Here is the full transcript of physician Michael Klaper’s talk titled “The Most Powerful Strategy for Healing People and the Planet” at TEDxTraverseCity 2018 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
A Resident’s Awakening
Once, my awakening happened while putting people to sleep. Actually, I was working in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1981. I was at the Vancouver General Hospital. I was a resident in anesthesiology.
As you can see, I’ve not changed a bit. And I found myself on the cardiovascular anesthesia service. And day after day, I’m putting people to sleep and I’m watching surgeons operate on arteries in their neck and their heart all over their body. From their arteries, the surgeons are pulling out this yellow greasy gut called atherosclerosis. This is nasty stuff, this stuff will kill you. This stuff will set up formation of blood clots and stop blood flow to your brain, your heart, will kill you with a stroke or a heart attack.
And one day, I’m watching the surgeon pull out a particularly slithery, rubbery piece of yellow material out of an artery. And I think to myself, “Man, that stuff looks like chicken fat.” And a little voice in my head says, “There’s a good reason why it looks like chicken fat. It is chicken fat and cow fat and pig fat and the fat of every other slow animal walking past this man’s table when he had a fork in his hand.” And this really resonated with me because I was eating lots of chicken and my cholesterol was through the roof.
A Personal Revelation
And my dad was already showing signs of clogged arteries. And I knew I was going to be laying on that operating table with that striker saw going up my sternum and I didn’t want that.
And so, I began getting these flashing lights saying, “You should change what you are eating. You should stop letting all that animal flesh through your arteries.” And that was duly registered.
But the real clincher came several weeks later. I was having dinner with a friend in a restaurant in Vancouver and actually the seeds of this incident had been planted years ago. There were already literature reports in the medical journals that people could reverse clogged arteries with a plant-based diet. This one was published in 1977.
Dr. Dean Ornish had already published studies showing that you could reverse this plaque out of your arteries with a plant-based diet. And as these were resonating with me, I remembered something that happened 10 years earlier. When I was a fourth-year medical student, I would spend my Saturday nights in the trauma unit at bad old Cook County Hospital in Chicago.
And every Saturday night, I would see the worst of what human beings inflicted upon each other. I saw the shotgun blasts and the machete chops and by Sunday morning, I would walk out of that trauma unit shaking with what I had seen humans do to each other. And I knew I couldn’t get rid of all the violence in the world, but at least I could try and get the violence out of my own life.
The Path to Nonviolence
So I started making a serious study of living a life of nonviolence. And I read the works of Gandhi and the Indian saints about living a life of ahimsa, of nonviolence. And so one evening in a restaurant in Vancouver, I am pontificating to a friend about living a life of nonviolence, but I was doing so while polishing off a 14-ounce porterhouse steak.
And he looked at me with great compassion and said, “That’s all very nice, Michael, but if you want to really get the violence out of your life, you might want to start with that piece of animal muscle on your plate because in satisfying your desire for the taste of that meat in your mouth, you are paying for the death of the animal and for the next one in line at the slaughterhouse.”
Well, when he said that, all the old rationalizations jumped into my head. “Well, that’s what they raised him for, the animal’s dead already,” all of those came up.
But before the words could pass my lips, that little voice in my head said, “You know, it’s right, it’s right.” I had done a lot of my growing up on my uncle’s dairy farm in Wisconsin. I saw the old dairy cows who weren’t being milked, shot in the head.
I had chopped the heads off chickens. I had seen calves taken away from their mothers to keep that milk flowing so my uncle could sell the milk. I knew the cruelty and the violence that were inherent in all animal flesh products, all meat, all dairy products.
A Life-Changing Decision
And when I went up to pay for the steak dinner, I felt complicit in a violent act, a violent crime. And at that point, I knew that my days of eating meat and dairy products were over. If I was going to be a man of integrity, I could no longer deny the fact that in paying for this meat, I’m actually paying for unspeakable cruelty to be delivered upon these innocent animals.
And I could not deny my complicity in that act. And so I adopted a plant-based diet. It wasn’t a big sacrifice, had oatmeal and fruit in the morning with some rice milk on it. Lunches and dinners, big colorful salads, hearty vegetable soups, oriental stir fries, Indian curries, big plate steamed green and yellow vegetables, lots of colorful food for dessert.
It was a joyous way of eating, still is, no calorie counting, no portion control, just eat till you get full. And my body loved it. Within 10 weeks, a 20-pound spare tire of fat melted around my waist. My high cholesterol sank to normal. My elevated blood pressure went to normal. And I felt great, waking up in a nice, lean, light body every day.
A New Direction in Medicine
And at that point, I realized I was six months away from finishing my residency. But as much as I loved anesthesia, I knew I didn’t want to be an anesthesiologist and spend all my time putting people to sleep, literally. What I really wanted to do was go back to general practice and help them wake up because I left general practice as a retreat because I couldn’t handle, I couldn’t face my patients like Ken.
Lovely man, funny guy, I really love Ken. But his body was a slow motion train wreck, 60 pounds past obese on two medications for blood pressure, on insulin and metformin for his diabetes. His lipids were over the moon. He hadn’t had an erection for years because his arteries are so clogged up. And every time I saw Ken and all his, you know, his wife Karen is the mirror image of him. And on this morning, doctors all over North America and Australia, New Zealand, UK, everybody’s got a waiting room full of Kens because this is who we’ve become in recent decades.
The Frustration of Traditional Medicine
And I would feel like a fraud every time I interacted with Ken. I didn’t know what to tell him. “You ought to lose some weight, Ken. Eat a little less. You ought to walk a little bit more.”
And I’d fiddle with his insulin dosage. And as he was leaving the office, I would mumble under my breath, “And please don’t have your stroke when I’m on call.” And this was the kind of medicine I was practicing.
And like so many doctors are practicing, it’s so disheartening because we know we’re really not helping and we’re just presiding over the slow motion demise of these patients.
Well, after my nutritional revelation, I knew what to tell these patients. Because Ken and all the diseases they bring to us, the obesity and the diabetes and the high blood pressure and all the inflammatory diseases, we’re told that these are chronic diseases.
The Truth About Chronic Diseases
You can’t get rid of them. You manage them. And doctors have become disease managers. We manage high blood pressure and we manage diabetes.
I don’t know of any doctor who filled out his medical school application and said, “My burning desire in life is to write prescriptions and manage chronic disease.” We went into medicine to relieve suffering and to cure these diseases, and every one of these diseases is curable, every single one of them. Every doctor who practices lifestyle medicine has a stable full of patients who used to have diabetes, who used to be obese, who used to have asthma. All these diseases go away.
But if you talk to the learned professors or you open up the medical textbooks to find the cause of these diseases, you’re going to run into two words that stop all further thought, “etiology unknown.” We don’t know what causes these diseases. There’s some molecular mismatch on some genetic issue here.
The Root Cause
We’re working on it. As soon as the smart docs in the labs figure out how to make a mesocylin, we’ll get it to you and you can give it to your patients for $1,000 a pill. But until then, you just keep prescribing your statins and your stents and don’t get too depressed.
And more and more doctors are getting depressed and leaving medicine. Etiology unknown. Nonsense. It’s the food. What people are eating these days. People are eating anywhere near the standard Western diet. And you have eggs in the morning and lunches and dinners have burgers and fried chicken and buffalo wings and pizzas, et cetera. That is the cause of the cardiac disease, obesity, diabetes, et cetera. Every meal sends a tide of heavy saturated fats, free radicals containing oils, problematic proteins, concentrated sugars.
The Impact of Meat Consumption
This injures us on every level. And if you decide you choose to put a piece of meat in the middle of every meal, and that’s how most Westerners eat. “Where’s my protein? Got to have meat with every meal.” If you choose to eat in that manner, you are choosing to add a particularly toxic brew of molecules into your bloodstream hour after hour.
I’ll just go over the first four of these. Very active cooking meat creates trillions of free radical ions and these rip electrons off your DNA and your cell membranes. Very destructive molecules. Neu5Gc, this is a sialic acid that only animals make, and it sets off inflammatory reactions throughout the body.
And the meat eaters are eating this stuff two, three times a day. Endotoxin, this is from the bacteria in the slaughterhouse that coat all the meat.
The Impact of Meat Consumption
They break apart their cell walls, forms this endotoxin molecule that makes your blood clot, slows your heart, sets off allergic reactions. TMAO, trimethylamine oxide, this stuff forces cholesterol into your artery walls, and it’s made from the bacteria in your gut that are spawned by eating meats and eggs. We are not homocarnivorous. We are not the meat-eating ape, but when we try and eat like that, we spawn microbes that turn on us, and I’m afraid our friends and patients eating in the paleo style are going to learn this one the hard way.
Even if you are taking the skin off the chicken and eating wild-caught salmon, you are still putting these molecules through your bloodstream hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year, and it has effects. We now know that food brings in a lot more than fats, carbohydrates, and protein. Our food is chemically alive. Within minutes, it could be anything.
Food and Genetics
Molecules of that food are washing through every cell in your body where your DNA lies unfolded, and the food molecules wash through your cells, and they play your DNA like a piano, and they turn genes on, they turn genes off. They induce enzymes, they shut enzymes down. Every meal changes us on a genetic, molecular level.
In this digital age, we can’t be shocked to realize that food brings in not only nutrients, it brings in information. The science is called nutrigenomics. It’s how your food turns your genes on and off, and we can’t pretend this is not happening. This is where inflammation starts. This is where cancer starts. This is where immunity resides. This is where healing begins if we turn on the right genes with our food.
People blame their genetics. “Oh, my dad had a heart attack at age 56. I was going to get one too.” Yeah, if you run the same food through your tissues, you’ll create the same diseases, but in one sentence, to free you from the idea that you’re genetically predetermined to get these diseases, your genes may load the gun, but your diet and your lifestyle pull the trigger.
The Power of Plant-Based Nutrition
Whether that disease actually manifests in your body depends upon the molecules you’re flowing through your tissues day after day. You don’t have to be a geneticist to understand that the genes that are going to be turned on by this fuel mixture are going to be fundamentally, qualitatively different than the genes turned on by this fuel mixture. A salad and a salad is symbolic of all the world of plant-based foods, all the green, yellow vegetables, the fruit, etc.
When you eat food like this, then hour after hour, tides of these wonderful phytonutrient molecules wash through your cells, and they are stabilizing. They are antioxidant. They quench free radicals. They promote tissue regeneration. They give the chemical message to your tissues. Calm down. Everything’s okay.
Because for doctors to practice medicine without appreciating what the patient’s diet is really doing to them puts the doctor in a position like the blind man and the elephant, where a group of blind men grab a different part of the elephant, each has a different part of the same elephant, but nobody has an idea what the whole elephant really is.
The Interconnectedness of Health Issues
Well, that’s the problem with modern medicine. All these specialists are in their cubicles looking at the body from all their given viewpoints, and they’re trying to figure out the molecular mechanisms, when the reality is that it’s what our patients are eating. The Western diet’s become so toxic that these molecules bubble up through all the organ systems, and the internist sees the high blood pressure, and the endocrinologist sees the type 2 diabetes, and the physiatrist sees the sore joints, and the rheumatologist sees the autoimmune diseases, and the dermatologist sees the psoriasis, and the gastroenterologist sees the colitis and the Crohn’s disease.
They’re all looking at the same disease. It’s what our patients are eating. It’s the food, it’s the food, it’s the food, and we can’t pretend it’s not. But when’s the last time you went to a doctor, and the doctor says, “Take me through your eating day, what do you have? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I’m really interested in your diet.”
Anybody have a doctor ask you that? Why not? That’s the real issue. Because if a patient goes on a whole food, plant-based diet, then we at least owe them the information.
The Transformative Power of Plant-Based Diets
30 days, 60 days, 90 days of bath fuel mix, the changes are spectacular. The obesity starts to melt away, the arteries open up, the high blood pressure goes down, the joints stop hurting, the skin clears up, the lungs stop wheezing, the bowels start working, and people turn into normal healthy people that don’t have diabetes, that don’t have aches and pains, and they don’t need medications and pills and procedures. You just see them at the health food store and the bike path, which is really just where I want to see them.
And medicine gets fun again. These fearsome diseases that you’re told never go away, and that food has nothing to do with them, you find absolutely. Food has everything to do with these conditions, and they get better as the diet gets better, including the artery disease. The plaques that are in this artery, a whole food, plant-based diet melts away.
How much longer can doctors pretend that food has nothing to do with these diseases? It is unfair and unethical to withhold this information from our patients. In fact, we are instructed by the Medical Association to give our patients this relevant knowledge. Medicine becomes fun again.
Environmental Impact of Diet
When that happens, it certainly happened to my patient, Ken. The body thrives on a whole food, plant-based diet, and so does the earth, because the reality is that our flesh-based diet, the industrial production of animal flesh, is the driving force behind every one of the major environmental destructive forces we face today. This is why the forests are being cut down to make grazing land and cropland for beef.
This is where the water is going. This is what is polluting the water, and 70 billion animals raised for slaughter every year are all breathing out carbon dioxide and belching out methane. And our thirst for flesh, our hunger for flesh, is really what’s driving so much of the destruction we’re seeing.
I urge people to go to the website, Comfortably Unaware, and educate yourself about how our meat consumption is really driving this poor bear onto this melting iceberg, and strip mining the ocean is not a help. But if we change our diet, we will need so much less land to feed everyone with a plant-based diet, that the forests will come back, the soils will stabilize, the water will get purer, this earth will heal, and the chances for a livable future for our kids will increase.
Resources for Plant-Based Living
I urge everyone to go to PCRM.org, educate yourself, and especially the physicians. There’s lots of good CME information there. Check out videos like “Forks Over Knives,” “Eating You Alive,” and “What the Health.” Doctors all over the world are waking up.
Check out the Plantrition Project. You’ll find there are thousands of plant-based doctors now all talking to each other as a new era of plant-based medicine is dawning. I’m doing what I can. I’m going to round to medical schools and talking to first, second, and third-year medical students, and giving them the lecture I wish someone had given me when I was a first-year medical student, saying it’s what your patients are eating.
A Call to Action
Ask them about your diet. You can cure these people. If we evolve our diets as individuals, we will get healthier. As a species, we will heal this planet, and the future will get better for all of us.
So I want the public to wake up to the power that they have available to them in a plant-based diet. I want my medical colleagues to wake up and see the food that our patients are eating are key in the causation and the cure of these diseases, and for all of us to be aware of the bright future that a plant-based diet offers all of us. I’m Dr. Michael Klaper.
What’s on your plate?
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