Rip Esselstyn - The Engine 2 Diet: The Texas Firefighters 28-Day Save-Your-Life Plan that Lowers Cholesterol and Burns Away the Pounds

This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical advice of physicians. The reader should regularly consult a physician in all matters relating to his or her health, and particularly with respect to any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.

Copyright 2009 by Rip Esselstyn

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Wellness Central

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

Wellness Central is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

The Wellness Central name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

First eBook Edition: February 2009

ISBN: 978-0-446-54368-2

Contents

For my wife, Jill, and my son, Kole

Dear Reader:

Im Rip Esselstyn and I want to thank you for picking up my book. I hope that once youve read it, you will choose to embark on the Engine 2 Diet in what will be a spectacular health makeover. Think about it: In just twenty-eight days, you will plant the seeds of a long-lasting, healthy life. I know that if I didnt follow this diet, I would never have had the energy to be a world-class triathlete, or just as grueling, a firefighter.

The Engine 2 Diet is a snap to follow. Depending on which of two programs you select, you will spend either two or four weeks eating nothing but the most colorful nutrient-packed foods Mother Nature provides: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds. During this time period you will push to the back burner all meats and dairy products, as well as refined and processed foodsincluding extracted oilswhile feasting on jillions of plant-diverse foods.

Thats the Engine 2 Diet in a healthy nutshell!

To assist you on your quest for great health, I have also included more than one hundred recipes that will make your mouth water, your friends envious, and your body happy.

I wish you only the best as you start what I hope will be a lifelong love affair with plant-beautiful foods. Remember, this isnt just a diet, its an adventure in perfect health.

Eat Plant-Strong!

T he evidence is now in. What our grandmothers always told us to doeat your vegetables and have an apple a day to keep the doctor awayis borne out by modern science. Increasingly, medical research is showing that we should consume a plant-based diet for optimal health.

But do people take this message seriously? I wish they did, but most do not. Part of the reason is our cultural tradition. For too long we have been accustomed, taste-wise, to animal foods or foods and food supplements derived from the wrong parts of plants, like their sugars, their oils (some of which we solidify and convert to trans fats!), and their refined flours without their outer bran layers. Then we add salt to produce unhealthy products that find their way to store shelves as convenience foods.

As a result, weve been getting fatter and suffering from an ever-increasing number and variety of ailments and life-threatening diseases. America now has the highest per capita health care costs in the world, while ignoring its 48 million citizens who lack medical insurance. Consuming the right kind of plant-based foods can go a long way toward solving not only our own personal health concerns, but our societys ills as well. There is simply nothing that can so profoundly affect our healing as eating fruits and vegetables.

How can we drive this message home? That is where Rip Esselstyn comes in. What a story he has to tell! Its personal, its inspiring, and its lifesaving. A world-class athlete and a firefighter, Rip managed to convert a firehouse full of committed meat eaters to a plant-based diet, and in the process improved everything from their weight to their blood pressure and cholesterol. From there he branched out to a pilot group of fifty-eight volunteers, all of whom achieved the same stunning results as the firefightersan average weight loss of ten pounds and a dramatic decline in cholesterolin a mere four weeks.

Best of all, those who completed the program reported feeling so much betterwith improvements to conditions such as kidney stones, constipation, and low energythat few felt tempted to resume their old way of eating.

I am not surprised by Rips accomplishments and motivations. He comes from an extraordinary line of medical men and women. The Esselstyns and the Criles (his mothers side) have served the public good for generations, and they know as much about medicine as any family in America. I find it fascinating that Rip, representing the first generation of the merger of these two brilliant medical families, has chosen to share his experiences in what I believe to be the most important health message to come upon the public horizon in many years.

I first met Rip in 1991 at a medical conference organized and hosted by his famous father, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., who was sharing for the first time his dramatic results on reversing and curing heart disease. He boldly named the conference The First National Conference on the Elimination of Coronary Heart Disease and had invited other researchers to present our own findings. Rip was only able to attend part of the conference, because of a prior commitment to compete in the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon, but he had stopped by to get a sense of what his father and others were doing. I met Rip on three other occasions while I was lecturing in Austin, Texas. On one of those occasions, he introduced me to his Engine 2 firehouse buddies, and I sensed a remarkable story emerging that is now being told in these pages.

I have spent five decades working as an experimental research scientist in the field of diet and health. I believe in the message that Rip Esslestyn is advocating and that his father and other clinicians have been adopting with great success in their clinics. I was not drawn to this view by any particular ideology but because of the experimental research done in my laboratory (mostly at Cornell University). Our findings were often challenging, even difficult to accept at times, because my background, both personally and professionally, ran counter to what I was seeing. I was raised on a dairy farm, milking cows, and my family lived off the land.

As our evidence accumulated, it became ever more impressive. John McDougall, MD, for years has been treating people, with great success, for a variety of illnesses with the plant-based diet that Rip recommends in this book. Recently, he and other physicians have cured most Type 2 diabetics and, in many cases, have greatly reduced insulin needs even for Type 1 patients. Rips father, Caldwell B. Esslestyn, Jr., MD, reverses and even cures advanced heart disease with this diet. Roy Swank, MD, followed multiple sclerosis patients for thirty-four years, using very much this same type of diet, and concluded that about 95 percent of MS patients [diagnosed early], remained only mildly disabled for about thirty years.

I have been lecturing extensively around the country and have heard from many cancer patients that they believe that they are cured or at least are in remission because of using a plant-based diet. This belief is borne out by the findings in our extensive experimental animal studies, in which we could turn on and off cancer development by relatively modest nutritional means, using a model of this same diet. Obesity can be controlled, migraine headaches reduced, arthritic conditions alleviatedthe list goes on and on. The idea that Rip Esselstyn elaborates in this book is spot-on, as my associates across the big pond say.