Dr Esselstyn from Hidden history of nutrition & health

追加: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]Okay, we're continuing from the book here, Hidden History of Nutrition, Health, and Science by me, Pete Rogers.

[00:00:05]We're going to be talking today, this is part eight. We're going to be talking about Caldwell Esselstyn. Caldwell Esselstyn is a physician. He was at the Cleveland Clinic for many years. He was primarily an endocrine surgeon, like a cancer surgeon doing, you know, breast surgery for breast cancer and other related things, like thyroid for thyroid cancer. And he was a little frustrated. He felt that he hadn't had that much of a beneficial clinical impact as he had expected from being a big shot surgeon. Okay? And he was reading about epidemiology, the incidence of diseases in other countries around the world, and he saw the pattern.

[00:00:44]Basically, in all these sort of third world plant-based populations, they don't get the chronic Western diseases, they don't get obesity, they don't get hypertension, they don't get diabetes, they don't get atherosclerosis, they don't get heart disease. Most common cause of death in the Western world is a heart disease, heart attack, okay? So, he thought, "Well, gee, I wonder if we put Western patients on the same diet those people eat, if they would get better."

[00:01:09]And he just volunteered on his personal day off administrative time to do this coronary artery disease research, and he's told the cardiologists and stuff, "Send me the patients who everybody's given up on. You can't do open heart surgery on them, you can't stent them anymore. Um you're not sure if they're going to make it with pill therapy and stuff, and let me just see if they respond to this diet." And he kept getting better and better results, and he organized it into a study, and he ended up following like 198 patients.

[00:01:35]Some dropped out, let's call it 178 patients, and he had dramatically good results. He says that every single patient who actually followed his dietary advice, a low-fat vegan diet with no oil, um no caffeine, no sweets, they uh not a single one of them had a cardiovascular event. In his study, he reported one patient that had a cardiovascular event, and that's it. The closest thing to it is like this optimized version of the Lyon study and he's got 30 times better results, more than 30 times better results than that.

[00:02:05]So, it's pretty obvious, you know, this is what works in animal studies, minimize dietary fat.

[00:02:11]This is what avoid animal foods. This is what works in um you know, epidemiology and populations and it works in Esselstyn studies. It worked for Pritikin, it worked for McDougall, it worked for uh for Dean Ornish, it worked for uh Walter Kempner. It's what works. So, here is is uh Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's book, Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease. It's a great book. It's very easy to read. I actually went and took his training course with him.

[00:02:37]And it was kind of funny. He keeps on going over nitric oxide. You want to do this because it increases nitric oxide.

[00:02:44]The most important thing is increase nitric oxide. And, you know, I sort of like raised my hand and I'm like, "Well, what about this? And what about this?"

[00:02:51]You know, everything he was saying was true, but I was interested in some of the more nuance and stuff and he's like, He came and said, "Let me talk to you afterwards." So, he came and spoke with me personally uh like when we were at lunch and there was a little more time and he's like He says, "I know what you're talking about is right and true and good." He says, "But I don't think that's what I need to do with these patients." He says, "They're not doctors." He says, "They just need to get one thing fixed in their brain. They follow the diet and nitric oxide will increase and they're going to be okay. That's what they need to know. That's what gets good results.

[00:03:20]I've been doing this for a long time."

[00:03:22]And he's right. The patients have to have a message that they can understand, they can hold on to in their mind's eye and visualize it and follow it through, you know, stick to the course and they'll get the good results. So, that's what he wanted to do. His job is not to be a scientific researcher and and get all the details. His job is what works, let's do what works, okay? And he's correct, all right?

[00:03:46]So, don't get me wrong, there's there's a lot more you could do.

[00:03:50]And I think that becomes relevant when you got a patient who's disappointed in the results, who's especially high risk, there's more that you can do. Other things that Dr. Esselstyn says, no nuts, not one bite, no oil, not one drop.

[00:04:04]Okay?

[00:04:07]Um including that one patient who had a stroke, he had a 99.4% uh success rate, which is extraordinary.

[00:04:14]That's off the charts good. And he says if they actually truly follow He says one patient who had the stroke didn't follow his diet. So he says he's never seen a single patient who followed his diet have a cardiovascular complication. So he's talking about 99 to 100% results. What's the cure rate for for pills, for stents, for surgery? 0%.

[00:04:34]You know, as Dr. McDougall says, the reason why you can't cure coronary artery disease with a stent or surgery is because they go by the fixed stenosis, which are like scar tissue, hardened scars, and those are not the vulnerable plaques, they're not the soft plaques, the ones that are prone to rupture and lead to subsequent rapid coronary artery occlusion with myocardial infarction and kill the patient. So he says they're treating the wrong lesions, number one. Number two, there's a William C. Roberts, best cardiac pathologist who ever lived, who did autopsies on over 2,000 uh coronary artery death patients, and he said that the coronary artery atherosclerosis, it's always diffuse of similar severity all throughout the three epicardial coronaries, those are the big ones that go on the outside of the heart. So the point is you could never bypass it cuz it's everywhere and of similar severity. So you know, you can get a reduction in anginal symptoms, coronary artery stenosis related, you know, chest pain, shortness of breath, dyspnea on exertion, okay? But you're not curing the underlying problem. That's what Dr. Esselstyn said as well. The reason why conventional medicine can't cure these patients and improve their longevity is because they don't address the real problem. Okay? The baseline atherosclerosis.

[00:05:42]When you start eating a healthier diet, the coronary artery endothelial cells start producing more nitric oxide and they're healthier.

[00:05:49]Okay, and I like this I made I had a friend of mine drew this drawing that Esselstyn's kind of like Old Testament God. Do as I say or I'll kick your butt.

[00:05:57]And I like that. He doesn't wimp out like, you know, the high-fat phonies.

[00:06:00]Try to reduce your intake oil. That's BS. No oil, not one drop.

[00:06:05]Oh, you know, I like nuts three times a day. It's another high-fat high-fat phony said that. And Esselstyn's like, "No, no nuts. They're too fat." Okay? He tells the patients the truth. His job's not to be Mr. Nice and soft and wonderful. His job is to help them to get better, save their life, and that's what he does. So, I really like what he did. That's Dr. Esselstyn with his son ripped there.

[00:06:28]Okay, so what did Dr. Esselstyn says? He says, "The reason I am strict about excluding animal foods, oils, and high-fat foods is because this is what works to improve arterial health."

[00:06:37]Yeah, when you eat animal foods, the animal protein has an anabolic effect that I think what's happening is it's mobilizing cholesterol from the liver to go up in the blood. So, a the animal protein itself without adding any fat will cause elevated blood cholesterol. So, it's harmful in that sense. You know, cuz it's activating mTOR, mammalian target of rapamycin, also called mechanistic target of rapamycin, to encourage cells to encourage cells to grow and to replicate, which is worrisome for increasing the risk of cancer, but it's also worrisome for, like I said, mobilizing a growth phase, pushing more cholesterol into the blood.

[00:07:11]You know, Esselstyn said a lot of other good things. He says, "These diseases don't exist in populations that eat low-fat plant-based diets." He says, "Coronary artery disease is a paper tiger that need not exist at all. It's a food-borne illness. Just don't eat the food, you don't get it. Stop pouring gasoline on the fire. All these animal foods, these oils, these are the equivalent of pouring gasoline on the fire. Stop doing that."

[00:07:35]He says, "I don't want you to put one thimble of gas on the fire." Okay? And then he also recommends his his more recent thing was eating uh some greens like, you know, six times a day to to get increased nitric oxide flowing through the um blood all day long. He sort of partnered up partnered up in some interviews with that Nathan Bryan guy who's sort of an expert on nitric oxide. With the idea being that the plant nitrates, especially in the greens, things like arugula other salads, they get converted from nitrates NO3 in the mouth to nitrites NO2 by the bacteria on the back of the tongue. Goes down into the stomach, stomach acid then converts them to nitric oxide, absorbed into the blood, you get systemic vasodilation.

[00:08:17]So, eating greens all day long he felt was a way to um minimize atherogenesis. Cuz nitric oxide is a gas that diffuses from the endothelial cells, the lining cells of the arteries into the artery and it has an antiplatelet effect. So, it's antithrombotic on the platelet, prevents them from becoming activated. Well, what is atherosclerosis? Atherosclerosis is a blood clot. So, if you prevent platelet aggregation, you reduce the risk of atherosclerotic plaque. Also, by eating all of these plant foods, you get a lot of fiber which maintains the gut lining, so you don't get leaky gut, so you don't get amyloid clotting related to the bacterial endotoxins. Also, if you're eating plant foods, whole plant foods, then you're going to get less iron cuz the iron's high in meat, iron's high in processed food. Iron absorption's like a of iron from meat five times higher, heme iron, than it is from plant iron, okay? So, all of that protects you from iron overload with the resulting reduction in the chance of having free iron in the blood, that ferrous redox cycles between Fe2+ and Fe3+ and thus you avoid free iron related amyloid clotting. So, you're reducing your risk of bacterial endotoxin clotting, you're reducing your risk of iron overload free iron associated amyloid clotting. So, all this reduction in thrombogenicity is going to lower your risk of atherosclerosis and formation of blood clots in your arteries. So, that's all really good.

[00:09:36]Um So, those are some things he did. I also wrote a book about atherosclerosis and I went into a lot more nuance. So, I would say for the regular person, they should read Dr. Esselstyn and that's all they're going to need. But, if you're a high-risk patient and you want to reduce your risk further, there's more things you can do and I go into all of them. Um you know, avoiding all these emulsifiers, filtering your tap water, um avoiding a bunch of other toxic chemicals in processed food, for example. I go through how sunshine releases nitric oxide precursors into your blood to vasodilate even more, uh systemic nitric oxide precursors, uh and other things like that that could be helpful.

[00:10:18]Okay, so that is uh Dr. Esselstyn's work, very very helpful, and we're going to leave it at that for today. Hope you found that helpful.