Dr Barnard: "I have to say I did spend the first half of my life eating all the wrong things and, and being kind of clueless may I say about what health really meant.

But for me, really the seeds of understanding things were sown the year before I went to medical school. I was working in the morgue of a Minneapolis hospital. When anyone would die in the hospital, my job was to assist at the autopsy. The pathologist would come in to determine the cause of death and I would weigh things and hold things and clean up afterward and all that stuff.

Because he knew I was going to go to medical school, [the pathologist] would give me quite an elaborate education as we were looking at what had killed these people. One day there was a guy who died of a heart attack in the hospital (and probably from eating hospital food, but that's another story). Anyhow, the pathologist made an incision through the skin and then he pulled off this big section of ribs from the chest and put it on the table. And then he said, "Look at the heart."

He sliced open a coronary artery and explain to me, "These arteries are called coronary because they crown the heart. They're on the surface of the heart, bringing oxygen to the heart muscle." And he sliced one open and he said, "Look inside."

Inside was not a nice wide-open artery. It was filled with plaque. If you put on a glove and you stick your finger on it, it's like concrete, it's hard and he said, "You know, this is bacon and eggs and whatever that causes these problems." So then we looked at the carotid arteries, going up to the brain and they had the same issue there and the arteries, the femoral arteries going to the legs and the renal arteries going to the kidneys; they all had the same disease.

That was an eye-opener. But then, at the end of that particular exam, the pathologist left the room and I had to clean everything up and I put the ribs back in the chest and I sewed up the skin and everything. And when I went up to the cafeteria, they were serving ribs for lunch and it looked like a body I had been working on and the ribs smelled like a body. And I realized, "This is a body you're eating."

I didn't become a vegetarian on the spot, but I just couldn't eat that. And as time went on, that kind of got me thinking more and more about these connections between the foods that we put in our bodies and the effects that they end up having.