The Most Powerful Strategy for Healing People and the Planet | Michael Klaper | TEDxTraverseCity (1)

Translator: Katrin R. Reviewer: Peter van de Ven

Once, my awakening happened while putting people to sleep, actually.

I was working in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1981.

At the Vancouver General Hospital, I was a resident in anesthesiology -

as you can see, I have not changed a bit -

(Laughter)

and I found myself on the cardiovascular anesthesia service.

Day after day, I'm putting people to sleep,

and I'm watching surgeons operate

on arteries in their neck, in their heart, all over their body.

And from their arteries, their 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.

One day, I'm watching a 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 the 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."

(Laughter)

This really resonated with me

because I was eating lot's of chicken, and my cholesterol was through the roof.

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 Stryker saw going up my sternum,

and uh-uh, I didn't want that.

I saw those people when they woke up.

I began getting these flashing lights

saying you should change what you are eating,

you should stop putting all that animal flesh through your arteries.

And that 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.

As these were resonating with me,

I remembered something that happened ten 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.

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.

So I started making a serious study of living a life of non-violence.

I read the works of Gandhi and the Indian saints

about living a life of ahimsa, of non-violence.

So one evening in a restaurant in Vancouver,

I am pontificating to a friend about living a life of non-violence,

but I was doing so while polishing off a 14-ounce porterhouse steak.

(Laughter)

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 their 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 them for," "The animal is dead already,"

all of those came up,

but before the words could pass my lips,

that little voice in my head said,

"Try it! Try it."

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.

When I went up to pay for the state 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.

So I adopted a plant-based diet.

It wasn't a big sacrifice.

I 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 plates of steamed green and yellow vegetables,

lots of colorful fruit 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 ten weeks,

a twenty-pounds 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.

At that point, I realized I was six months away from finishing my residency,

but as much 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 to 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, really love Ken,

but his body was a slow-motion train wreck.

Sixty 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 were so clogged up.

Every time I saw Ken and all his -

You know, his wife Karen is the mirror image of him.

On this morning,

doctors all over North America, Australia, New Zealand, UK,

where everybody's got a waiting room full of Kens

because this is who we've become in recent decades.

I would feel like a fraud every time I interacted with Ken.

I didn't know what to tell him.

"You've got to lose some weight, Ken.

Eat 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 a call."

And this was the kind of medicine I was practicing

and like so many doctors are practicing,

and it's so disheartening

because we know we're really not helping;

we are 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 were told that these are chronic diseases,

you can't get rid of them, you manage them,

and doctors have become disease managers:

we manage high blood pressure, 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 lurid 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.

We're working on it.

As soon as the smart docs in the labs figure out how to make "Amazocillin,"

we'll get it to you,

and you can give it to your patients for 1000 dollars a pill.

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.

They have eggs in the morning,

and lunches and dinners have burgers and fried chicken

and buffalo wings and pizzas, etc.

That is the cause of the clogged arteries, the obesity, diabetes, etc.

Every meal sends a tide of heavy saturated fats,

free-radical containing oils, problematic proteins,

concentrated sugars.

This injures us on every level.

And if you decide,

if 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 just go over the first four of these.

The very act of cooking meat creates trillions of free-radical ions,

and these rip electrons off of 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 or three times a day.

Endotoxin, this is from the bacteria in the slaughterhouse,

that coat all the meat.

They break apart their cell walls,

forms as 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 Homo Carnivorous.

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 of eating anything,

molecules of that food are washing through every cell in your body,

where your DNA lies unfolded.

Food molecules wash through your cells, and they play your DNA like a piano.

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;