The Most Powerful Strategy for Healing People and the Planet | Michael Klaper | TEDxTraverseCity (2)

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'm 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 lifestyle pull the trigger.

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 this fuel mixture

are going to be fundamentally qualitatively different

than the genes turned on by this fuel mixture.

This salad is symbolic of all the world of plant-based foods,

all the green and 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:

"Shh, 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 the position like the blind man and the elephant,

where blind men grab 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.

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 are trying to figure out the molecular mechanisms,

when the reality is that it's what our patients are eating.

The Western diet has become so toxic

that these molecules bubble up through all the organ systems.

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 are 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 the doctor, and he said,

"Take me through your 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.

30 days, 60 days, 90 days of that 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 bowel 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 procedure.

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 when that happens;

it certainly happened to my patient Ken.

The body thrives on the 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 crop land for beef.

This is where the water is going; this is what is polluting the water.

Seventy billion animals raised for slaughter every year

are all breathing out carbon dioxide and belching out methane.

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 land less 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.

I urge each of you to go to pcrm.org,

educate yourself, and especially the physicians -

there's lot's 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 Plantrician project;

you'll find there 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 around 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.

It's what your patients are eating!

Ask them about their diet.

You can cure these people.

If we evolve our diet 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?

(Applause)