Dr. Michael Greger

was sent home in a wheelchair basically to die with end-stage heart disease.

She already had so many bypass surgeries, she basically kind of run out of plumbing at some point.

So confined to a wheelchair, crushing chest pain, her life was over at age 65.

Oh, man.

Uh, and then she heard about this guy, Nathan Pritikin, one of our early lifestyle medicine pioneers.

And what happened next is actually detailed in Pritikin's biography.

It talks about Francis Gregor, my grandmother.

They wheeled her in and she walked out.

Though she was given her medical death sentence at age 65, thanks to a healthy diet, she was able to enjoy another 31 years on this planet until age 96 to continue to enjoy her six grandkids, including me.

That's why I went into medicine.

That's why I practiced lifestyle medicine, why I started the website NutritionFacts.org, why I wrote the book How Not to Die, why all the proceeds from all my books are donated directly to charity.

I just want to do for everyone's family what Pritikin did for my family.

Wow.

Was it all after medical school?

No, the big pivot was in 1990, before medical school even started.

And that was the publication of the Lifestyle Heart Trial from Dean Ornish and colleagues.

So what Pritkin was doing, he was reversing heart disease by the thousands.

But back then, we did not have the technology to actually look inside people's arteries.

So it was a clinical diagnosis.

You have chest pain when you walk upstairs, you got heart disease.