Getting Chronic Disease Is A Choice You Make

so my my message to patients is that as important as these larger external environmental issues are that they can perhaps have the biggest effect on the external environment by beginning to focus on their internal environment and the way that you resolve your internal environmental imbalances is through diet sleep and exercise and that the type of diet that’s going to be most effective at producing a health promoting internal environment is a whole plant food diet that also eliminates the addition of salt oil and sugar that’s it well i guess i’m finishing up and i think i’m going to finish up by telling you a little story so this story happened about 40 years ago when i was in university and i was visiting my parents and my dad he loved to tease me about my interest in nutrition and i remember him walking by i was sitting i was actually standing in the kitchen making lunch and he walked by me and he stuck his belly out as far as he could he had two cigarettes hanging out of his mouth and a bag of chips in one arm bag of licorice all sorts under his armpit and a two-liter bottle of coke in the other hand and he looked at me and he just had this big cheeky grin on his face and i just of course gave him the look of disgust and and a couple of hours later i i went and talked to him and i said i don’t i don’t understand why you’re doing this um you know we we want you to stick around we want you to to be here for the long haul and he said to me he said you know he said i i’d sooner live 50 years doing all the things i love to do then live 75 having to give up my freedom to do what i love and he said you know i could get hit by a truck tomorrow and i looked at him and i said i know dad but it doesn’t mean you have to walk out in front of one and the reality is that probably about 80 or more of the chronic diseases that are killing most of us are entirely preventable it is our choice and i think the thing that prevents people from making the right choice is is that a huge need to belong to their tribe and as we see mainstream shift it will get easier and easier for people and we knew we need to do everything we can to make it easier and and the reality is when we make a choice for our health there are consequences beyond ourselves and the consequences were very eloquently laid out by the other speakers the consequences are we preserve this planet for future generations and we remove to a large extent the suffering of the 70 billion animals that are slaughtered on this planet every year for our food to me it makes no sense that we can we that we cause pain suffering and death to other living beings when it is not only unnecessary we are destroying our planet in the process we have a choice and we need to make the right one for ourselves and for every other being that is on this planet

i’m going to ask the question you’re all thinking to ask brenda what happened to your dad well it it is quite a story and and you know my dad didn’t make the kind of changes i wish he would have made but he was told he he actually about two three years after this interaction he had a stroke and was taken to the hospital his blood pressure was 220 over 120 his blood sugar was over 500 milligrams per deciliter and he had to have graphs put below his heart into his legs and he was told if he didn’t stop smoking he’d live three months and if he did he might live three years and i can still remember sitting on his hospital bed and right after the doctor told him and the tears were coming down and he looked at me and he said i don’t want to die i i want to dance with the love of my life at our 50th wedding anniversary i want to see my grandchildren grow up and it was at that point that my dad i think understood that without health there is no freedom at all and and so my dad quit smoking and he started eating oatmeal and blueberries and flax seeds instead of bacon and eggs for breakfast and and i’m i’m i’m very happy to say that that he stuck around for probably 26 more years way longer than anyone ever thought he would and for that i am grateful he died in 2011 and i miss him every day thank you [Music]

i uh been listening to the others and i thought that the way i’d like to make a few comments about why it is that a general surgeon gets interested in nutrition and in the late 1970s and early 80s when i was chairman of our breast cancer task force i got quite disillusioned with the fact that for no matter how many women i was doing breast surgery i was doing absolutely nothing for the next unsuspecting victim and that led me to a bit of a global research and it was really quite striking to find that there were other cultures where indeed breast cancer rates were 30 and 40 times less frequent than the united states and if you looked at the women in rural japan and post-world war ii breast cancer was very infrequently identified and yet as soon as the japanese women would migrate to the united states by the second and third generation still pure japanese american they now had their same rate of breast cancer as their caucasian counterpart perhaps even more compelling was looking at japan in 1958 in the entire nation of japan how many autopsy proven deaths were there from cancer the prostate well 18 that was the most mind-boggling public health figure i think i’ve ever encountered by 1978 they were up to 137 with still pales in comparison to the eight thousand who will die this year in this country from prostate cancer but it was long in this global research i began to notice that i was encountering multiple cultures where cardiovascular disease was almost virtually non-existent and it suddenly dawned on me that you know that’s the leading killer of women and men in western civilization and really it would be probably much more bang for the buck if we could do research on cardiovascular disease and show indeed that we could not only halt it but reverse it but the dream was that if people could be taught to eat to save their heart they would at the same time be likely diminishing the likelihood of having the common western cancers of breast prostate colon and pancreatic but here’s where the rubber hits the road everybody’s talked about this message you cannot send out a message that is based on hype and snake oil you’ve got to do the science because then i think everybody the science the scepters everybody if your solids science is solid that’s what will happen so that was led but my first study and the second study and i think i feel that the way you’ve heard me conclude time and again about cardiovascular disease is that coronary artery disease is nothing more than a toothless paper tiger that need never ever exist and if it does exist it need never ever progress this is a completely benign foodborne illness so i guess my plea to the to the moderators wish that we could all sort of see what we have for the vision my vision is that we can actually solidify the science and really get that message of science in a format that the public can get their arms around so we can really then move forward thank you