DR.
PINEDA OCHOA: Can you tell us, so what does this diet entail?
The diet that you recommend.
If somebody tells you, what is the diet that would provide most optimum health?
What is the diet that you would recommend?
DR.
ESSELSTYN: We want our patients to eat whole food, plant-based nutrition – food as close
to grown as possible.
DR.
PINEDA OCHOA: Right now, what we’re doing — I know that you’ve mentioned that we
are doing kind of palliative care with regards to the way the we approach our number one
killer, cardiovascular disease.
Can you expand a little bit on that?
DR.
ESSELSTYN: Well, the reason that I’ve referred to present cardiovascular care – and by
the way, I have nothing but the greatest admiration and respect for my cardiovascular colleagues,
their care, their compassion, their fund of knowledge – but presently, it to me is totally
unacceptable to treat patients with drugs, procedures, and an operation which have absolutely
nothing to do with the causation of the illness, that literally it’s a guarantee that these
patients are going to have their second stent, third stent, fourth stent, fifth stent, maybe
throw in a bypass, and more stents to keep the bypass open.
And these procedures, and these drugs, and all this imaging — not only do they have
significant morbidity and mortality, but they are prodigiously expensive.
45% of Medicare is cardiology.
And what is cardiology?
It’s the first stent, second stent, third stent, fourth stent, bypass, more stents,
congestive heart failure, then you die.
Die of what?
A completely benign foodborne illness that never had its causation treated.
So I think we can do better.
DR.
PINEDA OCHOA: Currently, the cholesterol level that we’re supposed to have is set to under
200 milligrams total cholesterol.
Do you feel like patients and physicians should be comfortable with that kind of cholesterol
levels?
Or do you feel like we still have the potential of progressing towards heart disease with
those cholesterol levels?
DR.
ESSELSTYN: I don’t think anybody would say that heart disease is caused by a number.
Heart disease is caused by what is passing through your lips every day.
It is going to disrupt and injure this marvelous endothilial fortress that protects our artery.
Once you try to injure the fortress, cholesterol is going to get through there and be a problem.
Now, where we’re at today, when people get so totally tied into numbers, you can be eating
an absolutely horrible diet, and be taking a gorilla dose of statin, and have a marvelous
number.
And then sit there, being very puzzled and scratching your head why you ever had a heart
attack when you had an LDL or 70 or 60.
But what do you got?
In an autopsy, those people are just filled with plaque.
So that’s really a very false sense of security.
So anybody, once they’ve had a diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, I want them to
understand the disease well enough so they will agree with me that we want to stop, totally,
the causation of this illness, which is any morsel of food that passes their lips that
will, again, further injure an already injured endothilium.