I'm rip eselon and you're listening to the plan strong podcast today I am speaking with the president of the Physicians committee for responsible medicine you know him you love him he is such a constant in the plant-based movement and has been since 1985 I'm talking about Dr Neil Barnard about a breakthrough plan that traps tames and burns calories for easy and permanent weight loss I'm talking about Neil's latest book that comes out on March 26th it's called the power Foods diet and we're going to dive in right after this message from planstrong if you are drop dead tired of making the same meals over and over again and you're seeking some tasty inspiration for all of your PL based cooking I invite you to check out the allnew plan strong meal planner membership in the meal planner let you join us in the plant strong kitchen and inside there are hundreds of plant-based recipes plus you can organize and save recipes into personalized menus so all your favorites are right there at your 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a a riddle it is a riddle inside of a lockbox that nobody seems to have the combination for and you all know that the solution is very very simple it's just most people are barking in up the wrong tree and this is why we are so in love with a whole food plant-based diet is because it really is the the solution to this riddle on how to lose weight really effortlessly and as you all know I've dedicated the last 15 years of my life to help people achieve Optimal Health and weight loss with the power of a whole food plant-based diet that being said I am so so grateful to Dr Neil Barnard and other Pioneers for providing the research and the evidence-based studies that anchor and validate our food is medicine approach to health and that's what I love about Neil's latest book the power Foods diet the Breakthrough plan that traps tames and burns calories for easy and permanent weight loss this is a book that will help you lose weight permanently letting the food do the work for you without feeling hungry now we pack a lot of valuable information into this jam-packed hour including a discussion around those foods that will tame or reduce your appetite the foods that will trap calories so they are then flushed away and cannot be absorbed and even foods that will boost your metabolism and increase your body's ability to burn those calories hours after eating a meal what are the best foods for weight loss and what are some of those foods that may not be quite as healthy as people think you're going to hear about all this in my conversation with with Neil today plus I couldn't let Neil go away without asking his thoughts around the new weight loss drugs like OIC and woia and why even shows like 60 Minutes can't even be trusted all the time let's talk about power foods with Dr Neil Barnard hey Dr Neil Barnard welcome to the pl strong podcast it's nice to see you again it's great to see you too rip Neil the last time I saw you was November 7th in Washington DC at the national Press Club you were you and Chuck Caroll were nice enough to award the eslon family with the mij stuber Ambassador for a better life award and it was a barn burner of an evening it was such a blast I got to tell you rip your whole family is such I mean they just don't make them like that and it was really such a blast to honor your father your mother your sister you the whole family so yeah thank you for coming thank you for coming to the historic Press Club a lot of things have happened there they've had a lot of presidents but rip I don't think anything beat this event so thank thank and I'm serious well I don't think anything beat an kle esselon dragging a tire across the across the floor for audience that was such a highlight I can't believe she did that then your sister comes in and does cartwheels on the way in I know and anyway but but you know it was a lot of fun but it was also really um educational for everybody uh from you from your father from everybody so it was it was really quite an event and and thank you for for being there thank you for making it happen well listen it was our pleasure thank you so much so Neil what I want to talk about today with you is I want to talk about your latest book The Power Foods diet I can tell you I have dove in and what I love about it Neil is you know you've taken a subject that even I feel like I know a ton about and you've told people how you can basically lose weight permanently let the food do the work for you without going hungry counting calories you can do this eating carbohydrates and you don't have to exercise and you have these you talk the whole book is really around these three scientific breakthroughs that I want you to talk about and then after that I want you to talk about and I want to go through the foods that you recommend that we eat and then what foods are unhealthy then I want to finish it up by talking about drugs and money because there's so much swirling right now around OIC and woia and stuff like that so does that sound good good to you that sounds perfect rip there's a lot to be said a lot so why don't we start with well why I mean listen you've written so many books why did you feel it was time now to write the power food diet because I think so up until now people have really thought that Health depends on not doing something uh taking out all the foods that I love and I'm going to be left with only a few things and we started to realize that wait wait wait wait if we look at foods that are healthy for us it's not just the leftovers from all the things that you'd love what's the foods that are healthy for us are power Foods they're power foods for your body they do important things to help you to to lose weight but they also really enrich your The Culinary side of your life too so there are foods that you're bringing in that you might have forgotten about you might have neglected you might not have been taking advantage of them they're good for health they are good for weight loss but they are banging up great for breakfast for lunch for dinner so the point is not so much what you're not going to have it's what you are going to build into your diet and my hope is that people will take advantage of it for themselves but also for their family uh let their family members share uh the joy of of really great foods and and let me also before we go any further I want to really say a big thank you to Dustin Harter and to Lindsay s Nick and they are brilliant uh recipe developers and they worked with me on this so we've got 120 some recipes that use the power Foods so it's really been a blast yeah don't they look great I mean this it's sort of as close to food porn as we could get you know we we they really just made beautiful foods and the publisher did a great job with this book yeah oh I gotta show you those are um Justin's blueberry pops um and then the um triple berry sorbet and and carrot cake these are things you know people love these Foods if you want to have kids over and you want them to to eat healthy foods it's got to look good and it's got to taste good and so we made them in really really healthy ways there's nothing in it that you'd have to apologize for oh and french toast we're gonna have a few things to say about that French toast most fattening food known to humanity we did it in the exactly opposite way we built in the power food so yes it's a slimming FR it's a slimming French toast group so let's talk about some of these three scientific breakthroughs that kind of make this all possible and the first one that you talk about uh Neil is appetite taming Foods going back to research that you started at pcrm with the help of NIH in 2005 right yeah exactly uh NIH funded us to start looking at is there a better way for people to change their diets and the idea was to tackle not just weight problems with type two diabetes and we found that yes uh if we change our diets in a in a very different way from what people had been told to do the idea is not to count calories the idea is not to try to limit carbohydrates and those sorts of things we were using uh very plant a strong emphasis on plant foods and limiting fats limiting oils of all kinds um and what we found is that you could really improve blood sugar however we did a number of studies and what we found was really remarkable that when people would eat certain things and by the way they were afraid at how indulgent this might have sounded you're GNA have pancakes you would have uh it could be could be French toast it could be Linguini you know pasta things that people hadn't eaten in a long period of time but we would let them eat until they were full and we wouldn't track calories we wouldn't track carbohydrates at all as far as they knew but as we were watching how much they were eating what we discovered was something that was a really remarkable breakthrough and that is they would get full and satisfied about 200 calories before more more before uh 200 calories say less than what they had been eating before in other words let's say a person normally ate 2,000 calories a day they came in we gave them these foods and they would say I'm eating just as much as before I feel perfectly satisfied we would add it up they were eating 18800 instead of 2,000 you could say would you would you want a little bit more no no this is the portion this is the way I eat and we found people eating 1,00 1700 calories feeling perfectly fine uh We've repeated that over and over again and what we found is that it's consistently true and it's not really rocket science you're not eating spam you're not eating a chicken breast you're eating foods from Plants they've got fiber the fiber fills you up it has almost no calories uh carbohydrate although it's maligned has only four calories in a gram compared to fats so people get full they get satisfied they feel great but but the appetite taming effect is is really important and so and so just to kind of reiterate for our listeners what is it exactly that tames the appetite is it the fiber is it the water that's in these Foods what is it okay um fiber water carbohydrate these are all foods that are all products so to speak that really don't have a whole lot of calories that's part of it so that the calorie density goes down let's say in contrast I'm going to eat cheese you can eat cheese it'll fill you up too but at the point where you are full if you were to record the number of calories you've taken in for cheese it's huge because cheese is 70% fat and so it will fill you up but by the time you reach your satiety point you've taken in a lot of calories that's why your average American rip now eats 70,000 calories of cheese every single calendar year 70,000 some people even more than that so part of it is the the low calorie density fiber fills you up that's great the water watery Foods fill you up obviously uh high carb foods yes there's one other piece of this though OIC wovi these are the big uh Blockbuster injectable drugs they are trying to simulate something that you can do with Foods here's what it is let's say you eat a meal the meal the foods go down your esoph is through your stomach through your intestinal tract and as they hit your intestinal tract they trigger the release of glp1 glp1 this will not be on the test is it's a natur natural compound it goes through the bloodstream to the brain turns down your appetite that that's the point of it um is you need a system for your your digestive tract to say hey we've eaten enough you can stop now so glp1 comes out into your blood in response to food goes to the brain and says you can stop eating now so that's that's not something a company can patent so Novo Nordisk made a synthetic it's called The glp1 Agonist wovi OIC they're the same drug they just have two different names depending on on the dose and the indication um and so those drugs you inject them once a week they go to the brain they stimulate the same Center and they say stop eating and this is a big Blockbuster isn't this amazing um Hana Cova on our research staff she's our the head of our research program she fed a single meal to a group of individuals and found if it's high in fiber high in complex carbohydrates free of animal products you get this nice big glp1 increase goes right up that means your body is making the natural gp1 it is going to your brain it is taming your appetite now you can do the same test again and she did a meat-based meal you know what you see a lot of nothing your gp1 level does not go up so much it just kind of sits there so a mediator says gee I'm not I'm not really feeling full yet let let me have another portion let me have another portion they end up overdoing it a little bit right so the the power foods are the ones that give you that appetite taming effect partly the low energy density it's partly that you're getting that blast of glp1 that Foods ought to be giving you so is that glp1 is that similar to like Ging and leptin or or not um not exactly the same but you're thinking right um all your body has an amazing number of hormones that that will help you um and that will help tame the appetite so yeah I want to I want to Circle back to those drugs that you talked about here in a second but okay so appetite taming Foods so that's the the first scientific breakthrough the second one that you mention is calorie trapping Foods and you base this off a tough's uh University researchers in 2017 what what exactly are calorie trapping Foods this was the most amazing study and these are terrific researchers at TU University in Boston one of the Premier nutrition centers in in the world they brought in individuals they gave them two different kinds of Meals one group was asked to eat white bread white rice and and by the way what makes them white is that you've taken off the fiber the the brown rice that brown or that little tan coating that's fiber you take it off it's white rice uh so white rice white bread the other group got whole grain bread the fiber is still in it and brown rice so they're getting more fiber and then they did something that I got to tell you my research team is never going to do which is they collected stool samples from from all the participants for this long study and they analyze the stool samples and what they found was that the high fiber foods were actually picking up collecting and trapping calories that had not yet been absorbed by the body and Carri them out with the waste and so the participants in other words day after day eating these high-fiber foods their body is expelling calories before they can be absorbed and they literally flush them down the toilet so the question is how much is this significant and the answer is about 100 calories per day just from the calorie trapping effect of the whole grain breads brown rice now that's not a lot 100 calories a day isn't huge but you're going to take about two or 300 calories a day from the appetite taming effect another 100 for calorie trapping and even more for metabolism boosting which we'll talk about and you're starting to see why these power foods are so are so effective for weight loss so the power here is in the fiber it could be whole grains doesn't have to be it could be fruits it can be vegetables the granddaddy of all the high fiber foods is the Bean Group the beans be lentil so in the power Foods diet you'll see I've got a lentil soup and and you make lentil soup and your mom makes lentil soup you know delicious food but it's got enough fiber to go down your digestive tract trap those calories carry them away you never even see them did you have you been aware of all of the incredible benefits of fiber or are you just constantly amazed as I am with what it can do for what you just mentioned calorie trapping Foods you know we've learned from Will baltz and fiber fueled about what it does for the immune system and you know the microbiome it just seems like fiber is so vitally important for us as human beings and as you and I both know most Americans are fiber deficient you know a generation ago people didn't talk about fiber at all and it was 1991 um Dr Dennis Burkett uh who was a a wonderful man um he was an Irishman he became a surgeon lived in England for a long period of time but he spent a huge amount of time in Africa as a missionary surgeon he he has a had a heart that just wouldn't quit and he started to discover something that in Africa he just wasn't seeing people having a appendicitis colon cancer and and other similar things and he discovered that what was different about them was they were eating root vegetables uh beans lots of foods that were very high in fiber and compared to Ireland the UK Europe America where people were neglecting the high fiber fruits and so he became the biggest fiber Advocate and at first people wanted to ignore him and say fiber you know what's the point of it well the point of it is that that it helps clean you out and there are two kinds of fiber the soluble fiber which also lowers cholesterol the insoluble fiber which sweeps your digestive tract clean of of uh carcinogens and he became very famous and and really did a world of good yeah yeah by the way by the way one other thing I got to tell you um Dennis bur came to Washington DC uh in 1991 to join me and Colin Campbell and Oliver Alabaster is a researcher at George Washington to say that you don't need meat you don't need dairy products what you do need is these healthy plant Foods yeah that's so incredible that you got to meet him um I I assume he's no longer alive is that right no he died a number of years ago he was quite up in years when he came over but he was the most generous person he reminded me of your father um who was is always so generous with his time I I was talking to Dr Dr Burkett uh back in the 1980s and I I I just wanted to tap his brain because people weren't talking about this then and he saidwell Neil I'll tell you I I've got to come over to the US i' I've got a meeting in Chicago but why don't I stop in Washington and we can spend some time together and I thought what a generous man so he broke his travels he he stopped in Washington and I just asked him a bunch of questions I had my tape recorder going and I learned so much from him um and then he came back and he did this press conference and as long as he was alive he was such a great uh Ally H yeah um all right let's move on to your third scientific breakthrough that allows all this to be possible and that is you mentioned metabolic boosting foods but you you call them calorie burning foods and there was a uh some research done in 2020 by none other than pcrm again yes uh exactly in fact we've done this study a couple of times we'll bring in individuals and we track their calorie burning speed and the way you do it is you sit the patient down comfortably in a chair and we have um a mask that we put over their mouth and nose so that we're tracking how much oxygen their body is consuming minute by minute and how much carbon dioxide they're putting out and what we with some pretty simple arithmetic you've got their calorie burning speed so when a person is on a diet of fatty stuff let let's say I give you a stick of butter or two sticks of butter your metabolism does not rise just stays flat but instead let's say I give you plant-based Foods uh carbohydrate and protein from plant sources your metabolism goes up for about three hours after the meal that's good that's normal but what we had discovered uh in a couple of studies that we did including the one you just mentioned is that one once a person sticks with this where they're having no animal products at all they're keeping the oily Foods really low is that their metabolism not only Rises but it rises much more than before you can use the very same test meal but they're burning about 15% more calories um than they were earlier in the study so your body adapts to it and you get a bigger and big bigger metabolism boost each time how much it could be good for maybe a couple hundred calories per day uh of an extra metabolism so you're adding up the appetite taming effect the calorie trapping effect and then the the the burning effect the calorie burning effect and it's quite significant yeah yeah yeah yeah all three uh kind of um jumping in at once you said 15 15% on the calorie burning foods it can affect it 15% that I mean 15% is not nothing that's pretty substantial it is substantial and um you can also then accentuate this even further so okay I'll give you a quick example let's say I get up in the morning and I make oatmeal and today I'm going to do something a little different I'm got my little uh Salon cinnamon on my on my shelf and I'm going to put a little bit of that on my oatmeal okay the oatmeal is great you know raisins and so forth on top but the addition of the cinnamon cinnamon has a natural compound called it's an alahh and researchers not being very creative they called it calide the calide goes down your digestive tract it's it's it's a natural compound in the cinnamon it attaches to a receptor in your digestive T Digest Ive tract that triggers the release of a little touch of adrenaline that increases your metabolism so researchers thought maybe that would accelerate weight loss and they did a double blind trial where they gave people capsules of either cinnamon or Placebo and found that the people with the cinnamon capsules were about seven or seven and a half pounds lighter after the 16we study compared to the other people now they were having a fair amount they were having about a te in a day so you may not want to have that much but what we're found what we found is that you get a calorie burning effect from cinnamon Ginger uh hot peppers I'm not saying you want to have a jalapeno every day but if you ever did and I'm sure you did uh rip you know you put some DIC jalapenos on your veggie burger or something like that or on your on your bean burrito um if you kind of overdo it a little bit on the hot peppers you'll start to sweat a little bit and you you feel hot yeah researchers have measured that and they have discovered that the capsacin that make the peppers hot trigger the release of calories um so you're burning calories faster so all we're doing in the power Foods is we're using them and you're putting them to work in a smart way so I've got my Southwest chili you can imagine what's in there and you can burn calories faster if you want you know what's so funny about what you just said in that whole story with the the spices is that when I was at the peak of my Triathlon Career Training anywhere from two to eight hours a day yeah I was a lean mean 166 pounds I I loved having hot stuff and literally we'd be at a dinner and I would be breaking out in a sweat like I was like I just gotten done doing a 10 mile run and it was just the spices but I don't know if it's because I was as lean and mean and in shape as I ever was and literally all I was eating were you know Whole Food plant-based the three different you know um methods that you talk about here in your book but um yeah it just everything you said just rang so true there I would just be like I had just showered it was crazy right yeah and and the so the whole idea here is why not pick some foods that are power foods that will tap your tame your appetite and so forth and let's just put them into a dessert or put them into to a salad or a soup or or a main dish or whatever and so uh French toast I'm gonna make some french toast I'm G put some cinnamon on top and I'm not going to make the French toast with cream or butter or eggs or the usual kind of stuff it'll be a nice healthy french toast yeah and I'm going to put on the top of it blueberries because blueberries have anthocyanins in them that it's the purple color which has been shown to be strongly associated with weight loss specifically abdominal fat loss let's put this all together and you got a great great breakfast let's do it for lunch with a maybe a lentil soup or make a doll maybe a mango doll fine these are all power Foods let's have a pasta for dinner for every Dieter who was told you can't have pasta because it's carbohydrate bring it back because I'm going to show you how to make it into a slimming dish and then if you want to have dessert um you can do that too I've got black and blue brown black and blue brownies with black beans and blueberries in the brownies carrot cake all kinds of wonder things with the pasta and you talk about this with a lot of other Foods It Isn't So Much the food it's what you put on top of the food that makes it so so fattening and weight gaining correct yeah right exactly now there are different pastas I mean there are pastas that have that are whole grain pastas a better choice there are pastas that are egged pastas where they're trying to put in cholesterol in there not such a good choice uh but yeah what you said rip is exactly right uh where people run into trouble they go to their nearest Italian restaurant and they douse the stuff with ground beef sauce uh instead of that use use our I've got an arabiata sauce that's the Italian word for angry and it means a little bit spicy um and uh it's delicious it's filling and it's a calorie burner I'm G to I want to come back to some of these Foods in a sec but first I want to ask you about you talk about in the book how our food choices can actually change our fundamental body chemistry can you give me some examples yeah um back in 2015 Harvard researchers looked at more than 100,000 people and they tracked their weight over time but they also attract the foods that they were eating more of or less of and they found something remarkable that there are certain foods that if you increase your consumption of these specific foods that was associated with more weight loss and the granddaddy of all number one was blueberries and other berries in that category blueberries strawberries raspberries blackberries uh number two by the way I'll give you this real quick uh cruciferous vegetables like broccoli or cauliflower yep exactly you can't go wrong uh uh number three was green vegetables in general like spinach and so forth uh number four the uh Citrus Group which was a little bit of a surprise to me because it included oranges grapefruits and also orange juice said fine it's okay yes fine uh number five melons so a cantaloupe watermelon and number six our granddaddy the bean uh the whole bean group beans peas lentils but back to the blueberry just really quick to answer your question the question is why why are they causing weight loss what's happening in the body well what makes the blueberry blue is a special antioxidant called an anthocyanin and there's actually many anthocyanins there's a reddish anthocyanin that makes strawberries red so researchers two years after the Harvard report came out researchers in the UK did an amazing study they had almost 3,000 twins and everyone got a dexa scan where you measure how much fat do you you could measure your body composition how much fat do you have on your thighs and your abdomen and so forth and what they found was that the twin who ate more anthocyanins had 9% less abdominal abdominal fat compared to her genetically identical twin sister so the genes aren't there it's just the food and it was the anthocyanin now anthocyanins are in blueberries and other blueberries and and other berries uh if you have a pair that kind of pinkish blush on the peel that's anthos and too there's a grapes a little bit different one so bringing these things into your diet helps but you ask the questions what's it doing in your body well an anthocyans are number one very powerful antio acents but before you even absorb them if or let's say you don't absorb them at all while they're going down your digestive tract they are changing your gut microbiome affecting your metabolism of foods there plus to tell you the truth they're just a marker also that's it's a visual clue that these are foods with a really low glycemic index they don't spike your spike your blood sugar they've got a lot of fiber in them um and it's just a really healthy food h I want to ask you about a couple Foods right now because there's a lot of I think misinformation swirling around them and people are getting very very confused so let's start with bananas uh you know people think that a banana has as much sugar as a candy bar and it's gonna spike your insulin and your sugar levels and stay away from the banana what do you think about bananas I think bananas are great I think I would use them for anything um first of all it's a good food normally um it's a good food if you're having a snack and you want to have a snack at night it's a really good thing to have before bed as opposed to some really heavy meal after athletic Endeavor I think it's great bananas 100% fine all right good what about oatmeal I hear more people saying I'm wearing my continuous glucose monitor and I can't believe what my blood sugar does after my bowl of oatmeal and I'm like give me give me a break what do you say about oatmeal well uh if if a person has diabetes and they've got a continuous googless monitor for that purpose different people do react differently to to to certain foods and so you can just you know if they're saying this is uh spiking my blood sugar now I would say okay uh try that test again um at on a different date and try it over time and see if things don't change because they usually do but once in a while you have a person who reacts in a kind of unpredictable way to certain foods but oatmeal themselves what is it it's first of all it's a whole grain uh secondly it's in a wide variety of forms and you can and they're all still they all still have the oat fiber in it it's not just good for weight loss terrific for weight loss but it does other things too because the oat has both soluble and insoluble fiber the soluble fiber that's the one that's the one that kind of makes the oats kind of mushy it's it dissolves in the water and it becomes a little more pudding that soluble fiber will take your cholesterol down a few notches as well so uh oatmeal fine and extra credit what if I take that oatmeal which is already a slimming food and I put blueberries on it with the anthocyans and a little cinnamon on it as well you can see I mean you know you don't think of it as power Foods you think of just healthy stuff but these are power foods that will help you to reach your weight loss goals yeah well Neil this morning on my uh cereal I had blueberries mangoes grapefruit and banana and it was oh my knock down drag drag drag out good what about what about potatoes so many people are afraid of the potato you you in in your in power Foods diet you're a huge fan of potatoes why okay well number one let me let me say something that's going to surprise the viewers today a potato has more protein than an egg uh people will say wait a minute I'm going to the gym and my trainer told me I need lots and lots of protein so I went in the store and I got a whole bunch of eggs and I ate them raw fine if you want to do that what you're doing is you're getting a huge load of cholesterol and some significant saturated fat um zero fiber a large egg and a large potato look it up the large potato has more protein than the large egg wow okay yes yes it does now potatoes have a bad rep the idea is that they're fattening part of that is people just love potatoes and anything that we really love that much people want to say bad things about it because we assume that our tastes lead us astray but the thing that you know what I mean but the the the the problem with a potato is that this innocent potato comes out of the oven and what do we do to it we cut it open and throw a tablespoon of butter on top and another tablespoon of sour cream and some little cheese Doodles and some B bits and we gained weight and we blame the potato the potato was an innocent bystander for all the fatty toppings that go on top and you know there have been a lot of folks who have who have used potatoes to slim down I think maybe the most famous was the magician pen Gillette yeah who um pen and Teller you know he uh he he had a lot of weight to lose and he thought I got to deal with this and so he ate a huge amount of potatoes and man did he get Slim Fast the potato is a fairly low calorie food a really healthy food so the key those toppings do you have a favorite potato uh sweet sweet potatoes or Yukon Gold potatoes or just any old potato um yeah great question to tell you the truth I am really partial to the sweet potatoes and they all come in different varieties and they're not the same plant you know a Yukon Gold or a typical say maybe a baking potato or a roasting potato not the same as a sweet potato but um the sweet potato is an amazing thing uh in okanawa which is one of the real blue zones you know Dan butner's brilliant work uh looking at where people live the longest okanawa is one of the blue zones and the number one staple food in okanawa is not steak it's not chicken it's not rice it's not fish it's sweet potatoes and they have a special purple sweet potato that they eat a lot of and you'll see it occasionally in markets here absolutely knockout delicious and you can cut it up roast it you don't need to add any oil to it or anything it's just absolutely great so enjoy them yeah I have one of those purple ones and one of the white ones two days ago for dinner I found the purple one to be particularly dry uh the white one was nice and then I also had a normal sweet potato that was just so succulent and juicy and and you know and the the orange ones though you know the typical orange ones what we say as a yam or sweet potato um that's um that orange color comes from beta carotene yeah and beta carotene is an antioxidant also and is associated with weight loss too so yes it's a good an uh cancer preventor good idea but beta keratin rich foods ought to be front and center in your plate let's talk about soy because I know you mentioned soy as being a a good food here on the power food diet there's a lot of again misinformation I think swirling around soy soy is it good or bad and what's uh what's your verdict okay um there is no question anymore uh about it soy is fine soy is a good thing and this is so important because oh what was it maybe 20 years ago or so people started scientists said that soy isoflavones dine genistin glycine these are isoflavones within the soil um that they bind to estrogen receptors and if it binds to estrogen receptors maybe it would cause cancer or if you have cancer maybe it would cause the cancer to grow well researchers have had time to test this and so they'll take large groups of people and they'll look at those eating a lot of soy and those who tend not to eat soy and the rather consistent results are that women who consume the most soy have about 30% less breast cancer risk compared to the women women who avoid soy so it's it doesn't cause cancer it's the opposite it reduces cancer risk uh some studies may be closer to 40% cancer reduction and then women who have had a cancer diagnosis already a woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer and her well meaning but ill-informed oncologist says I wouldn't eat soy because it attaches to estrogen receptors da da da it turns out that the women consuming the most soy have a 25 to 30% reduction in the risk of their cancer coming back or risk of dying of it so soy is a Cancer preventor and it helps women to with with cancer to live longer so soy is fine now now soy is totally optional but remember at the be or a little earlier I was talking about the Harvard study where they identified beans as one of the six groups of foods associated with weight loss soybeans are in there and soybean products tofu Tempe miso all of the soybean products are part of it so I start my day I'll Grill some uh some tofu in a nonstick pan put a little nutritional yeast a little bit of organic soy sauce on top and it's got a lot of protein it's sort of like what people use sausage or bacon for except it's got no cholesterol no animal fat and it has the soy asof bones which don't just reduce breast cancer risk for us guys they reduce it reduces prostate cancer risk too bam I like it Neil what um is there is like you mentioned okanawa uh I know that they I think also aside from the sweet potato I think they also do some tofu is there an ideal amount of tofu like do we want to consume like two ounces a day four ounces a day do you have any any any research on that or or no um not exactly uh what we what we do know is that if you did a study only in Americans uh say Fargo North Dakota where I grew up and nobody's eating tofu you don't really it's hard to tease anything out because nobody's really doing it to really see the effect you have to include populations that eat a fair amount so something like three or four ounces a day would put you in probably in the right area but I'll tell you one other thing uh different soy products are different we we recently did a menopause study um where we brought in women who had hot flashes that were driving them crazy and what we found is that if you gave people just a plant-based diet The Hot Flashes might have reduced a little bit but they didn't go away if you cut oils and fat little benefit not huge if you gave them soy extract or soy beans little benefit not huge if you do all three together no animal products really keep the oil out and a half a cup of of soybeans every day The Hot Flashes were reduced by almost 90% very rapidly life-changing it's as strong as HRT but the soybeans we used rip in this case we used mature soybeans so uh let's say you're at a Japanese restaurant they give you the little edamame those those are baby soybeans leave them on the vine let them mature and the isoflavones really come out so the mature soybeans that's what you want uh cook them in your instant pot 40 40 minutes or so um you can toast them if you want to carry them with you to a business meeting or something like that and they work really really well that's a wonderful research congratulations on that I know lots of women in particular that would love to hear that and they're suffering from The Hot Flashes uh big time um Neil one more thing before we leave soy I would assume that you're not a fan of the high highly processed soy that the soy dogs the soy burgers that have the soy protein concentrates and isolates is that right or not well the closer it is to a bean the better it's going to be so if you take a soy product and maybe just ferment them like Tempe fine uh however the benefits are seen with things where the soybeans are are played around with a little bit more you turned into tofu or so not and I am going to say that if you take a soybean and I mean it's amazing how versatile it is you can make bacon out of it you can make hot dogs one day rip they're gonna make snow tires out of they make everything out of it um if you give your kid a soy hot dog you should pat yourself on the back because it is way better than the meat hot dog if you get soy bacon and your kids will eat that it is so much better than the yeah animal based animal-based Bacons but what you're saying is okay have have your foods be as close to normal as poss the the Natural State as possible that's a good idea yeah I want I want to delve into some of the less healthy um food groups that that are out there that you recommend people kind of stay away from and to me one of the things that you do so brilliantly is how you describe things like eggs and cheese and and and and oils so if you don't mind I'd love to throw L ball it out to you and then have you uh talk for a second on each one so let's start with let's start with animal protein why are you not a fan of animal protein well animal protein when we were kids we really thought that you needed lots of animal protein that it was a good complete protein but in 2016 that crashed and burned at Harvard University they looked at at individuals who got their protein from Plants got their protein from animals and they found that if you substitute instead of animal protein if you were to substitute plant protein your risk of dying was diminished and that was true whether what you were taking out was meat or if you were taking out the dairy or if you're taking out eggs if you're taking out fish in every case the plant proteins were associated with longer uh with less mortality so yeah protein yes but it's got to be plant protein okay you know I know you wrote a whole book on it with the cheese the cheese trap but talk to me about cheese and dairy products and why you are not a fan well lots of reasons I mean first is you can't ask for a more fattening food than that cheese is 70% fat if it were any worse it would be Vaseline but the big I'm serious but the big problem the big problem with it is that it's a little bit addicting or for some people more than a little bit and I'm sure you've seen this where people would say okay I'm plant strong except except for cheese or that's the hardest food to give up there's a reason for that it's partly because when they make the when when milk is converted into cheese they add a lot of salt and they concentrate the fat they take away the water and the natural sugars so it's very fatty and very salty like potato chips or onion rings fatty salty things addic us but the but the the the dairy protein contains Chom morphins which are natural opiates that go to the same brain receptor as heroin and it it it uh it it it addicts us so to speak I'm not saying it's as strong as heroin it's not but the quom morphins there's one called ques morphiceptin it's one of the ques morphins it has about one tenth the brain binding power of pure Pharmacy grade morphine so it's not enough to get you arrested but it's more than enough to make you want to eat this and your body expands before your very eyes I love that it's not enough to get you arrested that's brilliant um you in the cheese trap you talk I just want to say this to the audience because I use it all the time you talk about how 8 ounce glass of whole milk is about 150 calories but you take eight ounces of cheddar cheese and you melt it down and you put into that glass you now have 900 and 75 calories just to give you an idea of the calorie load that people are getting in cheese it's mind-numbing and I'm sorry to say that you know milk sales are dropping and dropping and dropping and Dro consistently dropping so the dairy industry has found the way to make money is to turn your milk into cheese and they are putting cheese in everything and they the US government to Market American agricultural products signs contracts with fast food chains to put more cheese on their menu and there's the reason that our kids are having more problems with their weight than previous generations yeah so you mentioned earlier how a potato a large potato has more protein than an egg but what are the two main things that you hate about an egg well I guess you'd have to say the Yoke and the white you know but you know rip think about it you know eggs eggs do not order room service when a chicken lays an egg that egg sits there and you know she she's laid this egg and that egg one day is going to hatch and when it hatches it's got feathers it's got a beak it's got eyes it's got a liver it's got little feet it's got all this stuff and that was all there in the egg when it was laid how do you get an entire animal to be constructed in an egg the way you do it is when you lay it you fill it full of cholesterol because cholesterol is needed to make cell membranes animals cell membranes um and so if a person decides I think I'm going to eat that egg you're eating all the ingredients of a chick and that means you're getting a huge amount of cholesterol now the white what's the white it's just a big glob of animal protein you don't need that the yolk is where the fat and the cholesterol L yeah I remember hearing you say that one egg yolk has as much cholesterol I'm sorry one egg yeah one egg yolk has as much cholesterol as two Burger King Whoppers with cheese boom mine explodes yeah yeah and the of course the egg industry is trying to fight back they say well you don't really absorb that much you do we've gone through the literature they can complain all you want if you consume cholesterol at Le maybe a good about half of it goes straight into your bloodstream wow okay I think my audience is pretty Savvy on oils and and why we don't want to do oils but could you just dive into quickly maybe coconut and palm oil and why are there the worst well all oils have n calories in every gram but the kinds which is a lot and so they all tend to slow down our weight loss efforts uh and if a person is trying to lower their cholesterol level man people run into trouble with coconut oil and they run into trouble with palm oil um and and you can see it if you take a bottle of corn oil it's a liquid if if if you take a h a jar of coconut oil it looks like Wax you don't need to send it to a lab you know the reason it's waxy is it's very high and saturated fat saturated fat raises cholesterol now to prove this bring in volunteers feed half of them coconut oil feed half of them another kind of oil or nothing and what you see is very predictably the coconut oil uh eaters their cholesterol levels go right up same thing with palm oil and the reason I'm concerned about it is there's a big market for it now they taste buttery they have that mouth feel and they got a a shelf life of 3,000 3,000 ear whatever I mean they they don't go ranted because they're so heavily saturated and so they will add them to everything they add them to baked goods they add them unfortunately to vegan cheeses they'll add them to peanut butter you get a jar that you think would be peanuts and you look on the back and they throw palm oil in there take that put it back on the Shelf don't eat it yeah especially with the no the no stir varieties that's where they add the palm oil right all right let's let's move let's move on I want to dive in a little deeper into the drug drugs and money that you talk about in this books around OIC and wovi um you talk about side effects right uh and and how almost two-thirds of people that go on these these drugs uh typically stop within a year is it because of the side effects that they stop uh that's part of it um when you consume that you feel sick you feel nauseated you might vomit you're going have diarrhea um the the digestive effects of them are no joke um and then over time some people have pancreatitis or they have uh gallbladder disease or other issues but I got to tell you one of the real issues with these drugs is they are so expensive that it it means people either their drug uh plan their insurance plan doesn't pay for them at all or if they ever a switched drug plans maybe they can't continue with it uh the current price is about 15,000 a little bit more than $155,000 a year for that for it and um very very pricey so let's say you decide well I'm desperate I'm going to do it uh I'm going to take these drugs and you do it for a year you do it for two years and and you do see weight loss with them the weight loss kind of plateaus after a while it's not you know it's not it's it's it's significant but it's not as much as you would have want wanted however when you stop paying and you stop taking that drug that weight comes right back and it comes back aggressively so the question is what am I doing um Blue Cross Blue Shield did a study because the question was should an insurance company pay payport what they discovered is for every 1% of people in your insurance plan who are taking OIC or wovi everybody else's premiums go up by almost 15 bucks a month so you have one no I don't mean to say that people um who have weight issues don't deserve good treatment they obviously need good treatment but good treatment doesn't mean injecting yourself with a drug every week for the rest of your life maybe for some people there is an inborn genetic issue where that might be the solution but in the vast majority of cases what they really need is good healthy foods and a little bit of support because everyone's get hit a bump in the road you're at a party you're traveling you're not too sure about this or that choice but it becomes so much easier than committing yourself to taking drugs forever it seems like there's just so many different factions of people in the medical community that are getting behind these drugs right now and tell me how incentivized are Physicians to prescribe these drugs and do they get any kind of Kickback $27 million um is the amount of money that Nova Nordisk pays doctors every single year now it's illegal to pay a doctor for prescribing a drug what you can do instead is you pay them for doing a presentation to their colleagues about how good these drugs are um or uh you give them a consultancy fee or something like that $27 million a year and uh Novo Nordisk also pay Novo Nordisk is a Scandinavian country but they take a big interest in American politics so they pay into the campaign funds up to the max allowed uh to encourage uh people running for office to say that these drugs should be paid for out of your Medicare Plan um so stay tuned oh the saddest thing I have to say growing up I always would watch 60 Minutes on CBS News January 1st 2023 60es did a 12 minute program all about wovi and what a great thing it was and afterwards we looked at every single medical expert they quoted was paid by Novo Nordisk and Novo Nordisk also sponsored CBS it was basically a commercial so the the money is really leading the way on this and I'm hoping that that uh we'll start to see things in a better way yeah that's super sad to hear that especially especially about 60 minutes that I thought was basically you know better than all than that um doctors you write about how typically doctors they're not supposed to basically prescribe this drug until after their patients have tried some sort of a diet but I think you and I both know that they're probably not being prescribed the power Foods diet so of course whatever diet they're being told to go on doesn't work and they come back saying you know give me give me the drugs right that's exactly what happens is somebody will go on a diet they might do an Atkins diet or a South Beach Diet or they might do a calorie counting diet where by Wednesday they are so hungry they say I can't do it anymore at by Nova nordisk's guidelines they will say well you are now a diet failure so you qualify for injections and I would say that's a mistake how about if we support the patient in eating the foods that are healthy for them the kinds of foods that you've been advocating for for a long period of time plant strong foods and if we get away from the oil and we get away from the animal products and we filled our plates with healthy foods and if we emphasize these power foods have fun with them enjoy them the weight comes off automatically instead of spending 15 grand a year the average person on a plant-based diet saves about 500 bucks a year compared to what they were doing before yeah I I I think to sum up this it's just these drugs you just said it these drugs do artificially what your body can do naturally with a plant strong and power Foods type diet will you touch upon cholesterol cholesterol lowering drugs and insulin and why those also uh perpetuate the weight gain yeah now let me be clear some people are going to need insulin there's no question about it but insulin will will really slow down weight loss it interferes with it it causes weight gain so what's the answer the answer isn't to throw your injections away the answer is to also be on a healthy diet because what we have found is that when people people are on a plant-based diet no animal products keeping oils really low high fiber foods the power Foods their insulin requirements drop dramatically that's true for type two diabetes it's true for type one diabetes for type one you'll still need insulin you can't stop it but the amount you need is typically reduced by about 30% now with statins an amazing thing statins are cholesterol lowering drugs what researchers have found is that although they're they have a pretty good safety profile we started to see that they do a lot of Mischief starting with muscle pains uh liver uh disorders sometimes but more recently a higher risk of diabetes and perhaps even a higher risk uh of other issues including weight gain and the question is why if you have more fat cells your fat cells make leptin which reduces your appetite except when you're taking a Statin it reduces the fat cell's ability to make leptin so when people go on a Statin prescription compared to Placebo they're they're gaining weight unfortunately so some people are going to need them but probably 80 or 90% of people on a sattin don't need them meaning they wouldn't need them if they would follow a diet that didn't have animal fat or cholesterol in it wow that's so it's so wild this is such such a a great book Neil you've done such a a fabulous job tell me you've been at the helm now of pcrm that you founded in 19 in 1985 what what are some of the most exciting things that you're working on right now well we're doing some really big research studies right now we're doing a study with Blue crossb Shield to look at whether a plant-based diet will help reduce uh medical utilization basically do become a cheaper date do you need do you need less time in the emergency room uh we'll see we're in the middle of that study I'll I'll let you know uh we're also doing some more diabetes studies where we're looking at actually what's happening inside the cells as people are changing these things we and uh lots more going on but perhaps more importantly our job is to really get the word out as far and wide and rip that's something I want to salute you for because you've done such a brilliant job of letting people know about what healthy foods are how to incorporate them into their life to realize that this is good this is it's a little bit cool may I say also you make it fun and I got to salute you for doing that well I salute you right back uh my plant strong brother in arms thank thank you for everything that that you're doing it for that you're doing and for doing it so incredibly well and with such class Neil thank you rip give me a plan strong fist buff on the way out gotcha power foods go get them all right thank you rip great talking with you today Neil's new book power Foods comes out on March 26th and it's one that you'll want to order right away and I'll be sure to provide the link in in today's show notes remember that there are foods that fill you up and actually help you burn more calories and what are those Foods well they're plant strong of course thanks so much for listening and sharing this episode and until next time always always keep it plant strong the pl strong podcast team includes Carrie Barrett Lori cordt and Amy Mackey if you like what you hear do us a favor and share the show with your friends and loved ones you can always leave a five-star rating and review on Apple podcast or Spotify and while you're there make sure to hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode as always this and every episode is dedicated to my parents Dr Cell Beeston Jr and an cryle Elston thanks so much for listening
