Question: How does the diet affect somebody with a high calcium score? Does it reverse calcification or stop its progression?

Dr Esselstyn: The calcium score is kind of interesting and important. When you get a calcium score, that tells the physician two things. It tells us that you've got coronary artery disease but it also tells us that you have got a number of non-calcified inflamed plaques. It's the non calcified inflamed plaque -- the more dangerous ones because those are the ones that can rupture. And this is something that I think most physicians don't know but it was something that I was taught years ago by Bill Castelli.

Dr Casselli was for many years the director of the world famous Framingham study. He said if you get somebody who had a high calcium score and they absolutely get it right -- over the next year, they're eating whole food plant-based nutrition, then they have another calcium score and if it was a hundred at baseline that may now be 175 or 200. But he said the patient is much better off because what has happened is during the time that they are eating whole food plant-based nutrition (which is so powerful as an anti-inflammatory ) is that those previously non-calcified inflamed plaque are losing their inflammation. It is as though the body wants to get in on the act and hasten along the quelling of this inflammation by dumping in some calcium in those previously non-calcified plaque. So if your physician says to you, "Mike I know that plant-based diet you're on is making you worse", that's absolutely wrong.