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I finished this conversation overflowing with hope and gratitude. Dr. Michael Klaper brings passion, clarity, and a fierce commitment to medicine living up to its highest purpose: preventing disease, restoring health, and saving lives.
After more than five decades in medicine, his message is direct and uncompromising: Doctors didn’t spend years in medical school to become cogs in a medical-industrial machine—treating lifestyle-driven disease with lifelong prescriptions while ignoring root causes.
As a young family physician, Dr. Klaper dreaded seeing patients with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and hypertension, knowing that all he could offer was medication to slow an otherwise predictable decline. Like many physicians, he carried an unintentional blind spot around nutrition. Yet food touches every system in the body—and conditions we accept as “chronic” are often reversible through a, whole-food, plant-based diet.
Once he integrated nutrition as medicine, everything changed: for his patients, for his practice, and for his understanding of what healthcare could be.
In his book Moving Medicine Forward, Dr. Klaper draws from decades of clinical experience and scientific research to expose why nutrition remains sidelined in modern medicine—and how reclaiming it can transform both patient outcomes and the doctor-patient relationship. The healthcare status quo is failing all of us. It’s time to move medicine forward.
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Early in Dr. Klaper’s career, he realised that medications alone were failing his patients.
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What was the turning point that led him to embrace plant-based nutrition as a core part of his practice?
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When he started integrating nutrition as medicine, were there moments of fear or resistance—from colleagues, patients, or even himself?
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How does Dr. Klaper approach conversations with patients who are skeptical or resistant to changing their diet?
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Does the approach differ with loved ones?
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Money, and how its incentives play out in the medical system.
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Medical schools receive significant funding from pharmaceutical companies and food industry stakeholders.
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If we agree that nutrition should be taught in medical school, but we don’t agree on the optimal diet, then exactly whose ideas on nutrition should be taught?
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Dr. Klaper is critical of western medicine’s focus on crisis care over prevention. Where does he see the biggest opportunity for change in the system right now?
I have so much respect for Dr. Klaper’s uncompromising clarity—that when you are a physician, or shaping future physicians, there is a professional obligation to follow the science, even when it challenges long-held traditions or cultural comfort. Lives are at stake, and honesty matters.
At the same time, I’m grateful for the personal responsibility he places back into our hands. He doesn’t ask us to wait for the system to catch up. He reminds us that we can lead—right now—by choosing a plant-based way of eating, whether our doctors are there yet or not.
What the book also makes clear, Dr. Klaper meets people with compassion while refusing to look away from uncomfortable truths. If we accept that chronic stress, poor sleep, lack of sunlight, and artificial light can create “bad energy” in the body, then we have to be willing to ask harder questions. What does it mean—for animals, and for us—to normalise lives of confinement, suffering, and fear, and then consume that flesh?
Moving Medicine Forward is released on April 7th and is available for pre-order now. This book—and this conversation—invite us to live with greater integrity, awareness, and care for our own health, and for the lives we affect along the way.
Dr. Klaper’s Website: https://www.doctorklaper.com/
Purchase: Moving Medicine Forward: What More Doctors Should Know About Nutrition―and How It Can Save Your Life:
If you would like to help create a revolutionary change in the teaching of medicine, please go to MovingMedForward.org and sign up for our newsletter, The Forward Report.
Dr. Klaper’s lecture, “What I Wish I Learned About Nutrition in Medical School”
Also, The Food Revolution Network:
That’s it for this week in Healthification.
Prioritise Your Health, the Animals, and the Planet—One Empowering Habit at a Time with the Plant Positive Journal Version 2 (printed and fillable PDF)
This journal and daily planner follows a twelve month format however is not dated so it is perfect to use at ANY time of the year.
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With love and gratitude plant friends.
EATING PLANT BASED IS SO MUCH EASIER THAN I EXPECTED!