Hi, I'm Dr. Baxter Montgomery. I'm a cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist here in Houston, Texas. Thirteen years ago we started integrating our clinical treatment with plant-based nutrition. So the heart here is in congestive heart failure beating around 20 to 24 percent. Here it's beating about 50%. After being on the plant-based diet for 78 days - much improved. Someone in her condition may have needed, could have needed bypass surgery. She may need a defibrillator. She may be even you know been placed on the heart transplant list, but instead of that, with plant-based nutrition, the heart improved significantly. And these are the types of findings we see on the regular basis. It's important for individuals to know that, despite how sick you are. We've seen individuals who are very ill. In fact, I've treated two different patients who were in the hospital on life support. One person on life support, we fed her green food to her PEG tube, detoxed her in the hospital, and she eventually walked out so don't give up. We haven't gotten into the most fundamental aspect of a health which is how we take care of the human frame and it's as simple as that plant-based food, fresh air, sunshine, and water. So there's a huge obsession with protein and a lot of this has to do with the education of the nutrition and medical community or perhaps miss-education as you will. And protein is emphasized. In the Western society, as other societies, animal protein is a major component of what people eat. When I was growing up, you didn't have a meal if there's not dead animal flesh on the table. Animal protein can trigger inflammation. It has adverse effects on your kidney, can have adverse effects on the blood vessels, adverse effects on the heart. You get more than enough protein from plant-based foods. The most important nutrient in my opinion is water. I mean, the healthy human body is healthy state is about 70 to 85 percent water. I'll pose a question and say well if you were left on an island and deserted for just just a twenty five days, you can have 25 days worth of baked chicken and you have 25 days of water. You can't have both one or the other and almost in very people choose the water because they know that they can't survive 25 days without water. As much as we emphasize eating the proper food, which starts and ends with a plant-based diet, it's also important to get fresh air and sunshine on a regular basis. So at least a couple of hours. Man-made rainbows! (Laughs) Oh wow! Another patient whose currently in her mid-nineties came to see me at the age of 89 and at that time she's taking about 22 medications, including about 40 units of insulin twice a day. She had been on insulin for forty years. We put her on a raw detox and we got off the insulin. Within a couple of days of her being on the raw detox, she's down to taking no medication the last I've seen and she hardly has to come and see us as s patient. She's in her mid-90s now. You know, I came into this arena as a traditional doctor, doing procedures, and putting them on the optimum medications. However, when I made this discovery for my own health and then subsequent for my patients I made a major change. As far as I know, we're the only facility in the United States that has an on-site plant-based restaurant that integrates it all in one. If I'm a physician who likes steak and eggs, it would be very difficult for me to aggressively counsel a patient away from eating these foods. This is our commercial kitchen, our restaurant, and the medical facility of the future will have a designated restaurant-kitchen that functions not only from a culinary standpoint, but also from a scientific standpoint. We see individuals in severe congestive heart failure, which is often thought of as a death sentence, but when they make fundamental changes in the way they eat, they go from a death sentence to a life sentence and that's an important differential. I'm Patricia Wiggins and this is my husband Carl he's Dr. Montgomery's patient. In a three-week time he's eliminated about 40 pounds of fluid from his body and his mental clarity is much better and he's now walking without his cane. When we came in he could barely walk with the cane and he had to hold on to me or to the wall or something to steady himself. So what you can see here is a model of an artery and there's several slices here and when someone consumes a diet high in saturated fat - and saturated fat, by the way, is code word for animal protein fat - if you then start to look anywhere an artery has this amount of disease, you're compromising blood to that organ and if the thin core ruptures that's what leads to a heart attack. So this predisposed to heart disease. This is the type of lesion that would be considered for a stent placement or for bypass surgery. However, you can reverse this type of disease with optimal plant-based nutrition. He was that severe. He wanted to make food our medicine and not pharmaceuticals. The added bonus is the fact that he is an MD. He is a cardiologist. He does know that part of medicine and he's not against it if it's needed. So if you were to look at all of the healthcare facilities, all the hospitals, all the emergency rooms, in this expanse of the medical center and we were to walk around and search for one patient who was suffering from protein deficiency we'd be challenged to find one. In regards to the prevalence of heart disease among different ethnic groups the CDC clearly shows that African-American women have the most heart disease in terms of prevalence and morbidity, mortality from heart disease. Next to them would be African-American men. More women die from heart disease than men in general and then more African-American women die from heart disease than any other race gender segment that we know of. Availability can be, these are all important things that I find and I think it's going to make a difference the more we make the food available. People do not realize how delicious plant food is. At the end of the day, it's going to be the food that makes the difference. I have a lot of friends who are ethical vegans and and I applaud them. When I came into eating plant-based I wasn't aware of the harms of what happened to animals and I think more messaging needs to come about with that. The other aspect of being ethical vegans is that we have to look at our own bodies and we have to be ethical to ourselves first and foremost because if we're not healthy, then we can't be a benefit to others, to animals, etc., so I often tell my patients that the number one animal you want to be ethical to is yourself. So foods that are minimally processed, raw, you want a lot of live foods that has the water content maintained. These are going to be some of the most healthy foods and if it is cooked you want to either dehydrated at relatively low temperatures, boil or steam it. And these are some simple approaches that individuals can take to consume a diet that's not only healthy for the environment as a whole but also healthy for your local environment, which is your body. If we can fundamentally change the way we eat, we get rid of the need for so much expense and so much time and effort toward helping people get better or I should say helping people live with the illness. By simply changing what that they eat you can help them reverse their condition and live a healthy life.