[What is the Optimal Nutrition for Humans?].

As practitioners, we are faced in practice daily with the question about the optimal diet. Nevertheless, nutrition covers only a very small part of our medical training. A look back in the history of man shows that the human body was set to a predominantly plant-based diet for millions of years. With the introduction of factory farming and industrial food processing several hundred years ago, the current Western diet has been consisting to a large extent of animal products, leading to a number of chronic diseases such as hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, coronary heart disease, vascular dementia, diabetes, and to an increase of cancer. Many of these diseases are preventable, some even reversible when resorting to a whole-foods plant-based diet. This review work is intended to provide the practitioner with the necessary knowledge and the scientific facts.