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So he stabs, I step in in the same way.

Now my hand slides down. And where are we at?

I've been teaching fighting techniques

to government agencies for more than 15 years.

Including the U.S. Marines, U.S. Marshals,

U.S. SWAT Teams, and U.S. Navy Seals.

He's gonna stab me. I go here and then I go here.

And then I could go here, or here.

Nearly, all the techniques I teach

are banned in the sport of mixed martial arts.

I can control the direction

of the muzzle. You guys see that?

These are some of the most effective

and damaging moves you could use

in a real life situation. Be it in self-defense...

If I'm here.

- ...on the street... - I twist you round

and I, then I knee.

...or in war.

Straight into the trachea.

Now you're gonna knee. Step back and then rip.

And the gun comes out. Good.

This is life or death for these guys.

And I'm honored to share this knowledge.

Let's see your muscles, James. Let's see your muscles.

- Oh, yes! - Go on, do it again.

And again! That's right.

That's it. Power.

James, he was a very lively child.

Quite hard to control.

James!

His teacher said to us,

I'm finding it difficult to cope with him

because he is so, um, not aggressive,

he is so...

- Lively, really. - ...lively. Yes.

I think that's probably the better word.

So I took him to one of the training sessions

of Kyokushinkai,

which is a very hard style of karate.

It's a bit more controlled and structured.

It calmed him down.

From then on, he took the karate to heart.

Bruce Lee was his hero as a child.

And he had big posters in his bedroom.

Like a lot of boys,

I dreamed about becoming a Kung Fu master

who could fight off bad guys in any situation.

But when I was a teenager,

I got attacked on the street and beaten up,

coming face to face with the reality

that all those choreographed karate routines

I'd spent years practicing, were completely useless.

Then I found out that the same thing

happened to Bruce Lee when he was my age,

launching him on a quest, the search for truth in combat.

Lee went on to study a wide range of martial arts,

taking only the best parts of each discipline.

His philosophy was simple.

Research your own experience,

absorb what is useful, reject what is useless,

add what is specifically your own.

Armed with this philosophy,

I vowed to follow in Lee's footsteps.

Fifteen years and five black belts later,

I was given the opportunity to put my training to the test.

- Oh, good combination by Wilks! - Good combination!

Johnson trying to fight back though!

Nice knees by Wilks!

- Johnson is in trouble early. - Wilks is attacking.

One hook in and he's got the choke.

He's got one arm across.

- The hand! - He's up and around now.

- He's gonna tap! - It's all over!

- It's unbelievable. - James Wilks

is The Ultimate Fighter.

With seconds to go!

Outstanding performance by James Wilks!

James Wilks from Leicester, England

is The Ultimate Fighter.

Then, I got injured.

I was sparring with a future heavyweight champion

and tore ligaments in both of my knees.

Unable to teach or train for at least six months,

I spent more than a thousand hours

studying peer reviewed science on recovery and nutrition.

Looking for any advantage I could find

to get back on track as quickly as possible.

That's when I stumbled across a study

about the Roman gladiators.

The Gladiator Graveyard

from Ephesus is the only one

with a significant number of individuals buried there.

Archaeologists recovered

the remains of at least 68 gladiators.

There have been more than 5,000 bones

analyzed for the study.

We found in the cross section of the bone,

very high bone mineral density,

which indicated intense training and high quality diet

to build up strong muscles and strong bones.

This diet gave the gladiators a nickname, Hordearii,

which means beans and barley muncher.

We know different food sources give different amounts

of strontium in the bones.

High strontium levels in vegetarians.

Low strontium levels in carnivores.

If there is low strontium in the sample

the flame will stay blue.

If there is high strontium levels,

it will change from blue to red.

The gladiators were predominantly vegetarian.

This totally blew my mind.

The gladiators were highly prized fighters

who got the most advanced training

and medical care in the Roman Empire.

To think that the original professional fighters

ate mainly plants went against everything

I'd been taught about nutrition.

And now, ladies and gentlemen,

the one and only, Superman.

James, does Superman eat meat?

- Yes. - He does?

- Yeah. - Oh.

Could you tell us what sort of foods you eat

at teatime when you come home?

Nearly the same as dinner but egg and...

lamb chop.

Do you think all the other children

should eat those sort of foods?

Yes!

- In order to get strong. - Hmm.

"The Notorious" Conor McGregor.

Even in the UFC,

this idea, that meat makes you tough

had become a focal point

for one of the most anticipated fights

in the history of the sport between Conor McGregor,

the world champion in two different weight classes

and Nate Diaz,

who accepted the fight with only 11 days' notice,

after McGregor's original opponent pulled out.

McGregor was a big meat eater.

It's steaks every day for me. Steaks for breakfast,

steaks for lunch, steaks for brunch.

Grass fed, massaged beef, all day long.

Diaz was on a plant based diet.

Eat your vegetables.

And McGregor had a field day with it.

This man, let's see, let's see, can he fight.

I'm a lion in there.

Your little gazelle friends are gonna be staring

through the cage looking at your carcass

getting eaten alive.

McGregor was just feeding off a stereotype

that was pretty much universal.

You hit like a vegetarian.

I was curious to find out

if there were any other elite athletes following

a plant-based diet.

The first I found was Scott Jurek,

one of the greatest ultra-runners of all time.

Scott built his career running extreme distances

over brutal terrain,

conquering the sport's most prestigious races,

including the Badwater Ultramarathon,

a 135 miles through California's Death Valley,

with temperatures reaching a 130 degrees.

I was training for the Western States

one hundred mile race

the Super Bowl of Ultra Marathon racing.

And that's when I was transitioning

to a plant-based diet.

I remember doubting myself,

even up to a week before the race, like,

"Maybe I should have eaten meat."

But I led that race from start to finish,

and won it for seven years in a row,

and there was no question

that the plant-based diet was fueling my victories.

When I met Scott, he was gearing up

for the greatest challenge of his career.

- ...inviting me over. - When I'm moving,

I'm definitely gonna be eating.

Having already mastered single-day endurance events,

Scott was now trying to become the fastest person ever

to run the entire Appalachian Trail

a distance of 2200 miles.

My goal is to break the record.

Forty-six days, 11 hours.

Let's go to Maine.

Two marathons a day over technical terrain.

Average of 11,000 feet of climbing,

and 11,000 feet of descent every day,

back to back to back to back,

it's completely beyond anything I've done before.

As Scott hit the trail,

I was confused about how his meat-free diet

could possibly give him enough energy.

So I reached out to Dr. James Loomis,

a team physician who was part of two championships,

a World Series and a Super Bowl.

What I found in the locker room was...

some pretty outdated ideas about nutrition.

You would go to a pre-game dinner

with the football team and you would see this spread.

There would be steak and chicken.

Very much protein oriented because their perception was

that the protein is what sustains their energy.

But, in fact, that's not the case.

The actual energy for exercise comes mainly from carbohydrates

in the form of glycogen that we store in our muscles.

And when we sacrifice those carbohydrate calories

for protein calories in our diet,

what ends up happening is, you will develop

really chronic carbohydrate or glycogen depletion.

And what does that lead to? Well,

it leads to chronic fatigue and loss of stamina.

I wanted to know how this whole

"meat gives you energy" thing got started,

and traced it back to the 1800s,

when a famous German chemist hypothesized

that muscular energy came from animal protein,

and that vegetarians were incapable

of prolonged exercise.

Liebig's beliefs were so widely accepted

that they even inspired

the USDA's first protein recommendations.

By the time science proved his theory false

with the discovery that hard-working muscles

run primarily on the carbohydrates

found in plants, it was too late.

People all around the world

had already bought into Liebig's ideas

about meat and energy.

But not everyone was convinced.

As early as 1908,

plant-based athletes were starting to claim

their first Olympic golds.

Are you still sticking to your vegetarian diet, Murray?

Very rigidly, yes.

And do you find that's of benefit

- to you, do you? - Greatly, or I wouldn't do it.

Edwin Moses winning the gold meda!

Lewis gets it!

And it's a new world record as well!

I changed my diet to a vegan diet and I set

all of my personal bests at 30 years old.

The oldest man, ever,

to win a world or Olympic men's final.

And there were current Olympians, too.

Morgan Mitchell

is the two-time Australian 400 meter champion.

Here comes Morgan Mitchell.

This is very, very fast.

It's tough, the 400, I won't lie.

The first 200 is pure speed

and then the last 200,

it shows who's got that speed endurance training

in their legs. And obviously the last 50,

you've just gotta pray because lactic is hitting hard.

You need to be able to hold that endurance.

She also represented Australia

at the 2016 summer Olympics.

A lot of people had doubted me

when I first became vegan,

but my energy levels increased incredibly

and my iron, my B12,

everything that people said would become deficient,

were amazing.

I thought, I'm gonna make sure

I'm beating them all on the track.

I mean, we're all friends, but it was pretty cool to finish

my Australian domestic season undefeated.

And to win the nationals was obviously

that little cherry on top.

Morgan Mitchell is tearing away from the field.

There was also Dotsie Bausch,

an eight time USA national cycling champion,

and two time Pan-American gold medalist.

My event in track cycling

requires a massive amount of explosive power.

- Go. Let's go, ladies. Go! Go! - Go!

First of all, we have got to get off the line

and we're starting from a dead start with one gear.

We have to be able to move that mass,

that weight off the line and get it up to speed

within three quarters of the length of the track.

My training regimen involves six days a week,

climbing mountains

up and down for at least four and five hours a day.

Hard track sessions,

and then big gym sessions.

I grew up in Kentucky so that's the land of casseroles

and barbecue and meat.

So when I transitioned over to an entirely plant-based diet,

I wasn't sure if I was gonna survive.

And I actually became like a machine.

I got up from being able to move about 300 pounds

on the inverted leg sled,

to moving 585 pounds, 60 reps times five sets.

To move that kind of weight,

you need more than just energy, you also need strength.

In other words, protein.

I just couldn't believe that Dotsie,

or anyone for that matter, could get enough protein

eating only plants.

I think one of the biggest misconceptions

in sports nutrition

is that we have to have animal protein,

in a particular meat, to get big and strong

and perform at a high level. That's just clearly not true.

All that protein that you get

when you eat a steak or a hamburger,

where did it come from? It came

from the plants that the cow ate.

I was surprised to learn

that all protein originates in plants.

Cows, pigs and chickens it turns out,

are just the middlemen.

In fact, the largest study to compare the nutrient intake

of meat eaters with plant eaters,

showed that the average plant-eater

not only gets enough protein,

but 70 percent more than they need.

Even meat-eaters like me

get roughly half of their protein from plants.

But athletes need more protein than most people do.

So I crunched the numbers from the study

and realized that based on the amount of calories

I was eating I'd still be getting

more than enough protein to build and maintain muscle.

For example, one cup of cooked lentils

or a peanut butter sandwich

has about as much protein as three ounces of beef

or three large eggs.

But what about the quality of the protein? I'd always heard

that plant-based protein was inferior.

Proteins are strings of amino acids

and there's some amino acids our bodies can't make.

Those are the essential amino acids,

so we have to get them from food.

And one of the arguments about animal based proteins

being superior is that plant based proteins

aren't complete, so you're not gonna get all the amino acids.

And that's a fallacy as well.

Again, I was surprised to discover

that every single plant contains all the essential amino acids

in varying proportions.

And when it comes to gaining strength

and muscle mass,

research comparing plant and animal protein

has shown that as long as the proper amount

of amino acids are consumed, the source is irrelevant.

This all sounded great in theory,

but all the athletes I'd met so far were pretty lean.

If getting lots of protein without animal foods

really wasn't an issue, where were all the big guys?

Kendrick Farris was the only male weightlifter

to represent the United States at the 2012

and 2016 Olympic Games.

Olympic style weightlifting is going

from the ground to overhead

in one or two explosive movements.

The most explosive movements that can be done.

When I made the switch to a plant based diet,

people, they were like, "I don't know

how you're gonna lift that much weight."

And, "You're not gonna be eating anything,

you're just gonna eat grass. Like, how you gonna be strong?"

I qualified for my third Olympic team,

you know what I'm saying?

I broke two American records.

I won at the Pan-Am games.

I was like, "Man."

Like, "I think, I should've done this a long while ago."

Like, "Why didn't I research this before?"

And Kendrick wasn't alone.

Five thousand miles away, I found another strength athlete

named Patrik Baboumian.

Patrik is one of the strongest men

on the planet, with multiple world records

including the front hold, the keg lift...

and the log lift.

- How could one of the world's... - Yeah!

...strongest men be so powerful,

eating only plants? No meat. No milk. No eggs.

...Patrik Baboumian!

Most of the training I do at home

because it's just more practical...

Someone asked me,

"How could you get as strong as an ox

without eating any meat?" And my answer was,

"Have you ever seen an ox eating meat?"

I stopped eating meat in 2005.

Up to that time I was 105 kilo.

And now I'm 130 kilos.

Also at the same time I set, like, four world records.

So when I stopped eating meat, I got stronger and bigger.

- Okay. So I just go under here. - Okay. Yeah.

Really take care of...

your... your back should really be straight.

Pick it up.

Get up.

At 700 pounds, I could not move

the yoke at all.

- It didn't move. - It felt like

it was bolted to the ground.

And that was just his warm-up weight.

It's hard to fathom how strong Patrik really is.

It's almost super human.

When I met Patrik,

he was training to break the world record

for the heaviest weight ever carried by a human being.

To break that record,

Patrik would have to carry 1224 pounds,

that's the weight of a horse, a distance of 33 feet.

The thing with the yoke is,

if you really, really go insane with the weight,

when you do a step

and all the weight is on one leg,

it sometimes feels like your bones

could just break.

It's probably one of the most terrifying things

that we do at strongman events.

Here we go!

When Nate Diaz stepped into the cage

to face Conor McGregor,

the Vegas odds makers had Diaz as the four to one underdog.

He caught him again with a right hook.

And another left!

And again with a combination!

Diaz trying to finish with a submission.

He's got it! That's it!

- He's got the choke! - Nate Diaz!

- He's got it, man. - He has done it!

Nate Diaz beats Conor McGregor!

Oh, my goodness!

Nate Diaz, you just shook up the world.

How does that feel?

Aye, I'm not surprised motherfuckers.

It's a bitter, bitter pill to swallow. Um,

It was simply a...

battle of energy in there and I...

and he got the better of that, so.

Nine days out from the fight,

I started eating two steaks a day

and it just came back to bite me on the ass, you know.

This was the greatest upset

in UFC history, and it turned out, Nate wasn't

the only plant-based fighter out there.

I stopped eating meat

probably like around the end of 2012.

I grew up not even knowing

about half of these other vegetables.

Asparagus to me just came out like five years ago.

You know what I'm saying? That's just like, as a kid,

I was like, "Asparagus. We ain't never see that."

I'm like, "What's that?"

Bryant Jennings is a heavyweight title contender

best known for going the distance

with Wladimir Klitschko,

one of the greatest boxing champions of all time.

My early years growing up in Philly,

the only thing we knew was spinach in a can,

collard greens and Popeye's, KFC, everybody frying chicken.

Most people say, "Oh, where do you get your protein?"

As if everybody that's in KFC

is looking at the back of a bucket.

Like, "Yeah, how much protein is..." Y'all don't know.

So, y'all really don't know what y'all eating.

I'd never really thought about it like that before.

What else was in the food I was eating?

An experiment to help answer that question

was being conducted by Dr. Robert Vogel,

co-chair of the NFL's sub committee

on cardiovascular health.

What you eat immediately before an athletic endeavor

really can have major impact on how you perform.

There's a direct correlation between a meal

and endothelial function.

The endothelium is a lining of blood vessels.

It regulates blood flow throughout the body.

It knows that a particular muscle group

or organ needs more blood flow, and it dilates, it opens up.

When the endothelium is impaired, it cannot open up.

It cannot allow blood flow to increase as much.

And therefore, impairs athletic performance.

The test subjects were three football players

from the Miami Dolphins.

Defensive back, Michael Thomas.

And wide receivers, Griff Whalen,

- and Kenny Stills. - Caught for the touchdown!

Kenny Stills!

Today, we're going to be feeding them

three burrito breakfasts with a lot of protein.

Two of them have sources of animal-based protein and fat.

One is from beef, one is from chicken.

The third is a plant-based burrito

which has beans in it,

so the protein and the fat came from a plant based source.

Tomorrow, we're gonna feed them all bean burritos.

We're looking at the impact of eating a different meal

- on the same people. - All right. Here's the beef.

- Thank you. - Chicken here.

- And the plant based one here. - Thank you.

Griff has been plant based for four years,

so he got bean burritos on both days.

On away games, we always eat fried chicken, we eat Popeye's.

I love fried chicken and I love Popeye's.

And I'm gonna eat Popeye's every time.

Two hours after each meal,

the players had their blood drawn

and put into a centrifuge.

The red blood cells sink to the bottom.

An amber colored fluid called plasma, rises to the top.

If the plasma is see-through,

it means there's not much fat in the blood

and the endothelium is likely functioning well.

Michael.

Today's blood, and yesterday's blood.

This is a plant burrito. This is a meat burrito.

Look at the difference it makes in what circulates

in your bloodstream.

- Cloudy. - Cloudy.

And that on top is the fat circulating

in your blood from the meat burrito.

- Gotcha. - Griff, you're the vegan.

Here's your blood from today and your blood from yesterday.

- Nice and clear, both of them. - So the fat from the avocado

doesn't have that kind of effect?

That's right. Kenny.

You're the fried chicken guy.

You wanna see your chicken? There it is.

Yeah, it's pretty gross to see.

Sources of animal-based protein

and fat have a tremendous impact on endothelial function

that lasts for six or seven hours after you eat.

So if you have bacon and eggs for breakfast,

a hamburger for lunch and a steak for dinner,

this is going on all day long. Your blood is always cloudy.

And the ability to operate at your best is always impaired.

Damn.

I guess I won't be eating my fried chicken no more.

Dr. Vogel's experiment

was backed up by numerous studies

measuring how a single animal-based meal

can impair blood flow.

I also found a large body of research

showing that plants have the opposite effect,

improving endothelial function and increasing blood flow.

Controlled studies show that simply drinking beet juice

before training allows subjects to cycle 22 percent longer,

and bench press 19 percent more total weight.

I've seen races where it has come down

to the one thousandth of a second.

Sometimes, you have to do things that you know your competitors

aren't doing.

Getting every single advantage you can.

Knowing I could get enough energy and protein

was one thing, but seeing what a single animal-based meal

could do to an athlete's blood sealed the deal.

It was time to give this plant-based thing a try.

But there was only one meal I could think of.

Could I get two bean burritos, please?

Bean.

Thank you.

When I went plant-based,

I thought that it would be a longer transition,

but I just immediately started feeling

like I could go kick ass

and not need the recovery in between.

It... it was mind blowing to my teammates.

They were tired of me saying,

like, "Let's go again and again."

Recovery is the most essential element

of an elite athlete's existence.

It's damage, repair, damage, repair

and you do that over and over again.

Because if you can do more work and more repair,

you're gonna be the better athlete.

Dotsie was right.

Bouncing back quickly between workouts

is a huge advantage for any athlete.

But the idea that food could be the secret weapon,

I had to find out more.

Dr. Scott Stoll is a former Olympian

and a team physician for the USA Olympic Team.

I work with professional athletes

that are very interested in protein.

Protein's important,

but which package is your protein coming in,

is the better question to answer.

The plant based protein versus the animal protein,

which package is going to help the body overcome inflammation

and help the body to recover.

In animal products,

you're getting protein packaged with inflammatory molecules

like Neu5Gc, endotoxins and heme iron.

When we consume animal products, it also changes the microbiome,

the bacteria that live in our gut.

And the bacterial species

that have been shown to promote inflammation overgrow

and begin to produce inflammatory mediators

like TMAO.

The study that showed that a single hamburger

impairs blood flow also showed

that it can increase measures of inflammation by 70 percent.

In the arteries, inflammation reduces blood flow.

In muscles and joints, it can increase soreness

and delay recovery.

In plant-based protein, you're getting protein

that's packaged with antioxidants,

phytochemicals, minerals, and vitamins

that are gonna reduce inflammation,

optimize the microbiome, optimize blood supply,

and optimize your body's performance.

The antioxidants Dr. Stoll was talking about

are found almost entirely in plants,

which have, on average, 64 times

the antioxidant content of animal foods.

Even iceberg lettuce has more antioxidants

than salmon or eggs.

As a result, switching to a plant-based diet

can help reduce measures of inflammation

by 29 percent in just three weeks.

I was about ready to retire, as I should've been,

because I'm like 35 at that time.

But I just kept getting better,

and so... ...they had to take me to the Olympics.

We were complete underdogs as Team USA.

In our semi-final ride against Australia,

we were down by 1.7 seconds.

No one's ever come back in team pursuit

from a deficit that large.

And we beat them on the line

by eight one-hundredths of a second.

I was 39 and a half years old

when I stood on the Olympic podium.

I'm still the oldest person, male or female,

to even go to the Olympic Games in my event.

My diet was the most powerful aspect

to me being able to perform and produce for the US team

at the Olympic Games.

All of these athletes and their stories

were impressive, but my goal from the beginning,

was to recover from actual injuries,

like the damage I'd done to my knees.

And he's down at the line of scrimmage,

in the arms of Derrick Morgan.

Derrick Morgan had been on a similar journey.

In the NFL, the injury rate is a 100 percent.

It's a violent game.

He's hit hard and goes down there.

And so, how you respond to injury

and how quickly you heal from injury

is important because if you're not on the field,

you're not helping the team. I was reading the research

and seeing that a plant-based diet

could be beneficial, specifically for recovery.

And so I started incorporating it

and I started seeing really good results with it.

I was recovering better. I wasn't getting as sore.

I was a lot less swollen.

Basically, to confirm what I was feeling,

I got my blood tested.

Six months after being on the diet,

all of my markers were down,

my blood pressure, my cholesterol.

But the main thing I was looking at

was the inflammation marker in your blood and mine was...

almost obsolete. It wasn't there anymore.

A whole food, plant-based diet

is gonna optimize the growth of blood vessels

into damaged tissue,

it's gonna lay down new tissue in tendons and muscles,

it's gonna stimulate their immune system

to fight off infections. So almost at every level,

eating the right foods

is going to accelerate the healing process.

Six weeks into my personal

plant based experiment,

I went to the gym to see if I could notice a difference.

I wasn't able to spar or wrestle yet,

so I decided to hit the battling ropes.

At my gym, lasting ten minutes on the ropes,

gets your name on the wall.

Only a few people had ever hit 20 minutes.

Even at the peak of my conditioning,

the most I'd ever got was eight minutes.

- James, keep it going. - But on this day,

I hit ten minutes easily.

Then I hit 20...

- thirty. - You're at 45 minutes.

I thought, "Holy shit, I'm gonna do an hour."

I went past the hour mark

by about one minute and just thought,

"All right, that'll do."

I can't believe you just did that, man.

The only thing that had changed was my diet.

I could have kept going.

That's way over the record right?

Yeah. A freaking hour.

When I was growing up

the toughest guy in the world to me was my dad.

He taught me the value of self-defense,

and was always there to help me when I got into trouble.

But now, he was the one who needed help.

- You had a heart attack? - Correct.

Had you had much in the way of symptoms prior

- to this episode? - No, never before, the first...

After my dad got out of the hospital

following emergency heart surgery,

we got on a Skype call with Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn,

an internationally renowned heart disease researcher

from the Cleveland Clinic.

...uh, always been, I think, very fit.

So somewhat of a surprise.

Well, no, not a surprise.

In all of western civilization, there is nothing more common

than coronary artery heart disease,

and that is because of the foods that most people eat every day.

Do you happen to recall

into which of your arteries that they placed the stent?

Was it into the left anterior descending

- or the right coronary... - After seeing how much

a single animal-based meal

can affect healthy young athletes,

I couldn't help but wonder what a lifetime of these foods

might have done to my father's heart.

In all of our studies, we found the same thing...

these same biological mechanisms

that affect performance also affect our health.

Chronic inflammation, oxidative stress

- and endothelial function. - When you eat animal products,

you start to form plaques in the coronary arteries.

Plaque formation in the arteries

doesn't just limit the function of the arteries,

it can also block the blood flow,

and that's when the heart starts to have some real problems

keeping up with the demands of the body.

In terms of heart disease, oftentimes there is confusion.

People think that "Well,

I don't eat red meat, so I'm okay."

We know that it's more complicated than that.

It's not just red meat. It's not just the fat.

For nearly 50 years, we were told

that the primary cause of heart disease

was saturated fat and cholesterol,

and that leaner meats, lower fat dairy products,

and egg whites were the solution.

But the research now shows

that the other inflammatory compounds in animal foods,

like those that can impair athletic recovery,

also play a significant role

in the development of heart disease.

We're going to do a whole lot better

by just getting rid of the animal products

and there are really good biochemical reasons for that.

Heme iron is one of them, for example.

Heme iron is from an animal source, right?

So, uh, most commonly you think red meat,

even though poultry have it, fish has it.

They did a meta-analysis

looking over six prospective dietary studies

over a 130,000 patients

and they came to the conclusion that one milligram a day

of heme iron is associated with a 27 percent increase

in risk of coronary heart disease.

To put that in perspective, an average hamburger patty...

has about two to three milligrams.

And it isn't just the iron in animal foods

that can cause problems.

It's actually the animal protein itself.

It's not just red meat,

not just chicken, not just eggs, not just milk.

It's the ingestion of any animal protein.

At that moment in time, a process begins

at a chemical level inside the body.

When the protein found in animal foods is cooked,

preserved, or even just digested by our gut bacteria,

highly inflammatory compounds are formed

that corrode our cardiovascular system.

This helps explain why people who get all of their protein

from plants reduce their risk of heart disease by 55 percent.

It would also help explain

why the only diet that has ever been shown

to actually reverse heart disease

is a plant-based one.

What we found is that in the first month,

there was improvement in blood flow

and the heart began to pump blood more normally.

After a year, even severely clogged

coronary arteries became measurably less clogged,

and even more improvement after five years.

But in the randomized control group, who were doing

just what their doctors told them to do at the time,

you know, less red meat, more fish and chicken,

little exercise and so on,

their arteries got more clogged after one year

and even more clogged after five years.

d Humpty Dumpty sat On the wall... d

While all of this sounded promising,

my dad didn't just need to get better,

he needed to get better fast.

The stents in his heart were only a temporary solution.

He could have another heart attack

at any moment.

I found some hope at a firehouse in Brooklyn,

where Dr. Esselstyn's son, Rip,

a former firefighter and professional triathlete

was launching some of New York's bravest

on a powerful new program.

What's the number one killer of firefighters

in the line of duty?

Heart attacks.

Sixty-seven percent of firefighters

who perish in the line of duty die of heart attacks.

So this, right here, that is what we call

a healthy artery.

The blood can flow through this huge opening here.

And this is what happens

after decades on the meat and dairy diet.

Okay.

If you guys have been eating this way,

I want you to take the seven-day rescue challenge.

We bought you guys plant-based groceries.

I want you to give yourselves the chance to see

what your internal biochemistry does in just seven days.

I know that my cholesterol is elevated.

My LDL's are always very high.

The same job that I was doing like ten years ago

- without an effort... - Yeah.

- ...is now taking an effort. - Despite working out all week,

playing sports, my cholesterol is high

and growing by about ten, fifteen points

every year for the last five or six years.

I realized a couple salads a week,

- it doesn't really cut it. - I got two kids, you know, so...

hopefully I'll feel better, have more energy and...

add some years to my life.

I went to see if I could get my dad

to make these same changes to his diet

as soon as possible.

Well, what are you suggesting?

- Well, let's do the shopping. - Tomatoes...

...cucumber,

we have hummus dips, blueberries, raspberries...

But my dad can be a little stubborn.

...soya yogurt and that's about it, I think.

So I wasn't feeling that hopeful.

We'll just drink tea.

I come from a town called Melton Mowbray,

known in England as the "Rural Capital of Food".

It's the home of Stilton cheese and the world famous

Melton Mowbray pork pie.

The pace of change here is very slow.

Tick 20, tick 22, tick 25...

And my dad, like most of us,

is a product of where he grew up.

I just couldn't imagine

someone as set in his ways as my father

making such a big switch...

On the top there, that's worth another 20 quid.

Give us 50 quid, the lot.

...until I got home and went back to the gym.

You push me? Go here.

I've spent years working out with Lucious Smith.

He was a cornerback in the NFL, has a black belt in jujitsu...

and was my strength and conditioning coach.

That's it, that's it, that's it. More arms. More arms.

I told Lou about the research

I'd been doing and what happened to my dad,

and he'd never mentioned this before and he said,

"I've been on a plant-based diet

- for almost ten years." - Okay, rotate.

Lou is 60-years-old, not far off my father's age.

Most guys my age

can't keep up with their grandchildren.

My grandchildren can't keep up with me.

When I went from an animal-based diet

to a plant-based diet, my blood pressure went down

to, like, 110 over 70.

My heart rate sometimes has been under 50, like, 48, 47.

I'm more focused, I'm more relaxed

and I notice that I have a lot more energy

because of the plant-based diet.

Come on, come on! Oh, man, come on, come on, come on!

People in their 20s, they come in here,

we do a workout,

I sustain the workout a lot easier than they do.

We can come in here and do 800, listen to what I just said.

Eight hundred kettlebell swings and snatches in one workout.

They can't make it!

I'm not kidding you.

They can't hang, man, I'm telling you.

They can't hang.

There was another guy my dad's age,

who had also made a big change.

I ate a lot of meat.

I ate my ten, 15 eggs a day

and, you know, I had my 250 grams of protein a day,

because I weighed 250 pounds.

The one and only Arnold Schwarzenegger!

But as I got older and as I started

reading up on it, I recognized the fact

that you really don't have to get your protein from meat

or from animals, as far as that goes.

So we started going more in a direction of the vegetarian

kind of a diet.

Now with doing it the right way,

with the right spices, all of a sudden,

I love it much more than the meat.

And, you know, the cholesterol went down

to around 109. It was the lowest

that it ever was in my entire life.

At almost 69.

What we eat has a major impact on our health and our well being

in every way we can measure.

People who eat a diet that's high in animal protein

have a 75 percent increased risk

of premature death from all causes,

and a four to five hundred percent

increased risk of death from most forms of cancer,

prostate, breast, colon cancer, as well as type two diabetes.

The amino acids that come from animal sources

tend to make our cells rev up and multiply faster.

For example, there is accumulating evidence

that high consumption of proteins from dairy sources

is related to a higher risk of prostate cancer.

That chain of cancer causation actually seems pretty clear.

Cancer has been linked to other animal foods as well.

Research funded by The National Cancer Institute

found that vegetarians who add one or more servings

per week of white meat, like chicken or fish

more than triple their risk of colon cancer.

So it's not one set of dietary guidelines

for improving your performance as an athlete,

another one for reversing heart disease,

a different one for reversing diabetes,

a different one for reversing prostate cancer.

It's the same for all of them.

As groundbreaking as al of this nutritional science was,

I also found it really confusing.

How could meat be so bad for us

if that's what our ancestors were supposedly built to eat?

When we think about the diet of early humans,

we're often drawn to thinking about meat,

but plant foods were more important

than the archaeological record gives credit for.

The food that could be relied on wherever you were

was the plant food.

The popular perception of what early humans ate

dates back to the 1930's to 1940's,

when there was some amazing finds

of early human ancestors, animal bones and tools

that very much looked like they may have been used

to butcher and maim those animals.

So very early on, we had this notion

that meat had a disproportionately larger role

in the diet of early human ancestors

than it actually did.

The bias in the archeological record

towards stone and bone preservation

over things like plants has led to a very skewed view.

If we look at deep time,

bones and stone tools preserve very well,

but plants decay very rapidly.

What's exciting though, is in the last decade

we've started to realize

microscopic fossils of plants do preserve quite well

and so we're revisiting

some of these earlier Paleolithic sites

and finding abundant evidence of plants.

Advanced technologies

like those used to analyze the gladiator bones,

have allowed scientists to take a closer look

at the tools, bones and teeth of our ancestors,

leading to the discovery that early humans

ate mostly plants.

And the reason for this is actually quite simple.

Humans do not have any specialized genetic,

anatomical, or physiological adaptations

to meat consumption. By contrast,

we have many adaptations to plant consumption.

We have longer digestive tracts than do carnivores,

and this allows humans to digest plants and fibers

that require longer processing time.

We also lack the ability to produce our own vitamin C.

Vitamin C is found in plants,

so the fact that we cannot make our own,

indicates just how reliant upon plants we actually are.

This is why we have trichromatic vision.

This is very different from carnivores,

which have dichromatic vision.

We can see more colors and this is very important,

especially if you need to find fresh, ripe fruit.

We have a brain that just is desperate for glucose.

Is a... I mean, it's such a fussy organ.

That's the only thing it really takes in for energy.

Well, meat's not a very good source

of glucose.

To have a big brain like this,

you need to eat something different,

and the most efficient way to get glucose

is to eat carbohydrates.

But what about our teeth?

Aren't they proof that we're built to eat meat?

In primates,

you might think canine teeth are associated

with a diet of meat, but they're not.

In gorillas, when males want to intimidate other males,

they will show the length of their formidable canines.

On the other hand, carnivores have distinctive teeth

and they're shaped like scissor blades.

They simply shred the meat off and they swallow.

Compare that to the teeth of a human being,

square and low-cusped,

for crushing and grinding tough plant tissues.

Right there in your own mouth is the best evidence we have

for a diet that could not have been meat.

If you just got placed in some ancestral environment,

the best thing you could be equipped with

is not a very sharp spear.

The most important thing you could be equipped with

is knowledge of which plants you can eat.

Suddenly, it all made sense.

The reason an animal based diet isn't good for us

is because our bodies aren't built for it.

It's simply the wrong type of fuel.

The only thing that really didn't fit was B12,

an important vitamin that everyone kept warning me

you could only get from animal foods.

It turns out that B12 isn't made by animals after all.

It's made by bacteria

that these animals consume in the soil and water.

Just like with protein, animals are only the middlemen.

Before industrial farming,

farm animals and humans could get B12

by eating traces of dirt on plant foods

or by drinking water from rivers or streams.

But now, because pesticides, antibiotics and chlorine

kill the bacteria that produce this vitamin,

even farm animals have to be given B12 supplements.

And up to 39 percent of people tested,

including meat eaters, are low in B12.

As a result, the best way for humans to get enough B12,

whether they eat animal foods or not,

is simply to take a supplement.

When I caught up with Scott a full month

into his 2200 mile trek,

he had fallen well behind record pace.

Not even a week into the journey,

I'd developed a quadricep tear.

I had to start thinking, "Okay, how am I going

to get through this?"

There are no rest days when you're setting

a speed record on the Appalachian Trail.

Let's do this!

I needed to recover

while I was still pushing my body to the brink,

waking up the next day, and the next day after that

and doing the same thing.

I really had to trust in my training

and trust in my nutrition to help me get up each morning

at 4:30 and put another 50 miles in.

With only 12 days left to break the record,

Scott still had 550 miles left to go.

They were experiencing record rainfall in Vermont

when I went through. And there was just no way

that I could be prepared for it.

I was trying to make up all the ground

that I had lost with the injury.

Trying to get back on record pace,

getting two to three hours of sleep, or less,

night after night, after night.

Going over some of the most remote stretches,

I put in 26 hours straight.

But the Appalachian Trail keeps throwing

more and more mountains at you, it never really lets up.

And by the time I actually got to New Hampshire,

the White Mountains just... obliterated me.

With less than two weeks remaining,

Patrik continued training for his world record attempt,

to carry more weight than anyone in history.

I started lifting weights

when I was 14 years old,

because I was kind of wimpy

and small... ...in that time.

And I wanted to be some kind of hero,

able to help if something happened.

This is my mom and dad.

When I was four years old,

my dad, my mom and my little sister,

she was six months old, they were in a car accident.

And...

only my mom survived the accident.

So when I was young, I had these fantasies

of, uh, being super-strong, and if someone got trapped,

being able to help them get out.

For any guy watching that day,

it wasn't just a car Patrik had crushed.

It was a myth they'd been fed their entire lives.

Steak. That's what a man eats.

Made from stuff guys need.

Eat like a man, man.

There is no one that can relate to that better than I do

because I've lived in that world.

Steak... is for men.

- Go meat! - Go meat!

They show these commercials, burgers,

- George Foreman with the grill. - Yeah!

And the big sandwiches and all that stuff.

Eat like a man and be full like a man.

This is great, great marketing by the meat industry.

Serious man food.

Selling that idea that real men eat meat.

You'll look like more of a man

with a quarter pounder in your hand.

But you've got to understand, that's marketing.

That's not based on reality.

Okay, I'm gonna take you down to the exam room.

When I think of a manly man, I think of somebody

who has strength, endurance,

sexual prowess and fertility. In fact,

what the scientific studies are showing

is that the more meat men eat,

the more quickly they lose their manly manhood.

The blood test with the Miami Dolphins

measured how a single meal could affect blood flow

throughout the entire body. I asked Dr. Spitz

if he could conduct an experiment

with three collegiate athletes, but this time,

on a more specific part of the male anatomy.

So...

...here's a model of the penis.

Dr. Spitz is the lead delegate of urology

for the American Medical Association.

When it comes to the penis, he literally wrote the book.

Now, you're gonna be putting this device on yourself.

One ring goes on the base of the penis,

and the other ring goes on at the tip of the penis,

just behind the head of the penis.

It knows how tight to squeeze to know

when an erection's starting, because when it squeezes

it'll determine, "Oh, it's now of a larger circumference.

Something's happening."

What we're going to look at is what effect

the meal you have has on your erections that night

and you're gonna be eating two different kinds of meals.

For this study, on the first night,

we gave the guys burritos that had meat.

Beef, chicken, pork.

But really high quality meats, grass-fed, organic.

On the second night,

we gave them very similar burritos

but we swapped out the animal portions

- for a plant-based protein. - This is really good.

I thought this was gonna be nasty,

I'm not gonna lie.

I didn't think we were gonna eat a burrito.

I thought we were gonna get a salad.

This study is gonna take advantage

of a natural function

that occurs in men when they sleep.

Men's bodies create erections, and this occurs

throughout the night while the subject is asleep.

And once an erection happens, this device can sense it

and a printout is generated of how firm the erection was,

how long it lasted and how many of them there were,

to see if we can see a physical effect

on erections as a result

of what they just ate for dinner.

This is where we take a look at the results.

So, Mason, I'm gonna give you your results first.

- Cool. - Let you take those out.

- All right. - Okay?

The bigger the circumference, the harder the erection,

and so you'll notice

that that first circle, which is the... the meat meal...

- Mm-hmm. - ...is not as big

a circle is not as hard an erection,

as that second circle, the vegan meal.

Now, let's look at the second sheet.

- The second sheet is a... a... - Oh, my God.

...accumulation of how many erections

and for how long you had over the course of the night.

So that first stubby graph...

...is really... It's not the size

- of your penis. - I'm so dead. I'm struggling.

It's not the size of your penis, it's how...

how many minutes throughout the night

- you had erections. - Wow.

Blake, let's take a look at your results.

- Oh, no. - Okay.

Hold composure. I'm ready.

- And, look, again... - Yup.

...like Mason, uh, you were more erect

after the plant-based diet than the meat-based diet.

Okay, how about how often you had erections.

- Oh-oh. - Wow!

That's almost a 500 percent difference.

Dang, man. That's crazy.

Blake, are you ready for yours?

- Give me the dossier. - All right, here you go.

You had about a 13 percent change

in the hardness of your erections.

Okay, let's look at...

how many or how long you had erections for.

Bro. Oh, fuck!

- Show it, dang it! - Yeah.

Don't hold out. Oh!

Bro, that's an hour, bro.

So you guys all had a very similar response

to the meat meal

- versus the plant meal. - That's crazy.

Yeah, like, growing up, if I saw some big dude at a restaurant

eating a big old steak and it's all, like, "Oh, I...

I need to be like that." And then, like, I see,

like, a guy ordering a salad off the menu, I'm, like...

- He's soft, right? - Yeah, I'm like, "Oh, that guy.

- what's he doing?" - Yeah, he's soft.

But really at the end of night,

I think the guy eating the big steak is soft,

and then the other guy is hard.

So, when you take your date out on Valentine's Day,

where are you gonna take them to eat?

- To the Veggie Grill, son. - Okay,

- the Veggie Grill. - Yeah, I was just thinking about that.

Now, this is not a scientifically

validated study,

but the results that we're seeing

are very exciting.

I think this is going to wake a lot of people up.

I think it's gonna wake up people who have penises,

and I think it's gonna wake up people who like people

who have penises.

While all this talk about erections was interesting,

it also made me wonder about hormones.

Specifically, testosterone.

I've never eaten a piece of meat in my entire life,

and I've never had an issue with testosterone.

I've gotten blood tests and all my levels

are right where they need to be.

And clearly, I don't have any trouble building muscle.

Studies comparing men who eat animal foods,

with men who don't, have consistently demonstrated

no difference in testosterone levels.

I found this hard to believe,

since plant-based diets often include soy products,

which I'd always been told were loaded with estrogen.

I post a lot of my food

and if it includes any type of soy products,

out of a hundred comments,

you've got 20 to 30 of them saying,

"Hey, well, I heard that soy raises estrogen levels."

Well, that's not the case.

Soy, it turns out, contains phytoestrogens.

Compounds that look like estrogens

but can actually have the opposite effect,

blocking some of our bodies' estrogen receptors

and preventing real dietary sources of estrogen

from taking hold.

The foods that contain real estrogens

are animal foods, like chicken, eggs, and dairy,

which can have a significant impact

on our hormone levels.

Simply drinking cow's milk

can increase a man's estrogen levels

by 26 percent in just one hour,

while dropping their testosterone levels

by 18 percent.

Another hormone strongly connected to diet

is cortisol, a stress hormone linked to reduced muscle mass

and increased body fat.

Research has shown that people who replace animal foods

with high carbohydrate plant foods

experience an average drop in cortisol levels

of 27 percent.

This is what I always heard, like,

you can't go lean, you can't go shredded, vegan.

Because you have so much carbs.

But I'm standing here in the best shape of my life.

Easy.

I already knew that processed carbs

like white flour and sugar can lead to weight gain,

but what I didn't realize is

that unprocessed carbohydrates like oats,

bananas and sweet potatoes

are associated with decreased body fat.

An eight-week weight-training trial also found

that those consuming a normal amount of carbs

gained 2.9 pounds of muscle mass,

while those in the low-carb group

actually lost muscle.

A typical bodybuilding diet

is a very low carb diet,

so these guys that haven't had a carb in two weeks,

they're walking around like zombies.

I'm backstage eating all the carbs that I want.

They're like, "How are you

eating that right now and you look this shredded?"

Back in Nashville,

Derrick introduced me to his wife Charity,

a professional chef

who had helped inspire a big transformation.

- Hey... - Nice to meet you.

When I started cooking plant-based,

whatever I made for dinner, I made a bunch of it

and would send it over

to the facility for Derrick to eat for lunch.

Because I knew he had no options other than a side salad.

You've seen Derrick. Do you think a side salad

is gonna fill him up?

Yeah, I love to eat.

In the beginning I was like, I gotta psych myself out

to say I don't care about flavor anymore.

It wasn't really a sacrifice.

She was still cooking, you know,

mac and cheese and chicken wings.

Just plant based.

It's taking that love that you have for food

and just changing it over to better ingredients.

And so I brought it into the cafeteria

and I had teammates coming up to me.

Guys were taking jabs and cracking their jokes.

At the end of the day,

the reason why I was doing it was to become a better player,

which inevitably is gonna help the team.

Players started looking over, like, "Okay, that smells good."

They were like, "Whatever you send Derrick, send me."

And I was like, "All right, good."

It started with five guys,

and now, middle of season, 13 players.

I never intended this to be a business at all.

But the last 15 years, we haven't been to the playoffs.

So I'm gonna do anything that I could do

- to help this team. - There she go. How you doing?

How you doing? Hopefully you're hungry.

Oh, definitely.

Sundays are good.

After the game, me and... and the guys

are always looking forward to meal time.

- How you doing? - Hey, how you doing?

- You come with an empty stomach? - Yeah.

There's some good times in this kitchen.

These are plant based burgers.

Grill up, smell, and taste like beef.

And I'm making truffle mac and cheese,

buffalo wings,

kale caesar salad,

crispy Brussels sprouts with a smoked sauce reduction,

and we'll finish off with a peanut butter cheesecake.

- Mm. - Mm.

- Oh, yeah... - Yeah.

- Thank you, babe. - Thank you.

So you guys have all eaten Charity's meal plan

- that she's done? - Mm-hmm.

And before what was your perception?

Well, I actually talked bad about y'all

for like, a couple weeks.

Did you think you needed meat to be like, strong and athletic?

Right, that's exactly what I thought.

I told him, I feel like, my whole childhood life

was a lie.

I definitely thought I was gonna miss it.

And honestly, I haven't even thought about it again.

I feel more energized,

feel stronger. It was pretty dope.

And what about the taste?

- It tastes really good. - The meals

were always looking good, and I found myself sitting

in the locker staring at what they eating.

So, you know, I tried it

and honestly, I mean, I felt a difference.

And, you know, I was just able to just perform consistently.

Yeah, you caught your first touchdown after you switched over, right?

Yeah.

Six months into my new diet,

my strength, endurance and recovery

were better than ever.

My dad's health was on the mend.

Even my wife and kids were on board.

But I was also pissed off.

Why didn't everyone know about this?

And then, I remembered my grandfather,

who died of heart failure at the age of 63

after more than four decades of smoking.

A paratrooper in World War II, he got hooked on cigarettes

during a time when young people like him

were being sold the idea

that smoking was actually good for you.

Babe Ruth, idol of millions...

To sell this idea,

the tobacco industry turned to famous athletes,

the ultimate symbols of fitness and health.

After a game, Carl Furillo of the Dodgers,

looks for a mild cigarette. A Camel, of course.

But right around the time

Babe Ruth died from throat cancer

in his early 50's,

the scientific evidence was starting stack up,

so, a new marketing plan was required.

According to this nationwide survey,

more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.

For years, the tobacco industry said

that their cigarettes did not cause cancer.

And they trotted out their own paid researchers

to come out with statements to confuse the issue.

- Despite their efforts... - Brought to you

- by Marlboro... - ...cigarette ads

were eventually banned from sports broadcasting.

Just in time for another big industry

to step up to the plate and start playing the same game.

- What's in the bag? - Big Mac.

Play you for it.

With a new generation of athletes.

Including me.

But it wasn't long before the evidence

against animal foods started stacking up as well.

Now, that playbook is being used by the food industry.

She's from the National Cattlemen's

Beef Association.

They're gonna hire their so-called experts...

Well, I'm first of all, a registered dietitian

and nutrition scientist and I'm a mom.

...to create just enough confusion.

Are you saying with processed meat

that it is not, in your view, carcinogenic?

I don't say that it supports a sufficient relationship.

And they make it seem

as though there's doubt about what we're talking about.

This is not a link, a causal link

between red and processed meat and any type of cancer.

But would you recommend reducing meat intake?

- No, not at all. - How on earth is the viewer

supposed to make sense of all of this?

With overwhelming scientific evidence

connecting animal foods

to many of the most common deadly disease

I discovered that the meat, dairy and egg industries

have engaged in a covert response,

funding studies that deny this evidence

while burying their involvement in the fine print.

One of the hired guns paid to conduct these studies

is Exponent Incorporated,

a company whose research was used by the tobacco industry

to deny the connection between secondhand smoke

and cancer.

For more than 50 years, Exponent has generated studies

that challenge the health risks of everything from asbestos,

arsenic, and mercury, to animal foods.

The formula works beautifully for people selling food.

It works beautifully for people selling drugs

to treat the diseases that bad food causes.

And, it works beautifully for the media,

which can give us a new story about diet every day.

Here we go again.

New guidelines are muddled and confusing

and not by accident.

- Eggs are in. - So happy about the eggs.

I know, I'm happy about the eggs.

- Eating bacon is okay. - Absolutely!

- Okay. Butter? - Butter. Butter is back.

But despite the appearance in our media

of confusion,

there is massive global consensus

about the fundamentals of a health promoting diet

and it's a diet that every time,

no matter whether it's high in fat or low in fat,

higher in carbs, lower in carbs,

in every population, every kind of research,

it's a plant food predominant diet, every time.

Just when I thought I'd uncovered every dark secret

of the animal foods industry,

I got invited to train a paramilitary group in Zimbabwe

with a special mission.

Yeah, so just be very careful, guys. Stay on the...

stay on the rocks.

Yeah.

So these guys are now listed

as critically endangered.

There's only about 5,000 of them left on the planet.

They've basically been hunted to extinction

because of the value of their horn.

Around 40,000 dollars a pound.

Damien Mander is a retired

Special Operations sniper

who completed 12 tours of duty in Iraq.

He's also the founder

of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation.

The poacher will maybe have an ax or a knife,

- so we're trying to disarm them. - Yeah, yeah.

So he's gonna thrust with the knife.

Here.

We are the SEAL Team Six of conservation.

We're the guys that go in and stop the hemorrhaging.

- Okay? - Yeah. I'll stick to my AK-47...

- Yeah. - ...you stick to that.

I lived every young boys' dream, jumping out of choppers,

blowing shit up. Stuff that most kids, uh,

can only dream of doing on a PlayStation.

I came to Africa because I was looking

for the next six month adventure.

I saw a bull elephant that had had its face cut off,

tusks that had been taken.

The whole elephant sitting there dead

because some guy wants to have a tusk on his desk.

What sort of ambush is this called?

- Linear. - Linear ambush. Very...

I had money and I had skills that could help these rangers.

...using the minimum amount

of force required to get the job done.

And I made the choice to dedicate my life...

to helping these guys protect these animals.

After making that choice, though, I started to realize

that every day, I was going out on patrol

and protecting one animal, and coming home at night

and putting another animal on the fire.

And I knew I was...

I knew I was full of shit.

I created this flexible morality

that was convenient for me, because if you don't eat meat,

you're some sort of vegan that shrivels up

into a string bean.

In my mind I justified it, there's enough cows

on the planet. They're not gonna go extinct.

But the longer I thought about it,

the more I started to accept what I already knew.

The easiest way to protect other animals

is just not to put them in your mouth.

This whole fantasy that we need meat

to get our protein, it's actually bullshit.

I mean, look at a gorilla.

A gorilla will fuck you up in two seconds.

What does a gorilla eat?

I just do the same things

as these big gray things out here

that we're trying to protect, elephant and rhino.

I just, uh, stick to plants.

The rangers that we support

patrol five million acres of wilderness

protecting these endangered species.

But the actual biggest threat we have is the meat industry,

and the land that they are continually taking away

from what we have left of these natural...

wilderness areas.

Inch by inch, yard by yard, mile by mile.

About three-quarters of all the agricultural land

in the world, is used for livestock production,

and it imposes a huge cost on biodiversity.

And what is the single biggest source

of habitat destruction?

It's the livestock sector.

Meat, dairy, egg and fish farming

use 83 percent of the world's farmland,

yet provide only 18 percent of the world's calories.

The reason livestock require so much land is because,

once again, animals are just the middlemen,

consuming on average,

six times more protein than they produce.

With more than 70 billion animals

consumed globally each year,

growing animal feed requires vast amounts of land,

making it one of the leading drivers

of deforestation.

It also requires huge amounts of water.

Meat plays a disproportionately large role

in causing this overuse of freshwater.

Twenty-five percent of the rivers in the world

no longer reach the ocean, because we're taking out

so much water to produce animal feed.

Water has been fed into the grain

that's been fed to the cattle.

The cattle's been made into beef.

One hamburger is 2400 liters of embedded water.

That's a heck of a lot of water.

All told, more than a quarter

of humanity's fresh water consumption goes

to produce animal foods.

And it's not just water depletion that's an issue,

it's also water pollution.

In the United States, for example,

farm animals produce nearly 50 times more waste per year

than its entire human population,

polluting rivers, lakes and groundwater

all across the country.

The livestock sector is responsible

for 15 percent of global man-made emissions.

So to put that in perspective,

that's about the same as all the emissions

from all the forms of transport in the world, all the planes,

trains, cars, vans, and ships all added up.

Agriculture is not only the biggest culprit

threatening the future for humanity on earth,

it is also the biggest

and most important silver bullet to a solution.

In the US, where meat consumption

is three times the global average,

shifting away from an animal-based diet

would reduce agricultural emissions

by up to 73 percent

and save one million liters of water per person, per year.

Globally, this shift would free up a total area

of land the size of Africa,

taking pressure off many of the world's

most endangered ecosystems and species.

The message is overwhelming, both for public health

and environmental reasons. The more plants you can eat

and the less meat and dairy you can consume, the better.

After learning how much is at stake

if we don't change the way we eat,

I went back to Brooklyn to find some hope.

- How are you doing with the weight? - It's good.

It's good.

- One-thirty over 80. - Yeah, see?

Did you do it right

- the whole seven days? - Yeah, the entire time.

- You did? Good for you. - Yeah.

After eating a meal, I didn't feel like,

"Oh, I gotta go find a couch to sit on or lay down."

- Like, that I actually felt energized... - Right. Right.

...and I could jump on the bicycle

or go on the treadmill

- or something. - Or fight a fire.

She said it was down 11.

- Eleven pounds? - Yeah.

Your cholesterol was 262.

- Right. - All right? Which is elevated,

- much higher than we wanna be. - Right. Mm-hmm.

- Today? A 176. - Wow! Almost a 100 points, huh?

- That's fantastic! - Yeah.

- Thank you. - On your blood pressure,

you dropped 16.

- Wow. That's really good. - On your systolic,

and two on your diastolic, so you're now 130 over 82

as opposed to 146 over 84.

- Fantastic. Little bump there. - Yeah!

Your cholesterol was 276.

I mean, you know that that's super-elevated, right?

- Yeah, they were freaking out. - They were freaking out?

- At the doctor's office. - Well, you know what?

They should be freaking out now, because today was 169.

Whoa! Now you're talking!

- One-sixty-nine? - You dropped 107 points, my man.

That's amazing.

Here's what we got.

After seven days, the cholesterol average drop

was 21 points.

The average weight loss was 6.12 pounds.

You guys, instead of having arteries

that looked like this here, right?

You guys are on the road to having arteries

that look like this here.

And we know that the number one killer

of in the line of duty firefighters

is heart attacks. This is a food created disease

and you guys don't have to be another statistic.

My doctor wanted to put me on a statin,

and I kind of looked at it like that was...

like cheating, like an easy way out

and there has to be a healthier, more long term alternative.

And then, when this opportunity presented itself...

I took it.

When you eat a healthy, whole foods,

plant-based diet, it changes the expression of your genes.

It turns on the good genes, turns off the bad genes.

Your genes are a predisposition,

but your genes are not your fate.

And even if your mother and your father

and aunts and uncles all died of diabetes,

cancer, even heart disease,

it doesn't mean that you need to.

Once I get to here, I'm gonna come up,

and I'm gonna drop my head on his face.

With help from my new diet,

I fully recovered from my injuries,

and I'm back to teaching self-defense.

Or I could chop here and start to come here.

But with a critical new component...

internal defense.

You can get improved blood flow. That allows more oxygen,

more nutrients to the muscles. And it's not just the...

Armed with the truth in nutrition,

I now have the tools to help protect more lives

than ever before.

- It's good. Yeah. - Is it?

Anybody else got a fiver now?

Anybody else got a fiver now?

James! Good to see you.

How are you feeling now?

Very good.

The figure that I read, it was 85 percent likelihood

of your first attack...

and that kills you.

That's a high percentage...

which makes me feel...

very blessed.

d Happy birthday Dear pops d

d Happy birthday to you d

Thank you.

We've gone down the vegan route.

And we now have soy milk.

Marsha makes sure I have my vegetables,

insists on it now.

- How old are you? - Seventy-one.

- Seventy-one. - Mm.

- I'm one! - And glad to be here.

What's up, what's good with ya?

Bruce Lee understood that the quest for truth

is only useful

if you're prepared to take action on what you find.

It's best to lead by example.

Most people say, "Oh, I just can't become vegan."

I said, "You're right. It's a process to it."

I'll give you guys some vegan chocolates.

People have this idea in their head

that if they're gonna do something,

it's an all or nothing approach and that's not the case at all.

If you go to people and say, "You must stop eating meat."

They'll say, "Fuck you.

Who the fuck are you to tell me how to eat?"

But if you explain it and say, "Hey, why don't you try

once a week, just chill it with the meat."

Fifty years ago, no one talked about, "Hey,

maybe you should just get your protein from vegetables."

But now, there is many, many athletes,

professional athletes in all kinds

of different sports, that have done extremely well,

staying away from animals foods.

Lewis Hamilton wins the German Grand Prix!

We all wanna feel great.

We all wanna look great, have more energy.

The most important thing is about having the right fuel

in your body.

I can't remember feeling this great

in my whole 32 years of my life.

At the 20, comes back to the 15,

and Matthews goes,

opening play touchdown for the Titans!

And I don't ever remember

a comeback like this. This is unreal!

This was our best season in the last 15 years.

Sacked by Orakpo and Derrick Morgan.

And we had about 14 guys on plant-based diets.

Jurrell Casey. Brian Orakpo!

Bright spot in this game

was this Titans defense.

Oh, my goodness!

Double digit sacks

for Derrick Morgan.

He had his best season of his career.

Titans on their way to the playoffs.

We did it, baby!

And the playoff win on my birthday was, probably,

the pinnacle of my career so far.

Everybody's talked about the defensive line

and this diet.

It was the burritos. It was the breakfast burritos.

That's what it was. That'll get you to the playoffs.

By the time Scott reached Mount Katahdin,

word of his perseverance

was bringing people out in droves.

But after 46 days and nearly 2200 miles,

Scott had only a few hours left to break the record.

This will be the heaviest weight that anyone has ever carried

on their shoulders. Patrik will be attempting 555 kilos,

which is 1,224 pounds.

This is an official Guinness World Record.

The potential of the human body is immense.

You can come out of some of the deepest,

darkest holes if you keep pressing forward.

I'm gonna do this. Whoa!

Here we go!

World record attempt!

Scott Jurek is one of the world's

most accomplished ultra marathoners.

His latest quest, the Appalachian Trail.

It takes most hikers five to seven months.

Jurek did it in 46 days...

...eight hours and seven minutes.

Three hours faster than the previous record.

Yeah!

Vegan power!

Yeah!

I did it!

It's not about being the strongest and the biggest.

It's really about

what are you going to do with your strength,

and what are you going to do with the power that you have.

I basically start my day

with a big, big, big smoothie.

Some greens in it, like, kale or spinach, some beet protein.

Pancakes really at the top

'cause I like breakfast food, anytime.

Like, there's no wrong time to have it.

I love my toast with peanut butter.

Lunch, I would make a veggie burger.

Avocados are really big one for me.

I'm addicted.

A big salad with veggies,

quinoa rice, I call it the trough bowl.

And then at dinner, anything from Japanese to Mexican.

I love Indian food, and also Thai curry.

Really just... I like pizza.

If I'm about to just chow down, like really get it,

- man, a lasagna. - If you like chicken nuggets,

okay, they have vegan nuggets. If you like meatballs,

they got vegan meatballs.

A lot of pizza, pasta and burgers.

Sometimes even at the same time.

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