How are ye doing, guys!
Today I'm going to explain why I eat a whole foods plant-based diet...and why you should,
too!
Hi, I'm Des and I'm a graduate in medicine from Trinity College, Dublin.
I eat a whole foods, plant-based diet, and encourage my friends, family and patients
to do so as well, because I am passionate about good nutrition and disease prevention.
High blood pressure, dietary risks and other nutrition-related risk factors now dominate
our leading causes of death Worldwide, with tobacco bumped off the top spot.
We are simply consuming too much processed food and animal products, and not enough whole
plant foods.
This has lead to our epidemic of diet-related, preventable chronic disease.
The traditional role of the doctor is to treat disease.
But with the increasing prevalence of incurable chronic disease, it is becoming more and more
incumbent upon doctors to educate themselves and hence their patients on how to reduce
their risk of getting sick in the first place.
The evidence is mounting every day that consumption of processed foods and animal products increases
the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver
disease, degenerative brain diseases and chronic kidney disease, to name but a few.
Some of these diseases have even been shown to be reversible in some cases by making simple
healthy lifestyle changes and eliminating these unhealthy foods.
We have been able to reverse type II diabetes in as few as 2 weeks and we have radiological
proof of reversal of coronary atherosclerosis that just gets better with time, such that
most heart disease patients were left angina-free after only 12 weeks of healthy eating and
lifestyle.
It's worth pausing here to appreciate how amazing some of these findings are - patients
have been able to get off insulin and other medications completely by changing their
diet, we have been able to restore blood flow to the ischaemic heart in as few as 3 weeks
and make our blood 8 times better at fighting cancer all with simple changes to diet and
lifestyle.
These are astonishing data, but what is more astonishing to me is the fact that these results
are not headline news every day of the week, and also that there is no massive push to
fund more of this research - some of these studies unfortunately have not been repeated
in large randomised controlled trials due to funding issues and due to the discovery
of so-called "better" treatments.
But let's take a step back for a minute and think about what these "better" treatments
are, and what we are actually treating.
The term "chronic disease", and even more specific terms like "diabetes mellitus", "stroke",
"cardiovascular disease" and so on don't give us any insight into the reality of these conditions
or what it's like for people coping with the burden of them on a day-to-day basis.
Like most doctors I'm reluctant to frighten people with the reality of these diseases.
But when doctors hear terms like "diabetes" we think of gangrene and blindness, and the
lifelong of injections currently used to treat the disease and the amputations often required
because the treatments are so ineffective.
When we hear "colorectal disease" we think of the surgical procedures to remove malfunctioning
or cancerous parts of the digestive tract, often leading to bowel obstruction, perforation,
fistula formation and neccessitating the stoma bags people have to carry around for the rest
of their lives.
Probably most frightening to me and the reason I personally ended up changing my own diet,
I think of the consequences of strokes and degenerative brain diseases.
People lying in bed not knowing who they or their loved ones are, perhaps not able to
move half their body or more and sometimes requiring 24-hour care for feeding, hygeine
and toileting.
Instead of "cardiovascular disease" we think of crippling, activity-limiting pain, neccessitating
sawing open the sternum to transplant veins from the leg into the heart - if you're lucky
enough to survive at all.
And the odds are that if you continue to eat the standard Western diet, this is how you
will die - cardiovascular disease, specifically ischaemic heart disease, is our number 1 killer.
But it doesn't have to be this way.
The human body isn't a bad design or just stupid, and this is not a natural consequence
of aging.
This is very unnatural, and a hugely unappreciated cause is the awful things we're taking in
on a daily basis in our diets - saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, animal protein,
refined carbohydrates, refined oils and excessive salt - animal products and processed junk.
Now I'm not one of these people that's been a health nut my entire life.
I ate the same bad diet as everyone else for years and to be honest, much worse than average
at times!
I didn't think my diet and lifestyle could ever lead to any of the awful diseases I had
read about - nobody ever does.
So understadably I was shocked when I learned that Alzheimer's disease, a disease which
I had believed to be mostly determined by genetics, was in fact more closely linked
to dietary factors than even the strongest genetic predisposition - specifically animal
fat and refined sugar, which I was consuming a lot of at the time.
A remarkable example of this diet-disease connection is seen in Nigerians, who have
some of the highest frequencies of the so-called Alzheimer's gene observed in the medical literature.
Yet native Nigerians eating their traditional rural diet have some of the lowest rates of
the disease in the World.
That is, until they migrate to the US and start eating a standard Western diet.
I was appalled and frightened when I learned of this Alzheimer's-diet connection, but also
intrigued, and in a way comforted - maybe cognitive decline is not an inevitable part
of aging, but instead there appear to be very real and powerful steps we can take to prevent
it from occuring, regardless of our genes.
And as I delved further into the research I learned about the myriad of other diseases
that can be prevented and sometimes reversed with diet.
Diseases I had learned how to treat and accepted as an inevitability are NOT inevitable - we
have more control over our health destiny than most people realise, and we can exert
that control through our diet.
Thus began my love affair with nutritional science as well as healthy eating.
With this growing weight of evidence, it's no wonder more and more eminent doctors are
advocating a whole foods, plant-based diet and share my passion for nutrition:
Dr. Michael Greger, Fellow of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, author of the
New York Times bestseller "How Not to Die" and founder of NutritionFacts.org.
Dr. Dean Ornish, Professor of Medicine at the University of California and author of
six national bestsellers on diet and lifestyle inspired by his extensive research, some of
which I have cited in this video.
Dr. John McDougall, founder of Dr. McDougall's Health & Medical Center which has helped countless
patients turn their health around and avoid drugs and surgery through his 10-day live-in
diet and lifestyle program.
Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Fellow of the American College of Cardiology, author of The New York
Times bestseller "Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease" and one of the stars of the documentary
"Forks over Knives."
Dr. Kim A. Williams, former president of the American College of Cardiology and author
of the famous New York Times piece "Advice from a Vegan Cardiologist."
And the countless others I didn't have time to mention!
Listen guys, no-one ever thinks they will be the one to end up in a wheelchair, the
one having a heart attack, the one to get cancer.
Yet in developed countries, there is approximately a 50/50 chance you will have developed at
least one chronic disease by age 50 and the odds just go up from there.
Don't be one of these statistics.
The time to act is now - the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
cure is more relevant today than it ever was.
So what should one eat instead, I hear you say?
What is a whole foods, plant-based diet?
And how have I become so convinced of the benefits of healthy eating that I have made
such a drastic change to my own diet and taken to YouTube to share it with everyone else?
Join me as I explore the ever-mounting evidence implicating our terrible diets in chronic
disease, and how much of a difference you can make with simple dietary changes for yourself
and your loved ones - how food can promote health instead of destroy it.
Thanks for watching, if you have any questions or comments leave them in the comment section
below and I'll get back to you.
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Sláinte!