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 percent. After being on the plant-based diet over 78 days—much improved. Someone in
her condition may have needed surgery, could have needed a bypass
surgery. She may have needed a defibrillator. She may have 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 a 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 through 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 our health, which is
how we take care of the human frame, and it's as simple as 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 miseducation, if you will—and protein is emphasized. In 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 kidneys. It 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 in its healthy state is about 70 to 75 percent water. I'll
pose a question and say: "Well, if you were left on an island and deserted
for just, say, 25 days, you can have 25 days worth of baked chicken or
you can have 25 days of water. You can't have both; one or the other." And almost invariably,
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-90s came to see me at the age of 89, and at that time she was taking
about 22 medications, including about 40 units of insulin twice a day. She had
been on insulin for 40 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 a 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, once I made this discovery for my own
health and then subsequently 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 this
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 flow to that organ. And if the thin core
ruptures, that's what leads to a heart attack.
So this is 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 M.D. 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 here, all the hospitals, all the
emergency rooms, in this expansive 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,
convenience—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
I applaud you. When I came into eating plant-based, I wasn't aware of the
horrors 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, 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 have
the water content maintained. These are going to be some of the most healthy
foods. And if it is cooked, you want to either dehydrate it 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 can 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 their illnesses. If we can just simply change what they eat, we can
help them reverse their conditions and live a healthier life.