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Animal protein (meat, dairy, and eggs) creates an acidic environment in the body, alters the mix of hormones to favor cell growth, modifies important enzyme activities to increase activation of carcinogens, and causes inflammation and cell proliferation—all of which create an ideal environment for cancer to thrive.

You can reduce your chances of getting cancer by 40 percent, heart disease by 50 percent, and diabetes by 60 percent by changing your diet to a whole foods, vegetarian diet.

Within days of switching to a plant-based diet, weight starts to drop away; within a week, blood sugar starts to fall; within two weeks, blood pressure improves; and within a month, cholesterol improves significantly.

Switching to a vegan diet and making some other important lifestyle changes (such as stress reduction and smoking cessation) seem to be the ticket to preventing and reversing major diseases.

You’ve heard it before: if things keep going the way they are, half of us will get cancer or heart disease and die from it. One out of every three children born after 2000 will develop type 2 diabetes, a disease that is almost entirely preventable. The diabetes epidemic is a rapidly emerging crisis, the seriousness of which I’m not sure we have yet recognized. The good news is, the means to prevent and heal disease seems to be right in front of us. It’s in our food. Honestly, our food choices can either kill us—which mounting studies say that they are—or they can lift us right out of the disease process and into soaring health.

Here’s what the latest science tells us: according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, you can reduce your chances of getting cancer by 40 percent, heart disease by 50 percent, and diabetes by 60 percent simply by following a whole foods, vegetarian diet (the odds are even better when you cut out eggs and dairy), and these are conservative numbers. On top of this, a plant-based diet can help people with all these conditions recover more quickly and fully. And even more startling: such diets can be catalysts in curing some of the most serious diseases we face. That’s right, curing.

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Our food choices can either kill us—which mounting studies say that they are—or they can lift us right out of the disease process and into soaring health.

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What this science is telling us is that we have to rethink all our assumptions about deadly diseases. No longer are pharmaceuticals or drastic medical procedures your only option; there is so much hope on your plate and in your pantry.

Shifting to a vegan diet and making some other important lifestyle changes (such as stress reduction and smoking cessation) seems to be the ticket to preventing, reversing, even curing disease.

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Eating foods that support healing while cutting out foods that create havoc can change the course of your life.

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In this chapter we’ll look at cancer, heart disease, and diabetes in turn to better understand how what we eat can make a difference.

Conquering Cancer

I am very fortunate to know T. Colin Campbell, PhD, professor emeritus of Cornell University and coauthor of the ground-breaking The China Study. I strongly recommend this book; it’s an expansive and hugely informative work on the effects of food on health. Campbell’s work is regarded by many as the definitive epidemiological examination of the relationship between diet and disease. He has received more than seventy grant years of peer-reviewed research funding (the gold standard of research), much of it from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and he has authored more than 300 research papers. Dr. Campbell grew up on a dairy farm and believed wholeheartedly in the health value of eating animal protein. Indeed, he set out in his career to investigate how to produce more and better animal protein. Troublesome to his preconceived opinion about the goodness of dairy, Campbell kept running up against results that pointed to a different truth: that