About 15 years ago, Elizabeth Klodas MD FACC, a John Hopkins trained cardiologist, looked around her waiting room and saw a whole bunch of people whose number were perfect, but didn’t look any better. In fact, they didn’t feel better and in some ways the drugs they were taking made them feel worse.

“I’m not sure what got into me, but one day I asked my patients what do you eat? What they told me was really eye-opening. For the first time, I understood their medications have to work really hard because they were eating in a way that was counterproductive to their health goals. And the bigger issue was that every single patient was telling me that I was the very first physician to even ask what they ate, which was shocking to me. I’m a cardiologist. I’m way down the care stream. By the time people see me, in most instances, they’ve seen multiple other physicians. Food is a bio-active substance. It’s just as bio-active as Lipitor. Shouldn’t we care?

Read the full article on Forbes.com here.