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To my parents, Ann and Essy. You made this possible. I love you.

F
orty-two-year-old Nick Gravina was one of the fittest firefighters in the South Metro, Colorado, fire department. He was also a total beast at the Firefighter Combat Challenge, a timed competition that involves climbing a 50-foot tower with five flights of stairs carrying a 42-pound roll of fire hose, descending and slamming a sledgehammer into a 160-pound metal beam until it moves 5 feet, pulling a charged hose line 75 feet, opening the nozzle and flowing water and hitting a target, and dragging a 175-pound dummy 106 feet to the finish line. Nick was able to do all this in less than 1 minute and 35 seconds, all the while wearing full gear and breathing air from a 30-pound Air-Pak on his back!

But I didn’t meet Nick in an athletic contest. We met because Nick’s mother sent me an e-mail asking for help.

Although Nick’s athletic abilities were amazing, his health wasn’t. One day in March 2012, Nick, who is married and has two young kids, started to feel some chest pain that he thought was just a bad case of indigestion, but it was painful enough that he alerted his crew, who immediately hooked him up to the heart monitor to get a look at his heart. The paramedic saw an abnormal rhythm and called an ambulance just as Nick’s heart stopped beating and he stopped breathing—he was, basically, dead. The firefighters immediately gave Nick two defibrillation shocks but they didn’t work. So the crew started CPR, and Nick’s heart barely began to beat on its own again. The ambulance then rushed him to the hospital, where for the next hour Nick went in and out of cardiac arrest while his crew and doctors tried desperately to save his life. After one hour of CPR and eighteen shocks to his heart, Nick’s doctors finally were able to remove a blood clot from his heart, saving his life.

When Nick recovered, he was determined to do everything in his power to make sure this attack was a onetime event. He was a great athlete, but he’d always eaten whatever he wanted, thinking he could burn everything off since he was so fit. Then his mother sent him a copy of my book,
The Engine 2 Diet
, which lured him into the plant-strong life.

Since going on the E2 diet, Nick’s total cholesterol has come down to 83 mg/dl, his LDL is 35 mg/dl, he’s leaner than he’s ever been, and he feels empowered with the knowledge that he and his food choices now control his health destiny. He is now a dedicated E2er. Way to go, Nick!

Nick isn’t alone. All over the country people are learning about healthy plant-based diets. In fact, things have changed dramatically since my first book,
The Engine 2 Diet
, was published in February of 2009. People are waking up to the fact that the current paradigm is broken. The answer is not another pill, procedure, or doctor, or more legislation. Unbelievably, the answer is right in front of our faces. But we’ve been blind because we had no idea the answer could be so simple. It’s like Glinda, the good witch of the North, telling Dorothy she’s always had the power to leave Oz and go home—all she ever had to do was click her heels together three times and say, “There’s no place like home.”

It’s the same with eating a plant-strong diet and the wonders it can do to prevent and reverse disease. Say it three times (and click your heels if you’d like): “There’s no diet like a plant-based diet.”

Over the last decade more and more people are figuring this out. The plant-strong boom is on! High-profile celebrities from television hosts Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell to NFL star running back Arian Foster, from actress Michelle Pfeiffer to President Bill Clinton have joined the plant-based team. Books and documentaries on the subject are selling like plant-based hotcakes—especially the documentary
Forks Over Knives
(starring T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., author of
The China Study
, and my father, Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr., M.D., author of
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease
), which has become one of the top-selling and most viewed documentaries in America for the last two years.

Other parts of America are noticing too, from nutritionists to doctors, from restaurants to stores. In 2010, the natural food supermarket chain Whole Foods Market launched its healthy eating initiative to educate the company’s thousands of employees and millions of customers about the benefits of eating a whole-food, plant-strong, nutrient-dense, healthy-fat diet. CEO John Mackey invited me to help the company do this, and so after twelve years at the Austin Fire Department, I jumped off the fire engine and stepped out of my bunker gear to rescue people from food instead of fires.

And yet, despite this terrific momentum, too many people are still
eating terribly, and too many people are ill-informed about food. In fact, even after Nick’s heart attack and brush with death, his fellow firefighters still can’t understand why he doesn’t eat meat or drink milk.

That’s why Nick’s mother called me—to ask me to support his new, lifesaving diet, but also to give him the information he needs to win over his firefighting friends. We talked for more than an hour, and I gave him all the ammunition he needed to win every argument his fellow firefighters might throw at him.

That’s exactly what this book does as well. Inside are all the facts you’ll need to combat the silly claims and misguided myths you’ll hear from naysayers who throw out statements like “You can’t get enough protein eating plants,” or “You can’t get enough vitamins,” and so on. You’ll learn the truth about protein, the facts about vitamins, and the myths about meat. In fact, by the time you’ve finished this book, you’ll be an expert on everything you need to know to win any argument with a meat eater. And you’ll be more convinced than ever that your plant-based diet rules!

Of course, once you’ve won the argument with your words, you’ll want to win it with your cooking as well. To that end, I’m offering you 140 mouthwatering Engine 2 recipes to serve to your no-longer-doubtful friends. These recipes will put a smile on your decreasing belly and you’ll be able to wow your friends at breakfast with Savory Shiitake and Cheesy Oats (
here
), Zeb’s Waffles (
here
), and Cranberry-Polenta French Toast (
here
); at lunch with Asparagus and Cream of Cashew Collard Wraps (
here
), Armadillo Sweet Potatoes (
here
), and Rockin’ Reuben on Rye (
here
); at dinner with BBQ LOL (Lentil Oat Loaf) (
here
), Summer Soba (
here
), and Raise-the-Barn Butternut Squash–Vegetable Lasagna (
here
); and for dessert with Bittersweet Chocolate Truffles (
here
), Banana-Oatmeal Peanut Butter Cookies (
here
), and Mango-Cherry “Ice Cream” (
here
). You’ll find recipes for the soup lovers in your circle, as well as the burger and fries fans. You’ll even find sauces, dips, salads, and salsas.

To source these recipes, I talked not only to my family, where everyone has been collecting plant-strong recipes for years, but to Engine 2 fans all over the country. Some of these people are professional chefs such as John Mercer, Fran Costigan, and Lindsay Nixon; some are parents such as Maria Steiner and Renee Van de Motter; some are working professionals such as Polly LaBarre, Wendy Solganik, and Dick
DuBois. What they all have in common is they’re all eating plant-strong and creating a new arsenal of amazing recipes that are plant based, filled with whole foods, and always delicious.

Armed with these facts and recipes, you, like Nick and millions of others, will be on your way to revolutionizing the way you eat and the way you live. An E2 plant-strong diet can rescue your health and save your life. There’s no argument there!

Let’s begin with The Facts—thirty-six of them! If you’ve been following the Engine 2 diet, or you’ve just been adding a lot of fruits and vegetables to your diet, you probably can’t count how many times you’ve heard naysayers proclaim, “Meat, it’s what’s for dinner” or, “Milk—it does a body good.” And how many times have you heard people make fun of your plant-based diet and spout their so-called facts about why you need to eat red meat, chicken, fish, and dairy. The real fact is: Their facts
aren’t
facts! They’re myths!