Eating You Alive

The problem is there is no known cure

and we probably won't even treat you

because we have no hope.

I don't think it's an accident

that the information on this

has been known for 15 or 20 years.

They told my parents I was going to die.

No one else should have died of heart disease.

We had the cure. We've had it for decades.

It's gonna take a radical shift in mindset.

We can't blame doctors,

they£re not trained in this field.

You know, my genes have already set my destiny.

What I thought I knew about

healthy eating almost killed me.

Three fourths of what we suffer from in America

is due to the food that we eat.

It's not food to me, it's torture.

I think we haven't really focused

on the quality of food that we take,

we're more interested in convenience.

Food is medicine.

You got to put back into the earth

in order to get back from it.

Changing what I put into my body

can make me live longer.

Why doesn't everybody know this?

About 19 years ago, we were staying at the house,

getting ready for Easter the night before,

dyeing Easter eggs and making cookies

and setting the table.

And my father and my husband

were watching television, this is hard for me, I'm sorry.

And in the wee hours of the morning

I heard my mom cry out that something was wrong.

And we raced up to their bedroom

and he was gone.

He was 58 years old and he was gone.

Everybody, everybody knows suffering, it's there.

People are hurting and it's a tragedy

and it's important to me.

Good evening, the news hit around breakfast time

as a lot of Americans were sitting down

in front of a plate of bacon or sausage.

The obesity crisis is getting worse in America not better.

We have to cut carbon pollution in our own countries

to prevent the worst effects of climate change.

This undercover video

shows chickens being buried alive.

You want to tell the story dramatically

and say you're in a hospital

and decide to change your mind, you know.

And I don't believe anything anyone says in a hospital,

on New Years Eve or during sex.

Those three times

are all information is considered invalid.

Everybody that goes to the hospital says,

you know, from now on I'm gonna eat right,

I'm gonna exercise, I'm gonna do all this,

they're always lying.

They say the same three things actually during sex

and on New Years Eve.

So I was in the hospital with bad hypertension

and I did not make any promises to change my life.

I would say I was probably 330 then,

got to get your weight down to about 280

where we can control your blood pressure with drugs.

And I said well it's 280 where I should get down to?

And then he said this sentence that blew my mind.

And it was the first time I'd ever something you know

anybody watching this is very familiar with

but I wasn't familiar with it.

He said, "Well if you get your weight down to 220, 230

you probably wouldn't need drugs at all."

And I said, "What!

I'd thought that my hypertension was genetic."

He says, "Well it is."

And I said, "Well no,

you're telling me that the drugs that I'm taking are,

telling me these are fat guy drugs.

I thought they were generic drugs."

He said, "Well yes of course."

I said, "Well it can't be both of course,

you can't say it's genetic

and yet if I get down to this weight

I wouldn't have it."

And that just bugged me,

that just bugged me tremendously.

We are eating ourselves in the most overweight,

obese population

in the history of the human race.

In this country this year we£ll spend

over three trillion dollars on health care,

Somewhere between 1 half and 75% of that

are lifestyle related problems.

You get out of your health exactly what you put into it.

And we have been putting the wrong fuel in our body.

We really didn't learn much of anything about nutrition

in medical school.

I was really angry.

I just could not understand why I didn't learn any of this.

The system is set up to reimburse,

kind of, pills and procedures.

You get paid to do things

for patients. You don't get paid if your patients get better.

We live in a pill popping generation

everybody wants a pill for this or a pill for that.

Big Pharma is

in the business of us being sick.

They fund medical education, that's what you learn about.

We've never had more pills in human history

and yet we've never had more chronic disease.

There's the food industry

which is a trillion dollar industry.

There's lot of people

that are making money off processed foods.

There are a lot of people making money off meat,

lot of people making money off dairy.

And it's a huge lobbying power.

Take away the supervision from the USDA

and give it to another body.

They£re handing out subsidies with this hand

and with the other hand they£re telling

the American public what to eat.

You know, they don't look at meat

and say this is full of saturated fat,

cholesterol, DDT,

environmental contaminants, infection.

not part of the sales pitch.

Dairy is the most toxic thing people put in their body,

I won't even call it food.

People that are eating the standard American diet

don't understand, number one,

the scientific implications of that in their body

but two, they often don't understand

that food has enslaved them by this addictive component.

Foods are the cause of diabetes, of heart disease,

of many forms of cancer, of hypertension

and if they are the cause they can also be the solution.

What is on our plate is really affecting our environment.

More global warming is caused by livestock consumption

that all forms of transportation combined.

Something's wrong with this paradigm

and we need to shift paradigms to find out what works better.

We're eating ourselves into our graves.

Since a small child, I've had a love of plants.

To have this living organism

within this tiny little package,

a seed and you plant it

and it grows into such beauty and potential.

I am a product of the state of New Jersey.

I went to Rutgers, the state university,

got a botany degree.

And then went on to the state medical school.

I received a, you know, standard academic training,

then went on to an internal medicine residency

in Washington, DC at George Washington

as a newly minted doctor.

My father who was an attorney, 69 years of age,

was suddenly diagnosed

with end stage metastatic pancreatic cancer.

He was given a prognosis of one to three months to live,

offered some standard treatment

and because there is very little success

with that age, my father decided to do nothing.

And just go home and prepare for death.

I knew in my world that I'd come from,

there was just nothing available

and even still to this day,

there is very little available for pancreatic cancer.

So I went to my local library

and finally came across some books on food,

brought these books home for my father.

The books were on a whole unrefined plant food

way of eating.

He grasped onto it and completely changed his diet

and a year later we went back.

When the doctor saw my father walk in,

he looked a little bit shaken.

He asked my father, what he was doing there

and why basically why was he still alive.

My father started to tell him about broccoli and brown rice

and the doctor lost complete interest

in what my father was saying.

That was the point for me

that changed what I would do as a doctor.

Our medical community in general

has really focused on symptoms of disease.

We see it throughout our whole pharmaceutical industry

and our whole approach to care.

And you know, we have this acute care model

in healthcare today.

And it was designed a 100 years ago

to treat communicable diseases and injury

and we're still trying to treat chronic disease now

with that same acute care model,

but it doesn't work.

We're trying to treat diabetes and heart disease

the way we treat strep throat with pills but it doesn't work.

I feel a little disenfranchised