EPIC Q&A: Dr Scott Stoll, Dr T Colin Campbell, Dr Dean Ornish, Dr Michael Greger MAGICAL

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 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 you know go around the country and to see the changes especially you call him and Dean that have started out so many years ago and and have seen the change and the things that have transpired over the last you know five years really than such a huge movement so what I think in no small parts on you as well thank you I appreciate that thank you you know I I just want to make this very conversation also 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 gonna 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 learns 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 work 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 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 denier to come up with a couple of others to point to you 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 Collins work with the China study was very very important not only in terms of showing from an epidemiological standpoint that the diseases we take for granted in this country are really not natural at all and that even though they have the same genetic diversity as we do or at least close to it 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 Kay Kay Carol and some others were one of the first to talk about getting beyond this whole fat versus carbs debate into animal protein itself being atherogenic and creating an 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 I think what Walter well it's done with physicians and Harvard Nurses Health Studies I think have been helpful in showing the strong link between a meat-based died in particular increasing the risk of so many chronic diseases and even though it's not an interventional study it's an today-but epidemiologic one the fact that it can collect such large amounts of data and from the Harvard 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 a nutritionfacts.org has been 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 and with great integrity which all of which are in rare supply these days and Scott the work that you've done with the Pine attrition conference getting 1,500 or 2,000 people at a time from you know multiple countries 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 Thank You Colin can I first off everyone who knows my friends of course for what what you guys have done mr. de cyclopædia over there and Dan you're we got on on to each other just work when was it 30 years ago I look good for 96 don't you think no I'd like to change the question just a little bit you know mine and and that is I'd like to honor some people who got forgotten in this field and some of the researcher was does so long ago I'd forgotten it says something about you know who we are why did we do what we do and something wrong with the science maybe just understand but I have to think of a guy dream of Chittenden back in the early 1900s he did the best study on diet and physical conditioning athleticism I mean it was it was classic he had two books about that thick each what was again Colin Chapman Russell chindan Shipman he always said yeah head of 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 bridged that question at the time he really took kind of a hint 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 too quite that way no no I mean in terms of you know people criticizing new ideas oh yeah thank you well maybe that's why I'm sorry talking why I'm because I have some sympathy some deficit for Thursday's but there was another study that done to at that time two or three studies that eventuated in a publication in 1923 to show that cholesterol dietary cholesterol was not the cause of elevated levels of cholesterol in the blood which return was an alleged to be related to heart disease and so the story went the story became a rather simplistic over the years and what was shown at that time rather conclusively of most to some ten to twelve research groups if the cause of high cholesterol was not really the fat or the cholesterol itself was a animal protein now that then under the standards of today that wasn't as convincing about perhaps as it could be today but you know looking at a larger context that that was really significant it wasn't that that they're that they were so that that was so proof positive of that relationship it just got forgotten ignored was my friend good doctor crush SP who turned that up some years ago but I I think this story's been brewing you know for a long time and you know we've been a benefactor to some extent you know if some of that early work got forgotten then we come back and you Michael to continue the love fest so nutritionfacts.org would not exist if not for a publication on July 21st 1990 and perhaps most prestigious medical journal in the world dr. Dean Ornish and colleagues the 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 people's of life every year like we really cared about saving lives if doctors really cared about saving lives okay that we know more not a penny more research needed to save literally hundreds of thousands of Americans alone every single year continue to die from this preventable rest of the reversible condition I mean so that is what started me on my journey and and to unearth all the the other mountains of evidence that's been just kind of buried and to bring that out to light and so we all have tremendous tremendous debt - OH - thank you thankfully receive and so the follow-up to that question that 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 more length earlier today I think we're two plays with Alzheimer's very similar to where we were with heart disease forty 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 there are no good drugs for treating it or for preventing it 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 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 propositions so I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hope that we will have some good news to share in a year soon you know just to follow up on that you know thinking about Alzheimer's how do you perceive the physiology ask dr. Dean shares I recently you know what's the genesis event 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 study's like the finger and studying 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 begin because it's affecting all these mechanisms that cause it every one of these mechanisms chronic inflammation oxidative stress changes the microbiome etc I mean your microbiome for example produces amyloid it produces many of the neurotoxins that end up in your brain beyond the diet is the the other aspects you know that 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 a an assisted living center where you know when 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 I think it's important to focus on diet but I think these other aspects you know II well is great but also they move more stress less and love more tickly the love warm is one that I think I'd like to see more research on regards to the question of the future I'm really fascinated with the idea that you know individual nutrients that we've studied for so long and tried to really focus in on our activities and you know what specifically they do with it we've been thinking it's 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 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 versus some of the outcomes I mean that just I find this concept of holism really just very exciting and so we can get away from you know arguing I should say chimes and focuses too much on individual little entities about doing things and I so I think that in the due course of time I think that idea is going to to expand I run into quite a number of people that now seem to identify with that and then in turn asked you know what is directing traffic you know in our bodies and we can think of all I mean even in the study I was wondering whether the social factors maze 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 factor as they began to more you know II 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 2 there are strong ties in China you know the family ties in communities and so on we're getting more disrupted do you think that might have played a role in this kind of interest what you said I just in fact was a during an interview with one of the Chinese people hearing and I haven't been around China for so long and they're they're having educated me so much you know particularly the question of the old Chinese philosophy I mean here was the country in transition especially since the time we did that work and I'll become a 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 and the Chinese thinking that I I really liked you know is that more holistic kind of concept that's so traditional of a judge and indigenous populations and and then and back and off and then ok now I'll have a look at what we do we do some things pretty interesting too especially the technical sense and so looking at that look at this and then in turn you know realize and if we take the best of all the best of that I think we got something really special and so I for myself I'd like to give a credit to the opportunity to my Chinese colleagues who sort of taught me some of that okay that's interesting Michael not another penny need be spent I mean we so we know the healthiest right now these dad now as a bonus can it also reverse all terms let's find out but we don't need that data point to I mean there's enough evidence to get people eating this healthy so really I see much of the research upcoming research these days is like what can excite people the most and it's the reversal so yet we know people that eat healthy or lower rates of low back pain for example 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 discs can we actually reverse a little baking that'd be a fantastic study you know Neal Barnard and PCR I'm doing some wonderful diabetes reversal studies I mean those are the things that really I think captured people's imagination so yes we know people eating plant-based said between two to three times lower likely to becoming demented later in life can actually reverse that's where we that's that'll get some headlines and so yeah so it's really it's it's almost like a PR thing like what else can we do to use to treat and reverse but we already know 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 attendants 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 and I did hear you know you guys I do as well and especially as a working you sort of Dean on a question kind of surname 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 know the sense of topic but but in nonetheless if you can start thinking about what nutrition can now you know when people have illnesses that's essentially treatment and we're spreading on some centers well it's a treatment but just because you treat something doesn't necessarily mean that it's gonna 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 could actually get better and better to the degree that you make these changes and in AI for those of you heard my earlier talk today forgive me for repeating this but in my new book undo it I present this unifying theory that the reason as Michael was saying that you know the 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 I have you know strokes or whatever 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 you like us even though they have the same genetic differences for example it doesn't matter if you're genetically not as efficient and 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 don't necessarily need to be researched in the sense that because it's the same in it's not like there's one diet for this in other word 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 they will even do that but if we can ask you so that people get better the light comes back on 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 captures peep 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 show and we could reverse the progression of early stage prostate cancer we now know that after ten years two studies in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that men with early-stage prostate cancer after ten years of being treated with surgery or radiation didn't live any longer than those that weren't could 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 what I 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 a huge economic and huge personal cost but we were able to show in a study we did here at sloan-kettering and at 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 gonna want to do something even if the something is coerced in 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 criticism of the plant-based nutrition is that you know there's very high recidivism levels people can't maintain this lifestyle and so I just like to ask you for your your response to that criticism because it's very important and it's 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 right I hear of that too one may be simplistic sort of notion is that when people are consuming the typical washer diet you know there are lots of food addictions they're addicted to fat they're addicted to this and that sugar and those addition is only declined and 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 addition and because if they and I don't know what that is maybe a month two three six months whatever I think the key is just staying with it you know having a world power to stay with it getting past those the dishes when you actually discover these new tastes are pretty good you know and so I think yeah 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 wouldn't he get with it neighborly mentally socially they taking 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 to me yeah going to take a crack at that - yeah absolutely well 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 then the patient doesn't change the doctor says see I knew they couldn't do it it all becomes self-fulfilling but it turns out that half to two-thirds of people prescribe 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 percent of the people are still following it and every site we train and a lot of doctors said how can that be I can't even get my page to eat less red meat exactly as you terian or vegan or you 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 where fewer actually works really well for the first month or so after someone's had a scare if they've ended up in the emergency room or had a heart attack though they're pretty much anything the doctor or 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 so one 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 affects 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 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 and 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 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 gonna live to be 86 instead of 85 that doesn't really motivate most people you know they say oh I don't am I gonna live longer they're just gonna seem longer all those kind of jokes here 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 likes and then 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 in my child's wedding I want to watch them grow up I want to whatever it is and then then they start to look at their food and say okay if I eat this I'm more likely to be aligned with my life's in my soul's purpose then suddenly the food doesn't those addictions that you so wisely talked about become let have less have a hold on us because they can be overridden by something that's even more compelling that's fantastic thank you Michael anything dad can table then [Applause] thank you so much Dean that is right that's right 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 so 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 is not really reverse Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court I've referred to that because that was the element that allowed you know obviously very powerful forces corporate bodies to support elections and he kept 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 it was sure many of you know this as well that the politician we elect or those who are you know we paid the most money for for the most part and they'll represent in powerful interests and they're not going to change and I I get quite upset because I have seen in the formation of dr. 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 and it really does happen that way 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 of represent either elected themselves or working for elected officials that these days are there because the citizens united and I can only think of another thing that's more pertinent to this argument then and actually working together all of us to get citizens united reversed no I think 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 right on target there are a lot of powerful forces that converge around the area of food I was working years ago with Ellen Haas which 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 is worth doing and they did that but then the salad was 595 the burgers 99 cents cuz 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 subsidize and B it doesn't really price into it the real cost to society so until we change the farm bill and change citizens united and change a lot of these issues that really did 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 nonprofit 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 Scripps at at UCSF but also in Omaha Des Moines Columbia South Carolina where they told me gravies of beverage this will be a big change in our lifestyle Brower 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 reimburse and that was the painful lesson I thought well if we just do a good sign sooo good clinical is it it's the best program we've had of its kind now we're closing it down it's like it's all about the Benjamins as the rapper's would say the money and so I realized that we could do a thousand settings 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 the same interventional cardiologist 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 realized they don't really work for most people they're now ain't randomized trials that have shown that stents and angioplasties don't prolong life don't prevent heart attacks and then in a study that I know how they got through the human studies committee they did fake angioplasty x' in london when they put a tube all the way up into the heart and just pulled it out without putting the stent in and half the patients in their reduction in angina was the same as those who actually got the stat meaning that they don't reduce angina either and so for decades we've been paying for you know over almost a hundred 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 if this was a in the early 2000s he said well look we might cover this but you have to get a letter from the head of the National Institutes of Health and National Heart Lung and Blood Institute saying that it's safe for older people to walk meditating vegetables and quit smoking I said you must be kidding me and he wasn't and would that so 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 it safe don't worry and there actually didn't say that they said in the way that federal government they said there's nothing to show that this diet is unsafe for all there are people I said okay that's good enough then a so they said another way right well you said that the diet is not unsafe but what about meditating and quitting smoking and 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 a hundred billion dollars a year for stents and angioplasties that don't work you know that are dangerous invasive expensive ineffective so never under any circumstances when I spent 16 years to work with the people at Medicare to get Medicare coverage because I knew that if we didn't do that no matter how many studies we did it was all I'd be on the fringes but if you changed reimbursement then you change medical practice and even medical education and that's that's what's happening now and 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 doctors only interested in money most doctors go into medicine so you really want to help people but if you're paid to use drugs in surgery and you're trained to use drugs and surgery then surprise we use drugs in surgery and so now that there's a way to make a living doing the lifestyle medicine it's 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 processing processed food industry load trillion-dollar industry probably the most profitable industry on the planet but the same kind of corporate forces that allow them to twist the science and have influence within the Beltway can also maybe in many ways the savior in terms of this movement you know GM spends more money on health insurance than they do on you know the the metal for their got you're on steel and so they are these there are these corporate players who are self insure 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 insurance companies is in their best interest to keep people healthy there are so there they're actually forces in which there is this rare alignment with what's actually good for people is actually saving people money so those low hanging fruit opportunities I think that will allow us to to to influence the larger society and you know when you hear that Tyson Foods for example right were the largest one largest meat companies in the world is starting their an entire new branch of kind of plant-based meats they're doing that 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 and so you do with dirt cheap ingredients they're subsidized by taxpayers itself for a few bucks a bottle that's how you make money the system is just set up to reward bad behavior but if all of a sudden you know Tyson doesn't care they just want to make money so they can make money signed plant-based music so make money sign plant-based I think those when once we see those kind of indicators where these large corporate you know when Dean Foods the one of the largest dairy companies bought out silk soymilk early no relation right right yeah no I mean really push the market and all of a sudden you know you have these plant-based milks right in there for a 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 I think that's behind some of the shifters things so ironically these evil corporate players may in many ways be our salvation in terms of supporting the plant-based movement Wow thank you Michael I'm gonna jump down and we'll take some questions from the audience are there's some questions all right like Donahue run acting all right we know that 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 veteran particularly a plant-based diet improves the quality of sleep the recovery during sleep or anything if they're related at all and to are there any particular foods or ingredients or things that help one sleep better there are some particular foods so in terms of eating patterns so that there are certainly so for example near Barnard did some studies where randomized people to plant-based diets for migraines for 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 study so we you can you can you can see that they didn't just get better cuz they because that dietary change that changing the diet in general wasn't asleep it was particularly the plant-based diet that did it but in terms of specific foods if you type in sleep in nutritionfacts.org there are particularly food so for example there was a study that showed that if you eat how many Kiwis was the two Kiwis a few hours a certain number hours before going to sleep you slept better than eating the same number of bananas for example so does that mean Kiwis have only special all we know is Kiwis are better than bananas but maybe there's and so and part of that was thinking both there's actually melatonin in certain fruits and maybe that was playing a role there's a couple of there specific foods that you on nutrition facts that are 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 number of things you can do to ensure kind of a sleep environment that maximizes your reducing screen time those those blu-rays in your eyes right before going to bed number things you can do to improve sleep which is critically important for health and longevity I mean curse people to get seven to eight hours a night if anybody has any trouble sleeping just listen to one of my lectures orcs my mother was had two craniopharyngioma 'z that she's had operated so doesn't have the pituitary gland so she's on about ten medications 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 sources usually a state of end-stage liver disease where your livers just signing it is so scarred up and at a certain point a liver transplant is really one's only option specific conditions that a dietary intervention can help with please feel free to contact me and my contact informations on nutrition facts that are organ written kind of work through the list but in general I mean be nice if there was a specific study showing a specific diet had specific benefits for that particular condition unfortunately often we don't have that so we could 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 be something that would sink or it says something don't worry about yeah I grew up in Texas we just suck on a trailer hitch and then you get all this incubator that sounds so uh one does not need to supplement with zinc so legumes based with these chickpeas and lentils has you know all the things that we'd like to think of an animal source protein such as you know iron zinc but also of course having the boat have not only missing the bag at saturated fat and cholesterol that comes along with animal sources of protein but also has the bonus of all those vegetable kingdom things like Foley and the fiber etc um so you kind of get the best of both worlds biting to using plant-based sources of protein you get all the 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 we certain blood or urine test so that's why it's a difficult to study often the first thing you sense in zinc deficiency is actually decreased taste sensitivity I've kissed a few vegetarians I think tastes pretty good to me but one doesn't see it taste differential in terms of those eating plant-based versus versus omnivores which would suggest there's really no difference in kind of zinc Staz fortunately very difficult to test and I I'm presuming that you misheard I mean a pound of pumpkin seeds to be a way more zinc than whenever anyone would need zinc deficiency has not been something that has popped up in you know long-term plant-based populations that we know thank you it won't be long before you have some major corporation that hires a porn star to say vegetarians tastes 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 those 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 oh there's especially growing I mean living in the San Francisco Bay Area where all the tech companies it's there's a kind of an implicit assumption everybody wants to live forever but I was suicidal 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 gonna 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 you know and and they'll say they help me deal with my pain they help me numb my pain I've got 12 friends of his 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 them the pain or opioids them the pain or drinking all the time numbs the pain or working all the time and so I think it's really important that we deal with these kind of existential questions because once then someone is said 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 you know accomplish something great in in in science whatever happens to be if you can get someone in touch with their raise on 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 call them the food addictions really are just to help them done 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 is about 50 billion spent on on health care and $2,000 about one and a half trillion and this year we're hovering around the three and a half trillion dollar number they say we have a healthcare problem in the United States I don't think it's a healthcare 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 is an ounce of prevention or a pound of cure and when 80% of the healthcare 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 a pound of cure but actually that's been around for a long time but in this context it's true that 86% of the three point six trillion dollars we spent last year in this country on healthcare which is really mostly sick 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 good ones and in this presidential debate you know it's like we're going to 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 or the lifestyle choices we make and think if we could free up a big chunk of that 86% of three point six trillion dollars we could make better care available for more people at much lower costs and I think that part of the reason with insurance companies in the past has been this belief that they know that 30% 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 gonna take years to see the benefit so why should we spend our money today for some future benefit that some other insurance company is gonna get and I say well that's because it's the right thing to do and they that was not the most convincing argument I could muster and so we did these studies where we showed with the first one was done in the early 90s with Mutual of Omaha and we found that almost almost 80% of people who were told they needed to have a stent or bypass who were offered our lifestyle program as a direct alternative were able to avoid surgery safely and they saved almost $30,000 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 the people that they'd spend at least $25,000 on or more in the previous year five percent of people account for up to 80% of all healthcare 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 insurance 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 costs 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 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 1 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 obviously the doctor is against it as well he says that it's not gonna do anything either way are there any proofs is there anything up in research and so if you looked at nutritionfacts.org for endometriosis yeah so you know it's right so there's now over 2,000 videos and so funny people will ask me and I'll be like have you checked out this great website that if there's nothing on endometriosis on nutritionfacts.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 to use this wonderful resource called PubMed gov is the database largest medical library in the world 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 and so the at least you can see if there's something out there um sometimes there's just no studies at all and so you can just you know generally say well you know eating a healthy diet it's up but whether it helps particularly with that I know there certainly I have a bunch of videos on fertility improving both male and female fertility and endometriosis is such a common cause of infertility maybe there's something in those videos but you just have to check the last leg otherwise you can't to give you guys 30 seconds to tell us about your new books so dean yours is out michael yours is coming your working on one so just 30 seconds and let us know what what's coming so Dean go ahead my new book is called undo it my spiritual teacher people said what are you a Hindu and say no I'm an undo so it's in partial homage to that as well as to the obvious of the Nike ads it's about how I took 40 years of work and reduce 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 Ann 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 Bartiromo show and bunch of others stop podcast 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 um so my last book how not to die the next book out in December how not to die it on weight loss it is essentially done it's a big book and attorney right but yeah short read 800 pages was it come on it's a sad 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 but it may just not end up in the book but it just goes through 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 unlike the US News & World Report panel and you know but every year there's new diets and so ladies 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 bear those criteria to any new diet that comes down the pike that's the first half and then the second half is ways that you can regardless of what you eat I'm accelerate loss of body fat and I deal with chronobiology microbiome and all sorts of other nifty ways any stubborn pounds that still need to come up but core spoiler alert so diet scent around whole plant foods it's not only the best diet for preventing arresting 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 talk about how their specific foods that may be able to push that even further excited will be out December 10th and my first speaking engagement for my 200 City tour will be here in New York City hope to see you then over the years become quite concerned about the fact that the science of nutrition itself is not very well very well respected it's not really taught in medical systems and medical schools there's a lot of confusion about nutrition I just some overwhelmed by the kind of arguments that we end up with it on details and and also at the same time having been indistinct since the late 70s as far as policy developments concerned I've had a good deal of experience and pushback which it back to offers some lessons to me and so I got very interested in why this vitriol at times and not necessarily you know 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 seventeen others especially during the eighteen hundred's brilliant leaders have really fascinating things essentially discovering your 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 eighteen hundred's that one had to do was in both in both cases that were speaking about cancer one had to do with the fact that cancer is a local disease they were for locally treated and the best way to do is cut it out that was a simplistic version the other was that was called the local theory of disease the other one had to do as a constitutional nature of disease they called it and that had a rich history quite frankly back to the 17 owners had more to do with it looking at this disease not in his exquisite detail and single factors affecting things but I really had to do with what quite frankly in the modern day we called nutrition in many ways and so my book is about elaborating on that and then coming to 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 right actually working on the last five paragraphs of the book but I think it'll be out hopefully by the fall maybe first of next year it's gonna be called I've got a couple of times I'll throw away one just kind of see you know sense in feeling nutrition and justice for all nutrition and justice for all let's go that's good so I I had the ownership of that title now we're so grateful that you're here thank you you

Channel: neofilm

Views: 150,469

Keywords: Physicians, Plant Based Doctor, Plant Based, Nutrition, Vegan, Dr Dean Ornish, Dr T Colin Campbell, Dr Greger, Dr Scott Stoll

Id: jP1nw71E9g0

Length: 55min 11sec (3311 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2019