Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn is a practitioner pioneer who showed that plant-based diets may not only stop heart disease, but reverse it.
Dr. Esselstyn is best known for his landmark clinical study and follow-up book (Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease) involving patients with advanced heart disease from his practice as a heart surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic. He put the patients on a low-fat, whole-food plant-based diet. All of those who followed the diet experienced significant improvement, in some cases actual reversal of near end-stage heart disease.
Since that study, Dr. Esselstyn switched to a plant-based diet himself and has worked to convince the medical profession that they should inform patients of dietary strategies for treating chronic diseases rather than assuming that they would not be willing to make changes in their diets. He reminds doctors and the public about the significant risks in heart bypass operations, including the potential to cause further heart damage, stroke, and brain dysfunction.
So compelling is the evidence from his own studies and those of others that Dr. Esselstyn has called heart disease a “paper tiger” that need never exist and where it does now, need never progress.
For substantiation of any statements of fact from the peer-reviewed medical literature, please see the associated videos below.
22 videos
Fasting and exercise can boost the longevity hormone FGF21, but what can we eat—or avoid eating—to get similar effects?
Cardiologists can criminally game the system by telling a patient they have a much more serious, unstable disease than they really have, fraud that results in unnecessary procedures, unnecessary cost, and unnecessary patient harm.
Over and over, studies have shown that doctors tend to make different clinical decisions for patients based on how much they will get paid personally.
Learn about this community-based education program informing physicians and patients alike about the power of nutrition as medicine.
The CHIP program has attempted to take the pioneering lifestyle medicine work of Pritikin and Ornish and spread it into the community.
Why is there a reticence to provide the public with guidelines that will spare them from preventable disease and premature death?
Health authorities appear to have taken the patronizing view that the public can’t handle the truth and would rather the science be watered down.
A randomized controlled trial found that a Mediterranean-type diet can dramatically lower the risk of subsequent heart attacks. How does it compare with plant-based diet data?
A randomized controlled trial found that a Mediterranean-type diet can dramatically lower the risk of subsequent heart attacks. How does it compare with plant-based diet data?
The Paleolithic period represents just the last two million years of human evolution. What did our bodies evolve to eat during the first 90% of our time on Earth?
Dr. Walter Kempner was a pioneer in the use of diet to treat life-threatening chronic disease, utilizing a diet of mostly rice and fruit to cure malignant hypertension and reverse heart and kidney failure.
Dr. Greger has scoured the world’s scholarly literature on clinical nutrition and developed this new presentation based on the latest in cutting-edge research exploring the role diet may play in preventing, arresting, and even reversing some of our leading causes of death and disability.
Evidence-based medicine may ironically bias medical professionals against the power of dietary intervention.
When doctors withhold dietary treatment options from cardiac patients, they are violating the cornerstone of medical ethics, informed consent.
The carotid arteries of those eating plant-based diets appear healthier than even those just as slim (long-distance endurance athletes who’ve run an average of 50,000 miles).
A plant-based diet may not only be the safest treatment for multiple sclerosis; it may also be the most effective.
By age 10, nearly all kids have fatty streaks in their arteries. This is the first sign of atherosclerosis, the leading cause of death in the United States. So the question for most of us is not whether we should eat healthy to prevent heart disease, but whether we want to reverse the heart disease we may already have.
Why does the medical establishment sometimes ignore highly efficacious therapies, such as plant-based diets, for heart disease prevention and treatment?
The China-Oxford-Cornell Diet and Health Project directed by T. Colin Campbell and colleagues showed that chronic diseases, such as heart disease, are not inevitable consequences of aging.
