While heart disease remains our #1 killer, taking a life every 48 seconds, the evidence for the benefits of Plant Based nutrition in preventing, improving and even reversing not only coronary artery disease, but also heart failure continues to mount as described in the video below.
Patients with chest pressure and shortness of breath after walking just ½ block were able to resolve these symptoms after just one month on a Whole Food Plant Based diet. Some improved to being able to walk for up to 50 minutes on a treadmill while others could jog up to 4 miles without symptoms, with a corresponding typical drop in total cholesterol of around 100 points. These anecdotal reports are backed up by randomized controlled trials detailed by Dr. Greger in the video below.
Regular people may not spend a lot of time thinking about this, but those of us who come from the cardiology field (I worked as a cardiac RN for over 25 years), find it frustrating that Plant Based nutrition remains highly underutilized as a option for patients given these jaw-dropping transformations. Doctors have struggled to get their patients to understand the futility of half-measures like the chicken/salmon diets in changing the grim outcomes that await heart patients, and the life changing potential of a Whole Food Plant Based diet in being able to alter the course of the leading cause of death in this country.
In my previous life directing an outpatient heart failure management program, I was tasked with keeping these very fragile patients from admitting to the hospital with fluid build-up. I found the most effective strategy to accomplish this goal was to teach my patients an unprocessed low sodium diet (I wasn’t aware of the benefits of a Plant Based diet at the time). But getting people to change ingrained lifestyle patterns requires a lot more cooperation on their part than something like a surgical procedure in which they only need to sign a consent form and then highly trained experts take over from there. But our healthcare system is much more adept at routinely performing the latter procedures, but struggles to succeed at implementing the former lifestyle changing skills that usually yield infinitely more benefit that the invasive procedures.
In my heart failure program, we worked to gain our patients’ trust, then did extensive education through a variety of means, offered concrete resources and recipes, tracked their progress and gently corrected them when they veered off course. In the above video, Dr. Greger discusses the difficulties even Plant-Based physicians experience in trying to introduce their patients to Plant Based Nutrition. There is simply a whole lot to learn about this completely different way of eating, and its much more involved to implement than simply anesthetizing a patient and performing an invasive procedure.
But sometimes the best paths we take in life are in fact, the simplest. Like learning to eat a nourishing diet of food that grows out of the ground.
After we reversed my husband’s pre-diabetes with a Plant Based Diet in early 2019, I went on to get a certification in Plant Based Nutrition. And then it occurred to me that I needed to use my previous chronic disease management skills to develop a program to prevent, improve, and hopefully reverse these same chronic diseases. In addition to heart disease, a Plant Based diet has been shown to greatly improve and frequently reverse conditions such as Type 2 Diabetes, arthritis pain, enlarged prostate, erectile dysfunction, gastric reflux, and many many more, and is also incredibly effective at achieving permanent weight loss. My husband and I both lost 20 # because we were never hungry for the first time in our lives on this nourishing high fiber diet.
So I developed a comprehensive program called Plant Based Transformation for Beginners. Our live classes were cut short and moved to Zoom cyberspace when the COVID pandemic hit in March, but now I have reworked the entire program to a comprehensive self-paced online format that students can access anytime of the day or night. Students can view over 8 hours of pre-recorded classes at their own pace. We start at the beginning (where do you get your protein!?) and then cover the research for the health and disease reversing benefits of WFPB nutrition I give students paramenters by which to track their progress, grocery shopping lists, recipes, internet resources, social support. And I even offer follow up group Zoom coaching sessions afterwards to keep students on track going forward.
So if you are ready to take that first step, or have a loved one that you think may benefit from this program,
Click here to view a free one hour webinar covering the basics of Plant Based nutrition with a detailed description of the online course.
Click here to view more information on my website
Click here to purchase the course for yourself or a a gift for a loved one!
"We have two lives. And the second begins
when we realize we only have one."
Confucious
Take that first step today!
Be well,
Stephanie
Stephanie Spencer RN, BSN
Certified, Plant Based Nutrition
T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies
