A plant-based approach to Alzheimer's and Brain Health with Neal Barnard, MD

[Music] welcome to the evolving past Alzheimer's podcast or we are focused on bringing you information to help prevent and reverse brain diseases like Alzheimer's and other dimensions I'm dr. Nate Bergman of a functional medicine physician in Cleveland Ohio and your host on this journey so whether you're a baby boomer who's worried that your brain wiring just isn't working like it once was or you have loved ones with the disease or you yourself have already been diagnosed and wondering what do I do now you'll want to listen to this podcast each episode we introduce you to the top doers and thinkers that are revisiting Alzheimer's and dementia if you have questions or comments or just want to connect please check us out on our Facebook page or if you're old-fashioned like me Google evolving past alzheimer's podcast and you'll find us that way so here we go let's get better welcome back to the show this week we're honored to have dr. Neal Barnard a noted physician advocate for nutritional science as well as president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible medicine here with us today welcome to the show Neal thank you it's great to be with you today it really is great to have you at you you bring a perspective that is I would say underrepresented at this point on our show sort of the plant-based approach you've spoken around the world and written about Alzheimer's but you also are president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible medicine can you tell us a bit about when that group was formed and sort of what its aims are yeah 1985 I was in my first job after residency I went to medical school here in Washington DC and did a residency in psychiatry and afterwards I moved to New York and I was had a busy practice at st. Vincent's Hospital in downtown New York and although I'm a psychiatrist by training I saw a lot of medically ill patients who happen to have psychiatric complications to their conditions and I became convinced that in American medicine we were pretty good once the heart attack has occurred but we don't do anything to prevent it and that's true for so many things I thought we've got to bring prevention back in we got to bring nutrition back in and also I was concerned to what ethical issues I think there's a lot of ethical things that medical practice and medical research have ignored and need to deal with such as the issues is regarding the use of animals and the need to bring in alternatives and although there's less abuse of human beings in research than in the past there have been some gaps there so anyway I set up this group called the Physicians Committee for Responsible medicine and now 30-some years later we're a lot bigger a lot busier than we were when I when I had the bad judgment of calling it a committee because it's a lot bigger than that now it's phenomenal and hopefully a little bit later we can talk about some of the kind of practical steps that you guys are taking an advocacy work it's really remarkable you wrote and have written you know a lot on a lot of topics in health specifically Alzheimer's I as I understand it your your father was contracted Alzheimer's at some point in his life is that yeah that that's right and he wasn't the first my maternal father became demented quite young and it was dead in his early 60s and yeah and my father had a slow downhill course that was really terrible uh and and obviously people listening to your program are all are nodding their heads with thinking about their own experiences and their with their own family members and thinking if there's if you made a list of all the things that you don't want to have happen to you or to a loved one that's at the top of the list absolutely yeah absolutely you co-authored an article with the previous guest of ours Martha Claire Morris and it one dietary lifestyle guidelines for the Prevention of Alzheimer's disease can you tell us briefly what you found and in kind of the process you used to come up with those guidelines yes this goes back a number of years ago we had a big conference here in Washington and the idea was to bring together experts from around the world and to present to caregivers and to other researchers about what can be done to hopefully not in this case not treat but to prevent Alzheimer's disease and this was back in 2013 we had the conference and we published our findings in 2014 and then has in today I feel like we're still kind of in the infancy of looking at what can be done at the same time there have been so many important findings that we thought it's essential even even if the research is still not done and even if the ink is not dry on so many of the documents that are being written it's essential to get the word out about the things that can be done and so we came up with seven points that we thought were important for people to be aware of and if you'd like I could maybe just run through them real quickly oh be great okay and apologies in advance science has marched on but I think these are still important points number one relates to fat in the diet saturated fat which is dairy is the main source of saturated fat meat is number two saturated fats are linked to Alzheimer's disease people should minimize saturated fat and ideally avoid those products dairy and meat and silver a related fat trans fats sometimes called partially hydrogenated oils they are in snack foods they should be avoided completely as well so anyway that's the first thing is to tackle these bad fats in your diet then secondly to vegetable if four groups vegetables fruits whole grains and also legumes which is the bean group they should replace meats and dairy products as the primary staples of the diet so mine Fargo North Dakota diet that I grew up on which was meat potatoes and meat it's gonna give way to vegetables and all those neglected simple foods so that's not that's the second thing a plant-based kind of diet third is vitamin E which is an interesting thing vitamin E should come from foods not vitamin E supplements that you might pick up at the store but food sources of vitamin E would include seeds and nuts and green leafy vegetables and whole grains the RDA is about 15 milligrams per day but if you get there with supplements it does not seem to be effective and that's probably because supplements contain just one vitamin E type whereas there are eight different forms in nature and if you get them from food you get all the forms that nature had in mind for you so third is vitamin E fourth is b12 you do need to have a source of vitamin b12 should be part of your routine it should be a supplement and I don't care what kind of diet a person is on they should really be supplementing b12 at least after age 50 if not before if you happen to be choosing multiple vitamins choose those that do not have any iron in them or don't have any copper in them so many of the daily multiple vitamins have these as supplements but iron and copper we believe are harmful to the brain Ziggs aluminum remains a very controversial and in completely studied area but I believe it makes sense to minimize aluminum exposure that means being cautious about aluminum cookware antacids often contain aluminum baking powder and some others do you'll see it on the label it's easy to avoid and vii nothing to do with food but this has altered with lacing up Snickers aerobic exercise three times a week good risk walk 40 minutes and that's it there may be other things that could be added to this list like brightly colored foods blueberries and so forth but but those seven points were the RL timers preventers yeah excellent yeah those I love those goverment's they're very clear and they're also for the most part I mean they're very achievable for most people I mean sometimes we ask people do these sort of crazy things and there's really nothing extreme about this list it's very practical I love that but let me also say all the side effects are good so let's say a person says all right avoid saturated fat get away from dairy meat follow a vegan diet should I do that and the answer is it's gonna be presumably good for your brain but it's also the best thing you can do for your heart and for for your arteries throughout your body so that when a person does this if they're doing it for the brain in fact I have to say it's sometimes a little bit comical to see what happens we use diets like this all the time in research studies people come in starting a plant-based diet to lose weight or to improve their diabetes and they're not aware that they're gonna get some good side effects about three months into this into some of these studies I'll have a middle-aged or older man come in saying that he came into the study to treat his diabetes and magically his erectile dysfunction is gone how did that happen yeah and less pain and he's sleeping better and yeah this arterial function is better his blood flow is better it so anyway all the side effects are good there's never a reason not not to do a healthy diet so along those lines have you seen anyone to date or a handful or several people that have had memory issues cognitive decline maybe full-blown to dementia or like on Alzheimer's maybe not usually it's you see the changes earlier have you seen anyone improve from cognitive decline or cognitive changes by following sort of a plant-based or vegan type of diet well first of all let me be clear I think that prevention is the name of the game here and yes to the extent that the brain cells are actually lost in this disease process which when you look at the brain of a person who's died with Alzheimer's disease the brain physic you can it is physically not the same structure as it was before the brain cells are and so there is a point when that is not going to be yeah yeah basically there's a point of no return and and having said that I have been very impressed by researchers that have looked at than just to make sure that we're all on the same page a condition that we call mild cognitive impairment and this you're still yourself but you know your memory is not good and names and words are just slipping out and you you know the name of that actor was in a movie but you just can't come up with it and for some people that is the first step toward Alzheimer's disease and so people have been researchers have been doing Studies on this and there was a very good finished study that looked at people with mild cognitive impairment and found that the very same things that lead to Alzheimer's lead to that high stature and fat intake increases the risk of mild cognitive impairment conversely if you avoid saturated fat your risk is reduced but two key points first is even in people who are at genetic risk of Alzheimer's they carry this a bowi epsilon for allele those people if they avoid the saturated fats their risk of developing this mild cognitive impairment it's cut by about 80% secondly for people who have mild cognitive impairment now there have been a few studies that have been extremely promising some researchers at the University of Cincinnati started looking at foods they were gonna add and the foods they chose were those that are rich in what are called anthocyanins this will not be on the test but anthocyanins are dark pigment in blueberries and in grapes they're the color of an anthocyanin that's a sign that they are antioxidants and in the first of these studies they brought in people they all had mild cognitive impairment meaning they were all saying my memory is terrible I'm going downhill I'm so concerned I'm gonna be like my father who had Alzheimer's the average age was 78 years old and the intervention was the three-month period and in the first study they used just grapes ordinary grape juice but they made them drink a fair amount of it because it's extremely rich in anthocyanins and they drink a pint of this every day and they compared them to a placebo group and what they showed was that they're learning you know in other words their ability to take in new information was significantly improved and then their memory their recall was significantly improved as well so they did the study again this time with a different anthocyanins source they loot you looked at blueberries got exactly the same results and then researchers at the University of Illinois did this only with them it was an exercise study three times a week forty minute brisk walk did it for a year and they showed not only improve memory but in brain scans they looked at the hippocampus which as you know is the sort of the staging area of memory that's the part of the brain that decides what has to be remembered and what could be safely forgotten the hippocampus it's just over time but in this case the shrinkage had been stopped and those people who exercised got the blood flowing there there you could show the hippocampus was actually restored to a degree and and memory was better so forgive me for this long-winded answer but but in research studies we are seeing that if you get people early where their memory is starting to sputter and you do some of these either dietary or exercise interventions that you in fact can change their course yeah absolutely total agreement and kind of the name of the game is prevention you know you know there's been a lot of hype around sort of these fad diets the higher fat diets ketogenic diets even paleo diets there's been some fairly serious scientists talking about kind of the evolutionary framework for this and you know there's people making a lot of claims about the results that they're getting you know the people are starting to study this in a rigorous way you are very clear on your stance in terms of plant-based vegan and I fully appreciate the ethical argument I mean that's for sure in terms of animals how other way just on a pure sort of health basis we're of the human species how do you respond to the challenge of the ketogenic diets or the higher fat diets or the paleo diets you know these types of diets that seem to have kind of risen in popularity over the last decade or so popularity and truth are two different things and the paleo diets I think chief attraction is that the name paleo just sounds so attractive to people it makes it sound like you're a successful hunter who's ready to be on the cover of men's health and I honestly think that's part of the reason why people go to these kinds of diets the idea of a paleo diet it's there it's not completely without some merit the idea is why don't we look back and eat sort of like our ancestors that ate the problem with the quote-unquote Paleo diet as that as it's been marketed is that it chooses a narrow band in time if you really looked back human beings are great apes and great apes natives of chimpanzees and gorillas that are orangutans and bonobos and there are they they don't consume any dairy products and they consume either no meat or very very little meat on the part of chimpanzees maybe 4% of their diet but apart from that it's a plant-based diet for all of them and but the Paleo idea says well wait a minute why don't we start history when human beings developed stone tools and arrowheads and could could hunt but stop it once we figured out how to plant anything and so that's the band this sort of Paleolithic band is figured out how to eat meat but before we figured out how to plant grains well the good thing about the Paleo diet is that dairy is much much later the advent of the area was what ten or twelve thousand years ago so they're avoiding cheese and yogurt and that kind of thing and I salute them for that but the idea that a person eating meat is it going to be healthier and some way than a person who avoids me it's just a fantasy meat is clearly linked to cardiovascular disease diabetes and many other health problems and when people avoid that avoid meat they they do better on all those things that they're the prevention is better and the reversal of these diseases is also possible to an extent also grains are not harmful if you look at the healthiest longest-lived populations on the planet they are either vegans or else people living in asia-- rural Asia before westernization and what were they eating they're eating rice the enormous amounts of rice and noodles and other grains and their health and longevity was terrific and then once McDonald's came in and rice became less popular and meat became more popular their longevity started to decline diabetes came in we're starting to see more Alzheimer's in these populations so this idea that grain is poisonous is a big mistake and the idea that meat is somehow innocuous or desirable is also a mistake so you're just a follow up on that because again I there's a lot of kind of noise in this space in terms of popular diets and fad diets as it were in and again I like I said there are some sort of serious scientists really starting to take note of some of these newer diets and saying okay let's look at this and let's look at this in the long term because that's really the only way to know is you know of course is these longer-term studies that are 10 and 20 and longer years well it depends on what endpoint you're looking at in my research laboratory people come in with a whole metabolic syndrome I mean they have high cholesterol levels they've got diabetes they got hypertension you put them on a plant-based diet and you don't have to wait for 15 years for that pivot for them to get better you equate 15 days and you see their blood sugars are coming down their cholesterol ZAR falling they're losing weight disease will reverse itself quite rapidly to degree now I don't want to suggest that reversal is necessarily complete it depends on how soon in the disease process you intervene but when Dean Ornish showed that you could reopen the arteries again to the heart the diet he was using was plant-based diet it didn't have any meat or chicken or fish in it at all and it happens rapidly and I met all of the research participants in his 1990 study and their experience was remarkable the chest pain was gone within a matter of a month or five six weeks and the reason the chest pain is gone as their arteries are opening up again so these changes are fast and clear not controversial in any way I create detector Ornish on a huge family he's his contribution was you know a giant yeah and not past-tense I mean he's he's still working but right now I'm saying his but his contribution to reversal of heart disease and you know his in the fact that he got Medicare to cover his program is just remarkable I mean it's very very I call the heavy lifting or the heavy lifting work that we all talk about on a kind of another practical level when it comes to grains and whole grains and versus other grains you know there's sort of another idea floating around now people are a lot of people are experiencing with which is to go gluten-free and while there's you know there's certainly there's evidence for celiac and even non celiac gluten sensitivities I have a lot of people that I see you know as patients that will tell me you know I feel just feel better off gluten but I will say some people will say but when I go to Italy and I have pasta bread etc there and it's all fresh it's all from Ted this morning and say they don't have the stomach complaints that sometimes the joint pain that they have when they eat the stuff in this country the United States I mean do you see this as do you have a comment on that or and what are your thoughts about sort of this idea of gluten and grain and u.s. gluten or you know this type of stuff yeah it's an interesting question I think what you said is is right that most people don't have celiac disease it's less than 1% of the population and the people who do have celiac I mean they just cannot have gluten in Italy or the US or anywhere including just means we barley and rye and and some of the hybrids that come from them and that's that's all so they can have pasta if it's rice pasta or something something like that but then there's a larger group maybe 15% or so of the population and they say just what you were describing is they say I you know I don't have celiac but I just feel better and the way they feel better is digestive ly they feel better or mentally they feel a little clearer if they don't have gluten and so for those people I think it makes really good sense to avoid gluten and also some of the gluten-free products are really pretty good you can get a gluten free pizza that's totally vegan it's made on a rice crust and it's it's really tasty regarding the US versus Italy if people have been speculate what's going on with American wheat and I don't know if it's the wheat or if it's the Velveeta that goes on top of it that's an impossibility it's a little hard to say but the bottom line is there's there's certainly no danger to avoiding wheat and choosing other grains instead and if people feel better that way I think it's fine fun find it find a change okay and I have to have my wife's a dietitian she's a wonderful sort of whole foods chef we're not vegan in our house but we don't need a huge amount of meat and chicken and she doesn't like fish I like fish but she doesn't like fish so we don't have much fish at all but she has a problem with beans like legumes and so your protein is you know obviously in there's loads of other nutrients in beans and legumes and again on the sort of practical level people that say my stomach bothers me when I eat legumes or beans what is another good go-to source of proteins for those folks and nuts and seeds and things like that okay well first of all in defense of our friend the bean if a person if a person is just has a little bit of gas enos or a lot of gas enos from beans that's not a reason to avoid them that's a reason to cook them now if beans should never be served al dente you should cook for the Jesus out of your beans so they're really really soft if you're cooking them at home throw away your soaking water and and cook it in fresh water and then just cook them like crazy um and you'll find that over time a person just adapts to it and that for some reason that gassy and is just kind of goes away also its dose-related so some people who are used to eating a big steak think that they have to eat a big serving of beans but a little bit goes a long way and have grains with it so the beans you just adapt in you and you're gonna do fine and whatever the gas in US or other problems a person has tend to tend to go away but that said are there other high-protein vegan foods the answer is absolutely if you went out into a rural area and you looked at a bowl or a cow or a rhinoceros or a stallion they're not eating beans for the most part they're they're getting there rippling muscles from other protein sources they're eating green vegetables and you think wait a minute if I eat broccoli is there protein in broccoli and the answer is a surprisingly huge amount if in fact if you tomorrow ate nothing but broccoli all day and let's say you eat 2,000 a day to be pretty typical if you happened it just as an experiment to 2,000 calories worth of broccoli in a day you get about 146 grams of pure protein which is about 3 times as much as your body actually needs now if you were a cow you'd be eating a different green leafy vegetable and beating grass but green vegetables have a lot of protein grains have protein beans as you mentioned protein soy is super high in protein so protein is not going to be a problem and it's the first thing that everybody asks about on a vegan diet but in all normal circumstances it is a complete 100% non-issue that any normal variety of plant foods gives you plenty of protein calcium likewise not an issue calcium's in green leafy vegetables - yeah it's interesting I co-authored an article when I was still in training with kind of what a preeminent cardiologist in my area plus a guy named Pedro Bastos who's a sort of outspoken of anti dairy a researcher in Europe and the basic approach was you know calcium and calcium supplementation is probably not the best idea and when we went to publish the article you know it was a lot of sort of outrage of it how can you get calcium if you don't have dairy and you don't drink milk and you have my kids school they still give milk it as a snack and most athletic trainers still recommend chocolate milk is the best sort of post-exercise recovery drink you know you wrote a book recently that has many of us very fascinated so the cheese trap how breaking a surprising addiction will help you lose weight gain injuring you can get healthy the dairy thing it seems to be kind of right at the tip of controversy it's such showed of you intuitively it's just not something you'd think would be something we as human beings would be eating can you summarize your thoughts about dairy and how you came up with this idea of the cheese trap and and that the harms of dairy sure and let me come back to what you're saying really is how do you get calcium cows don't make calcium a cow's body does not make calcium so if there's calcium and milk it's only because the calcium was in the ground and then when grass grew out of the ground had pulled the calcium into the green leaves that the cow ate see if you eat green leaves broccoli brussel sprouts kale collards and whatever or beans for that matter you get calcium in those plants so a cow never makes it it's that's just the middleman so to speak you don't need dairy for calcium at all what made me write the cheese trap and I have to say it's the quirkiest strangest book I ever wrote I think a an important one because in our research studies we found that people do so well on vegan diets they improve so much but many of them report craving cheese specifically cheese not ice cream not milk yogurt specifically cheese I thought what's that about so I started really looking into it and we found really three things the first of all dairy products are fattening secondly I am going to say they contribute to a surprising range of health problems and third I'm going to also suggest that cheese is addicting and I mean physically addicting and all of those sound very controversial and in our modern marketplace where dairy is promoted and subsidised by the government and and the reason your children drink in school is because the government requires by law schools to offer dairy to milk and the reason is used as a quote recovery drink after athletics is because the dairy industry pushes it but no but no dairy products are a problem the average American consumes 65,000 calories of cheese every year and it's I think one of the biggest reasons why kids are chubby nowadays it's not soda which is what gets the blame but soda has been dropping now for almost 20 years but cheese is going up up up up up and it's it's 70% fanat for any worse it would be Vaseline and kids eat phenomenal quantities of it that it's just fattening them up your average kid seating 30 34 35 pounds of cheese every single year all they need to do is gain a couple of extra unwanted pounds and then they are on exactly the obesity trajectory that Americans are on so when they hit adulthood two thirds of adults are overweight and it's not because they're eating brown rice so that's so interesting so I'll share with you a personal story so a couple of years ago when we were visiting my parents my parents are quite health-conscious they're you know very conscious about what they eat my mom's a MD father's a lawyer and they exercise and they're very conscious but we went back for a holiday and a lot of the kids were eating sort of like bread and and and and cheese melted on top of it and one of my daughters became almost like obsessed with this it was something that we had limited you know we just we don't have much dairy out and around in our house for the most part because a lot of us are soda intolerant of dairy and myself included and so what we noticed was my one of my daughter she was like six years old at the time was going for these cheese like the cheese snacks like for breakfast first snack in between breads and I entered for lunch and and there's no like sort of nobody's overweight and everybody you know was pretty active in our family and she was like it was like it an edit and I had to come back from Kansas City where I'm from and come back to Cleveland to go to work for a few days and my wife is on the phone with me she's like you should see this hi we decided we're gonna something behaviorally was changing with her when she was on the dairy and then we decided we're gonna cut it off and when we cut it off I mean she was at my wife's like at my wife's feet screaming like like screaming like blood curly I was like it was frightening to hear for a couple of like for a day or so she's gonna die if she doesn't have cheese it was like it was amazing thing and then when sort of the dust settled her behavior really evened out and I don't I don't know what do you make of that well it's a fascinating thing it's wonderful that you were able to put your finger on it and make a change there are chemical compounds in dairy products that are in rather small traces but and they wouldn't matter if we followed what nature had in mind which is that you get weaned you know a mother has milk that she gives to her baby and then and when the baby can eat on his own or her own there's no more milk anymore in dairy products there are substances called kaizo morphemes those are in the casein protein CA SEI and casein kzm is the main protein in cow's milk and as it breaks down during digestion it releases morphine like compounds called k-zone orphans they go to the brain they attach to the very same receptors in the brain that morphine or heroin or Demerol would attach to and they're not as strong they're about the strongest one has about 1/10 the brain receptor binding power compared with pharmacy grade pure morphine so that they're not as strong but they're strong enough that we believe that that's one of the reasons why people get hooked on on cheese and why they may not care for it at first but they crave it and they go through this kind of almost a withdrawal that that you saw with your daughter oh it was clear I was unbelievable I'm blue I would never have believed it I've had I know but it also makes us wonder wait a minute when they're on this how else is it affecting them and some people have looked at things like autism or other behavioral problems and wondered if it could be affected by this but there are other things there are hormones in milk that are concentrated in cheese and they come from the fact that the cows are pregnant they're impregnated every year by the dairy farmers because if they give birth it so that's like an artificially inseminated by by farmers is that what you're saying correct and they are not volunteers and it is not a pleasant thing to see first of all the way it is done is very creepy and secondly nine months later they're just stations about nine months about the same as a human when they have a baby their baby is torn away from them in front of their very eyes and there's no stronger bond in nature than that between a mother and her child and so I just raised that for people who are motivated by ethical things if you want to give up something dairy is a really good one and then by the time the Cubs are about four years old they're killed anyway and their daughters take their place to get artificially inseminated because they're just not as productive you know if you let them live to be 15 or 20 as they would in nature the reason I'm mentioning this is that dairy cows are pregnant most of the time they're pregnant nine months out of twelve a pregnant cow makes hormones estrogens the estrogens get into the milk and the longer there's as she gets closer and closer to term the amount of estrogens gets higher and higher and it's so much that if you sent a pail of milk from your deer to the laboratory they would tell you they would say okay this cows about eight months and that you can you can measure him and then you and then you drink him out but if you turn the milk into cheese you're concentrating the hormones and what was particularly frightening California there was a big study of women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer in the past and treated those women who consumed the most cheese or other high-fat dairy products had a 49% higher cancer mortality compared to those women who generally avoided dairy the reason I mentioned that is we think that the hormones although it's just traces and cheese we think it's probably not innocuous and so if you have a choice of giving this to your seven-year-old daughter or your six-year-old son or or versus not giving them the answer is don't go anywhere near it and those cancers are those hormone-dependent cancers like breast cancer in women and then I think there's some evidence for prostate cancer in men as I recall yes there are two large Harvard studies showing not just cheese but dairy in general is clearly linked to a substantially higher risk of prostate cancer in men and in women that the data I was speaking of was women who had had cancer already but you look at whether they they're going to survive their cancer or not and the the women consuming the most dairy and it's not a lot it's as serving a day of high-fat dairy was associated with a 49% higher mortality compared to the woman is there any much less so it's a hormone related thing that was designed by nature for a baby calf and an adult primate has no business consuming it and you can't consume it without risk but at least that's what the data seemed to be showing you know so it's so interesting you know the the process is fascinating to learn about I and I agree that you know a visit to dairy farm or just even hearing how the process works is will have people some people at least kind of rethinking their relationship with dairy though cheese is yes I mean it had like you've you've said and I mean I hear from a lot of people it's very addictive the idea that this notion of the kind of the model of autism is in some ways though certainly in many ways not similar to kind of the Alzheimer's model and because there is so much and you talk about this in your in your book as dairy proteins being a trigger for inflammation and that's why you know kids with asthma go off dairy and most people see improvements if not resolution of there's a lot of their symptoms I wonder especially with this idea that it's Casey orphans and addiction and as one of the drivers for you know maybe one of the four or five big drivers in Alzheimer's disease is information in neuro inflammation in particular and in our group where I was always looking for ways to to measure we do measure three typically three or more markers for inflammation but none of them are sort of brain specific and it's an it's sort of a real challenge to say well is there no inflammation is it resolving do you know of any evidence that dairy may trigger neuro inflammation or inflammation of the brain that would then sort of resolve or we could posit that it might resolve when somebody abstains from dairy and cheese in particular I think it's a tantalizing hypothesis that needs to be investigated and the beauty of it is though that that while it's being investigated people can decide to get out of the get get out of harm's way so to speak they can decide all right but it's you can sort it out I'm not gonna have any dairy while you're doing this this process so yes I think it'll be a very important thing to study and yet we should not wait for the studies to be done in order to take action I guess is what I'm saying yeah speaking of action ie FS I have to ask you why is cheese legal based of an if Kelly could the politics of of dairy it's unbelievable I mean that gets us sort of into your policy work with the so called committee the the group you started the Physicians Committee for Responsible medicine can you tell us a little bit about I mean you've sued the American government it's fascinating kind of what you're doing in terms of pushing a legislative agenda can you tell us anything interesting about what's going on at a recent yeah the the hot thing right now in Washington is the SNAP program the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program started with any of stamps but it's now called snap and and it's a good idea you know the idea is is let's feed hungry people but the program has grown enormously and it's not one in every seven Americans the problem with it is unlike every other food program like schools or the WIC program for women and infants and children those programs focus on at least some kind of health standard but snap has no health standards so if you're a retailer and you've got snap authorization you can put out fatty cheese and fatty meat and candy bars and energy drinks and people come in with SNAP benefits and you take their money and you can give them those things and the government pays for a dollar for dollar and the healthfulness has zero to do with it and so when we look at the statistics people on snap are less healthy than people who don't have snap the rates of diabetes are really high and all that needs to change but the people who wanted not to change are the people profiting from particularly sodas and cheese the the processed food manufacturers and the beverage manufacturers because that's a huge part of their market but it needs to it needs to change so if I understand you correctly more than making a statement some of the industries in the governmental agencies in the United States say as I understand it and I've heard you articulate this poorer I think like the USDA are inherently conflicted in who they represent in other words they may represent to a certain extent the American public and the interests of the American public health but but may also by law be required to also represent the interests of American industry American business do I have that correct yeah that's exactly right and by law the Department of Agriculture must promote American agricultural products and the structure of USDA was established really way before anybody realized that bacon and cheese could affect your arteries or affect your health in other ways and and in fact before a lot of the modern grocery products were even invented but the other big problem is that the dairy industry in particular but others too and meat industry the egg industry and others candy industry of the soda industry they're highly organized very politically active particularly in the rural states and they wield a lot of power and so it's been very very hard to get them out but but I take some comfort in the fact that the tobacco industry was sent packing back in the 1980s and I think the same will happen with the food industry - I tend to agree with you and I you know with leadership from folks like yourself certainly that's more likely to happen and we we appreciate you being with us if people want to learn more about your work or get involved in advocacy work with you how do they find you well thank you for asking that our website is PCRM org that stands for Physicians Committee for Responsible medicine dot o-r-g and let me mention one of the things that we have there we have a program called the kickstart so if anyone thought well that vegan diet sounds healthy but I'm not sure if I could do it the kickstart program is an online program that gives you menus and recipes every day for free with no commercial sponsorship and what people should do is take about a week and just think about vegan foods they might like make a list and then jump in do it all you know I'll do it full-time for about three weeks which is very manageable and at the end of that time just size up how you feel and how your weight loss is gone and what your energy is like and it just changes people's lives so focus on the short-term see what you see if you like it and for most people it'll be a life-changing experience after Barnard we so appreciate your time thank you for your leadership thank you for time today and good luck in the future it's been my pleasure and thank you for all that you've done so that's our episode I hope you guys got something out of that check the shun outs out on iTunes or on our website where we've summarized the key points if you have questions or comments or just want to connect please check us out on our Facebook page or if you're old-fashioned like me Google evolving and past Alzheimer's podcast and you'll find us that way finally if you find the information here valuable please consider giving us a five star rating on iTunes and leaving comments in the comment section it will really help us bring this message to as many people as we can thanks and talk to you next time [Music]

Channel: Evolving Past Alzheimer's

Views: 9,781

Rating: 4.9152541 out of 5

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Id: Gl994lb8t4A

Length: 41min 7sec (2467 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 05 2018