Forks Over Knives (6 page)

Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 127,924

Accidents (unintentional injuries): 123,706

Alzheimer’s disease: 74,632

Diabetes: 71,382

Influenza and pneumonia: 52,717

Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 46,448

Septicemia: 34,828

There is much evidence showing that heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, and Alzheimer’s disease are nutritionally related, so it could well be said that the leading cause of death in the United States in 2007 was poor nutrition.

DR. CALDWELL B. Esselstyn Jr., known as Es, was educated at Yale and Case Western Reserve. (While at Yale, he won a gold medal at the 1956 Olympic Games as a member of the U.S. rowing team.) He trained as a surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic and at St. George’s Hospital in London. In 1968, as an army surgeon in Vietnam, he was awarded the Bronze Star.

Es has been associated with the Cleveland Clinic since 1968, serving as the president of the staff, a member of its Board of Governors, chair of its Breast Cancer Task Force, and head of its division of thyroid and parathyroid surgery. In 1991, he served as president of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons; in 2005, he was the first recipient of the Benjamin Spock Award for Compassion in Medicine; and in 2009, he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Cleveland Clinic Alumni Association. Today Es runs the cardiovascular prevention and reversal program at the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute.

Es has written more than 150 scientific articles, and in 1995 he published the results of his long-term research on arresting and reversing coronary artery disease through nutrition in his book
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease
. He and his wife, Ann Crile Esselstyn, have been following a plant-based diet for more than twenty-six years.

Es began his long-term study because, after performing surgeries on many women with breast cancer, “I wanted to decrease the number of patients rather than simply wait for the next one to arrive.”

To that end, Es performed two decades of global research, finding that, wherever people ate a plant-based diet, cancer and cardiovascular disease were rare. “To do the study, we recruited twenty-four patients from the clinic’s cardiovascular department, people who had basically been told to go home
and prepare for death, and put them on a plant-based diet. Every one of them who followed the diet lived without any more incidents of heart disease.”

Es has been preaching the advantages of a plant-based diet ever since, to a slowly growing audience. “It takes time for people to catch on,” he says. “But it will happen. The trigger will be larger studies that will be so compelling that specialists will
have
to offer the option of a lifestyle change to patients.

“Sadly, today most doctors treat only the symptoms, not the cause, giving their patients pills, procedures, and operations that are expensive and dangerous. Some of them say, ‘Well, patients won’t change their diet.’ But if you sit with patients for five hours, as we do, and explain exactly what diet does, why, and how, we find that patients
do
change successfully. This kind of care restores the covenant of trust that must exist between the caregiver and the patient, who realizes you are telling him or her absolutely everything you know about the disease so it can be halted, and even reversed. And the patient then feels empowered to do so.

“Cardiovascular disease is a toothless paper tiger that need never exist. And if it does exist, it need never progress. It is a food-borne illness. Change your food, and you change your life.”

Figure 3a

Figure 3b

Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s studies have corroborated the concept that the typical Western diet of processed oils, dairy, and meat destroys our endothelial cells (the lining of our blood vessels) and leaves a plaque buildup that inhibits blood flow. Figure 3a shows a blood vessel with plaque buildup; Figure 3b shows the blood vessel of a plant-based eater.