been proven to substantially reduce the risk of stroke. In fact, according to the remarkable fifty-year Framingham Heart Study conducted by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, for every three additional servings of fruits and vegetables you eat per day, your risk of stroke is reduced by 22 percent.

DR. TERRY MASON is the chief medical officer of the Cook County Health and Hospitals System in Illinois. He works with three hospitals; sixteen ambulatory clinics, some of which treat outpatients for HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases; a public health department; the local juvenile detention center; and the cook county jail.

Terry grew up and was educated in and around Chicago. He then attended college at Loyola University and medical school at the University of Illinois and performed his residency in urology at Michael Reese Hospital. A board-certified urologist, Terry practiced medicine for twenty-five years before being named commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health in 2005. During his tenure there, he focused on fighting chronic disease by promoting healthier lifestyles.

Terry is also an inspirational speaker on the topic of building healthy communities. He hosts a radio talk show,
Doctor in the House
, and he is a frequent guest on national television and radio programs.

Terry took an unusual route to arrive at his current 98 percent plant-based philosophy (now and then he may eat an egg white or two). As a urologist, he found himself dealing with patients who had many challenging medical issues, particularly his specialty, erectile dysfunction.

“There was a strong link between men who had erection problems and men who had heart disease, something we discussed at a joint meeting of cardiologists and urologists at the National Medical Association convention to help us understand the link between the pathology for cardiovascular disease and that of erectile dysfunction.

“Soon, we found that this strong relationship was due to damage to the endothelial cells. The endothelium is the thin layer of cells that line the interior
surface of blood vessels. Now, the penis has more endothelial cells per unit volume than any other organ in the body. So anything that would affect endothelial cell function would also pose a problem in the penis.

“As we also looked at the American diet, we found a strong correlation between damage to these endothelial cells and a meat-based, high-fat, high-calorie, and low-to-no exercise lifestyle. This lifestyle had a negative effect on both the penis and the heart.

“We are losing a million people a year to heart disease and cancer, and this is because of three things: smoking, the failure to exercise, and our poor diet. We need to address all three, and the right way to change that last issue is by adopting a plant-based diet. But we are going to have to take some radical steps to do so. When you adopt a public-health approach, you have to change society’s basic structures in a way that will make it easier for people to do the right things and harder for them to do the wrong ones. I would put whatever resources are required into a government-led campaign to make fruits and veggies cheaper and more widely available and teach people how to prepare them.

“We are in a state of emergency! We can’t continue to do what we are doing and expect different results. That’s called insanity.”

FORKS OVER KNIVES
chronicles many personal stories, including those of several people whose lives have been saved by switching to a whole-foods, plant-based diet—even after a lifetime of illness.

Among them are Anthony Yen and Evelyn Oswick. Anthony and Evelyn had each suffered multiple severe coronary events (heart attacks and bypass surgeries) and many years of chronic chest pain. Both had spent their lives making poor food choices, and the best options that their doctors had to offer them were merely palliative.

Evelyn recounts a conversation she had with her former cardiologist after her second heart attack: “I said, ‘You mean that what you want me to do is buy a rocking chair and just sit there and rock away and wait?’ And he just looked at me and said, ‘Yes, that’s just exactly what I’m saying.’”

Demographically speaking, Anthony started out with every advantage to protect him against heart disease. Born in China more than seventy years ago, he grew up eating what he calls a typical Chinese diet. Family meals centered on vegetables, rice, and soup, with only small servings of meat used as a seasoning, rather than the large portions served in the United States as a main course.

However, after moving to the United States as a young man and becoming a successful entrepreneur, Anthony started eating the typical Western diet, which emphasizes hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and pizza over whole, plant-based foods. Soon he was gaining weight, and he kept gaining weight in the years that followed. Anthony did a great deal of entertaining for business, and that meant countless fancy dinners featuring oysters, roast beef, steak, and shrimp.

All this indulgence lead to angina (chest pain) and a trip to the doctor’s office, which was followed by a cardiogram, an angiogram, the diagnosis of a severe artery blockage, and finally, open-heart surgery with five bypasses—all this at the age of 55.

The net result of Anthony’s surgery was more chest pain a week later. Fortunately, a cardiac specialist referred him to Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, who soon had Anthony eating a whole-foods, plant-based diet.

Evelyn, also in her seventies, was a lover of doughnuts, desserts, chocolate, and thick sauces. She was first alerted to her own heart disease by a heart attack she suffered while pedaling on a stationary bike during a routine physical. Soon she was undergoing triple-bypass surgery.

Symptom-free before the surgery, Evelyn managed to get through another five years on her heart-killing diet before enduring a second cardiac incident. This time, bypass surgery wasn’t recommended. Instead, she received the quiet suggestion that she while away her few remaining days on earth. Lucky for Evelyn, in what seemed like an afterthought her doctor mentioned that another physician, Dr. Esselstyn, was starting a new diet program for the heart and suggested she try it.

Evelyn’s initial conversation with Dr. Esselstyn was short. He explained the foods she could and could not eat, and she made her decision.

“I’d rather die than be on your diet,” she blurted.

“Okay, if that’s the way you feel,” Dr. Esselstyn replied.

But Evelyn soon decided that what she really felt was a desire to save her own life.

Both Evelyn and Anthony continued treatment under Dr. Esselstyn, who devoted a great deal of time to both of his new patients, explaining why they were going on this type of diet and listening for hours as they talked about their lives and their medical histories.

Like the overwhelming majority of Dr. Esselstyn’s patients, Anthony and Evelyn successfully reversed their advanced-stage heart disease. In fact, not only have they survived far longer than their cardiologists had predicted, they are still living after what Dr. Esselstyn sometimes likes to call the heart-patient “warranty period” (25 years or 25,000 miles). Most important, today both Evelyn and Anthony are enjoying active lives full of friends, family, and meaningful work.

The Leading Causes Of Death …

THE TEN LEADING CAUSES of death in the united states in 2007 (and numbers of fatalities):

Heart disease: 616,067

Cancer: 562,875

Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 135,952