Foods for Protecting the Body & Mind: Dr. Neal Barnard

hello hello good evening welcome everybody to the Murdoch mind body and spirit series I'm Gina Murdoch it's great to see so many of you here I love the front row we are so honored my husband Jerry and I to present this series at the Aspen Institute and we're so happy to see a full house once again for this series connecting mind body and spirit this is really the part of the founding principles of the Aspen Institute we have an incredible speaker here tonight and we're very very excited about hearing from dr. Neal Barnard if you weren't here for that talk you can just exit no I'm kidding let's all take a collective deep breath here it's the Aspen summer season and I know there's quite a bit of frenetic energy so let's just close our eyes take a few deep breaths and really connect into this space so we can be present for this talk here today so just breathing in and out through the nose go ahead and close your eyes I won't go away I know I saw you just take a couple deep breaths so we talked a lot about the mind the body and the spirit and a lot of that is just about mindfulness about being present in the in the moment and here we are already in August August 5th 2015 and for some of us we wonder how we got there so just take a couple deep breaths and just reflecting on all the amazing things that you've seen in this space and the Aspen Institute I personally would like to thank crystal Logan for helping us with this series together and the staff at the Aspen Institute and so just taking one more deep breath in through the nose and as you exhale just a sigh let's just do that one more time inhale through the nose ah oh that feels good we're going to talk about foods for protecting the body in mind tonight with dr. Neal Barnard and I'm just going to tell you just a little bit about him and you can read more in the program book Neal Barnard is an adjective so seeit professor of medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health and Sciences in Washington DC president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible medicine through numerous studies he has found ways to reverse and prevent disease and he has worked tirelessly to educate the medical community as well as the public about findings from a host of peer-reviewed studies dr. Barnard has authored more than 70 scientific publications as well as 17 books including the New York Times bestsellers power foods for the brain and 21-day weight-loss kickstart he'll be signing his books after this program so please take some time to connect with him after and just really quickly the bio is very impressive and we know that all of our speakers here are incredible human beings really pushing the envelope with innovation and creativity when I was going to present dr. Barnard I got an email from a friend of mine named Martin Oswald Martin are you in the audience yeah Martin I'm sorry to embarrass you but what's so wonderful is Martin is a local chef and what he's done is he was inspired by dr. Barnard and I think you guys have connected and he went ahead and did an experiment at Grand Valley Hospital in rifle and used the diet that dr. Barnard talks about with was 50 different patients that were pre-diabetes and through the diet all of them every single one of them became clear of the diabetes and and their cholesterol was lowered some of them cleared up acne they got happier they looked better and so lo and behold this stuff really really works so I just wanted to share that story let's give this guy a hand join me in welcoming dr. Neal Barnard up on the stage thank you come on up Neal welcome well Thank You Gina Thank You Jerry it's a delight to be here what a wonderful place um I didn't grow up in such a wonderful place I have to tell you I grew up in Fargo North Dakota um anybody been there seen the movie okay that's my mom in that movie anyway um my my father grew up in the cattle business and his father and his father and his father they were all cattle ranchers and and my dad didn't like the cattle business and so he left and he went to medical school and he came back and he became the diabetes expert for Fargo and all of North Dakota and western Minnesota and I never once heard him say that anyone got better what they did is they managed their disease diabetes was a one-way street it was a progressive disease and our goal was to try to manage it and to do the best that you could and when he was in his late 60s early 70s he started to succumb to symptoms that we had never seen in him before and his mind was starting to go a little bit like his father's mind had gone where the same story started to repeat and then he said words were slipping out every day and many times a day and when he died with severe dementia I realized that I'd never heard of any way of preventing that I want to talk about those things today it's a new world we now know more about all of this than we've known before and we have tools not only to show us what's going on but to take this power into our hands and to share it and to change this world for ourselves and our loved ones and that's what I want to talk about today first a little bit of bad news this is diabetes it is not your imagination it is getting a lot worse and people come into my office and they say I'm doing pretty well I'm doing pretty well I'm not eating any bread because what they're thinking is diabetes means I got too much sugar in my blood sugar is glucose and it comes from carbohydrate so the idea is don't eat any bread don't eat any potatoes don't eat sweet potatoes don't eat cookies don't eat cakes don't eat rice because those are carbohydrates well if you'd look around the world a little bit Jerry and I we talked about this earlier take a look at Japan in Japan you have the skinniest people the longest lived people on the planet what's the dietary staple of Japan huge amounts of rice for breakfast lunch dinner and if you look at diabetes in Japan in adults over the age of 40 before 1980 diabetes was rare one to five percent of the population but what happened to Japan right around 1980 anybody know as William Castelli at the Framingham Heart Study always said when you see the golden arches you could be on the road to the pearly gates and this is not traditional Japanese food but it's become very popular and if you look at that can you see that the fat content of the diet is it's not as bad as ours but it's going up and carbohydrate is going down they're eating less rice year by year and by 1990 diabetes was 11 to 12 percent this shows us two things the first thing is diabetes is not caused by eating rice and a little while I'll tell you what it is caused by the second thing is diabetes is not genetic not for the most part there are genes for type 1 diabetes and for type 2 diabetes but did genes change during that time no they didn't there are two kinds of genes there are dictator genes those are the genes that say blue eyes you're gonna have blue eyes they give orders you obey the genes for diabetes are more like committees they make suggestions you could get diabetes but maybe you couldn't okay alright so let's take a lesson from the United States we do not have a rice based diet we have a meat-based diet and in 1909 the Department of Agriculture started tracking what we eat and meat intake rose especially in the post-world War two period and hit an all-time high in 2004 and what was the big increase pork beef chicken Americans eat a million chickens per hour let me say a special word of condemnation for cheese back in 1909 when the government started tracking cheese was a European thing we don't eat cheese in North Dakota but in the 60s and 70s and 80s fast food chains and especially pizza chains brought cheese into our lives you know Pizza is a delivery vehicle for cheese and as of 2012 your average American was eating 30 pounds more than we were a century earlier that would be okay except it's 70% fat mostly saturated fat that's bad fat it's got a lot of cholesterol it's got a lot of sodium if it were any worse it would be Vaseline and we're eating huge amounts of this stuff enormous quantities sugar when Americans were gaining weight in the 1980s 1990s 2000s awe was different kinds of sugar were moving in different directions the blue line is table sugar the Green Line high fructose corn syrup put it all together you get the red line reading more sugar okay so more meat more cheese more sugar why do we have an obesity epidemic I don't know we're not exercising enough right no that has nothing to do with it it's all on the input side of the equation and the reason this is important is if we're wagging a finger at our kids saying you just need to stop reading it's get off your your iPad and start exercising you cannot exercise that off exercise is great but the reason for obesity and the reason for the diabetes epidemic and other things I'm going to talk to you about is because we are eating in a way that human beings never ate in the history of this planet now here's diabetes from 20 years ago 1994 there is North Dakota right up there less than 4% of the population had diabetes here we are in disgrace in Louisiana Mississippi more than 6% but as our diet was changing the map started changing here's 95 and 96 and 97 and 98 and 99 2000 2001 diabetes doesn't wait if you change your diet it comes roaring in now I'm going to change the color scheme because I want to zero in on certain counties but the math is getting worse in Colorado better than everybody but even in Colorado things are starting to get worse okay so who does better researchers for a long time have studied seventh-day adventists and when I started my research career I couldn't figure out why are you putting Adventists under the microscope well I soon learned that seventh-day adventists by their teachings are supposed to avoid tobacco and alcohol and caffeine and meat and almost all Adventists are good at the first three but some eat some don't they're non-smokers not drinkers and in 2009 the American Diabetes Association published these data what they were looking at was BMI are you familiar with BMI but body mass index it's it's your weight but it's adjusted for how tall you are and ideally below 25 they looked at not quite 61 thousand people and they separated them based on the diet that they habitually followed and the red bar on the left is what they called non vegetarians or meat-eaters and they they were not below 25 they were at about 28 point eight and the next group was semi vegetarians meat less than once a week little skinnier the third group pesco vegetarians pesco meaning okay no meat except fish little thinner then lacto-ovo vegetarians lacto meaning ok dairy products ovo eggs ok no meat but dairy and eggs and was that blue line out on the right I have to tell my patients that a vegan is not a person from the planet Vegas but this is a person who doesn't consume animal products at all and that's the only group that is smack in the middle of the healthy weight range but this is not why the American Diabetes Association published these data they were looking at diabetes and you see the same gradient the mediators have a lot the vegans have almost none so that's very impressive so my research team thought okay let's test the diet let's bring in people who never thought about doing anything like this before and let's see what happens so we brought in a group of people who were all it was postmenopausal women with moderate to severe weight problems and we did not say to reduce calories or avoid carbs what we said was no animal products and keep oils low so don't take that bottle of olive oil go glug glug glug glug glug glug glug all over your past it's gonna be low-fat foods we asked him not to change their exercise and it was a 14 week study so what we asked them to eat from was what we call the power plate fruits grains vegetables legumes legumes are okay now beans peas lentils foods that grow in a pod so breakfast might be blueberry pancakes or oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins or chili with not meat but with vegetables or beans and if my linguini arrives instead of an alfredo sauce it might have artichokes and see Royster mushrooms this is not a punishing diet no calorie counting no carb counting and at 14 weeks the average person have lost 13 pounds their waist dropped by two inches and their insulin sensitivity improved which we measure with glucose tolerance testing so predicated on these results which we published in the American Journal of Medicine NIH oh I forgot to tell you we tracked them for two more years and we compared them to a control group following a chicken and fish diet the control group is the red line over the long run they didn't do so well the blue line was the vegan group and because you're not starving there's no reason to overeat there's no reason for the way to come back and you just it's a one-way street to a healthier waistline okay so the National Institutes of Health and gave us a grant and said why don't you test this for type 2 diabetes so we used a plant-based diet and compared it to a conventional carb counting calorie restricted conventional diabetes diet 22 week studies so about five months and a year follow-up ninety-nine people and what we track is something called hemoglobin a1c if you have diabetes you know what I'm talking about and what what a1c is if I test your blood glucose it's going up and down minute by minute but a1c stays pretty stable and it should be below seven if you have diabetes so the redline was the conventional diet they had a nice drop down to seven point five the people on the vegan diet no calorie counting no carb limits at all they were free to eat as much as they wanted had this massive drop just on average of more than one point two absolute percentage points on a1c which is not only better than any other diet that's ever been tested but better than any oral diabetes medication that we had available - and when we saw these results um there were some unusual things that happen this is Vance Vance had been a policeman in Washington his father was dead by age 30 Vance was diagnosed with diabetes at 31 came into CS in his late 30s and he was randomly assigned to the vegan group and after about three weeks she said this is the easiest diet I ever did you know tell me to count anything you don't tell me to not eat stuff I can eat as much as I want I just got to learn different kinds of foods but he said it was easy lost about 60 pounds over the course of a year his diabetes medications were discontinued and his hemoglobin a1c was not below 7 to start it was 9.5 which is terrible it dropped to 5.3 which is normal here's what this when I was in medical school I was taught you can't get normal here was a man's in front of me and his lab tests showed that on no medication at all he had a hemoglobin a1c of a teenager the diabetes was no longer do I tell him that I have to say I thought about this for a long period of time could I tell him he didn't have diabetes anymore I have to say as this as you started to see many many cases of this we're quite comfortable telling people that their diabetes is gone that does not mean it could not come back it's waiting around the corner if Velveeta comes back into your life diabetes will find you this is o by the way I was asking his permission to share his experience he said make sure you tell everybody that my erectile dysfunction went away too you can write that down um this is Nancy same story she lost about 40 pounds she stopped her diabetes medications her a1c improved it's still in the diabetic range but much much better and her arthritis improved dramatically it effectively went away and that's another talk but bottom line when you're not eating dairy products and dairy protein the inflammatory processes that are attacking the joints in many cases goes away and there are there other parts of the diet that can cause inflammation too but this is a biggie okay all right now I want to this is my most important slide if there are any medical people I want you to turn on your phone and take a picture of this this is a muscle cell the reason I'm showing you a muscle cell is that's where sugar is going some sugar in your blood goes to your brain some goes to your liver some goes to other parts but most of it goes to your muscles because it's it's powering your your movements and so there is the glucose to get into that cell it needs a hormone which is called insulin and there it is insulin is like a key so here's the insulin it attaches to that red receptor just like a key in a lock and once the insulin attaches it signals those channels to bring in the glucose and there it is coming right in that's what's supposed to happen but there's there's a problem here this is when I was a kid growing up in North Dakota I lived in a part of town where some other kids would play this not very nice trick when nobody was home they would put chewing them in your front door lock and you get home with a perfectly good key that will not open your door any more I hope you never lived in a neighborhood like that so rather than climb in and out your window all for the rest of your life you clean the door Oh door lock out and your key will work again you don't have chewing gum in your cells what you have is fat chicken fat cheese fat beef fat fryer grease olive oil extra virgin olive oil extra extra virgin olive oil there might be a little 1040 motor oil in there Fraulein Oh anyway this fat builds up inside the cell and it stops the insulin kee from working are you with me the buildup of fat causes insulin resistance now doctors hate words like fat it's got one syllable so we are going to call it intra Mayo cellular lipid it's this is fat inside the cell so why did Vance's diabetes go away well think about how much fat is there in the low-fat vegan diet how much animal fat is there there isn't any and if I keep the oils low do you think that fat is going to stay there it gradually dissipates the insulin can work again and so time goes backwards the cause of his diabetes is starting to go away and not just for vans but for anybody with type-2 diabetes and by the way this is not belly fat you can be skinny this is fat inside the cell that I can only detect with mr spectroscopy it's inside the cell ok and now I'd like to talk to you bout your car insurance this is Geico when I look out my office window GEICO's national headquarters is about three blocks away and back in 2006 the head of the health service at Geico said we need you here we've got 2,500 employees here was self-insured you wouldn't believe what we're paying for lipitor for insulin for blood pressure pills why don't we do your diet at Geico and I said let's do it but let's do it as a test so we picked two different Geico facilities this one in the Washington area and one in Fredericksburg Virginia and at this one they got a program of introducing a healthy diet at work and at the other one they didn't and we tracked everyone's weight and health and the idea was that they would once a week get a discussion group at lunchtime on how to begin a vegan diet if anybody wanted to do a totally voluntary and the other thing was that they would get vegan food served in the cafeteria but this was totally new to the cafeteria manager huh it anyway they figured it out it took a little while and the people in Fredericksburg didn't lose any weight but the people in the Washington area they lost weight very nicely and so then Geico said well that was pretty good let's do it in Georgia let's do it in San Diego let's do it but we did it in 10 different cities and exactly the same thing happened if you had weight to lose you lost weight if you have diabetes you got better and by now we just see this all the time and my I have to say my instructors who were teaching in all these cities were really really happy because instead of thinking people who are resistant people love it it's it's a fun cool thing that you can do at work except except there were two participants that my instructors kept complaining about these were in the Washington area and every week the instructors would come back and say Hillary and Bruce I don't know why they even show up because they sit in the back of the room and they chatter and talk and they then pay no attention to what anybody else is saying and they're just distracting everybody I wish they wouldn't come and every week I kept hearing about how bad Hillary and Bruce are and I want to tell you something you can misjudge people they were distracting but what they were actually talking about was the foods they were going to pick up at the store on the way home how they would convince her father to go vegan with them how they would have a vegan Thanksgiving for all their friends and a year later they sent me this picture Hillary's lost 85 pounds Bruce has lost 100 pounds and the other thing about this if you have been beaten up by a diet and by beaten up by a diet I mean you thought it was going to work and it was hard for you and somehow you're not getting the results that other people were getting that's not just bad for you physically that's bad for you psychologically because it teaches you there's something wrong with you and I want to tell you something there is nothing wrong with you there is a lot wrong with diets that are based on starvation or telling you you can't eat healthy complex carbs and things like that and there's a lot of goofy diets out there but a diet based on healthy vegetables and fruits and whole grains and beans is the fuel yerba body works on and that allows you to succeed automatically and that heals you physically but it also allows you to repair some of the damage that happens to us in years of commercial diet goofy nonsense that we've had to live with okay all right so this is a man named John Raimi lived in Canada sent me these pictures cuz he was at 320 pounds his doctor said you've got pre-diabetes and his wife heard about the program that we were doing gave him a book by the time he got to chapter four he'd lost 160 pounds and like Hillary and Bruce he discovered he liked exercising now he got energy this is Gina same story she needed to lose not as much weight but wanted to lose it not by starving but just making qualitative shifts she gets her waistline back and her health back and and and this is what works okay at the same time as we were doing this work on diabetes some researchers elsewhere started to discover a parallel track that led to the health of the brain and if you if it's alright with you I'd like to pursue that a little bit first of all the bad news Alzheimer's is getting much more common this is not just because the baby boomers are aging that's part of it the disease is more common not just here but in other countries and it starts out as a lapse what was the name of that movie if this happens once in a while that's normal that's sleep deprivation but if it's everyday it's mild cognitive impairment and if you're having trouble learning and remembering and reasoning a visual spatial ability you can't get a map straight anymore language and personalities start to go this is what starts to lead us down to a diagnosis of Alzheimer's now you're going to say I don't want that that is like the last disease that I want to even think about getting because when you get alle summers you lose everything everything your doctor will say to you I'm sorry it's genetic there there's a gene it's called the apoE epsilon for allele if you got it from one parent you've got three times the risk of both parents gave it to you you've got 10 to 15 times the risk get new parents I don't think so uh let me show you how the brain what's going on in the brain this red crescent that's the hippocampus that's Latin for seahorse this will be on the test that they hit the hip okay some anatomist 2,000 years ago thought that looked like a seahorse I'm anyway it's the hippocampus the hippocampus has the job of deciding what's worth remembering so the waiter comes up to your restaurant table it says hi my name is Kelly I'll be your waiter tonight in the hippocampus goes and I don't think so but things that need to be remembered go up to the cerebral hemispheres and you don't get a new cell for every new fact what you get is new connections and stronger connections between cells but if you look into the cerebral hemispheres you discover that these cells these normal brain cells are squishing out protein strands and these protein strands will get into sort of balls of yarn or little meatballs that we call beta amyloid plaques and that doesn't look so good it's sort of like one of those old-fashioned sausage makers cranking out the strands of of protein and then they collect in these meatballs in the brain it's a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease well anybody know what this is that is Chicago 1993 the chicago health and aging project got started and what they did is they interviewed thousands of people all they ask them is what did you have for breakfast what did you have for lunch what did you have for dinner and they then carefully track those people over years and to see if there was anything that linked to brain health and the first thing that they keyed in on was something I knew about when I was a kid growing up in Fargo my mother had had five kids and bacon would waft it smell up to our bedroom and we'd all run down stairs and my mother was taking the bacon strips out of the I'm pan and putting them on a paper towel to cool down and when the pan had no more bacon in it she had that bacon hot grease in the pan and you don't want to throw that away that's good bacon grease so she would carefully pour it into a jar to save it did your mom do this that jar did not go in the refrigerator it just went on the shelf because she knew that when bacon grease cools down what happens to it it solidifies and that is a sign that it's really high in saturated fat bad fat and the number one source of saturated fat is dairy products but it's also in meat okay so in Chicago some people don't eat very much of it and some people eat a lot of it and we're going to separate those two groups so the researchers tried to compare the low saturated fat group to the high saturated fat group and I should want to show you the numbers that's the low group that's a high group so the people who are eating the most saturated fat most dairy most bacon had three and a half times the risk of Alzheimer's compared to the other people where is it coming from two eggs three grams of saturated fat one strip of bacon another gram do you know anyone who has one strip of bacon chicken thigh even without the skin four and a half grams glass a whole milk another four and a half grams pizza for 112 grams do you know people who eat these foods people are eating these foods everywhere and you just add that up and you're automatically in the high-risk group okay uh researchers in Finland said what if we don't look at Alzheimer's what if we just look at mild cognitive impairment that that situation where you're having a lot of mental lapses later in life but you don't have Alzheimer's you're still driving you're still managing they took a little bit more than a thousand adults they track their diet at age fifty and then they watch them for the next twenty-one years and some of them ate relatively little saturated fat some ate more and it wasn't just Alzheimer's exactly the same thing with the mental lapses that hit us as we're older the fattier your diet the more likely you are to have brain problems well what about that gene that a bowi epsilon 4 allele well they they redid the data looking only at those people and here we are some people had relatively low fat some high fat and here's the numbers just so that you understand these are all people at genetic risk but if you avoided the bad fats your risk of developing these memory problems was cut by 80% genes are not destiny just like in the case of diabetes the genes for Alzheimer's disease are a committee that's making a real strong suggestion and now is the time to say I don't think so I don't want that disease the the solution to it is not a perfect one but we have tools that we didn't used to have oh yeah what's that now there's a fat in donuts anybody know what that's called trans trans fat that's right some people in Chicago know what a donut is some people avoid it some people eat a lot of it and I want to show you the numbers exactly the same okay so what we're doing is we're adding up the tools if I'm avoiding the a the saturated fat if I'm avoiding the trans fats I've cut my wrists dramatic are you with me okay you know we're just getting started but why would this be researchers at Kaiser Permanente said maybe it's cholesterol bad fats raised cholesterol so they brought in 10,000 not quite 10,000 people and some of them had a lower cholesterol a little higher a little higher and a little higher cholesterol and then they looked at their likelihood of getting Alzheimer's the higher you up here that's the more Alzheimer's you see obvious pattern if you have a low cholesterol level your Alzheimer's risk is relatively low if you maintain a high cholesterol your Alzheimer's risk is high but these cholesterol tests were done when they were 40 years of age dictating their Alzheimer's risk three decades later never to related to change okay so what else is look at lurking in those plaques there's the protein there's cholesterol there also are iron and / I don't know that surprises you if you're cast iron pan rusted if you're copper penny oxidizes well the same thing happens to Ock iron and copper in your body we eat iron and meat and a number of foods copper is in many foods it oxidizes in your body as it oxidizes it releases free radicals you know about free radicals these are the sparks that are attacking your skin and they're attacking your brain they're destroying the connections between cells so cast iron pans copper pipes meat liver probably the worst of all multiple vitamins the vitamins are fine but they put iron and copper in that you don't need now this one set trip silver says we know you don't need iron anymore you're getting plenty from foods they'll take it out but they're still loading you up with copper they're 20 years behind the science you should be taking a vitamin b12 supplement that's good but if you're taking a multiple vitamin get one that's called vitamins only note without the iron it out the copper you don't need it you're getting those from foods okay um alright so I've been saying get away from the animal products eat the healthy natural foods it sounds kind of like a Mediterranean diet and it is and in fact if you look at Mediterranean regions those people who have a glass or two of wine every day have less Alzheimer's than other people and it's true in fact when I was in college I think some of my roommates felt that they were on the Mediterranean program they were doing their best to follow a good healthy Mediterranean diet um but some researchers said well maybe it's not the alcohol that's doing that maybe it's the grape so at the University of Cincinnati researchers brought in a group of people add mild cognitive impairment average age 78 and what they tested was just grape juice pint a day which is a lot but what they discovered was that in three months their learning was better and their recall was better why I mean that's too easy three months um how well think about it a grape has a rough life it's sitting on the vine all day under the Sun with no protection or wait a minute that purple color but that's those are anthocyanins they are powerful antioxidants they protect the grape well if that's it maybe other foods that have that same kind of color will do it back to the lab let's try blueberry juice and so it was brought in a new group of people gave them a pint today of blueberries exactly the same benefit okay now I'm not suggesting that you need to have blueberry juice or grape juice what I am suggesting is that oops sorry what I am suggesting is that those colors aren't just there to be pretty if you go to the produce aisle of a grocery store the orange color of carrots or sweet potatoes you can see that at a hundred yards the red lycopene that's in a tomato you can see that across the room the the dark purple anthocyanins in blueberries and in grapes and many other foods you could see that a long ways away but if your cat came with you your cat would say I don't see what's you're so excited about your cat doesn't have your color or vision your cat is a carnivore and is looking for motion in the distance cats and dogs have a very acute sense of hearing and of smell and they're acutely attuned to motion but the human retina has evolved over time to recognize antioxidants and the human brain has created a positive valence that says I want that now we take those colors and we put them in an MMS bag but the original function is to save your life is this making sense okay all right so food isn't everything exercise is important too and at the University of Illinois researchers did an interesting thing they brought in 120 adults and they asked them to take a brisk walk three times a week and it reversed brain shrinkage especially in the hippocampus which is Latin for seahorse whose header asparagus today that's very good and it improved their memory so exercise is good it gets the oxygen going in the brain gets the waste product out so I have my own exercise tips that I would like to share with you arrive at the airport as late as possible carry massively heavy luggage run for the plane I do this about two or three times every week but what they did at the University of Illinois was a little different they just said ten minute walk three times a week not a trudge this is a brisk walk then add five minutes every week so it's 15 15 15 then the next week 20 20 20 once you get up to 40 minutes three times a week brisk walk that is the level that reverse brain shrinkage okay imagine what happens if you get the saturated fat out the trans fats out the excess metals out and you're pumping up your brain are you getting power absolutely we're just getting started okay um it's not just physical exercise it's mental exercising you know this already it started in Canada some people in Canada speak one language some people speak to the people who speak two languages have a delay of cognitive decline by about five years compared to other people if you speak three languages even better your high school French will not help you you have to be using it today if you're using it it will help you okay so intellectual activities documentaries newspapers these are all good for you this is the one I read pick out the one that is most meaningful to you but anything that gets that the word machinery working is good for you okay crosswords and anagrams are especially good I was sitting in a lecture by Dean or you know Dean Ornish he's a medical genius he showed that you can reverse heart disease with a plant-based diet and a healthy lifestyle and he I was sitting in a lecture and he showed this slide he said if I focus just on myself if I focus on I I will be ill but if I focus on we if I get the support of a group I can be well and he was making a really good point get a good group support but while he was making that point I was thinking about something completely different which was isn't that cool it there's these words hidden in other words and that's probably good for your brain to see that so I started taking words like this and if you rearrange them it's amazing what you can kind of come up with and as you do this this is helping your gray matter improve this is helping your white mat or get better and if you do this daily you're going to see a lot of improvement in your brain okay so now there are some companies that are making money doing this you've heard about Lumosity calm oh hi David I remember what you ordered last time you were at my restaurant and you get a tip or how many words begin with di G they're working on memory and reaction time and reasoning five minutes a day there I'm not pushing Lumosity there are many others but the idea is that these resources are out there for you okay now the most important thing whether it's physical exercise or intellectual exercise the most important thing is to stop you must stop you have to go to sleep because the first part of the night when you're asleep your brain is engaged in what's called slow-wave sleep it's integrating words and facts and experiences it's like all of the memories and things that came in during the day are a jumble of file folders you got to stop so they can be filed away the second half of the night is REM sleep rapid eye movement your brain is sorting out physical skills like a musical instrument or riding a bike or playing tennis and emotions in dream if you're up all night and if you're at night after night just not sleeping well your memory will be poor and your emotional control will be poor so there's a physiological substrate at night your amyloid that that sausage-maker turns off it stops cranking out so much amyloid protein but that only turns off if you go to sleep okay so this is my most important medical device I don't care how good your book is 10 o'clock should close it turn off the light go to sleep if you're having problems sleeping I have a regimen that I use for people that's very very easy to do and it's in my book power foods for the brain or we can talk about it in Q&A it's a very easy thing to do alright so what's a healthy diet fruits grains vegetables legumes those should be our staples and we we the Physicians Committee are some of you members of the Physicians Committee for the first possible medicine thank you if you are if you're not please do join us where we are trying to promote a healthier world in many ways and and I'd love for you to hear about what we're doing but back in 2009 we sent this to the US government and said the pyramid is a nice shape but people eat off a plate give them a plate and you don't need a meat group in a dairy group these are the foods to emphasize well we didn't hear back from them so in 2011 we filed a lawsuit against the USDA and we did hear back from them and I don't know if you've seen but this is what the USDA now calls my plate and they said okay fruits grains protein that protein could be meat but it could be beans or tofu or nuts for the first time in American history there is no meat group anymore the dairy group now includes soy milk it's not perfect but we're going in the right direction I'm not taking any credit for this change it could be a coincidence but but we're making we're making progress okay so by now you might be thinking all right dr. Bryant I get it if I followed your diet I'd probably be healthier but my family would divorce me I have to live in the garage all the pleasures of life will be gone how am I going to do this well I want to show you how we do this in research studies we've done this with hundreds of people and I have never seen anyone unable to do it I want to walk you through it two steps step one check out the possibilities I do for the first week we're not going to eliminate any foods all we are going to do is try to identify plant-based foods that we genuinely really like so you take a sheet of paper and you mark breakfast lunch dinner snack and you go to the store or try different recipes and you just see what fits in okay uh-oh meal tastes like wallpaper paste I got to put some raisins on it some cinnamon and now it's good blueberry pancakes that'll work I've never tasted almond milk but I'll put it on my bran flakes and see what I think so all I'm doing is I'm just testing out different things and for lunch I'll try the veggie pizza without cheese and I'll try a veggie hotdog or Mandarin stir-fry whatever it is I'm just trying them out and I'm going to an Italian restaurant where I'll check out the salads and the pasta fagioli or the angel hair pasta with an arrabbiata sauce or Mexican I'll try the veggie fajitas or bean burritos at Chinese I might try the rice and tofu and vegetable dishes extra points for Japanese because it's often delicate and very low in oil so all I'm doing is trying out the plant-based options and if I happen to go to a submarine sandwich place would they be willing to make it without meat and cheese sure so you load it up with the lettuce and tomato and onions and cucumbers and olives and red wine vinegar and they'll toast it for you and taco bell may not be the pinnacle of culinary art but they'll make you a bean burrito so that's where you're eating you're trying out these options so whatever you're eating from the whole idea is to just look for your breakfast lunch dinner snack that works for you and then once you found them then step 2 is to mark out just 21 days not 22 not 28 just 21 on your calendar and do it all vegan all the time for three weeks just as a test I can do that okay easy at the end of that time two things will have happened the first is you're healthier you're physically you are healthier your blood sugar is coming down you're losing weight your digestion is finally sorted itself out but the other thing is your tastes are starting to change in ways you didn't expect and if that sounds strange let me ask this group how many of you ever switched from whole milk to nonfat milk or skim milk an icy hand huh okay when you did what was the skim milk like at the beginning watery it's kind of blue - it doesn't look right um how many of you got used to that did how many go do you used to the lighter taste did you ever go back and taste whole milk again what was that like too thick kind like cream like wait a minute you for your whole life it was fine but what if you're not tasting it for about three week period your taste buds physically change and they prefer the latter taste so if you start a low-fat plant-based diet for the first week it will seem light you're going to think to yourself do I have to acquire a taste for folk music now break out the tie-dye I'm doing a vegan dialogue well the second week it starts to make sense and by the third week you've heard that Serena Williams is doing this and Bill Clinton I think and Ellen DeGeneres and I think Al Gore started doing and a lot of people are doing this and there are like 10,000 books and there are a million websites and DVDs and programs and a lot of fun products at the store so it becomes cool and you discover that all of your friends have adopted you as the nutrition authority and after about four weeks if you go back and you have a double bacon cheeseburger what do you discover it's not the joyful experience that you remember but it's simply it's like being a smoker if you smoke every other day you never forget it but if you've gone without for about three weeks you got power so that's why we do it this way if you want transition foods like the veggie burger instead of the meat burger or instead of Jimmy Dean there's gimme lean you can do this if you want so I'm not pushing them but the meat substitutes are there we have a free online program called the kick-start it's 21 days of menus and recipes and cooking videos so on day one Alicia Silverstone will send you her menus and recipes I'm not making this up and a lot of other Hollywood celebrities and athletes will do the same we've got an app that's also free 21 day kickstart it's all here at PCRM org please sign up by the way for those of you who are caregivers we have it in English Spanish Mandarin and a program for people from the Indian subcontinent about 450,000 people have used this program all totally free no commercial bias whatsoever and is the world changing I showed you that meat intake hit an all-time high 2004 butter on two thousand five six seven it started to sputter in 2008 it fell 2009 it fell 2010-2011 it started to fall and if you do the math by about 2012 we had dropped about 20 pounds of meat per person per year if you're an animal person every 1% drop is a hundred million animals who weren't eaten if you're an environmental person that's that much feed grain that didn't have to be irrigated if you're a cardiologist that's a whole lot of lipitor you're not using so we're not where we need to be but it is also not your imagination the world is changing things are going in a much better direction however I want to tell you something and this is where I'd like to I'd like to focus your attention on something where we're facing a serious challenge do you remember this there are a lot of people who are profiting from things that aren't so healthy and they can say things that sound good in a soundbite but may not be entirely true eat butter butters okay Dairy Management the beef industry Atkins there a lot of people who are spending a lot of time trying to convince you to eat their product and their secret weapon is research because if I can do a study that says 20% of adolescent girls are low in iron then I can press release this and every TV station on the six o'clock news with a new study shows that women tend to be low in iron therefore doctors recommend more red meat or I could do another study showing that people are going calcium so therefore we need cheese and sour cream and milk and dairy products industry uses as they are not fools this is the Cattlemen's Beef board look at the research budget six point seven million dollars per year some of that's marketing a lot of that is things to get on the evening news they want your kids your grandkids to buy their products now the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee did you see this earlier this year this is a group picked by the federal government to decide what Americans should eat and they put out a report that said there's available evidence shows no relationship between the consumption of dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption in other words we can finally go back and have what we have been craving which is this egg and this is apparently the most important thing in our lives and we can stuff it down our gullet in fact if cholesterol doesn't matter why stop there we can have sausage again and this is what Americans over the last several months have started to think a Gallup poll earlier this month showed that Americans are less worried about food than they ever were and not just this we can eat salt we can eat sugar we can eat all the stuff who cares well I took a look at a research study that happened to be published by one of the members Alice Lichtenstein who's a good researcher a tough to university she published a study looking that I believe they relied on and they showed that dietary cholesterol has really only a very modest effect on your blood cholesterol so in other words are you with me if you're eating a lot of eggs and other high cholesterol foods according to this study it's not really doing much to the cholesterol in your blood so don't worry about it well that's the headline but killjoy that I am I got a hold of this study and it was a review of 12 prior studies and here they are this won't be on the test don't try to read this but there's 12 of them these are the sponsors can you see that 11 of the 12 are industry 10 are the egg industry and one is fisheries that's prawns they're worried about now skip with the interventions but what I put here I put you if they found an unfavorable effect of the eggs on your cholesterol level I put F if it had a favorable effect and in some cases for statisticians it was statistically significant and others less so but do you see the pattern in virtually every single study if you're feeding eggs or eating shrimp or whatever your blood cholesterol does go up it goes up a little bit or it goes up a lot and that's what people weren't seeing 92% of cholesterol studies are funded by industry this was not the case back in the 50s and 60s what has happened what has happened is that by 1990 1995 it was clear-cut cholesterol in foods about half of it is absorbed into your blood it makes your blood cholesterol rise end of story the federal government stopped doing research on it it's like they stopped doing studies to see if smoking causes lung cancer it just does stop studying it the only people who fund research now are the egg industry who end and to some extent the shrimp industry to try to make a case that it doesn't matter and if I bring in relatively small groups of participants I can get results that aren't statistically significant I can say it could be just chance and they do a lot of these studies it's just a chance finding it's not significant and then they send these two good researchers to say it's just small it doesn't matter you can forget about it this is a lie okay so there are five are you with me is this making sense there are five steps for winning this battle the first is you have to use research strategically and I mean good solid well conducted honest research secondly you need to bring nutrition into medical education and care you shouldn't be able to walk out of your doctor's office without the doctor saying are you smoking and tell me about what you're eating the doctor doesn't have to give you an hour in nutrition lecture but the doctor has to know where to refer you to and to give you those resources and if the doctor doesn't they're not doing their job it needs to it needs to involve the insurers so that they're in the game and you need to involve schools and it needs to involve businesses so we did this a Geico but there isn't any reason that every business can't say you know if we can cut our health care costs we're going to be more competitive my cars in Detroit can compete with cars in Japan if I'm not spending two thousand dollars per car on viagra number one lipitor blood pressure medicines diabetes medicines all of those are related to diet okay Oh every business in America could say lunchtime you can have a class on Wednesdays now this is a little bit bigger this is one of our classes a little bit bigger than we like but you can do this we did it a Geico we've done it at the Power Company and in Washington we've done it all kinds of places once you bring the stuff into work you can revolutionize your workplace now when it comes to research studies I'm going to tell you what we need we need meta-analysis that pull all the data together because in five years time the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee is meeting again and that's what they are going to look for so if the egg industry is buying them that's what they're going to get we at the physicians committee this is what we do and this is what has to be done you need good clinical trials on diabetes on Alzheimer's disease on hypertension and you need exploratory studies so if rheumatoid arthritis is something that maybe doesn't have to be treated by drugs but can be treated by diet let's let's study that and not wait for just another drug trial that's what we need to do now the last thing that I just want to say is we can get there because we've been here before a generation ago I was sitting in a meeting in my Hospital the George Washington University Hospital we were deciding whether or not we should ban smoking we sold cigarettes in the gift shop I bought them my head of surgery bought them we would walk down the corridor to the doctors lounge smoking cigarettes our patients smoked in bed and that you remember this time we decided we're going to ban smoking and every other hospital did the same thing in every restaurant in every airline and every government building and every business that you can't smoke here and that became the greatest gift to every smoker who wanted to quit but needed some support and now it could be a February morning in Washington DC there's some guy shivering in his shirtsleeves outside finishing his cigarette before he's allowed into his non-smoking building well people are changing their diets too but not fast enough we're just like we're we were smoking we weren't idiots then we were just taking our time because it takes time to get cancer I can quit eventually well we made the decision the time is now with cigarettes a generation fast forward to today that's our air with food now is the time because we don't do anything our kids are at risk everyone we love is at risk and we are at risk but we can make these changes and the way to do it is to have fun with it try new foods new recipes new books new DVDs new explorations a new restaurant try it out if you have a dud who cares we're having fun with us and then if you find something you like share it at work share it with schools share it with people you love share it with a letter to the editor share it with a call to your member of Congress about what foods we subsidize if we make enough noise yes there are industries that profit from this but there are more doctors nurses dieticians worried parents worried principals and teachers our problem is we're quiet if we have fun with it if we explore with it and if we make some noise we can revolutionize the health of this country thank you very much huge collectible paper thank you um we have time for a few questions if there are any I'd be more than happy to take them in do we have a microphone for people okay yes if you have a question they'll bring a microphone to you yeah that's fine I um I just want to say I'm one of your fans I I love your website and I get your nutritional facts and everything coming emails every day and I work with dr. fine singer in the valley we he started a plant-based whole food program for his patients and I helped support that but my question today is have you done any research with chronic fatigue syndrome because it seems to be a real problem and I was wondering if you had any insights into that um it well it's a it's a great question the questions what about chronic fatigue syndrome and we see a whole constellation that also includes fibromyalgia and other conditions and I don't think nearly enough research has been done and that's in my list of things that need to be addressed and and have not been adequately addressed however we do see a pattern with rheumatoid arthritis with migraines to some extent fibromyalgia and some people with chronic fatigue that there does seem to be some benefit of getting certain foods out of their diet and it often is the same foods it's often the same list of foods for some people it's dairy for some people it might be gluten not everybody is gluten sensitive but some are it might be we um citrus fruits or tomatoes and we have an organized system for eliminating them to see which are the bad guys in which aren't but I think a lot more research really should be there as well as looking at foods that are supportive to help get the body back into balance so I'm with the hundred percent um where's our microphone you said you have it Oh tips about how to go to Sri yes where are you oh there you are okay um very severe so here's what I do um first of all we do a little a little sleep hygiene which starts with caffeine if you're a coffee drinker about a quarter of your morning coffee the caffeine is still there at midnight so like it or not it makes your sleep light and easy to disrupt alcohol will lure you to sleep but about 4:00 in the morning the alcohol molecule transforms into Elda is that our stimulants and they cause a certain kind of a wake up where problems and annoyances hit you at about 427 in the morning and you know exactly what I'm talking about so we deal with those initially and there are a few other things as well don't eat high-protein foods in the evening and then we bring in exercise physical exercise and I like to strain the muscles a little bit and I don't mean hurt yourself but things like push-ups or anything that causes the muscles to get tired because for a lot of people when you were seven you are physically active you didn't drink coffee you didn't drink alcohol and you were very physically active and your muscles got tired and so when you lay down to sleep your body demanded sleep and you just collapse when you're an adult we the only exercise we got is this or this now and so when we lie down our brain is wired and our body is not really fatigued so we don't sleep well so get some physical exercise as well and the last thing that I would mention sounds completely ridiculous but this is true look at what a toddler does or a little kid does before they go to sleep for about 45 minutes they go through this ritual of stretching their arms out and yawning really wide and your cat does it too and your dog does it and when I was in medical school I had a little rescued laboratory rat who lived with me and she would stick out her rat paw in the evening and do this big rat yawn and collapsed into sleep adults don't do that we just closed our book and we go like this I know I can go to sleep if I just try so tonight when you go home if you're if you don't do this naturally fake it do a big stretch and a big yawn hopefully no one's watching you and in a couple of seconds it will turn into a real one do it about four times it triggers the sleep mechanism and you will sleep well so just try those things look out from certain medications that are bugging you to but to see if it doesn't help you where are we now yes I'm just wondering in terms of the four food types that you recommend are there particular places that you recommend to buy them from like health food stores or Whole Foods or whatever okay a great question no I'm not recommending any particular sort however I would recommend that if you have a choice buy organic and you almost always do have choices these days I mean it doesn't have to be expensive if you buy dried beans and a sack of yams it's really really cheap but I would suggest that you buy the best quality food that you can find it's it's a very good investment where are we now my favorite piece of cooking equipment is my grandmother's cast-iron skillet must I throw it away um a great question if you're using a cast-iron pan every day you are getting too much iron if it's if you're having it once a month who cares yeah yes okay well I have a question about the difference between grass-fed animals and grain-fed animals there's a lot of information we're in a part of the country where we have cattlemen changing to only grass-fed beef instead of sending their animals off to confined feeding operations and where there are hunters bringing home elk and deer and I'm wondering if you've seen any research or done any research with your own patients in comparing the two different kinds of animal protein if the animal has a natural diet or a human right force-fed diet yeah I'm sorry to say that while it sounds like a great thing that if we would take the same ruminant animal and just feed them on grass instead of corn that all the health problems would disappear but it really does not seem to be the case the cholesterol content the fat content and even a number of the contaminants are pretty much the same and much of the research was done on cardiovascular disease and other things was done before feed Lots became as common as they are now and in my own family it was all grass fed generation after generation after generation and it was a health problem then - so I have to say I think the big push for organic grass-fed beef is promotion not science I have the mic over here yes um can you you alluded to this but could you be specific about the the work of Nina ty Holt's who wrote the book big fat surprise right and your question is it's a so her hypothesis that she defends intelligently is fat no big deal we've we've been all wrong about it and that seems 180 degrees from what you're saying and so yeah I think she's a really nice person I think she's done many many good things in her life and I think many many people like her a lot if you read her book and you check what she says you will find just one distortion after another that way it will make you slam it shut for example the Maasai in Africa eat blood and dairy products they don't have any cardiovascular disease at all in fact they have massive cardiovascular disease um well but they don't yeah okay they have cardiovascular disease but they don't get heart attacks it's really hard to document heart attacks in rural Africa something that might be considered since sudden death it isn't listed as a myocardial infarction so to hang your hat on that it's commercial nonsense I'm sorry well I don't mean to say that she's a very good person but I really say I've gone to that book and there's there's there lots of there's there's a million of them and they're their true believers in what they say but but the science is really very very poor yes please there are internet sites such as biotrust which say some of what you say but also suggest that complex carbohydrates or complex proteins snacking at night such as turkey chicken cottage cheese and things dairy products are beneficial for you what I'm hearing is totally different of course they're selling pills at a very high price would you comment please yeah you know it's it's true and um these are terrific questions and I feel I feel your pain there is so much confusion out there people will say my good friend David Perlmutter said the whole problem is grain don't eat grain and I say David what do you think people ate in Japan before McDonald's arrived it's a grain based diet and there are many many people who are trying to say the whole problem is is is carbs or grain or whatever I'm hoping that the information that I presented will intrigue you to see that the healthful foods are these very simple traditional vegetables fruits whole grains and beans on our website and those of you are members you'll get updates all the time where we do try to to bring the science to you I haven't found a way to turn down the din of competing messages but hopefully we're making some progress we should probably stop it at that point I do want to say a big thanks to the Aspen Institute and specifically thanks to Gina thanks to Jerry I really appreciate you letting to share this time with you thank you

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 1,442,276

Rating: 4.7788835 out of 5

Keywords: Neal D. Barnard (Physician), Physician (Profession), Health (Industry), Food, Your, Cooking, Aspen Institute (Nonprofit Organization), Weight Loss (Symptom), Mind, Cooking (Interest), diet, Body, Veganism (Diet), Saturated Fat (Nutrient), Dieting (Symptom), Diet (Industry), vegan, meat

Id: BnHYHjchn6w

Length: 68min 39sec (4119 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2015