Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease

IT WAS A FRIDAY in November 1996. I had operated all day. I finished, said good-bye to my last patient, and got a very, very bad headache. It hit me in a flash. I had to sit down. A minute or two after that, the chest pain started. It radiated up my arm and shoulder and into my jaw.
These are the words of Joe Crowe, the doctor who succeeded me as chairman of the breast cancer task force at the Cleveland Clinic. He was having a heart attack. He was only forty-four years old. He had no family history of heart disease, was not overweight or diabetic, and did not have high blood pressure or a bad cholesterol count. In short, he was not the usual candidate for a heart attack. Nonetheless, he had been struck and struck hard.
In this book, I tell Joe Crowe s story, along with those of many other patients I have treated over the past twenty years. My subject is coronary artery disease, its cause, and the revolutionary treatment, available to all, that can abolish it and that has saved Joe Crowe and many others. My message is clear and absolute: coronary artery disease need not exist, and if it does, it need not progress. It is my dream that one day we may entirely abolish heart disease, the scourge of the affluent, modern West, along with an impressive roster of other chronic illnesses.
Here are the facts. Coronary artery disease is the leading killer of men and women in Western civilization. In the United States alone, more than half a million people die of it every single year. Three times that number suffer known heart attacks. And approximately three million more have silent heart attacks, experiencing minimal symptoms and having no idea, until well after the damage is done, that they are in mortal danger. In the course of a lifetime, one out of every two American men and one out of every three American women will have some form of the disease.
The cost of this epidemic is enormous greater, by far, than that of any other disease. The United States spends more than $250 billion a year on heart disease. That s about the same amount the nation spent on the first two and half years of its military venture in Iraq, and fully twice as much as the federal government allocates annually for all research and development including R&D for defense and national security.1
But here is the truly shocking statistic: nearly all of that money is devoted to treating symptoms. It pays for cardiac drugs, for clot-dissolving medications, and for costly mechanical techniques that bypass clogged arteries or widen them with balloons, tiny rotating knives, lasers, and stents. All of these approaches carry significant risk of serious complications, including death. And even if they are successful, they provide only temporary relief from the symptoms. They do nothing at all to cure the underlying disease or to prevent its development in other potential victims.
I believe that we in the medical profession have taken the wrong course. It is as if we were simply standing by, watching millions of people march over a cliff, and then intervening in a desperate, last-minute attempt to save them once they have fallen over the edge. Instead, we should be teaching them how to avoid the chasm entirely, how to walk parallel to the precipice so that they will never fall at all.
I believe that coronary artery disease is preventable, and that even after it is under way, its progress can be stopped, its insidious effects reversed. I believe, and my work over the past twenty years has demonstrated, that all this can be accomplished without expensive mechanical intervention and with minimal use of drugs. The key lies in nutrition specifically, in abandoning the toxic American diet and maintaining cholesterol levels well below those historically recommended by health policy experts.
The bottom line of the nutritional progra

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"This powerful program will make you virtually heart-attack proof. Based on decades of research, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn has shown not only how to prevent heart disease, but how to reverse it-even for people who have been affected for many years. I strongly recommend this important book."
Neal D. Barnard, M.D., President, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and author of Breaking the Food Seduction

"If you have heart disease, this book should be essential reading. It could save your life."
Michael F. Jacobson, Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest

Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease provides a practical approach for people to regain their lost health. Considering the worldwide prevalence of coronary artery disease this book should become the bestseller of all times."
John McDougall, M.D., author of The McDougall Program

Dr. Esselstyn s solution in Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease is as profound as Newton s discovery of gravity. Half of all Americans dying today could have changed their date with the undertaker by following Dr. Esselstyn s plan.
Howard F. Lyman, author of No More Bull! and Mad Cowboy

Dr. Esselstyn's eminently successful arrest-and-reversal therapy for heart disease through patient education and empowerment as the treatment of choice will send shock waves through a mercenary medical system that focuses largely on pills and procedures.
Hans Diehl, Founder & Director of the Coronary Health Improvement Program (CHIP)