EPIC Panel: Dr Dean Ornish, Dr Michael Greger, Dr Scott Stoll, Dr T Colin Campbell

really pioneers for all of us you know they have gone before us they have cut the trail they've gone up some hard rocky roads they've fought some battles and because of their work because of their amazing uh personal sacrifices you know we're all here today in this room and i know it's a great reward for all of you to um you know go around the country and to see the changes especially you colin and dean that have started out so many years ago and uh and have seen the change and the things that have transpired over the last you know five years really it's been such a huge movement so what i think in no small parts of you as well so thank you i appreciate that dean thank you you know um i just want to make this very conversational so between the four of us and then also you all so i have a few questions i would like to ask them and then i'm going to open it up questions from you all as well that we can you know maybe delve a little deeper than the research that we've heard and learn some more of the back story and also to hear about their vision for the future because i think that's really important because they they obviously saw into the future almost prophetically and have worked to get there but i know that they see further than we do right now so i have a couple of questions for you guys that i thought would be interesting um you know one question that i thought i would like to talk about is you know other than your own research what would you say are like the top two or three pieces of research that are like fundamental cornerstones for plant-based nutrition so that's why i said other than your own because i want dean to not to come up with a couple of others to point to but if you had to think through the trials that have been completed to date the meta-analyses you know what are the top couple of pieces of research that you would point to that say this really helps to define plant-based nutrition and then on the tail end of that is what are the couple of studies that we still need to do and what are the pieces of research that still need to be done to clarify this vision dean well i've never been asked that question before so and i've been asked a lot of questions so that's good colin's work with the china study was very was very important not only in terms of showing from an epidemiological standpoint that the diseases we take for granted in this country are really uh not natural at all and that even though they have the same genetic diversity uh as we do or at least close to it um those genes don't get expressed until they get into a western diet lifestyle but you're all familiar with his work but the other part of your work that i find has been really inspiring was you were one of the first you know you and k.k carroll and some others were one of the first to talk about getting beyond this whole fat versus carbs debate into animal protein itself being anthrogenic and creating inflam inflammation and oxidative stress and other things that lead to so many chronic diseases so from both aspects of your work i i salute that um i think uh what walter willett's done with physicians and harvard nurses uh health studies i think have been helpful in showing the strong link between a meat-based diet in particular increasing the risk of so many chronic diseases and even though it's not an interventional study it's an it's a name but epidemiological and the fact that it can collect such large amounts of data and from the harvard uh prestige of being able to disseminate that information i think it's really had a great impact and i think what michael what you've been doing with uh nutritionfacts.org has been uh i think the best public service that is really out there in the plant-based world really done for all the right reasons with great intelligence and making it fun and interesting and impactful and uh and with great integrity which all of which are in rare supply these days and scott the work that you've done with uh the plantricion conference getting 1500 or 2000 people at a time from you know multiple countries uh has been raising awareness and to me awareness is always the first step in healing so i want to acknowledge you for that too thank you dean i appreciate that thank you colin can i first off uh i want to acknowledge my friends of course for what what you guys have done mr encyclopedia over there and daniel we got on on to each other's work when was it 30 years ago i look good for 96 don't you think um you know i'd like to change the question just a little bit if you don't mind and and that is i'd like to honor some people who got forgotten in this field and some of the research was done so long ago and forgotten it said something about you know who we are why do we do what we do and something wrong with the science maybe to some extent but i i have to think of a guy named chittenden back in the early 1900s he did the best study on diet and physical conditioning athleticism i mean it was almost it was classic he had two books about that thick each what was from michigan colin russell he was a head of uh physiology at yale university and he did this very thoughtful kind of study and i won't go into the details here but the results that he got were so striking and it came at a time when when questioning the the supposed superiority of animal protein for example or questioned protein in general when he raised that question at the time he really took kind of a hit and they almost dismissed him and nobody heard of him hardly ever since you wouldn't know anything about what that's like with you i wasn't living quite then is that what you said no no no i mean in terms of you know people criticizing new ideas oh yeah like well maybe that's why i'm sort of talking where i am because i have some sympathy some empathy for those guys but there was another study that done two at that time two or three studies that eventuated in a publication in 1923 to show that cholesterol dietary cholesterol is not the cause of elevated levels of cholesterol in the blood which in turn was alleged to be related to heart disease and so the story went the story became very rather simplistic over the years and what was shown at that time rather conclusively amongst some 10 to 12 research groups that the cause of high cholesterol was not really the fat or the cholesterol itself was the animal protein now then under the standards of today that wasn't as convincing but perhaps as it could be today but you know looking at a larger context that was really significant it wasn't that that there that they were so that that was so proof positive of that relationship it just got forgotten ignored it was my friend good dr krashesky who turned that up some years ago but i i think this story has been uh brewing you know for a long time and uh you know we've been a benefactor to some extent you know some of that early work got forgotten and we come back and michael to continue the love fest so nutritionfacts.org would not exist if not for a publication on july 21 1990 and perhaps the most prestigious medical journal in the world dr d norrish and colleagues a lifestyle heart trial randomized controlled trial first showing that you can reverse the number one killer of men and women since that day no more studies i mean you could stop research right there and save hundreds of thousands of peoples of life every year like we really cared about saving lives if doctors really cared about saving lives okay that we no more not a penny even more research needed to save literally hundreds of thousands of americans alone every single year continue to die from this preventable arrestable reversible condition i mean so that is what started me on my journey and uh and to to unearth all the the other mountains of evidence that's been just kind of uh buried um and to bring that out to light um uh and uh so we all have a tremendous tremendous um debt to owe um to thank you thankfully and so the follow-up to that question then is what do we still need to know like what pieces of research still need to be done there's so much research that's being churned out in plant-based nutrition now which is really exciting but there's probably a couple of key studies that would really tip the scales well i'm i'm most interested in the study we're actually doing was just to see whether we can reverse alzheimer's disease by the same kind of lifestyle changes and as i talked about in in more length earlier today i think we're at a place with alzheimer's very similar to where we were with heart disease 40 years ago there was every reason to think it may be reversible it's the same biological mechanisms that affect all of these chronic diseases you know chronic inflammation oxidative stress changes in the microbiome and telomeres angiogenesis gene expression over stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system etc they're no good drugs for treating it or for preventing it uh it's i think the worst disease because when you lose your memories you lose everything and i have a personal interest because my mom and many of her siblings died of it so i'm sure i have the apoe4 gene as well but i think it's going to work and in some ways it may be even more if it does work may i and i'm always speculating but if it did work if it does work it'll be even more impactful than the heart disease studies because at least they had other treatments for heart disease there are no good treatments for alzheimer's and as our population ages it's going to become an increasingly both expensive and horrible proposition so i'm keeping my fingers crossed and hope that we'll have some good news to share in a year or so and you know just to follow up on that you know thinking about alzheimer's um how do you perceive the physiology i asked dr dean cher's i recently you know what's the genesis event that initiates alzheimer's well he and his wife are doing some great work and they wrote a great book about preventing alzheimer's again i think the studies like the finger study from finland and others have shown that less intensive interventions can slow the rate of progression much as they did 40 years ago with less intensive lifestyle interventions could slow the rate of progression of heart disease that's part of why i think that a more intensive intervention may even reverse it and again because it's affecting all these mechanisms that cause it every one of these mechanisms chronic inflammation oxidative stress change in the microbiome et cetera i mean your microbiome for example produces amyloid uh it produces many of the neurotoxins that end up in your brain beyond the diet is the um the other aspects you know that uh in people with alzheimer's it's not like your brain in the early stages gets destroyed those memories were still there you just lose the connections to them and i think the social isolation and the depression and they being cut off and then when you have alzheimer's you often get into a kind of a downward spiral where you start to forget things and then you get embarrassed you don't want to go out much because you don't embarrass yourself and then that makes you more isolated which makes you more forgetful and then maybe you lose your driver's license and now your world contracts even more or you end up in an assisted living center where you know you don't see your friends or family nearly as much and i think that in some ways it may be an adaptive response to this kind of chronic loneliness and isolation that i think is really what's epidemic in our culture and so um i think that it's important to focus on diet but i think these other aspects you know ewell is great but also to move more stress less and love more particularly the love more is one that i think i'd like to see more research on in regards to the question of the future uh i'm really fascinated with the idea that uh you know uh individual nutrients that we've studied for so long and tried to really focus in on their activities and you know what specifically they do we've been we've been thinking in such a reductionist way we practice medicine that way too and that's caused a lot of confusion because in reality as far as i'm concerned nutrition in particular you know representation of all the food that we consume and or don't consume um that that concept of all of this stuff working together under some kind of guidance that we don't we can't really identify in a really miraculous ways and like if you had referred before to the number of so-called mechanisms participating in various and some of the outcomes i mean that just i find this concept of holism really just very exciting and uh so we can get away from you know arguing i should say at times and focus it too much on individual little entities of doing things and i so i think that in the due course of time uh i think that idea is going to uh to expand i i've run into quite a number of people that now seem to identify with that and then in turn ask you know what is directing traffic you know in our bodies and we can think about it i mean even in the china study i was wondering whether the social factors may also played a role you know they had much tighter communities as well as healthier diets and that when they became more westernized not only did the dye get disrupted but a lot of those social networks did as well do you think that might have played a fact as they began to more you know eat like us and live like us and die like us in part though at the same time they were their food chain was changing their social networks were changing too there were strong ties in china you know the family ties and communities and so on were getting more disrupted do you think that might have played a role as part of this kind of interest what you said i just in fact was doing an interview with one of the chinese people here and and haven't been around china for so long and they're they're having educated me so much you know particularly in the question of the old chinese philosophy i mean here was a country in transition especially since the time we did that work and now becoming more urbanized taking on western medicine and so forth and so on as i look at that scenery it's clear at least for me there were some elements in the chinese thinking that i i really liked you know is that more holistic kind of concept that's so traditional of indulgent indigenous populations and and then and backing off and then okay now i'll have a look at what we do we do some things pretty interesting too especially in the technical sense and so looking at that look at this and then in turn uh you know realizing if we take the best of all the best of that i think we got something really special and uh so i i for myself i'd like to give credit to the opportunity to my chinese colleagues who sort of taught me some of that good that's interesting michael not another penny need be spent um i mean so we know the healthiest right the healthiest diet now as a bonus can it also reverse alzheimer's let's find out but we don't need that data point to um i mean there's enough evidence to get people eating this healthy so really um i i see much of the research um upcoming research these days is like what can excite people the most and it's the reversal um so yeah we know people that eat healthier have lower rates of low back pain for example um a significant cause of disability in this country but it's but can we reverse low back pain if we open up those vertebral arteries get more blood flow to the disc can we actually um reverse a low back that'd be a fantastic study you know neil barnard and pcrm doing some wonderful diabetes reversal studies i mean those are the things that really i think capture people's imagination so yes we know people eating plant-based between two to three times lower likely to becoming demented later in life can actually reverse that's what we that's that'll get some headlines um and so yeah so it's really it's it's almost like a pr thing like what else can we do to um use to uh treat and reverse but we already know um the key tenants of a healthy diet in fact we have for decades remarkable consensus in the medical literature and so much of this manufactured controversy and daily headlines if you look to the key attendance of healthy living we've known about it they have they've been around and will continue to be around and so let's all start eating healthy and then see all the new exciting research coming down the pike can i throw in an idea here uh you know you guys i do as well and especially with what you started uh dean uh on the question currency certain reversal we're still using that word reversal so much i'd like to suggest just change that and call it treatment because if you start i i know there's a sense of topic but but nonetheless if you can start thinking about what nutrition can do now you know when people have illnesses that's that's essentially treatment and we're spreading on some incentives well it's a treatment but just because you treat something doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to get better and so i like the term reversal because i think it does capture people's imagination that you can actually instead of getting worse more slowly which is another form of treatment you can actually get better and better to the degree that you make these changes and then i for those of you who heard my earlier talk today um forgive me for repeating this but in in my new book undo it i present this unifying theory that the reason as as mike was saying that you know these same diet and lifestyle changes can not only help prevent but even reverse the progression of so many chronic diseases if they're really to me the same disease masquerading and manifesting in different forms because they all share the same underlying biological mechanisms it's one reason why you often find you know in the same person they may have what they call comorbidities they might have high blood pressure and high cholesterol and diabetes and be overweight and have heart disease you know and have you know strokes or whatever um because they're all the same condition or why in colin campbell's you know revolutionary china study you know whole countries had very low rates of these chronic diseases but until they start to like us even though they have the same genetic differences for example it doesn't matter if you're genetically not as efficient at metabolizing dietary fat or animal protein or sugar and then someone else if you're not eating that much of it in the first place but then when you start to you know have a western diet then those genetic differences begin to manifest and so i agree with you that these same issues um don't necessarily need to be researched in the sense that because it's the same it's not like there's one diet for this another one for that but i think the more evidence we have the more we can actually show that it's reversing disease i mean take alzheimer's we already know that lifestyle changes can slow the rate of progression that's important since there are no good drugs that we even do that but if we can actually show that people get better the light comes back on in their eyes they begin to you know remember things they could remember i'm not saying we're going to show that i'm not saying we are showing that i'm saying if we could show that which i'm hopeful that we could that's my bias anyway that would be a revolution that would be the kind of thing that can capture people's imagination almost as a trojan horse so that by the way the environment you know global warming benefits by the way you freed up more resources to feed the hungry you know there's so many other good things that is more compassionate from an ethical standpoint look at prostate cancer we did a randomized trial shown we could reverse the progression of early stage prostate cancer we now know that after 10 years two studies in the new england journal medicine showed that men with early stage prostate cancer after 10 years of being treated with surgery or radiation didn't live any longer than those that weren't and maybe one out of 50 men do and peter carroll has actually found ways who's the chief of urology ucsf has found ways of identifying who is that one out of 50 men who actually benefits from surgery radiation but the other 49 want to quote do something and if the only thing you have to do is surgery radiation as opposed to watchful waiting and waiting for something bad to happen most of you guys want to like get it out of me you know cut it out and yet those treatments often leave most guys maimed in the most personal ways being either impotent or incontinent or both you can't have sex wearing a diaper for no benefit 49 out of 50 times at huge economic and huge personal costs but we were able to show in a study we did here at sloan kettering and ucsf that these same lifestyle changes could slow stop and even reverse the progression of early stage prostate cancer so if the choice is between doing nothing and doing something most guys are going to want to do something even if the something is worse than doing nothing but if you can offer a third alternative which is intensive lifestyle changes because we've shown now that you can often reverse its progression that really captures people's imaginations and enables them paradoxically to make bigger changes than they might otherwise because again part of the value of science is to provide new hope and new choices by showing that if you're willing to make these changes there's a good chance you may get better thank you very much one of the challenges that we've seen and one of the criticisms of plant-based nutrition and your studies have actually answered this criticism is the idea of adherence and recidivism and you know one of the criticisms of plant-based nutrition is that you know there's very high recidivism levels uh people can't maintain this lifestyle and so i'd just like to ask you for your your response to that criticism because it's very important and it's um it's important for physicians and healthcare providers to be able to you know confidently recommend that knowing that there's going to be long-term adherence i think that's a terrific question i i hear of that too one may simplistic sort of notion uh is that when people are consuming the typical washing diet uh you know there are lots of food addictions they're addicted to fat they're addicted to this and that sugar and those addictions only decline and disappear after time and so i think some of the recidivism that you're talking about i think it happens fairly early on people haven't really rid themselves of that kind of addiction and because they and i don't know what that is maybe a month two three six months whatever i think the key is uh just staying with it you know having the willpower to stay with it getting past those addictions when you actually discover these new tastes are pretty good you know and and so i think uh and a lot of the people who do come back you know i don't think they're doing it long enough people do stay with it when they get with it and they really mentally socially they take on the responsibility and then they also discover that food is pretty good you know i don't know i think that's a pretty significant thing that may yeah um do you want to take a crack at that too yeah absolutely i talked about this earlier at length but the short version is a lot of this becomes self-fulfilling if a doctor says look i know you're not going to change your diet and why would you want to anyway just take this lipitor that'll take care of it and the patient doesn't change the doctor says yeah i knew they couldn't do it it all becomes self-fulfilling but it turns out that half the two-thirds of people prescribed cholesterol-lowering drugs are not taking them just four to six months later even though it's just taking a pill and yet we're finding you know we've been medicare is covering our reversing heart disease program and most insurance companies are around the country and it's a nine week program 94 of those 72 hours get completed in every site including in you know jackson mississippi salinas arkansas as well as in los angeles or san diego or places like that but it's only a nine week programs and yet a year later 85 to 90 of the people are still following it in every site we've trained and a lot of doctors said how could that be i can't even get my pasty eat less red meat except you could be vegetarian or vegan are you kidding me and and meditate and exercise and love more all at the same time there's no way but the paradox is that i've learned through making a lot of mistakes over the many years what does and what doesn't motivate people to change and what doesn't work is fear fear actually works really well for the first month or so after someone's had a scare if they'd end up in the emergency room or had a heart attack they'll do pretty much anything the doctor nurse tells them for about a month or two and then they stop because it's too scary to think that you're gonna die or get a heart attack so people stop thinking about it i mean the mortality rate in this room is still one per person it's a hundred percent but we don't think about it most of the time it's too scary and so i've just found that efforts to try to motivate people to that fear is not a sustainable motivator but what is sustainable is joy and pleasure and love and feeling good and because these biological mechanisms are so dynamic that affect our health and our well-being when you make really big changes it's actually easier to sustain than making small ones because you feel so much better so quickly it reframes the reason for changing from fear of dying to joy of living if you're you know as i talked about earlier your brain gets more blood you think more clearly you have more energy you can grow so many new brain neurons your brain can get bigger in just a few months your heart gets more blood flow your your face gets more blood flow you look 20 years younger your sexual organs get more blood flow your sexual function improves everything works better and so what you gain is so much more than what you give up then it becomes sustainable and also the other paradox is that it's easier to change your diet along with all these other things you know not just eat well but move more stress less and love more because each of those makes you feel so much better and then you say oh when i do this i feel good when i do that i don't feel so good so let me do more of this and less of that it comes out of your own experience not because some book or doctor told you that might have gotten you interested but then you don't have to like get into all these food fights and diet wars and so on you say oh i know this works you know i can experience it and it's not about living longer it's about feeling better you know if you tell somebody you're going to live to be 86 instead of 85 that doesn't really motivate most people you know they say oh i don't am i going to live longer is it just going to seem longer all those kind of jokes you hear but when you actually feel it's just backwards you actually feel so much better so quickly when you make these changes to the degree you make them at any age then that's really much bigger and if you have the love and support behind you then you know people will do things like say well why do you want to live longer i want to dance at my child's wedding i want to watch them grow up i want to whatever it is and then they start to look at their food and say okay if i eat this i'm more likely to to be aligned with my life's and my soul's purpose then suddenly the food doesn't those addictions that you so wisely talked about become have less of a hold on us because they can be overridden by something that's even more compelling yeah that's fantastic thank you michael anything to add can't top that oh it's great [Applause] thank you so much dean that is right that's right um kind of a follow-up to that and then we'll take some questions from the audience you know we're in the early stages of a movement there's like an inflection that's occurred in the last five years that we all can see and feel isn't that when you first started doing your conferences well so uh but the question is you know in this movement what are important elements that we need to focus on to make sure that the movement actually grows has longevity and has depth of influence that we have penetration and we begin shifting culture this sounds like off the subject but it's not really uh reverse citizens united decision of the supreme court i referred to that because that was the element that allowed you know obviously very powerful forces corporate bodies to support elections and get people elected they wanted to get elected and i've spent quite a bit of time in policy development i've seen it firsthand and i'm sure many of you know this as well that the politicians we elect are those who are you know we paid the most money for for the most part and they're representing powerful interest and they're not going to change and i i get quite upset because i have seen in the formation of doctor guidelines and that sort of thing over the years that the pushback that comes oftentimes is actually kind of proactive on the part of the government i mean it really does happen that we can't really say what we want to say what we believe to true sometimes because of that really pretty severe pushback which in turn is actually coming from very powerful political figures who in turn are representing either elected themselves or working for elected officials that these days are there because of citizens united and i can only think of another thing that's more pertinent to this argument than and actually working together all of us to get citizens united reversed thank you team now i think that's that's absolutely right you know citizens united was the supreme court ruling that said the corporations were people and so i think you're you're right on target there are a lot of powerful forces that converge around the area of food um i was working years ago with ellen haas when she was assistant secretary of agriculture just to change the school lunch program and it was you know increasingly hard i worked i took a lot of flack for this but i worked with the ceo of mcdonald's to get them to put salads on the menu i figured you know they have 43 million customers a day and if they could come there and eat salads instead of a burger that's you know incremental change on that scale's worth doing and they did that but then the salad was 5.95 the burger's 99 cents because the burgers subsidized for the reasons you're talking about the salad wasn't so you get more calories for your dollar by eating junk food because a it's subsidized and b it doesn't really price into the real cost of society so until we change the farm bill and change citizens united and change a lot of these issues that really do dictate policy it's an uphill battle but the other thing i would say that can really make a difference in lifestyle medicine is changing reimbursement in the early 90s i started a 501 c 3 non-profit called the preventive medicine research institute back in 1984 when i finished my medical training in boston and moved to san francisco in the early 90s we trained hospitals and clinics around the country between 53 of them for free basically harvard at beth israel new york here at scripps at ucsf but also in omaha des moines columbia south carolina where they told me gravy's a beverage this will be a big change in our lifestyle uh broward general all over the country and it worked we got bigger changes in lifestyle better clinical outcomes bigger cost savings better adherence and a number of the sites closed down because they said you don't have reimbursement and that was the painful lesson i thought well if we just did good science do a good clinical he said it's the best program we've had of its kind and we're closing it down it's like it's all about the benjamins as the rappers would say the money and so i realized that we could do a thousand studies with a million people and would always remain on the fringe of medical practice and yet if you look at cardiology since we were doing studies on reversing heart disease um the same interventional cardiologists who were so critical of bypass surgeons who did bypass surgery for years without any studies until they finally got around to doing randomized trials they realize they don't really work for most people they're now eight randomized trials that have shown that stints and angioplasties don't prolong life don't prevent heart attacks and then in a study that i don't know how they got through the human studies committee they did fake angioplasties uh in london where they put a tube all the way up into the heart and just pulled it out without putting the stent in in half the patients and their reduction in angina was the same as those who actually got the stent meaning that they don't reduce angina either and so for a decades we've been paying for you know over almost 100 billion dollars a year for interventions that are dangerous invasive expensive and ineffective and i remember when i was talking with the then head of medicare at the time that this was uh in the early 2000s he said well look um we might cover this but you have to get a letter from the head of the national institutes of health the national heart lung and blood institute saying that it's safe for older people to walk meditate eat vegetables and quit smoking i said you must be kidding me and he wasn't and that's what we had to do we actually did a whole literature review saying that these were not high-risk behaviors they sent it back to the head of medicare said the diets are safe don't worry and they actually didn't say that they said in the way the federal government they said there is nothing to show that this diet is unsafe for older people i said okay that's good enough but then they said they said another letter well you said that the diet is not unsafe but what about meditating and quitting smoking and walking is are those okay for older people so they had to do a second literature review now this is while they're paying 100 billion dollars a year for stents and angioplasties that don't work you know that are dangerous invasive expensive and effective so never underestimates follow the money you know and i don't want to sound cynical because i'm not a cynical person but i'm my eyes were open after it was really heartbreaking in many ways when we had to close down a lot of these sites so that's when i spent 16 years to work to with the people in medicare to get medicare coverage because i knew that if we didn't do that no matter how many studies we did it was always beyond the fringes but if you change reimbursement then you change medical practice and even medical education and that's that's what's happening now now that medicare is paying for it most other insurance companies are we're showing that they're cutting their costs in half in the first year you know and so when we can show that it saves more money than it's costing and that doctors can make a living doing it then it goes all the way back to affecting medical practice it's not just because doctor is only interested in money most doctors go into medicine because you really want to help people but if you're paid to use drugs in surgery and you're trained to use drugs in surgery then surprise we use drugs in surgery and so now that there's a way to make a living doing lifestyle medicine is really transformational thank you michael yeah i think there's an irony here in that yes the medical device companies and big pharma and meat dairy process processed food industry low trillion dollar industry probably the most profitable industry on the planet but the same kind of corporate forces that allow um them to twist the signs and uh have influence within the beltway can also maybe in many ways um the savior in terms of this movement you know gm spends more money on health insurance than they do on you know the the the the metal for their on steel um and so they are these there are these corporate players who are self-insured so every one of their employees that gets diabetes is a hit to the bottom line and so it's in their best interest so to have a healthy have healthy employees um insurance companies is in their best interest to keep people healthy um there are so there are there are actually forces in which there is this rare alignment with what's actually good for people is actually saving people money it's those low-hanging fruit opportunities i think that will allow um us to to uh to influence the larger society and you know when you hear that tyson foods for example right the largest uh one of the largest meat companies in the world is starting their whole an entire new branch of kind of plant-based meats they're doing that i mean tyson is not about you know the the you know the ceo of coca-cola is not sitting around saying how can we make children obese they're thinking how can we make our stockholders money um and so you do with dirt cheap ingredients they're subsidized by taxpayers you sell for a few bucks a bottle that's how you make money the system is just set up to reward bad behavior um but if all of a sudden you know tyson doesn't care they just want to make money so if they can make money selling plant-based music sell make money selling plant-based i think those when once we see those kind of indicators where these large corporate um you know when dean foods the one of the largest dairy companies bought out silk soy milk earlier no relationship right yeah not really i mean it really pushed the market and all of a sudden you know you have these plant-based milks right in the refrigerated section i mean you see this huge drop in liquid milk consumption once there's kind of money to be made in health and healthier products um i think that's behind some of the shifters seeing so ironically these evil corporate players um may in many ways um be our salvation in terms of supporting the plant-based movement wow thank you michael i'm going to jump down and we'll take some questions from the audience are there some questions all right it's like donahue run acting we know that um in addition to diet a critical lifestyle factor for health and wellness is sleep and my question is about the relationship between diet and sleep and i'm wondering if there's any evidence that eating better and particularly a plant-based diet improves the quality of sleep the recovery during sleep or any if they're related at all and two are there any particular foods or ingredients or things that help one sleep better there are some particular foods on so in terms of eating patterns um so there are certainly um so for example nearby and i did some studies where um randomized people to plant-based diets for migraines for uh uh for menstrual pain and a number of other clinical conditions and even though it wasn't the primary outcome saw an improvement in sleep and energy levels and a bunch of other things as a secondary outcome that was positively affected by the switch to the plant-based diet and what's nice is we have this randomized controlled um study so we you can you can you can see that they didn't just get better because they um because that dietary change um that changing the diet in general wasn't sleep it was particularly the plant-based diet um that did it but in terms of specific foods if you type in sleep and nutritionbox.org um there are particular foods so for example there was a study that showed that if you eat um how many kiwis was it two kiwis a few hours a certain number of hours before going to sleep um you slept better than eating the same number of bananas for example so does that does that mean kiwis have something special all we know is kiwis are better than bananas but maybe this and so and part of that was thinking well there's actually melatonin in certain fruits and maybe that was i'm playing a role there's a couple other specific foods that you on nutritionback.org i think the most important thing are some of the kind of sleep hygiene things beyond just what you eat but you want it dark and cool and quiet and there's no other things you can do to ensure kind of a sleep environment that maximizes um you're reducing screen time those those blue rays in your eyes right before going to bed a number of things you can do to improve sleep which is critically important for health and longevity i encourage people to get seven to eight hours a night if anybody has any trouble sleeping just listen to one of my lecture resorts my mother was had a two craniopharyngomas that had she's had operated so um doesn't have the pituitary gland so she's on about 10 medications um including for diabetes insipidus she also has dormant pulmonary sarcoidosis and the most recent to the list is cirrhosis of the liver and she doesn't have a terrible diet but it is still you know a classic western american diet and she can't really go off of her medications completely because of what she has but how can convincing her that going fully whole food plant-based may help and i haven't seen any research or i've tried looking at the research in nutritionfacts.org related to what to do or what to eat that helps with cirrhosis of the liver when you have it i've seen things about prevention but what do you do when all of these things together already exist and how does the diet help even if there is a particular condition for which no studies have been done in terms of dietary interventions of any type plant-based or otherwise eating healthy can only help right yeah so if we in terms of even if it's just not adding extra diseases to the list so but in terms of cirrhosis cersei's usually a state of uh end stage liver disease where your liver is just signing so scarred up and at a certain point a liver transplant is really one's only option specific conditions that um a dietary intervention can help with please feel free to contact me and my contact information is on nutritionfacts.org and we can kind of work through the list but in general uh i mean be nice if there was a specific study showing a specific diet has specific benefits for that particular condition um unfortunately often we don't have that so we can but we can point to ah but if you also don't want to die of a heart attack while you're dealing with these other things here's some things we can do for you should we supplement with zinc or is that something to worry about i grew up in texas where you just suck on a trailer hitch and then you get all the zinc you need that um so uh one does not need to supplement with zinc uh so legumes beans flippies chickpeas and lentils has uh you know all the things that we'd like to think of in animal source protein such as you know iron zinc um but also of course having the bone not only missing the bag it's such saturated fat and cholesterol that comes along with animal sources of of protein but also has the bonus of all those vegetable kingdom things like folate um and the fiber etc so you kind of get the best of both worlds but in choosing uh plant-based sources of protein you get all the problem is we don't really there's no real good test for zinc status there's some nutrients in our body we can get a sense with certain blood or urine tests um so that's why it's difficult to study often the first thing you sense in zinc deficiencies actually a decreased taste sensitivity i've kissed a few vegetarians i think tastes pretty good to me but one doesn't see a taste differential in terms of those eating plant-based versus versus omnivores which would suggest there's really no difference in kind of zinc stats fortunately it's very difficult to test and i i'm presuming that um you misheard i mean a pound of pumpkin seeds would be uh way more zinc than whatever uh anyone would need zinc deficiency has not been something that has popped up in you know long-term plant-based populations that we know of great thank you it won't be long before you have some major corporation that hires a porn star to say vegetarians taste better you know so mark my words what is your advice i do have a couple patients already that i know will benefit from major lifestyle change what would be your advice for a first step to take as far as transitioning them to that way for someone who's not seeing you for that purpose my first step would be to ask them a question why do you want why do you want to do this and they'll generally say i want to live longer and then i'd say why do you want to live longer and they'd say no one's ever asked me that before i mean there's all there's especially growing i mean living in the in san francisco bay area where all the tech companies if there's a kind of an implicit assumption everybody wants to live forever but i was suicidally depressed when i was in college and a lot of people i think that's the real epidemic on our culture is with the breakdown of the social networks is loneliness and depression and telling someone who's lonely and depressed so they're going to live longer is not that motivating because they're just they're i mean they're they're saying i'm just trying to get through the day you know and you say why do you eat all these things why do you do all these things and then and they'll say they helped me deal with my pain they helped me numb my pain i've got 12 friends in this pack of cigarettes or the food fills the void or fat coats my nerves and numbs the pain things i talked about earlier today or you know video games numb the pain or opioids them the pain or drinking all the time numbs of pain or working all the time numbs the pain and so i think it's really important that we deal with these kind of existential questions um because once then someone is saying well i want to live longer well gosh i want to live longer i don't know to watch my kids grow up or dance at their wedding or whatever it is that you know make love with my partner you know write a book uh you know accomplish something great in in in science whatever it happens to be if you can get someone in touch with their raison debt why they want to live longer then they're much more likely to do all the things most people have a pretty good idea of what they need to do to be healthy they just don't do them because as you say colin the food addictions really are just to help them numb that pain that they're feeling and so to the extent that you can help them get more in touch with their life's purpose and why they want to live longer then they're much more likely to make these changes then you can say okay well here's what you do but until you deal with that it's just a lot of information and we're drowning in information we need to really deal with the deeper issues that i think ultimately determine why people make sustainable changes in 1970 in the united states there was about 50 billion spent on on health care in 2000 was about one and a half trillion and uh this year we're hovering around the three and a half trillion dollar number they say we have a health care problem in the united states i don't think it's a health care problem i think it's a health problem and to address a health problem we have to look at lifestyle primarily diet movement so on and so forth i'm not in the medical field i'm just very interested in health and nutrition and it seems like dr ornish one of the quotes over the years from books that i've read from you that i really like is there's an ounce of prevention or a pound of cure and when eighty percent of the health care dollars are spent on five percent of the population due to what's mostly preventable diseases it seems like the ounce of prevention is significantly less expensive than the pound of cure we talked about it briefly this afternoon and some of the questions but why aren't insurance companies all over lifestyle medicine as the ounce of prevention to prevent that pound of cure well i'd like to be able to take credit for the ounce of prevention and pound of cure but actually that's been around for a long time um but in this context it's true that 86 percent of the 3.6 trillion dollars we spent last year in this country on health care which is really mostly sick care is for treating chronic diseases that are largely preventable and often even reversible through making these same lifestyle changes at a fraction of the costs and the only side effects are our good ones and in this presidential debate you know it's like we're gonna have medicare for all are we gonna not but there's this third alternative again which is to address the more fundamental causes of why people get sick which to a large degree are the lifestyle choices we make and think if we could free up a big chunk of that 86 of 3.6 trillion dollars we could make better care available for more people at much lower costs and um i think that part of the reason with insurance companies in the past has been this belief that they know that 30 percent of people change companies every year because they usually change their employers and with that they change their insurance and they say okay even if it does save money it's going to take years to see the benefits so why should we spend our money today for some future benefit that some other insurance company is going to get and i'd say well that's because it's the right thing to do and that was not the most convincing argument i could muster and so we did these studies where we showed with uh the first one was done in the early 90s with um mutual of omaha and we found that almost almost 80 percent of people who were told they needed to have a stent or a bypass who were offered our lifestyle program as a direct alternative we're able to avoid surgery safely and they saved almost 30 thousand dollars per patient in the first year not years down the road we did a study with highmark blue cross blue shield where they found that they cut their costs in half in the first year compared to a control group you know match for age and gender disease severity by half in the first year and by 400 percent of the first year when they looked at the people they'd spent at least 25 thousand dollars on or more in the previous year five percent of people account for up to 80 of all health care costs those are the people who have chronic diseases so the fact that we now show that we can actually reverse those again why i think reversal is an important term to use when it's appropriate is that we can then save money in the first year and then for a corporation as you say most large corporations are self-insured so those savings accrue to their bottom line if they have a key executive that has a bypass they generally don't go back to work they spend millions of dollars having to replace that key executive in addition to the cost themselves and you know we even found extreme cases several people who could avoid a heart transplant by making these lifestyle changes that saves over a million dollars per patient again immediately so now i think more and more insurance companies are beginning to look at these issues because they realize as as michael said is that it's good for their bottom line and if it's good for the bottom line then it's sustainable i think this question is more for dr greger my daughter struggling with endometriosis and she had a surgery and she's at the age when where we would like some grandkids they may not be coming because of it she does not want to hear about plant-based nutrition she says there's no scientific proof that will do anything with her problem and and obviously the doctor is against it as well well he says that it's not gonna do anything either way are there any uh proofs is there anything up in research so have you looked at nutritionbacks.org for endometriosis no no i honestly haven't yeah so uh you know it's like so there's now uh over 2 000 videos and so it's funny people ask me and i'll be like have you checked out this great website that if there's nothing on endometriosis on nutritionfx.org one of two things either there's no research period or there was no research at that point in time and maybe there's something since so i encourage everyone to uh to use this wonderful resource called pubmed.gov is the database the largest medical library in the world um and you can type in any disease and diet and you can find out if there is something out there either for the prevention or treatment and if there is please feel free to send it my way and maybe i'll do a video about it um and something at least you can see if there's something out there um sometimes there's just no studies at all um and so you can just you know generally say well you know eating a healthy diet itself but whether it helps particularly with that i know there's certainly um i have a bunch of videos on fertility improving both male and female fertility and endometriosis is such a common cause of infertility uh maybe there's something in those videos but you just have to check the last like i want you guys to give you guys 30 seconds to tell us about your new books so dean yours is out michael yours is coming you're working on one so just 30 seconds and let us know what's coming so dean go ahead my new book is called undo it my spiritual teacher people say what are you hinduism i'm an undo so it's in partial homage to that as well as to the obviously the nike ads it's about how i took 40 years of work and reduced it down to its most basic understanding eat well move more stress less love more that's it and the more diseases we study the more mechanisms we look at the more evidence we have i present this new unifying theory that these are all the same diseases manifesting and masquerading in different forms and my wife anne has a how-to section of how you can actually reverse these conditions i'm doing a lot of media this week for the book i'll be on the ellen degeneres show on tuesday and fox and friends on monday and maria bartoromo show and a bunch of other stuff podcasts and so on so if you're thinking of buying the book this would be a good week to buy it because we're hoping to get it onto the new york times list this week thank you thank you michael um so my last book how not to die the uh the next book out in december how not to diet on weight loss it is essentially done it's a big book and they're trying to read right right yeah short read 800 pages what is it come on it's a flat book but it may actually be contracted since then but all that we will lose none of the information i'll make videos about everything and so um but it may just not end up in the book but it just goes through um first half of the book is 17 ingredients for an optimal weight loss diet and so originally i was just going to go through all the the existing diets you know i'm on like the u.s news and world report panel and you know but every year there's new diets and stuff like playing whack-a-mole instead of doing that i said well let's just what are the criteria for healthy weight loss diet and then you can compare those criteria to any new diet that comes down the the pike um so that's the first half um and then the second half um is ways that you can regardless of what you eat um accelerate loss of body fat and i deal with chronobiology and microbiome and all sorts of other nifty ways any stubborn pounds that still need to come up but core spoiler alert so a diet centered around whole plant foods is not only the best diet for preventing wrestling reversing many of our top killers as i showed in the first book but also the most effective diet ever shown of its kind in terms of weight loss and so that was the broad study in new zealand and then uh talk about how their specific foods that may be able to push that even further excited will be out december 10th um and my first speaking engagement for my 200 city tour will be here in new york city hope to see you then that's great thank you michael thank you colin over the years become quite concerned about the fact that the science of nutrition itself is not very well very well respected uh it's not really taught in medical systems and medical schools there's a lot of confusion about nutrition i just i'm overwhelmed by the the kind of arguments that we end up with on details and um and also at the same time having been in this thing since the late 70s as far as policy development is concerned i've had a good deal of experience and pushback uh which in fact offered some lessons to me and so i got really very interested in why this vitriol at times and not necessarily i'm not talking about the plant-based community at all i'm talking about just the people who are in the profession of nutritional science the kind of things that have happened over the years so i got quite concerned about that some years ago and and went back and tried to understand better where did all this come from and i got all the way back into the late 1700s especially during the 1800s uh i really learned some really fascinating things essentially discovering i would argue if i may the roots of some of this problem you know why there is so much confusion there was a fascinating duality in a sense of two theories during the 1800s that one had to do with and both in both cases they were speaking about cancer one had to do with the fact that cancer is a local disease therefore locally treated and the best way to do is cut it out that was a simplistic version the other was uh that was called the local theory of disease the other one had to do with the constitutional nature of disease they called it and that had a rich history quite frankly back to the 1700s had more to do with that looking at this disease not in this exquisite detail and single factors affecting things but it really had to do with what quite frankly in the modern day we call nutrition in many ways and so my book is about elaborating on that and then come into the modern day to see how that history fed into the problems we have i find it really fascinating i'm quite excited about it so i'm actually working on the last five paragraphs of the book but i think uh it'll be out hopefully by the fall maybe first of next year it's gonna be called i've got a couple of titles i'll throw like one just kind of you know sense and feeling nutrition and justice for all nutrition and justice for all that's great that's good so i i have the ownership of that child now we're so grateful that you're here thank you you

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Length: 55min 11sec (3311 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021