My name is Dr. Milton Mills I am an internal medicine trained physician who works now exclusively as an intensive care unit doctor here in the Washington DC metro area. Humans are often described as being omnivores and that description is actually based on watching what a lot of humans choose to eat and if you look at the majority of humans on the planet yes they do choose to include both animal foods and plant foods in their diet. But in fact when you actually look at the way our digestive systems are constructed we have the anatomy and the physiology of a strict plant eater or herbivore. We don't have any adaptations in our digestive system or in our physiology that is adapted to eating or consuming animal flesh and that's why we can't consume animal flesh without the aid of technology but when you look at the jaw structure and jaw mechanics our esophagus our stomach and the length of our intestines it's clear that we have the anatomy of a committed herbivore. You know one of the questions that all vegans and vegetarians get that drives me literally out of my mind: Where do you get your protein? It's an insane question because all protein is originally made by plants. Any protein you get from an animal source is actually recycled protein and it's much healthier to actually get your protein from the plant sources because it turns out that plant proteins have a much better impact on our health. They are better for your immune system, they lower your risk of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer whereas animal proteins on the other hand increase your risk for cancer, heart disease, and other problems. So you absolutely do not need animal food to get your protein. If you just stop and think about it the largest strongest animals on the planet are all strict herbivores. So your elephants, your rhinos, your horses, your giraffes, they're all strict herbivores and they get all the protein that they need from plant sources. The atmosphere is something like 80% nitrogen and only plants have the ability to take nitrogen from the air and change it into a form that can be incorporated into an amino acid which is then connected together to form these proteins. There has never been a study that has shown that dairy calcium protects our bones from osteoporosis. In fact the majority of people of color are lactose intolerant. So for instance 95% of Asians are lactose intolerant, 73% of African Americans are lactose intolerant, 74% of Native Americans are lactose intolerant, and approximately 53% of Hispanics are lactose intolerance versus only about 30 to 33 percent of Caucasian Americans. The watershed moment came when I had this one African-American woman who came in and said to me I'm having this problem and I said there well you're lactose intolerant. She looked at me and said: Oh I know that! And I said well if you know that you're lactose intolerant why are you continuing to dairy foods? And she said to me because the government says I have to and that really made me very very angry because the government was intentionally encouraging people of color to eat foods that it knew was going to make them sick not for health benefit but because of the lobbying efforts of the dairy industry. It clearly was a case of institutional racism. Dairy products are often touted as the best way to get your calcium but that is marketing it is not science 80% of the disease and premature death that we see could be prevented if people ate differently and switch from a diet that was centered around animal foods to one that was a plant-based diet based on whole plant foods including whole grains, legumes, greens, fruits, and vegetables. That's a diet that promotes the best overall health for humans. We can avoid and even reverse a lot of these chronic diseases by changing to a plant-based diet.