Sitting down with Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. Esselstyn, now 86 and sharp as ever, was one of the first doctors to insist that his patients adopt a plant-based diet for heart health, and he wants people to know how to live a long and healthy, active, vibrant life. Want a better sex life, healthier, younger organs and to reverse heart disease symptoms? Caldwell Esselstyn was a surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic and treating breast cancer patients when he realized that he was doing nothing to help the future patients, those who were unsuspecting of their condition or who were getting sick even as he tried to save those who arrived at his surgical offices. This led to a practice of helping his patients change their diet. What happened next was something short of a miracle.
One of the two major physician figures in the movie is Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, a former surgeon and now a vegan evangelist. Esselstyn, along with T. Every observational study in nutrition has demonstrated that fish consumption is associated with lower cardiovascular disease. While working at the Cleveland Clinic, Esselstyn developed an interest in using a plant-based diet to treat patients with advanced CAD. He says he had an epiphany one rainy, depressing day when he was served a slab of bloody roast beef.
Updating Synopsis. Modern cardiology has given up on curing heart disease. Its aggressive interventions— coronary artery bypass graft, atherectomy, angioplasty, and stenting—do not reduce the frequency of new heart attacks or prolong survival except in small subsets of patients. It is time to call this approach by its true name: palliative cardiology. It is also time to acknowledge that this approach is not the only alternative for our patients. I will also show that this fact can—and must—be made on the basis of a truly curative cardiology that prevents, halts, and selectively reverses heart disease. Although coronary artery disease is the leading killer of men and women in the USA, it is rarely encountered in cultures that base their nutrition primarily on grains, legumes, lentils, vegetables, and fruit. For over a decade it has been known that sufficient reduction of lipids may arrest and, in some cases, reverse coronary artery disease.