Eating to Age Well: Nutrient Needs | Dr. Neal Barnard Live Q&A

damn room live brought to you by the physicians committee hi i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll we appreciate you helping to make the world a healthier place today's question is this how do your nutrient requirements change as you get older do you need a little bit more of this vitamin and maybe a little bit less of this one what about fat and calories and carbs does any of that change as we age how do you eat to maximize your health as the years roll by we're going to find out as we're joined by the author of your body imbalance dr neil barnard and doctor's mailbag wide open so go ahead and let's fill it up with your questions as well we're going to get to as many as we can here on the show and here's how you put your question in that mail bag you just put it in the comment or in the chat box and we're going to get to as many as we can we want that thing stuffed because we want to help raise those health iqs and you can also send them to me on demand anytime twitter and instagram i'm at chuck carroll wlc so let's talk about nutrient requirements as you get older how to maximize your diet as the years roll by with dr neil barnard my friend it is good to have you here once again great to be with you chuck this is a great question and i'm so happy that donna sent this one in and she's wondering does your diet need to change in order to meet nutrient requirements as you get older that is a great question because needless to say that's happening to everybody we're all getting a little bit older um there are some nutrients where we're kind of short frankly even before we're older and they can often get worse when they're older and some of them are pretty obvious fiber for example your average american does not get very much fiber fiber is the roughage in beans and vegetables and fruits and whole grains and if you don't get enough fiber apart from the normal constipation and things that we associate with it the gut bacteria aren't so healthy either without adequate fiber and that releases all kinds of problems then okay so fiber is a pretty obvious one another kind of obvious one is vitamin b12 you need b12 you probably know this already for healthy nerves and healthy blood and supplementing is a really good idea but when people are older they can really run low in b12 for a couple reasons one is that if let's say a person is not vegan and they're trying to get their b12 from meat well there is b12 in it but without a lot of stomach acid you can't pull the b12 off the protein and so even though they're eating an omnivorous diet they're low in b12 if they're on medications metformin most common diabetes medication uh acid blockers also really common those reduce um b12 absorption so so medications can kick in for a lot of older folks and so they end up being low in b12 and the answer for them is just like the answer for everybody else go to your local health food store go online go to a drug store and pick up the smallest b12 supplement they have and take that uh maybe just a couple of others chuck that i just gonna mention really quickly one is calcium and calcium is a funny one because um the requirements that the government will specify are pretty high they'll say a thousand milligrams or for older people maybe 1200 you think yeah there's no way i'm getting there why is it so high it's i believe it's high because the dairy industry has pushed the government to tell people they need more calcium if you look at the scientific literature i would say about 700 milligrams per day is the amount that you ought to aim for where do you get it um you get calcium you know this already green leafy vegetables number one source beans also have a lot um and maybe just to to wrap it up vitamin d is something that normally comes from sunlight on your skin the older we get for a lot of folks they're indoors more of the time they're not getting much sun and so they should be taking a vitamin d supplement probably most doctors will suggest about 2 000 international units a day so those those are some of the key key issues for folks uh nutrient-wise as they get older the calcium uh being you might not need as much as what the what the rdas suggest right now that's fascinating so in the studies that have been published that 700 milligrams a day that will protect you pretty well against fractures and all of the other concerns that people have when they're short on it that's exactly right um if you have very little calcium in your diet you know a couple of hundred milligrams per day you are at higher risk for a fracture and so if you go from 300 to 500 to 600 you're going to reduce your risk of fracture but once you get to about 700 it's really hard to make a case that going higher than that does any good at all with regard to the fracture risk and where people run into trouble is they're saying to their kids make sure you have lots of milk because it's high in calcium and they're just kind of regurgitating the promotions they've heard what do you end up doing you end up giving the kid all the problems that milk will cause from the saturated fat that increases the risk of heart disease milk is linked to long-term risk of prostate cancer and you don't want to set up your male members of your family for prostate cancer there's some evidence not as strong but but still compelling linking milk to breast cancer so there's every reason to not shoot for these really high calcium targets if you're doing it with an unhealthy food like dairy if you're doing it with green leafy vegetables there's really not much risk of having a little extra brussels sprouts or or some broccoli or in there yeah i know my my granddaddy before his passing he was really big on getting all of his calcium from cheese and it could have been a hunk of cheddar or it could have been cheap oh my gosh cheese was in a can uh but he was always like i'm getting my calcium and it uh you know at the time i i was like good for you granddaddy this is so good you know you're gonna have those good strong teeth and bones but man alive i mean just the conversations that you and i have had over the years on this show i mean there really are a lot better sources of calcium that a person can get than eating cheese you you said it chuck i mean uh if you had a calcium supplement that was 70 percent fat i mean that is that is not one you want to choose okay so uh let's kind of put a put a bow on this conversation here so uh we we've talked about a lot of other nutrients but would i be correct in assuming that kathleen is kind of wondering the same thing here would i be correct in assuming that the requirements for things like vitamin a vitamin c those kinds of vitamin k like they really don't change over the years they don't change a lot um when the the us government looks at all these recommendations and they do modify them a little bit here and there but by and large uh after about age 19 or so they're about pretty much relatively flat for the rest of time even when people are older here's an interesting one from laurie she sent me an email and she's uh she linked off to an article that said that seniors should increase their fat intake do you know whether or not there is any scientific evidence to back that up okay um what they're probably thinking of is that when you're older you're at higher risk of dementia and the brain uses omega-3s and so the idea is let's just stuff a bunch of fat in the brain and hope that it's that we're going to be protected what really matters is the quality of fat it it's got to be certain types and the typical fat that's in cheese is not omega-3 the typical fat in a burger is not omega-3 so what a person really needs is less fat overall because if you're having a lot of unhealthy fats it actually competes with the good fats and it will actually slow down the omega-3 production so you really you no no you don't want to increase fat overall but you do want to make sure that proportionately of the fat you're getting it's high in omega-3 what do i mean you take some broccoli send it to a lab and they'll say you thought it was fat free but it's actually seven or eight percent of of the broccoli's calories are actually fat believe it or not and what matters is that proportionately the omega-3 is really very high in green leafy vegetables so not much fat overall but proportionately a lot of omega-3 and over time if you eat a lot of those foods the fats in your body tend to mirror the proportions in your foods so if your foods are proportionately high in omega-3 you will you will be too um some people will supplement with omega-3s if you do skip the fish oil you can get exactly the same thing in a cleaner package with vegan omega-3s there's dha epa supplements uh controversial they probably increase the risk of prostate cancer in men so a lot of people are not recommending them but if you're choosing um that's that's what people are looking at all right so we're talking about omega-3 and brain health there but troy's wondering about what other nutrients might be important for brain health uh certain things you got to avoid um certain things you want to pump in um number one thing to avoid and you've heard me say this before saturated fat that's the fat that's in dairy fat that's in in meat uh even your chinook salmon has a surprising amount of saturated fat strongly linked to dementia particularly alzheimer's and the chicago health and aging project almost 20 years ago reported these findings that people eating the most saturated fat that means dairy that means meat had about two to three times higher risk of alzheimer's compared to people who generally avoided those things so saturated fat avoid trans fats avoid that means snack foods it also means there are traces in dairy of trans fats believe it or not um also to avoid excess iron not green leafy vegetables they're okay because they have non-heme iron but meat products have iron animal products have too much copper those can damage the brain things to take advantage of vitamin e is actually okay and that's in nuts and seeds not a lot because yes they are fattening but maybe an ounce something like that a day will give you a good chunk of vitamin e and vegetables and fruits in general when researchers look at people who avoid them people who eat vegetables and fruits the vegetable and fruit eaters have a lot lower risk of cognitive decline even if you're just comparing like a person who has zero versus a person has about one serving a day so you pump it up you have two or three servings a day um you're getting you're you're doing your brain a big favor there too just talking about copper and and metal in the diet i want to take a question now from sheila who's wondering about iron she says should i limit the amount of greens and soy in my diet because they're high in iron she said she's worried about alzheimer's risk uh well first of all it's good that you're worried because alzheimer's is the last thing you want to get and foods do play into it but the short answer is no i would not worry about the greens and i would not worry about soy but you're thinking right you don't want to overdo it with iron the good news about any vegetable source any plant source of iron is that it comes in the form of what we call non-heme iron and that means that it is the type that your body can absorb more of if you're low in iron and if you're high in iron your body will actually keep it out so if you eat lots and lots of green vegetables your body is monitoring your yes this your body actually monitors your iron content so to speak um and if you need more iron it'll absorb more if you're already iron overloaded it absorbs less contrast that with a steak uh animal products have a lot of what's called heme iron and the heme iron barges into your party whether you needed it or not so so the the bad sources of iron are the liver meat products in general because they have a they will tend to lead you into overload um and so what what is the limit that we're looking at when it comes to iron alzheimer's runs in my family i know that it runs in millions of other families around the world so is there a threshold that we should be worried about when it comes to iron and we also get this question a lot dr barnard is if somebody is taking a multivitamin multivitamin supplement should they be looking for one that does not have iron in it the answer is yes um look at the label and one a day and so forth they want to sell you something that sounds complete they know you need iron so they throw the iron into the package and you'll see it on the on the label and they know you need copper so they'll throw copper in there what they missed is that there is iron in the foods that you're eating and there's copper in the foods you're eating so yeah if you want to take a multiple vitamin go online or go to the store and get one that's marked vitamins only uh and they will say that they're not a lot of them but but you'll see them and then when you look at the ingredients there's vitamin b12 there's b vitamins and and so forth most of which you're getting from food anyway so you don't really need need it but if there's no added iron that's good if there's no added copper that's good now um some of the companies like centrum years ago started to realize that particularly women after menopause their needs for iron changed a lot they're no longer menstruating they're no longer losing iron every month and so you start accumulating it and men have been accumulating it all their life and so they um they took the iron out of say centrum silver which is the one for people older so that's good but unfortunately they haven't caught up on copper they still pack the copper in there so yeah pick them all if you're going to use a multivitamin pick one that does not have iron does not have copper but you might also ask why you're bothering with a multivitamin anyway if you just go to the store and get b12 frankly that's got you covered or b12 and d you probably don't need uh your multi i want to take a question now from annie who's watching us on youtube this one came in at 12 11 today we were talking about having too much of a certain vitamin or nutrient in the diet a lot of that comes from through supplementation but annie's wondering specifically what do you do if you have too much calcium in your system too much calcium in your system i guess i'm wondering what uh what she's thinking about now if if it's that you got a blood test and it just showed that it was high in calcium your doctor is going to investigate that and see if there's some other some other explanation that's it's that's not a common finding and your doctor can look to see if there's a physiological explanation um people talk about calcium in a couple of other contexts one is kidney stones one is heart blockages heart blockages are calcium they end up being calcified as time goes on the answer to both of these is a healthier diet if you are taking calcium supplements because you have been low in calcium and you've had fractures and your doctors got you on a specific regimen take the calcium with food don't take it on an empty stomach if you take it with food your somehow your body kind of balances things out a little bit and calcium with food is not associated with kidney stones calcium on an empty stomach is associated with kidney stones so so have it with your food um but hopefully you don't need a calcium supplement and hopefully you're getting calcium just from the um the levels uh in the foods that you're eating naturally now one other thing i just want one last thing and that's vitamin d helps your body absorb calcium so when you're talking with your doctor about it the doctor will look at your calcium intake your vitamin d intake which helps the calcium come in and to see if there's anything fluky hormonally going on that might affect your calcium levels all right let's look at another nutrient on the opposite end of the spectrum so we've been talking about too much of something now let's talk about when you may not have enough of something janice is uh wondering what should you do what should you eat when your iron levels are too low okay we need to bring in more iron but we bring it in in a healthy healthy source and green leafy vegetables and beans are the healthiest source i was mentioning earlier that the non-heme iron is more absorbable when your body needs more some people use the lemon trick a little bit of lemon juice any high vitamin seafood will increase the absorption however let me give you a big caveat here how do we know that our iron level is too low if it was just a blood test and your doctor said you're kind of borderline low if you feel well if you are not anemic if you have no symptoms to be on sort of the low end of the iron window is actually a good thing that means you're at the least risk for alzheimer's least risk for heart disease now if you're frankly frankly low so that you're anemic and sluggish and so forth then you've obviously got to take it seriously and uh when we're talking about iron and alzheimer's risk i always like to also bring up cookware into the equation um brought up saying a cast iron skillet is about the best thing that you could have in your kitchen come to find out that's really not such a good idea is it well it's a good thing to you put a nail in the wall and you put it there and it looks sort of like a rustic environment and you never actually take it down and cook with it that's fine um the problem is when you do cook with it yeah you're absolutely right chuck the iron will end up in the food and so if it's your once every two months pan big deal uh no no real problem but if it's your go-to pen which for a lot of people it is you know they love their cast iron pan they use it every day yeah you are getting too much iron and it is absorbable and you don't want that um i know this sounds like just too ultra modern but there is nothing wrong with a non-stick pan uh very controversial people remember teflon you know from the 70s that would chip off and and also as it would heat it would give off toxic fumes those problems have really been solved and so the modern non-stick pans really are quite good you know you don't have to use them but they allow you to escape the iron you escape the aluminum and you're escaping the added fats a couple of quick hellos to some roomies who are joining us live today gp saying uh that they're watching the exam room live live for the very first time very cool thanks for being here also want to say hi to paul who's watching us from bracebridge ontario canada i hear it's lovely this time of year in bracebridge so thank you so very much for tuning in um paul uh dr bronner let's go back to aging here take a question from greg who's wondering uh whether the risk for certain diseases like cancer actually decrease over the age of 80. well kind of disturbing statistic here really the average age for many of the common cancers if you look at lung cancer breast cancer and these things it's way up in the upper 60s typically so what that means is that half the cases occur before that time and the other half all occur after that time so when people are in their older years that's when frankly you see a lot of cancer happening pretty fast um there's an exception to that though in that sometimes people are killed by other things first you know the cardiovascular disease becomes their preoccupation and not so much on the cancers but yes cancers can occur more and more commonly as people age partly their defenses their immune defenses are not as strong and frankly their accumulated exposures are are are worse than ever a guy who's been having dairy all his life not going to get prostate cancer when he's 24 but when he's 84 very it's much more likely it's the same as smoking you know the first year of smoking your lung cancer risk really low but if you've been making a career of it it gets higher and higher and higher so so we don't want to think okay i'm up in years now i can't get cancer it's it's always a really good good time to follow as healthier diet as you possibly can um i think maybe one of the reasons why this question piqued my interest is uh speaking with dr will bolsoewitz i believe he mentioned that past a certain age really men don't have to worry too much about getting a colonoscopy uh is the is that correct am i remembering that that correctly um that's reasonable advice um and and it's for for a couple reasons it's not that you're not at risk for colorectal cancer it's that it takes time for colorectal cancer to develop and so that's why the colonoscopies are recommended maybe even every five years or less often and because there's a small risk to colonoscopy not a big risk but there is a small risk i mean there is such a thing as perforation and anesthesia problems and stuff the doctor makes kind of an equation it says what's your real benefit what's the likelihood i'm going to find anything versus what's the likelihood of your having a problem with it and once you're really up in years they kind of decide maybe it's not worth it so much anymore so when people are in their 60s early 70s the doctors often start slacking off on those recommendations not too terribly long ago you and i did a show on high cholesterol a very popular episode and i'm bringing this question back from it because it's a really important one especially as we're talking about aging today and this one is from nina who's wondering whether women are more likely to have high cholesterol after menopause yeah they are nobody really knows exactly the reason for it but as estrogen shifts estrogen levels fall at menopause cholesterol levels do go up um and the question of course is what can you do about it and you already know the first part of that answer which is get the cholesterol off your plate so we don't want to be having animal products at all um and it's not just the egg that has cholesterol it's in meats it's in dairy and even worse is the fat that's in meats and in dairy the saturated fat that i was criticizing before it's uh it drives cholesterol levels up it certainly does so when you avoid those things your cholesterol level for for ninety percent of people their cholesterol levels fall that's great um if yours didn't um what i would suggest you do is take another couple of steps one is not not just no animal products but keep oils really low take olive oil for example chicken fat is about 30 saturated fat olive oil better it's only 14 but if you didn't use any oil it's zero um so that's another step you can take and also our good friend david jenkins at um at the university of toronto developed what he called the portfolio and this meant you start with a vegan diet but you add certain things to it soluble fiber what's that mean that means oats you already know that oats will take a couple of extra points off your cholesterol beans soy products have an independent effect lowering cholesterol and he found that nuts seem to do that too for example almonds be careful because if you go too far with the almonds they can raise your weight but his portfolio of soluble fiber a little bit of nuts of soy products and that kind of thing really brought cholesterol down really really fast when done as part of the vegan diet all right we've been talking about having too much of a certain vitamin or of a certain nutrient now let's talk about having too much of a certain food uh leonardo may win question of the day for this one it comes in from youtube at 12 23 says i love beans and i wonder if i can have too much beans if there is an upper limit for consumption of the beans so is it possible to eat way too many beans dr bernard not if you live alone [Laughter] asked and answered me okay have all the beads you want in that case and not if you live alone oh you're gonna you know you're gonna be fine beans do not have any cholesterol in them they don't have they have virtually no saturated fat at all they have iron but the iron is in the form of non-heme iron so you really it's hard for you to overdo it with the iron they're fine but you know you don't want just beans you know beans along with grains um are that's a really really good complementary relationship and don't forget the green leafy vegetables and fruits and so forth so you want to make sure you're not crowding these more humble foods out of your diet too all right interesting question here from elizabeth one that i've wondered myself as well uh why are seniors hungry less often a couple couple of things can happen um i guess the obvious thing for some seniors they're not as physically active um you're staying home you might be watching tv and sometimes that can be aggravated if people have a physical problem like joint disease that that makes them less and less physically active um so that's the first thing um also their hormones are changing and so they're not burning calories off even even with the same level of physical activity they're not burning calories so much and then there are certain health conditions that can come in uh for some people not others thyroid disease for example and lots of chronic conditions if people have liver disease or kidneys disease um their appetite a loss of appetite is is a real common presenter and that's one of the things that doctors will look for they and with relatively simple blood tests they can sort those kind of things out and not to worry you but a loss of appetite also occurs with really simple or i'm sorry really serious problems like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and even certain cancers so you want to check those out but but i think what you're really getting at is why do seniors just lose their appetite it's really a lack of physical activity and some normal hormonal changes all right so if you're not eating as much if your meals are a lot smaller then there's a good chance that you may not be getting enough vitamins and nutrients in your diet reaching those uh those daily needs so tammy has a good follow-up to that how can you maximize nutrition while still eating a smaller meal ah great question um here's where i think the vegetables come to our rescue you know when i was a kid growing up in north dakota vegetables were just an afterthought you had a hunk of like a pork chop or something maybe a potato and the vegetables could be carrots or green beans and nobody noticed if you eat if you ate them or not and nobody nobody gave them any respect if you put the vegetables into the middle of your plate now you're getting fiber you're getting healthy complex carbohydrates and you're getting the really rich source of vitamins and healthy minerals that you really need so i would say even start planning your meal with which vegetable or vegetables am i going to going to really emphasize in this meal and it could be more than one green vegetable like broccoli along with an orange vegetable like sweet potatoes great combination and that's where you're going to get the nutrient powerhouses coming in all right i want to pivot now and take a question that can really kind of apply to anyone especially as they're really trying to take charge of their health for the first time a lot of us turn to these apps these days where you can log every single food that you have and it just spits out did you get enough of this did you not get enough of that diane writes and she says look i am frustrated she says i log everything that i eat in a nutrient tracking app and i still come up short with some vitamins how can i get it right and is it possible that i'm just worrying too much uh you might be worrying too much here's the first question i would ask is if you're logging in what what you're eating and then you're seeing am i getting enough protein am i getting enough calcium or whatever and if it says low the first thing i would look at is what standards are they using we mentioned this a little bit earlier in today's program calcium the us government will say have a thousand milligrams a day or even more for certain groups it's really hard to defend that based on science so you might say well i'm at 750 i'm too low 750 is fine um same with iron um if your iron levels are on the low end of normal and you're not symptomatic meaning you're not tired you feel well there's nothing health-wise going on there's no reason to really be pushing for some astronomical level same for protein a protein has kind of near religious significance for some people you've got to have lots and lots of protein got to have a hundred grams a day gotta have 200 grams a day ridiculous uh a an adult woman needs 46 grams a day according to the government and even that has a buffer that's higher than her actual needs uh for men it's 56. so anyway that's the first thing to think about are the standards right or are they exaggerated and the other thing is to make sure that you're getting a healthy mix of things in your diet and that's four groups you might know them already fruits vegetables whole grains and the bean group or the legume group beans peas lentils if you're getting lots of vegetables fruits whole grains and beans that nutrient mix is going to be just about optimal and don't forget the b12 added to it and and at that point you can probably not look at the app quite quite as often as you might be doing now betsy uh checking in in the chat room says uh look my appetite is just fine and i'm a senior she says look not this senior i am literally hungry all the time so uh betsy probably eating a healthy diet if she's joining us here today um here's a here's another question about menopause i know that this is menopause is something that you cover extensively in your book your body imbalance we talked a little bit about it on the show here today also but i don't think that we've ever been asked this question in particular uh donna faye at 1228 she's joining us on facebook today she says i'm going through menopause are grains still good for me yes they are in fact they're they're more important than ever um and i'm glad you asked that because a lot of people particularly in the last what decade or so where low carbohydrate diets have come in um this unfortunate fad has gotten people to to worry if they eat bread or if they eat brown rice the idea is it's too many carbs carbohydrate is going to be your best friend and and here's what i mean by that um after menopause if you're thinking gee you know it's harder for me to to keep the weight off i'm i'm gaining weight or or my cholesterol is is up um grains don't have any cholesterol they have virtually no saturated fat so they're they're going to help give you energy without driving your cholesterol up and the calorie content of them is surprisingly low where grains get get a bad wrap is you put the whole grain toast in the toast a whole grain bread in the toaster it pops out without very many calories it's going to be a good thing to eat but on goes the butter or the grain that uh becomes spaghetti after it comes out of the pot we slather cream sauce all over the top of it or ground beef or oil or something like that it's those toppings that pack in the calories and that was the problem with the baked potato there's nothing wrong with the potato the problem is the butter and the cheese doodles and bacobits and all this stuff that go on top of it so the fatty toppings are the issue grains are going to be fine for you one small exception maybe one in ten people feels better when they don't have wheat the other ninety percent of people are perfectly fine with wheat and with gluten uh if if weed or other gluten products are a problem for you you may want to avoid them but for other people not an issue at all all right let's grab a couple of more here before we turn to an exciting article uh that you uh published uh this week in a journal that i want to ask you about uh but my goodness gracious we've been talking about plant-based diets this entire time and different nutrients but the one that hasn't come up yet protein you knew it was coming to the conversation do protein requirements change for us as we get older you will hear people say that older people should have a little bit more protein and kind of what they're thinking of it is that older folks sometimes seem to lose their muscle mass which is partly hormonal and partly inactivity so it's frankly really good to maintain your activity that's the most important thing the activity then will fuel your appetite and you'll eat more normal amounts of foods you're going to be fine but it's a mistake to think okay i need more protein because i'm older so let me have chicken wings or let me have more fish or let me have more meat or dairy or something like that because what comes along with the protein cholesterol you know saturated fat iron you don't need the occasional tapeworm you know these are things these are things you don't need in your diet at all so so it's the diet should remain 100 plant-based vegan vegetables fruits whole grains beans and of these the high protein group is the bean group and anything made from them like soybeans that turn into tofu or tempeh or that kind of thing those are really quite rich in protein and you can include them at any age and if you're older and trying to pump up your protein that's one place to look uh let's uh laura harris 1232 a brave soul admitting her age she says i'm 41 exercise moderately six days a week she's wondering specifically at that age and with that level of exercise how much protein should she be taking in i well first of all you're a young woman and it's great that you're exercising um a lot that's that's terrific and i would not i would not think about it at all and here's what i mean let's say you're out there for a run or a good brisk walk and you know your muscles need more oxygen because they're working right how much oxygen should you take in i don't know i never measured it you don't have to think about it why because your blood your body is monitoring your oxygen needs and when you are hypoxic when you are low in oxygen your body automatically tells your diaphragm to start kicking in you start breathing much more rapidly you take in the oxygen and then you breathe more slowly your body is pretty smart when it comes to protein needs too and also caloric needs in general you could run a whole marathon you could do that every day um if you had the energy to do it and your but you would not really have to plan so much how many calories you need because your body naturally kicks in extra hunger and along with the natural foods that you're eating you get the additional not just calories not just carbohydrates for energy but you get the protein right along with it so your physical activity makes you hungry the hunger brings food on your plate you'll naturally pile it higher and protein just comes right along for the ride all right i want to wrap up today by pivoting and talking about something completely different and every once in a while you know i'll be thumbing through these journals and i'll see something i'll say huh that is really interesting and that happened this week and it just happened to be an article that you co-authored with dr hanakaliova our colleague and the headline in the american journal of lifestyle medicine was the role of nutrition in covid19 taking lessons from the 1918 h1n1 pandemic so you were looking to the past for answers to today what did you and dr kaliova discover it's the most remarkable thing you go back a century and there was a terrible pandemic and it was influenza and the parallels are enormous you know uh the coronavirus started in animals too started in bats um and whether people believe the bats were in the wuhan market or in a wuhan area laboratory either way it came from animals influenza came from birds and it's it's a bird born virus and wild birds put it into domestic flocks and then it got into the human population and in 1918 we had virtually no immunity to it and it killed a lot of people far more than coco 19 [Music] however there was a lesson there were areas where people were particularly health conscious including what at the time were called sanatoriums some people say with in religious areas where they were inside doing good work and studying but eating really healthful diets and what they found is that these people really weren't contracting serious influenza at all um now you might say well they're socially distance and so forth but even if they would get it nobody seemed to need the hospitalizations and so forth and that led to this hypothesis that arose really back in 2020 as soon as as coronavirus came in the hypothesis that if a healthy diet would help against influenza maybe it would help against coronavirus and so right away we started to see yeah the people who are are thinner have less risk of severe covet 19 that if they don't have diabetes they have less risk of severe coca 19 and then people did the ultimate question that's the ultimate question forgetting just diabetes and obesity what is on your plate and there were two really good studies one had was healthcare workers in six different countries people following a healthy plant-based diet much less likely to have severe covit and then there was the covet symptoms study half a million participants huge study showed exactly the same thing the more people were plant-based the less risk they had of superior covenant 19. caveat to that last study uh people who are who are um as part of the the healthcare workers study those who are following low-carb diets much higher risk of severe cocaine so the lessons we learned back in 1918 that there's something about a healthy diet and a hygienic lifestyle that just seems to to allow people to repel the serious illness in the in the face of a of an infection does apply to covet now the reason this really matters now is that covet the covet story is changing every couple of months different viral variant uh different vaccination uh prevalences different exposures everything is kind of a changing landscape but the one constant here is that people who eat in a healthy way and who are able to use a healthy diet to keep their bodies healthy have much much much better odds of if they catch the virus of throwing it off and not letting uh not letting it become serious total you know what if type of question here uh as we record this here there have been more than six million deaths worldwide from covet 19 nearly a million here in the states if and this is a a huge if but if everyone were eating a plant-based diet how do you think that number would change from what it is today at the risk of sounding overly strident first of all that number would have been zero um if people had left the animals alone um you animal products that carry animal viruses into the human population have been to blame for all kinds of problems um and so back with the influenza from 1918 as i mentioned it came from people who had flocks of birds that they were going to eat and you have a big outdoor flock and the wild birds uh join with them and spread the wild bird virus into the phlox and so people eating poultry um the the farm workers and farm dwellers were the the first nodes of that infection that then spread spread out from there and we see this over and over again with one pandemic after another people want to eat bats and other animals and they maintain markets for them or they're curious about them and they want to experiment on them in a laboratory whatever when you bring the animals into your proximity because you're going to abuse them or eat them or whatever that's when the viruses jump if you don't do that the viruses don't jump okay but that's not exactly what you asked me um chuck here's the let's say let's say you're going to get the virus but if people were really following a truly healthy diet would the risk of severe illness go down and by how much the answer is yeah even in the most conservative projections the reduction in severe illness would be somewhere on the order of between 40 and 70 reduction and perhaps even a greater reduction in that if you factor in then also the reductions in diabetes the reductions in obesity that the diet brings the the risk reduction is just absolutely huge it's sort of like what happens to lung cancer if everybody stops smoking wouldn't go to zero but it goes dramatically down and so when people are on healthy diets the payoff is just huge for the infectious diseases as well as the other chronic diseases we always talk about that is a very interesting conversation and maybe it's one that we can circle back to at some point um my goodness gracious a lot of great information there uh dr barnard thanks so very much for joining us today my friend you bet thank you chuck all right and if you enjoyed the show today and we covered a lot of ground my goodness gracious if you liked it go ahead and like us here on facebook and subscribe on youtube be sure to like this video as well and i can't finish today also without saying a huge thank you to the gregory j rider memorial fund for their support of the exam room live and the physicians committee because it really is helping to raise our health iqs together and the gregory j ryder memorial fund supports organizations just like the physicians committee that carry on greg's love for animals and they're doing it by promoting plant-based health and working to end animal abuse while emphasizing programs that promote systemic change and also benefit people you can visit them online right now at gregoryriderfund.org that's gregory writer spelled r-e-i-t-e-r-fund dot org and be sure to subscribe to the exam room podcast by the physicians committee you can catch these replays anytime on apple podcast or spotify wherever shows are available and when you subscribe please also leave a five star rating and if you feel so inclined a nice comment as well thank you one more time dr neil barnard for being here and helping to raise our health iqs into the crew behind the scenes that makes the magic happen thank you as always and to you exam roomies thank you guys for asking so many great questions because you are the reason why this show is what it is you guys drive this vehicle and you drive it so so so very well for everyone here at the physicians committee i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll we'll talk to you again soon but until then keep it plant-based

Channel: Physicians Committee

Views: 152,041

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Id: 8XVMGQU4rzI

Length: 43min 25sec (2605 seconds)

Published: Wed May 04 2022