Dr Neal Barnard | The Whole Foods Plant-Based Approach For Optimal Health & Avoiding Dementia

[Music] such a pleasure as a privilege to get to talk to you welcome to the show thank you it's great to be with you today amazing so before we kick this off i was uh thinking back about a conversation i had on the show recently with dr william lee and dr lee said to me that uh when he thinks about health most people just think about their in terms of the absence of disease but really there's a lot more to to that and i was looking around my friendship group i mean i'm 24 i'm a young guy a girl a lot of friends and it was notable that a lot of them had aches and pains they were suffering with fatigue you know they and i was looking around at you know different people i know and it just seems to me as if there are very few people which i would say in terms of their physical health are actually thriving so why are people in the west so sick well certainly um as as you can imagine a lot of it comes down to what we have for breakfast and what we have for lunch and what we have for dinner and what we have all in between those times because you can in the same way as you can when you're filling up your car at the filling station you can put in the gasoline that it's intended for or you could accidentally put diesel in a car that takes unleaded and everything is going to go wrong so i think that's kind of what it is our bodies prefer unleaded and a lot of people are putting in diesel i love it so it's interesting reading your body imbalance you are a proponent of a low-fat whole food plant-based diet so i find this completely fascinating when i consider your backstory in that you grew up on a farm in north dakota right so i wonder how how do how do those two things uh co-inspire well i have to say you know before i dive into kind of how i got here i i should say that um what we're really talking about is big stuff um there are so many people who are suffering now um there are imagine say a couple dealing with infertility and and year after year they're going they're spending a fortune on testing and treatments and so forth um or a young woman who's dealing with with say menstrual pain that every single month is leaving her out of work or a guy who's got prostate cancer and he's wondering if he's going to survive these are serious issues but what they all have in common is that they relate to hormones and people don't think about hormones what are hormones hormones are chemicals that are made in one part of your body and they travel through the bloodstream to dictate what the rest of your body is going to do they determine a lot of your health and most people have absolutely no idea that your breakfast determines hormone levels and your lunch is does the same and your dinner does the same and people are eating willy-nilly not realizing that that's going to change their reproductive hormones and their thyroid hormone everything so they can feel rotten or they can feel great or their reproduction can work well or not or whatever so that's to me is exciting and i recognize that that's new for many people you think wait a minute i figured food would either make me gain weight or lose weight or make my cholesterol go up or down now we're talking about a whole completely new universe of health issues and i get it and that's why that's why i wrote this book your body imbalances is for people who are dealing with hormonal issues that relate to reproduction i'm talking about a woman who's got cramps or endometriosis or pcos or is worried about breast cancer or a guy who has erectile dysfunction or fertility problems or people with thyroid issues or diabetes or mood things all these things are so mysterious and hard to figure and i wanted to boil it down make it simple help people to figure out which foods help so anyway with that long-winded preamble you said like how does somebody from fargo get into all this um the year before i went to medical school i had a job in a hospital i was i was i was the morgue attendant that was my job yes somebody died in the hospital and i would have to prepare the body for an examination by the pathologist uh and one day we had a guy die in the hospital of a massive heart attack probably from eating hospital food but that's another issue so anyway um the guy the guy was dead he had a heart attack and the pathologist cut a big chunk of ribs right off the front of his chest which you do not do with great delicacy you slice through the skin and peel it back and you take a clipper like a garden clipper and you go crunch crunch crunch through the ribs and you pull the ribs off and that exposed the heart which was diseased you could you could see that the heart had was severely damaged and so the pathologist knew that i was going to be going to medical school and he made sure i saw everything he sliced open a coronary artery he said look inside so i had gloves on i could feel inside and the the artery would itch an artery should feel kind of rubbery uh because it allows the blood to go through but this was crispy like filled with sand and it was he said that's that's cholesterol wow amazing and we looked at the arteries to the brain and they had the same thing meaning the person was headed for a stroke but the heart attack killed him first at the end of the exam he left i had to clean everything up so i put the ribs back in the chest and i sewed up the skin and you know it sponged everything everything down and i went up to the cafeteria when i was done and they were serving ribs for lunch and it smelled like the body and it and it looked like the body and i thought this is a body and i didn't become a vegetarian on the spot but i could not i couldn't eat it i just said like no and then it started this process of thinking through like what is it that um we're putting in our mouths and i started to connect food and disease and death and the more i learned about it the more i realized that getting away from animal products is obviously the way to go very interesting and all the people that i've interviewed him in there's been dr william lee dr bolshevitz i mean i interviewed dr b twice um then michael greger then uh the mastering diabetes guys and it's been a common theme you've got to speak to neil barnard you've got to speak to neil barnard uh it's incredible the work in what you do you're highly highly respected in this field so there's no accounting for taste but thank you so let's get really better in terms of um your book so the book is called your body imbalance the new suit of the new science of food hormones and health let's focus specifically on the hormones part for now because that's what we'll be talking about today how would you define a hormone and what is the job of a hormone okay hormones are chemical messengers they've got directions to tell your body what to do so they're made in one part of your body they go in the bloodstream they go somewhere else and say this is what we're going to do today so in a woman's body the ovaries make estrogens estrogens are hormones they go in the blood and they go to the uterus and they go to the other reproductive organs and they they cause changes in those organs um the thyroid hormone the the thyroid gland is at the base of your neck and it makes thyroid hormone that goes through the blood to the to the cells of the body to give them energy says okay wake up let's get with it or in a man's body the testes make testosterone it goes in the blood and i guess it goes to his brain and it makes him want to run for president i guess so anyhow a hormone okay just kidding a hormone is a chemical that's made in one part of the body to give directions to the rest of the body and when things are going wrong you've got all kinds of problems i'll give you an example sitting at my desk one day and the phone rang it was a woman with with menstrual cramps young woman she said i've got a business trip out of town tomorrow but i can't get out of bed and for about one in 10 women cramps are so bad every single month that they just really can't function and they're taking fistfuls of ibuprofen and whatever so she she wanted help and i said all right i can give you some painkillers for now but i started thinking what's the deal with cramps and i i i made an a well i suggested to her that you take painkillers for now but for the next four weeks before her next period no animal products in your diet you're gonna become a vegan and keep oils really low now this kind of surprised you like what are you talking about why should i do that i said let's just do this as an experiment and she called back a month later and said this is amazing she had a normal period zero cramps and it was it was her cure now let me go back to why i suggested this researchers have been looking at hormones for breast cancer because if you've got a breast can a breast cell that becomes a cancer cell estrogen fuels the growth of that cell so it will grow and expand and spread and can kill you and so researchers have said estrogen is trouble you know you need a little bit for reproduction but you don't need the excess that could make the cancer cells grow so researchers brought a large group of women they put them they locked them up in a research ward and they fed them a variety diets and they found certain things high fiber diets talking about beans and grains and vegetables caused the body to excrete a little extra estrogen so it brings estrogen down and they found that high fat diets bacon grease chicken fat fish oil those things make estrogens go up so they said wait a minute if you don't want to get cancer let's keep your estrogens inbound high fiber low fat so as the woman was calling me with cramps i thought what are cramps cramps are the uterus is changing every month and it's changing too much your the technical part is the inner lining of the uterus the endometrium thickens up in response to estrogen if it thickens up too much you just hurt at the end of the month so by changing her diet to a vegan diet it's really high fiber really low in fat and that would bring her estrogen down and make her feel good but anyway the point i'm making here that was just the door in and once we walked through that door we then did a research study to see if it works for women more broadly and it does and in the course of this we also found that it could affect fertility and it could affect endometriosis and all kinds of things so we discovered if i can control my hormones if i can learn what the heck they are and in kind of the same way somebody gives you a car and the keys but you never have driven before you've got to figure out how this works but once you know how to drive you got power and once you know how to control your hormones you can bring your health to a completely different level than it's been on i want to come back to the uh sex-related cancers in just a moment but you mentioned fertility and didn't in one of your research trials this new approach actually give way to a woman given birth that didn't think that she could yeah we this is something we've seen this in the first case you're right we were working with georgetown university and all we wanted to do was to test whether a low-fat plant-based diet really would help with menstrual cramps in a randomized trial a large group of women came in some of them started the diet some of them did not and whatever and it worked great but in in the course of this study we asked all the women to not use any hormone medications because that would goof up the study but that means the pill so we said if you're sexually active please use some other kind of contraception and one of the women in the study said forget it don't worry about me i'm completely infertile i said well how do you know she says well my husband and i have been trying for years and we were both evaluated and he's it's not him it's me i don't ovulate you know it's i'm just infertile that's the way so so don't worry i don't use hormones of any kind i don't use the pill the second month that she was on the plant-based diet she came into our center she said dr barnard i got bad news and i've got good news i said well what do you mean she says the bad news is i'm leaving your study and the good news is i am pregnant and she couldn't believe it she was pregnant like like that and then about maybe eight or nine years later i saw her again she came to one of my lectures she had three kids with her these were all her kids so anyway the point i made and she's not the only one there are other cases the case of catherine lawrence uh who i described she was in the air force over in iraq and when you're in a war zone you know you don't eat well you don't you don't you don't get any weight gain any weight uh but once you got back to louisiana and tucked into gumbo cheese all kinds of things she gained weight and she developed endometriosis which is a very painful condition where cells are growing in your abdomen that are fueled by estrogen exact same story she she was she was scheduled for a hysterectomy to control her because she had out of control endometriosis medication couldn't stop it and she was only 27 didn't want to have a hysterectomy um because i mean that means you're not going to have kids but her doctor said look the endometriosis has almost certainly rendered you infertile anyway ah so she she she scheduled the hysterectomy before she could have it she had six weeks before she could have it she went on the diet that i just described no animal products really low fat she started feeling better and better and better and better and by the time when when it came time for the hysterectomy the doctor opened her up and an hour later she was sedated an hour later the doctor wakes her up in the recovery room and says catherine i got some news for you your endometriosis is gone and she had some scarring where it had been and some adhesions would have then that could cause some continuing continuing pain so we just freed up the the scars removed the adhesions um and she was fine and so she she never had the hysterectomy and she no longer had endometriosis and she she has now three children of her own so anyway here's here's my point so many people have imagined that health is just can't really be changed much by food that there's not really a lot you can do and if you're infertile that's god's will it's probably not god's will it's probably the will of velveeta or you know mcdonald's or something like that but it has nothing to do with a deity um uh and you know that well i'm older or it's genetic there's nothing i do well maybe you know i mean our bodies you can have problems but a lot of the health issues we deal with our hormones gone awry and once people know what they are they can do better we've talked about women's issues but that's true for men it's true for older folks who don't want to have diabetes they want to conquer breast cancer prostate cancer they want to conquer their thyroid problems they want to get their energy back all that is possible with a healthy diet yeah and one of the things which you really hammer home in the book is the relationship between foods and things like estrogen and testosterone so i want to focus on that with the impact on things like breast and prostate cancer how does food impact the sex related cancers yeah in a major way and this has become well let's let's focus on men for a minute with prostate cancer when i was in medical school we were taught that all men will eventually get prostate cancer just just as with being old but then researchers said well wait a minute at harvard they brought in a large group of men 21 000 men and those men who consumed the most dairy were 30 for 34 more likely to get prostate cancer the men who avoided dairy less likely they thought oh that's interesting let's see if it's really true they did another study 48 000 men the health professionals follow-up study and now it was dairy increased cancer risk about 60 percent so the men who the men who said glass of milk no way cheese i don't eat it their risk of prostate cancer is dramatically less what's that about we know that prostate cancer the prostate is this organ right below a man's bladder nature put it there to drive poor men crazy um and it causes all kinds of symptoms uh as it enlarges but cancer cells can form in the prostate very very common when a man drinks milk something happens in his body very much like what happens when a calf drinks milk from the mother cow which is the calf's milk helps the calf grow milk has sugars in it lactose sugar proteins fats and hormones and in the calf's body it causes certain hormone-like substances called igf-1 is insulin-like growth factor number one and others to increase an amount and that makes the calf grow now you're a fully grown man it can make cancer cells grow we're pushed to drink milk you need it for calcium you need it for protein there are healthier sources of all those things that are not going to cause cancer and it's interesting as well because in your work in terms of men's health you talk about things like erectile dysfunction and i think you you've said a line in the book that was something like uh don't reach for viagra reach for vegetables right sorry could you just talk about this because i love this we see this every day i we have a clinic here at the physicians committee and every clinic is like this a guy goes into the clinic and he sees the doc and he says to the doc oh you know doc i can't raise the flag you know patients have all kinds of euphemisms for these things and so the doctor says you want a viagra prescription right and the patient says yeah that's what i need doc and so the doc says well i can give you that and so the patient snatches the prescription and says thanks doc and he walks out you know the doctor drops his pen races out the door and grabs the patient before he goes down the elevator and says we're not finished you got to come back and sit down and the doctor sits down at the patient and says this viagra that might help you tonight but let me tell you what erectile dysfunction means it means it's not performance anxiety the reason that you can't get an erection is you don't have blood flow you know the male sexual anatomy what causes it to change is blood flow you get a lot of blood flow and you get an erection you don't have it it doesn't happen so if a man has erectile dysfunction he's 55 years old he's generally healthy he thinks but he suddenly has this erectile dysfunction that's a sign that the arteries to his private parts are narrowing and narrowing and narrowing so there's not blood getting through anymore and erectile does viagra will will momentarily enlarge those arteries and then they close down again um but what the doctor explains to the patient is you if you've got narrow arteries there that's a sign that you've got narrowed arteries to your heart muscle and you're gonna have a heart attack you've got artery narrowings in the arteries that are feeding your brain you are at much higher risk of a stroke than other people and and i'm not talking long term i'm talking about within the next three to five years so if i got your attention patient go ahead and take your viagra tonight but that's not going to reverse any of this what reverses the artery disease is to get the cholesterol out of your diet and the animal fat out of your diet and if you do those things you have a shot i'm talking about a completely plant-based diet you have a shot of those arteries healing naturally that'll prevent the heart attack help you reduce the risk of a stroke and with regard to your private parts one of the really common side effects we see in our clinic is that erectile dysfunction goes away um without any drugs at all so that that will take um some weeks but but it does happen and it's i got to tell you it makes patients really like the taste of that vegan food yeah the tofu must taste awfully sweet with that i want to loop back on this because i want to touch back as we're on the sex relate the cancers i want to zoom back background and look at the female side so i think that there's so much confusion here especially i'm based in the uk i'm in wales and i hear all the time and it drives me pretty mad this take that soy is so damaging to people's health where do you stand on soy well um what they're thinking of is this that soy soy beans have compounds in them called isoflavones and those were identified back in the 1930s and the concerns started because the isoflavones appear to attach to the estrogen receptor so if you take a test tube and you put breast cells in them the isoflavones from soy can attach to the receptor so people started to speculate well could that cause cancer well we've had more than enough time to study that and if you look at large groups of women who consume different amounts of soy and then you track who's getting cancer who isn't in fact you you could take um the the the groups that are most effective to study are asian women or asian american women for example where some consume a phenomenal amount of soy you know tofu soy milk um miso and so forth on a daily basis and others may not have them so it gives you a really good ability to to to to look at the question and the data are really clear and that is uh soy does affect cancer risk in the following way the women consuming the most soy products have 30 less likelihood of getting cancer or maybe more maybe 40 less risk so so soy doesn't cause cancer it does the opposite it reduces the risk quite a lot 30 40 um so yes soy products reduce cancer risk but more than that researchers have looked at women who have had cancer in the past she was diagnosed she was treated what happens now and it turns out that women consuming the most soy again have about a 30 reduction in the likelihood of dying of their cancer so why would all this be um and you can get the answer by going down your stairs walking out to the street and getting in your car and you look down at the pedals on the floor of your car and on the right or i'm sorry you're in wales um probably on the left you've got the gas well i forget i got the gas on the right they go the gasoline your gas is on the right same as us okay same as that's great the steering wheel is on the right our steering goes on the other side all right your right foot hits the gas right next to it is another pedal and that pedal is the brake now if you step on the gas the car goes you step on the brake the car stops um isoflavones attach they don't attach to the alpha receptor so much they attach preferentially to the beta receptor so you can think of soy as the break and if you've got no breaks in your car you're in trouble um so the idea about soy and and breast cancer is an important one but we now we strongly encourage women to make soy part of their life it's good in a couple ways one is in and of itself these chemical impacts are helpful but the other part of it is it's replacing something that would not have been good for you if instead of a hamburger you have the soy veggie burger or instead of cow's milk you have soy milk or soy yogurt that is dramatically better than what it replaces now let me be clear you don't need soy and i think all things in balance you know you don't want to have only soy but it does seem to be beneficial and it reduces the risk of developing cancer or dying of it it's interesting how you talk about uh the sort of the opportunity cost by consuming are you not consuming something else and i've got a friend that um was really big into bodybuilding and physique uh you know the physique side of things and he was typically eating four meals a day and he decided to switch that to just one meal per day so one big meal a day so he was fasting for probably about 23 hours um what he noticed was that by fasting uh he is he just felt entirely better he noticed his strength went up his but his body fat decreased to a certain extent and we were trying to ponder on why this was and he there was still some animal uh products in there but what my theory is is that he cut out a m you know but by fasting he cut out the chance to consume twinkies or mars bars or you know the eggs and bacon for breakfast so where do you stand on fasting um i think fasting is okay um there are people who do it in a number of ways and for particularly severe autoimmune conditions for example fasting has been therapeutic for many people but i do have a couple cautions uh one is if you're gonna do a serious fast and by that i mean several days or longer not just like one meal a day okay you're not gonna hurt yourself but if you're if you're really fasting for a week or more it's something to do under supervision from uh medical people who know what you're doing because it can be dangerous the second thing is if some people are fasting there's kind of been a fad now eat five days that fast two days so on the weekend people eat only tiny amounts or something like that you can you can do that but very rapidly people know that they're going to be fasting so they start overeating on the other days and then as time goes on they're not so happy with their results and i have to say a plant-based diet is in a way a way of getting the same benefits while still eating because think about it if you're eating meat meat doesn't have any fiber in it at all it's a mixture of protein and fat plus the occasional parasite but it's but with regard to nutrients it's protein and fat if i eat beans or vegetables it's got protein it's got traces of fat but it has a lot of fiber in it fiber fills you up but fiber doesn't have calories so that brings down your calorie intake in a healthy way without you having to go hungry so it can help people to kind of accomplish what they're doing in a little bit different way i love it i love it one of the other major topics i'd love to delve into in your book is you talk about um a low-fat plant-based diet also being key for regulating metabolism now this i drew real interest in and this was something that my own mother had actually been suffering with so i wonder how does her actually do this we discovered this a number of years ago and it's true um people will come into our research center they come in at six o'clock in the morning they just got out of bed they got in their car they come in because we're expecting them they haven't had breakfast and we measure their metabolism but when i say metabolism i mean how fast is your body burning calories and she might be 55 years old and she'll say i got no metabolism anymore when i was when i was 12 i could eat anything but now i just look at food i gain weight i'm obviously not burning calories well we can measure it and the way we do it is you lie down on an exam table and we have a it almost looks like a helmet it's a plastic kind of clear plastic globe that goes over your face and your and your neck and your shoulders as you're lying there and i'm measuring how much carbon dioxide you're breathing out and how much oxygen you're taking in and that's directly proportional to your your metabolism how fast your cal your if your body is burning up a lot of calories you're consuming a lot of oxygen so we can measure this real easily and then once i've measured your metabolism and you're right it's low then i give you breakfast and at the end i'm going to give you a standardized breakfast and your metabolism starts to rise and then i'm going to and i measure how much it rises that always happens happens for everybody it if with a mixed breakfast now for the next 14 weeks or so i'm going to make you a vegan we're going to eat only plant foods we're going to keep oils low too and at the end of that time you'll have lost weight your cholesterol is better and so forth but but let's come back in the laboratory and let's check specifically your metabolism you lie down on the table put the same globe over your face and i'm measuring your metabolism and then i give you breakfast again in fact i'm going to give you the very same breakfast i gave you before but your metabolism isn't the same at all it's higher than it was before for during the after meal period you're now burning 15 16 faster than you were before now that's not a lot but what if for three hours after breakfast you're burning calories about 15 16 more than you were before and you do it again after lunch you do it again after dinner why is it the vegans are the skinniest people on the block it's because they're taking in fewer calories because it's high fiber low-fat food just naturally lowering calories and their metabolism is a little bit better after every meal than it was before so yeah you can change your metabolism and it happens right away um and the studies we do we usually give it you know maybe three months or four months before we test it again but the changes start occurring in your body on day one see this is really interesting to me because i always thought that weight was just a matter of a weight gain or loss was simply a matter of calories in versus calories out and then my good friend dr will bolsheviks he tells me no no joe the microbiome plays a major role in this um so i was like okay you know i imagine it might do then i started tracking calories with my own mother and i started realizing that okay you know maybe metabolism and the microbiome does play a part in this so just in terms of the actual food and the whole food plant-based diet what what impact is that actually having on the metabolism well uh over the short run what happens is that if let's say you're eating fat uh i'm gonna eat a big steak or i'm gonna eat a salmon fillet which is you know if it's chinook salmon 52 fat um those fat grams that come out of the salmon they go down my esophagus they don't stimulate metabolism much at all they get they go through the bloodstream and they add to body fat which is why people eat a lot of fish tend to be portly but that's true for chicken fat or any other kind of fat fat does not stimulate the metabolism what stimulates the metabolism over the short run is particularly carbohydrate and protein as well so let's say i'm eating instead of the fish or animal products or don't eat cheese i mean it's 70 percent fat let's say instead i'm eating a bean i'm going to need a plate of beans they're only about four percent fat compare that with as i said fifty percent for the chinook salmon but what beans have is protein and carbohydrate so i get a good burn afterwards but there's something more than that um day by day you get a better burn from from foods that provide healthy plant-based proteins and plant-based carbohydrate however over the long run when you get the fatty foods out of your diet that means that the fat actually starts draining out of your muscles and draining out of your liver so without all that fat in your muscle tissue and without the fat in your liver your body can actually burn calories more efficiently over the long run so it's partly an acute meal effect but it's more importantly a longer-term effect of having healthier cells that's really interesting that's really interesting um what is the effect of having adipose fat extra fat on the body what effect does that actually have it well your body is trying to store it it says would you please stop eating the burgers if you don't mind and you keep eating it and so your body says all right what am i gonna do with all this fat that's coming down your body tries to store it that's the whole point of belly fat and thigh fat fat on your derriere is your body's trying to get it out of the way and the more you we eat the heavier we get your body's trying to sequester this fat away the problem is the body can never really succeed at that so much as it tries to get it out of the way some of that fat is going to sneak inside your muscle cells and some of that fat is going to sneak in your liver cells instead of going into body fat it's going into the cells that are trying to work with you and the more it gets into your muscle cells and liver cells then then it interferes with insulin now i know this is i don't want to get overly complex but insulin is a hormone that works on the muscle cells it works on the liver cells to get sugar out of your blood to get it into those cells to power them so suddenly the fatty foods pack fat into the muscle and liver cells insulin can't do its job anymore because the cells all gummed up with fat and then your blood sugar starts to rise and your doctor says you've got diabetes he said what how did i get diabetes you got diabetes from eating fatty foods then pack the fat into your muscle and liver and that stops insulin from being able to work and now your blood sugar just goes up and up and up and up and up and then so for the rest of their life people don't eat sugar or they don't eat bread they thought that was the issue that was never the issue the issue was the fat getting into the cell really do you not take a stance against sugar at all don't get me wrong um if it's natural sugars like in an apple or an orange or a banana i mean those those are are healthy for you in fact sugar is like your ferrari drives on gasoline you know your your body thrives on glucose that's the natural sugar you need your brain needs glucose if you don't have it you're on the floor dead yeah so sugar is a good thing in that respect where where it's not so good is that people take sugar cane and they throw away all the fiber and so forth and they pack the sugar the pack that into candy or they'll take sugar beets and throw away all the pulp and all the fiber and then they take the sugar that refined sugar and they'll put it in a drink and they'll call it dr pepper which is not a medical drink despite the name um and so these artificial sugars are not healthy for us yeah it's interesting i'd love to link my own personal experience you into your work so quite a while ago i watched um michael pollan's in defense of who this great documentary and he simplified this journey he went on and i remember he said eat plants no sorry he said eat food not too much mostly plants and once i listened to that i thought okay i want to make the one decision that removes a hundred later decisions so to the best of my ability i'm just going to try to stick to only food essentially i'm going to try to avoid the middle aisles as best as i could and where i noticed that by doing this it would it felt like i was in the matrix because of how much my thinking improved it was like like i thought i could like bend walls with my thoughts so i'd love to know what is the impact between uh nutrition the food in which wheat and also perhaps uh brain fog or perhaps even mental health there are several really important things um one of the things that has concerned me in particular is the risk of alzheimer's disease i mean make a list of all the diseases you never want to get in your life and number the top of the list is alzheimer's disease because i mean you lose everything and researchers have shown that the very same fatty foods that cause heart attacks also appear to increase the risk of alzheimer's disease and and by a lot i'm talking about bacon grease and dairy fat and all that kind of stuff the saturated fat is a big one one of many drivers um but when we're speaking at brain health we're not only speaking of sort of later life dementia we're also talking about how you feel today or this morning and we have done a number of studies where we have been looking at when when people start a plant-based diet to lose weight or to track tackle diabetes or something like that we also kind of surreptitiously track what's happening with how they feel what what's going on with their mood and you can do this with paper and pencil tests uh you can rate depression you can write anxiety you can look at job absenteeism are you able to work or not and that kind of thing and what we find quite consistently is that when people follow plant-based diets depression goes down anxiety goes down job job absenteeism goes down all these things go down now then the next question is why and i think there are several reasons i think part of it is let's face it if you lose 30 or 45 pounds you feel better you know you feel you feel just as you were saying you feel more power you feel um for a lot of a better word you just feel pumped up um because you've conquered problems you know when you no longer have diabetes i mean that feels fantastic when your doctor says i'm going to cut your medicines in half no i'm going to take you off your medicine those all feel fantastic but there's more to it you mentioned the gut microbiome the bacteria that are in your digestive tract a meaty dairy-rich diet fosters the growth of unhealthy bacteria plant-based foods beans vegetables whole grains fruits increase the they really foster the growth of healthy bacteria that feed back to the brain they make neurotransmitters themselves and finally the when the brain when we look at people who have depression they very often have a chronic inflammatory condition in their body um their cells are making inflammatory compounds that affect the brain on a plant-based diet the inflammation goes down they feel better so why do people feel better why is their energy better why is their depression down is it because physically they're healthier and that just makes you pumped up is it that their gut is healthier is it that they're not so inflamed is it something else the answer is all the above in terms of the alzheimer's prevention are there any dr neil barnard's power foods which you could suggest to us which would be great in preventing or perhaps even maybe reverse in some effects caused by alzheimer's um yeah uh let me certain things i would favor and certain things i would not favor um the things to get away from we already mentioned the foods that are high in bad fat saturated fat dairy that's number one get away from the dairy the cheese yes i know that some people watching this program they say look i'm addicted to cheese how i can't live without it i feel your pain but cheese doesn't love you back it's a maladaptive relationship and it's time to end it now and that's true for me you know meat is the second biggest source of saturated fat after cheese and dairy products breaking up with them is a really great idea let me also suggest snack foods that often have the trans fats in them get away from those and there's a special place in hell for people who are ruining healthy plant-based foods you can have wonderful vegan foods but over the past couple years people are packing coconut oil and palm oil in them and that's not healthy that's a saturated fat too so look for the ones that don't have that be careful about your cookware uh don't cook in aluminum pots and pans if the aluminum is touching the food because aluminum can be a brain toxin too uh same with iron we're in love with our cast iron pan but especially for men women will women in the reproductive years will lose a little bit of blood every month and so their iron levels tend to stay low older women and men at any age tend to store too much iron and iron can goof up the brain too so i'm a big fan of stainless steel cookware or or non-stick cookware not the aluminum and not the the iron so with regard to things too so that's all the stuff to not do on the things to do before i get to food do lace up your sneakers and go out for a good run because if you pump get your heart pumping it gets oxygen to the brain it gets the toxins out so exercise is good do make sure you sleep yes i know there's a lot of great stuff for to stay awake for on the internet but it's good to knock off once in a while and let your brain your brain needs to rest but with regard to food we there are four food groups that are important vegetables fruits whole grains beans but within them look for color um the carrots are sweet potatoes yams that orange color is beta-carotene that's an antioxidant that's important tomatoes that red color that's lycopene that's an antioxidant vitamin e rich foods those are the nuts and seeds those are antioxidants think about blueberries um grapes uh those the the the pigments are you're often a guide to antioxidants that have protected the plant and they can protect you too so eat for color interesting that you mentioned um tomatoes are you not a believer in this argument for lectins and the avoidance of them oh no i don't think lectins are really important to tell you the truth i know there's um been kind of a fad to avoid lectins um and i think the thing to to recognize is that there are a lot of compounds in plants um if you if you were to eat raw beans i mean dry beans first of all you would break a tooth trying to do that and if you did you would get a lot of lectins but when you cook them it really becomes a non-issue so i don't think you need to worry about lectins the reason i mentioned tomatoes is at half a mile away you can see the lycopene that's in them that's that's what makes them a bright red color and lycopene isn't just a healthy it's a cousin of beta carotene the orange carrot has beta-carotene lycopene is the tomato version of that and it's an antioxidant that will help protect you against oxidative processes i think that this has been amazing before we get you know where our audience can connect with you and uh you know where we can point them towards the book we always ask one last question and this isn't related to your researcher though maybe but we always ask at the end of every podcast what makes a life worth living wow what a fabulous question um uh allow me to be brief um in my own view of the world i don't believe that i am trying to rack up points for uh an enjoyable afterlife my feeling is that this is it i don't know quite how i got here i'm not sure how any of us got here but i think that we do have a couple things that we can do my view is that we do what we can to alleviate suffering in whatever forms it takes whether that's human suffering or animal suffering or destroying the planet to do what we can to alleviate suffering i think is our highest calling beyond that once you've done your duty for the day to eliminate suffering there are some things that we can do to beautify the world whether it's through music or through kindness or other things then that's job too i thought that was a beautiful answer um and let me put my grat due to because a lot of people which i've talked to they've all said go and speak to neil go and speak to neil he's doing incredible things and and i do have to pay my gratitude because it is true can you tell our audience where they could connect with you and also about your work going forward oh well thank you for asking that our website is pcrm.org that stands for the physicians committee for responsible medicine pcrm.org and so if you go there you'll see lots of of information and we're on all the social media channels as well and we have an app that's called the 21 day vegan challenge and this is for people who say okay this might be a good thing but i'm not sure it's going to really work for me and i'll probably get divorced if i go vegan uh let me just try it so you just think you just map out three weeks you just try it it's kind of like driving you know test driving your car before you buy so it's called the 21 day vegan uh kickstart 21 day vegan kickstarter it's on your iphone or your android or whatever and download it and have at it and your body imbalance is available on amazon if possible please buy from local bookstores but neil this has been such a pleasure everything will be linked below i really can't thank you enough for coming on the show it's been such a privilege well i want to i want to thank you you know in any given day a doctor might see 15 patients 20 patients if they're busy or something like that but one of your programs reaches a lot of people huge number of people and you educate them and you inspire them and you you'll never know how many lives you save but i guarantee you'll save many so thank you for including me on this

Channel: Freedom Pact

Views: 128,361

Keywords: iMovie, wholefoods, superfoods, nealbarnard, yourbodyinbalance, powerfoods, vegan, vegetarian, londonreal, drnealbarnard, alzheimers, dementia, health, vitality, veganism, animals, brain, neuroscience, hormones, healthy, weightloss, erectiledysfunction, diabetes, plantbased, wfpb, diabetesfree, rich roll, Neal barnard, whole foods, London real, rich roll podcast, weight loss, power foods, ted x, aspen institute, physicians committee, Joel furhman, Joel kahn

Id: jMr5NvR1Y3Y

Length: 46min 43sec (2803 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020