How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease by Terry Shintani (Transcript only)

Terry Shintani, M.D., M.P.H., J.D. here discusses ways to prevent and reverse heart disease in this presentation. He is is the author of the Eat More, Weigh Less Diet, The Hawaii Diet, and The Good Carbohydrate Revolution.

TRANSCRIPT:

Introduction

I want to thank you for coming this evening. It’s a very nice crowd this evening. The topic tonight is How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. Well, it’s February, so because of Valentine’s Day I guess they call this heart month. And so all the health organizations try to deal with heart disease this month. And to me every month is heart month, because heart disease as you all know is the number one killer of all Americans. Today roughly 30% of us die of coronary heart disease.

If you look at other countries, some places heart disease is almost non-existent. For example, in parts of China – in rural China where their diet is nearly all plant based, heart disease rates are, believe it or not, 1%. In parts of Africa in the rural areas, heart disease rates are about 1%. And it should let people realize that coronary heart disease is well 90% preventable. I’m here to talk to you about ways that you can prevent and even reverse heart disease even if you’ve got it.

How many of you are interested in learning how to control cholesterol with your diet? Well, that’s about everybody. How many of you interested in controlling blood pressure with diet? How about dealing with blood sugar and diet? And why do I say blood sugar? Well, it’s because diabetes is actually a risk factor for heart disease as well. How many just want to learn how to eat twice as much food and still lose weight? Isn’t that funny? It’s funny. I say that at many of my lectures and I get the same reaction.

People are interested in their health but when it comes to losing weight and looking good, they’re even more interested in that. Everybody has the same interest. And you’ll see that in some of my statistics that in this way in terms of heart disease, people all around the world are actually more similar than they are different. The reason we talk about prevention of heart disease is that of all of the diseases that plague America today, the most common ones heart disease which is the number-one cause of death in America, some cancers, diabetes which is actually rising to epidemic levels, and strokes. These are actually very preventable diseases. And so it’s really important to deal with the now rather than later.