A plant-based diet and coronary artery disease: a mandate for effective therapy

A 1999 autopsy study of young adults in the US between the ages of 17 and 34 years of who died from accidents, suicides, and homicides confirmed that coronary artery disease (CAD) is ubiquitous in this age group. The disease process at this stage is too early to cause coronary events but heralds their onset in the decades to follow. These data are similar to those reported in an earlier postmortem analysis of US combat casualties during the Korean conflict, which found early CAD in nearly 80% of soldiers at an average age of 20 years. From these reports, which are 17 and 63 years old, respectively, it is clear that the foundation of CAD is established by the end of high school. Yet, medicine and public health leaders have not taken any steps to forestall or eliminate the early onset of this epidemic. Smoking cessation, a diet with lean meat and low-fat dairy, and exercise are generally advised, but cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the number one killer of women and men in the US. The question is, why? Unfortunately, such dietary gestures do not treat the primary cause of CVD. The same can be said of commonly prescribed cardiovascular medications such as beta-blockers, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers, anticoagulants, aspirin, and cholesterol lowering drugs and medical interventions such as bare metal stents, drug-eluting stents, and coronary artery bypass surgery. It is increasingly a shameful national embarrassment for the United States to have constructed a billion-dollar cardiac healthcare industry surrounding an illness that does not even exist in more than half of the planet. If you, as a cardiologist or a cardiac surgeon, decided to hang your shingle in Okinawa, the Papua Highlands of New Guinea, rural China, Central Africa, or with the Tarahumara Indians of Northern Mexico, you better plan on a different profession because these countries do not have cardiovascular disease. The common thread is that they all thrive on whole food, plant-based nutrition (WFPBN) with minimal intake of animal products. By way of contrast, in the United States, we ignore CVD inception initiated by progressive endothelial injury, inflammatory oxidative stress, decreased nitric oxide production, foam cell formation, diminished endothelial progenitor cell production and development of plaque that may rupture and cause myocardial infarction or stroke. This series of events is primarily set in motion, and worsened, by the Western diet, which consists of added oils, dairy, meat, fish, fowl, and sugary foods and drinks—all of which injure endothelial function after ingestion, making food a major, if not the major cause of CAD. In overlooking disease causation, we implement therapies that have high morbidity and mortality. The side effects of a plethora of cardiovascular drugs include the risk of diabetes, neuromuscular pain, brain fog, liver injury, chronic cough, fatigue, hemorrhage, and erectile dysfunction. Surgical interventions are fatal for tens of thousands of patients annually. Each year approximately 1.2 million stents are placed with a 1% mortality rate, causing 12,000 deaths, and 500,000 bypass surgeries are performed with a 3% mortality rate, resulting in another 15,000 deaths. In total, 27,000 patients die annually from these two procedures. It is as though in ignoring this dairy, oil, and animal-based illness, we are wedded to providing futile attempts at temporary symptomatic relief with drugs and interventional therapy, which employs an unsuccessful mechanical approach to a biological illness with no hope for cure. Patients continue to consume the very foods that are destroying them. This disastrous illness and ineffective treatments need never happen if we follow the lessons of plant-based cultures where CVD is virtually nonexistent.