Foods That Help Diabetes Naturally | Dr. Neal Barnard Live Q&A

welcome to the exam room live brought to you by the physicians committee hi i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll we appreciate you joining us to help to make the world a healthier place today we're going to be giving you some help for diabetes we're going to discover the best foods for lowering blood sugar naturally and possibly even fully reversing a diabetes diagnosis we're going to learn all about that when we're joined by dr neil barnard in just a moment but first i wanted to share some numbers with you did you know that an estimated 37 million people in the united states right now have diabetes that's better than 11 percent of the entire population and as we get older that rate even climbs higher much more there are millions of others literally millions of other people walking around right now with blood sugar that's raging completely out of control and they don't have an idea about it they're walking around with an undiagnosed diabetes issue so what can be done about that what foods can help improve that blood sugar naturally and how effective are they compared to medication dr barnard's going to share those details in just a moment and also today we're opening up the doctor's mailbag which means dr barnard is going to be answering your questions so if there's something that you would like to ask him go ahead post that in the comment or in the chat we're going to get to as many as we can on the program today and if you're on the social media you can send me your questions there too i am at chuck carroll wlc on both twitter and instagram so let's get this healthy train rolling right out of the station right now welcome dr barnard to the show my friend good to see you again good to see you chuck uh diabetes is such a huge topic and i know that we always get so much feedback from the exam roomies whenever we talk about it and it's no surprise to me that that happens given the fact that 11 of the population here in the states has diabetes at the moment the numbers yes and the numbers were not always like that it has been going up and up and up and up and and that the big tragedy is we used to say this was mostly a disease of people over 40. well now you can be 14 15 16 17 we're starting to see these earlier ages so it's great that we're going to be spending some time on this yeah and we're going to talk just a little bit about a study that looks about just the soaring rates of pre-diabetes among kids but i want to start today's show with a question from lee who wrote in lee was just recently diagnosed with diabetes herself and she says she doesn't want to be on medication for the rest of her life she's wondering what she can do and so her question is what foods can help lower blood sugar and possibly even reverse diabetes it's such a great question it's the most important question really of all and you're going to get different answers depending on who you talk to and the old-fashioned approach said well diabetes means there's too much sugar in your blood so don't eat sugar and don't eat things like bread that will digest to release sugar and you can understand why people would say that because the more of those things you eat the higher your blood sugar goes here's the important point though none of that stuff is the cause of the problem the cause of the problem is something completely different normally your muscle cells take sugar out of the blood why because muscles use sugar like i mean that's their gasoline that's their fuel that's what allows your muscles to work your brain same story your brain uses sugar to fuel it your liver and the problem is that let's say we've been eating a lot of fatty stuff cheese sandwiches and meat and other dairy products that kind of stuff the fat from these foods gets into the muscle cells and when the cells feel filled up with fat we call it intramyocellular lipid then your insulin can't get the sugar into the cell so the problem wasn't so much eating sugar and and it really wasn't the problem of eating carbohydrates that digest the sugar the problem was that our cells are filled with fat particles that cause insulin to not work anymore so what are the best foods to answer your question what are the best foods to eat fruits whole grains beans vegetables and throw out the animal products completely keep oils really really low over time what happens is the fat from the cells starts to dissipate they can then take the sugar out of the blood diabetes improves in some cases it even goes away and when you work you begin to eat that way with those kinds of foods i think that naturally what we've seen and the guests that we've spoken to here on the show they see improvement not just with their blood sugar but with so many other chronic conditions uh even hypertension uh we have a question here from wendell at 1201 who's wondering what foods can help lower your blood pressure along with the blood sugar okay great um those same foods that i mentioned are going to start bringing blood pressure down for two reasons one is because they help you lose weight and as your weight comes down your blood pressure comes down along with it the other thing is the all these foods they're not greasy foods you know fruits and grains and beans and vegetables they're not greasy so what that means is that your blood isn't getting a big infusion of grease like it would if you ate a cheese sandwich or a pork chop the grease from those foods causes your blood to get thicker and that makes your blood pressure go up so the same plant-based foods that i mentioned for lowering blood sugar will also lower blood pressure and i can hear you screaming there's one other thing we haven't talked about that's sodium keep sodium levels low whereas sodium sodium is added to snack foods and it is a big ingredient in cheese if you needed one more reason get away from cheese sodium is one now if you get away from that the the sodium your blood pressure will drop even more quick roll call here dj is tuning in today from upstate new york janice is in canada and denise says that this is her first time being able to join us live but she always listens to the recording so denise i'm glad that you're here today because this is really an important topic and dr barnard mentioned here at the top of the show just the the study that just came out and was talking about just how many more kids now have pre-diabetes you said that this wasn't just a disease now for people over 40. we're seeing this in younger and younger people here so what what is this latest study telling us as far as the numbers here are they in fact soaring yeah yeah this is a study from jama pediatrics and the research was done by the u.s preventive services task force uh the numbers are quite concerning yeah in night they reported from in 1999 the percentage of young people 12 age 12 to 19 who had pre-diabetes meaning their blood sugar was inching up but not quite enough to be diagnosed with diabetes at that point almost 12 percent of young people had pre-diabetes and you think well that's not that good because that means as they get older they're going to tip into diabetes but the the what was just reported was the new figures it was almost 12 back in 1999 fast forward 20 years it's now over 28 of kids in their teen years now have pre-diabetes and a couple things about this some people say well diabetes is genetic well genes did not change between 1999 and now um what's really changing is that our diets are getting worse and worse and worse and worse and it's mostly uh more cheese animal products fast food really coming in and to the extent that we can get those things out and return to the healthy foods i mentioned earlier we could turn these numbers around that we could we could turn it around really very quickly you know and i was just speaking with dr monica agarwal she's a friend of the show i was on her podcast recently and she was asking me about what it was that i ate as a child you know what you know trying to gain some insight as to why i was gaining so much weight into my adulthood and i just i remember thinking back to that menu here and it was you know probably some sort of a sugary cereal you know your standard school lunch with that cardboard square piece of pizza and french fries and then milk or fruit punch or something like that and then after school going to grandma's house and having a hot dog macaroni and cheese baked beans and lay's potato chips her her what she considered to be a well-balanced meal and then after that mom would scoop my brother and i up take us home and on our way we would stop at the drive-through go to burger king and by the time i'm in the third grade i'm already eating a full double cheeseburger with a big size fries and a big old drink with that so to hear those kinds of numbers as far as the number of kids who have pre-diabetes now it's no surprise to me and i think that as time has marched on there are more and more kids who are eating just as i did back then they're eating that way today and that is that's really setting them up for a dangerously unhealthy adulthood yeah unfortunately that's the case and sometimes that's because those are the foods that are available uh depending on where where you live that may be the what's most convenient and if parents have very little time sometimes it's easier to just pick something up at a fast food place or put a frozen pizza in the oven and the issue with that is that the cheese the meat all of these things contain a lot of fat and fat as we've talked about in the show has nine calories in every single gram compared with carbohydrates which have only four what does that mean that means weight gain and it also means the fat gets into the cells causing the insulin resistance leading to these high diabetes figures and unfortunately because many people don't know these facts they think well okay if i've got diabetes it's from eating sugar so the thing that they stop eating is the apple or the orange or the banana but those those had nothing to do with it the more of those healthy fruits they eat really typically the better um and schools have been in a tough bind too they've got budget issues and so forth and by law they have to serve dairy products and i want to tip my hat to eric adams in new york who has really taken all of this to heart as the mayor and has said we really need to have healthier foods in schools and kids should understand what a plant-based meal is and frankly if kids had access to plant-based meals every day and if they learned to love those tastes we would knock down these pre-diabetes figures in the diabetes figures we would do it very very rapidly and that's that's really the public health message here and look i can only tell you about one case study toward a healthier diet for kids and that was what happened in my high school when i was a senior and in one of the lunch lines they just opened a salad bar for us and the line for the salad bar was way longer than any of the other regular lunch lines like my classmates naturally gravitated toward the healthier fare so when critics say hey that's crazy mayor adams kids are never going to want to eat healthy all the time i think back to what happened this was 20 some odd years ago at this point and i think that today with kids being even more health conscious that you're going to see even more students graduate toward that so i don't think it's going to be this natural this this radical shift that a lot of people are thinking that it is i think that if you give it an opportunity dr barnard just based off of what i saw in high school kids are really going to love love love having those healthier options yes and not just at high school we actually put this very thing to the test and we did this years ago it was in broward county florida and broward county which is around fort lauderdale and so forth one of the most diverse counties in america diverse economically from very economically disadvantaged to very economically dis advantaged a wide range of economics wide range of ethnicities and races and so the school board there wanted to test vegan meals in schools and so jill eckert from our staff went down there and the kids are all in the lunchroom and she walked around with a tray and she took a veggie burger and cut it into little pie wedges and said who wants to try one and so some brave kids you know these like eight-year-old kid said i'll try one and so he ate the little veggie burger and then jill gave him a sticker that said i veged out and then the other kids all said well where'd you get that sticker and he would say well that lady gave it to me so they would all want to try the veggie burger and they would all try it they would put on their sticker and they'd wear it probably all day the next day the kids went through the lunch line and there was the sticker in the lunch line and behind it was the veggie burger and you know what it outsold everything and sold chicken nuggets and all this stuff and so it worked with a veggie burger we did the same thing with with chili completely vegan chili kids loved it and something like beans and rice we tried that as well and i thought well that's kind of too simple but i forgot the kids like simple and so all of these things work they work for grade school middle school high school here's my point that often we have the idea that kids only want absolute junk they'll only eat candy and soda kids like simple things they like simple tastes if they're there and they're offered to them and it's really really important that we make those available in our homes and in our schools so in the standard school lunch milk is a cornerstone of that but by no means is dairy limited to just school lunch i mean dairy is an enormous industry here in the u.s we have a few people right now wondering in the chat how the natural sugars in dairy can affect blood sugar well um dairy products do have a sugar called lactose and lactose is a double sugar it's two sugars stuck together one is glucose the other is galactose galactose and when you consume that they break apart and the glucose just as you're saying will add to your own the reason that's important is that some people imagine that say soda is bad which of course it is but that milk is somehow better but milk is a sugary fatty cholesterol-laden drink too and um there's no reason to have it in the diet at all so if you drink that carton of milk will you have a blood sugar spike well there yeah there are two problems with it one is the sugar itself the other is if it's whole milk the fat that you're consuming will add to the fat in your cells causing more and more insulin resistance so over time it's part of the problem and in fact when we look at the the prevalence of diabetes let's say a person's a meat eater and they decide well i'm not going to eat meat so often i'm going to eat meat less than once a week well the risk of diabetes does go down and if they say well i'm not going to eat any meat at all except for fish their risk of diabetes will go down another step if they say i'm not going to eat the the meat's even fish but i'm going to have dairy products but no meat their risk goes down a little bit more but if they get rid of the dairy and they go to a completely plant-based diet their risk drops much much more so yeah dairy is part of the problem it's not part of the solution when it comes to diabetes let's stick on fat here for a little bit maj is answering the direct question i'm sure some other people are wondering as well this question came in at 12 12. maj is wondering does eating fat itself give you an insulin spike what happens is that the fat that you eat goes down yourself because it gets into your bloodstream it goes into the muscle cells and the fat won't cause an instant it will not cause an instant blood sugar spike usually um but it could be a little bit of a delay as the fat gets into the cells then the insulin no longer will work as well and you'll find that you need if you're taking insulin now because you have diabetes your need for insulin will be higher if you have a higher fat diet it'll be lower if you're on a lower fat diet and this is even true not just for type 2 but for type 1 for people who have type 1 diabetes and they have to administer insulin because their body's not making it when you're on a really low fat healthy plant-based diet many people discover that their insulin requirement goes way down because their own insulin resistance improves um so something to think about there you go and we were talking about case studies with kids eating healthier you mentioned jill and the veggie burgers and and me with my salad bar carolyn right now one of the exam roomies in the chat said look my high school put in a salad bar 30 years ago 30 years ago and the exact same thing happened all of her friends started eating at the salad bar she did too every single day so healthier options man just give it a try and see what happens i want to take a question from nicholas who is wondering whether it's okay to eat rice and whole grains at every meal if you have diabetes yeah it's a-okay um to do that um when it comes to rice brown rice is better than white rice and the reason is it's got that fiber that has been removed in the white rice with the brown rice it's still there intermittent fasting is all the rage let's talk about that for a second take a question from jenny she's wondering whether intermittent fasting can help with diabetes i don't think it's the answer intermittent fasting for many people it's say five days of eating and then two days of reduced eating for many people they do well with it and they like it but the risk is if you know that tomorrow i'm not going to be eating very much and so i'm going to overdo it a little bit today in preparation or after those two days of reduced eating i make up for it by overeating on monday or whatever the case may be uh we're doing really more harm than good and to me intermittent fasting is a little bit like intermittent breathing you know you just kind of might want to be doing it all the time um rather than in other words following a healthy meal a healthy uh regime really all the time uh rather than than overdoing it some days and trying to make up for it on other days talking about overdoing it let's take a question from bang here how many carbs from whole foods can somebody with diabetes eat on a particular day i'm going to suggest something really radical which is don't count if you're if you don't have type 1 diabetes and you don't have to say calibrate your insulin doses based on your carbohydrate you don't have to count you eat as much as you want of fruits vegetables whole grains beans and what you'll discover is that if those are the foods that you're eating and so it turns into oatmeal for breakfast or a bean burrito for lunch or spaghetti with a tomato sauce for dinner and lots of vegetables the way it'll shake out is about 10 of your calories will end up being from fat and another 10 or 15 will be from protein and the rest will be from carbohydrate you think my goodness that's a lot but it's healthy complex carbohydrates mostly that fuel your physical activity and so you shouldn't really have to count the carb grams nature will take care of it naturally for you all right let's talk about if somebody is diagnosed with diabetes and you know they they're put on medication right away and just like lee who had our first question today they're not really keen on the idea of having to take pills every single day for the rest of their life potentially even insulin injections so what what is the effectiveness of eating a healthy low-fat plant-based diet compared to medications have there been studies that have pitted the two head-to-head when we do our diabetes studies and people come in they're on medication to start with um almost always with type 2 diabetes the first medicine is metformin and a patient might be started out of 500 twice a day and then they go up to a thousand twice a day and the doctor says this isn't enough and so they're going to add some other medicines and eventually they add insulin so at this point people hear about the work we're doing and so they go on a diet that has no animal products at all keeps oils really low and that causes within the first week within the first couple days the fat content of their muscle cells starts to diminish and so their natural insulin is working better and so very rapidly they don't need those medicines to the degree that they had before but everybody's different so we don't stop them we let their doctor know that they're making these diet changes and the doctor is going to have to to ratchet down their medication doses often really quite rapidly to make sure that their blood sugars don't fall too low but your question then is well which is more powerful the diet or the or or the medications if a person is on medications starting with metformin and adding others it's almost a guarantee i mean they're just not going to get rid of their diabetes if that's if that's the approach because they're eating typical foods that don't really tackle the cause of the disease when a person goes on a plant-based diet without a lot of added oils they're now tackling the cause they're able to reduce their use of medications in some cases get off them completely and we see something that we never saw before which is diabetes sometimes going away for all intents and purposes so from that analysis a diet change is much more powerful than medications if it's the right kind of diet change that said don't throw your pills away or your syringes away tell your doctor you're doing this and let your doctor guide you off your medications when the time is right ruth is throwing an interesting hypothetical at us today and she's wondering she says great go on a whole food plant-based diet and what if it works to a t you lose all of your excess weight your blood sugar comes down but maybe it drops a little bit too low you would just mention blood sugar being a little bit too low ruth is wondering if that happens should the person then potentially look at putting on a few more pounds to kind of offset that and try to bring the blood sugar back up no low blood sugar is not typically caused by by foods that you eat it's typically caused by the medications that a person is taking so let's say a person injected some insulin and their blood sugar comes down and now and and they're they're doing this day after day after day and now they're suddenly on this very powerful vegan diet but they're using the same amount of insulin their blood sugar is going to be too low so that's why your doctor is going to ratchet you down on your medication it's going to reduce the amount that you're taking and so the diet alone will not lower your blood pressure abnormally low the one exception is there are some people who are quite sensitive to sugars and to refined carbohydrates this is not super common but it can happen where a person has a really sugary meal and their blood sugar goes up and then it goes down and it dips down a little bit too low but that that doesn't happen to most people if you're on a diet of beans and vegetables and fruits and whole grains your blood sugar should be staying in really a pretty good range and will not dip too low all right so you're eating a healthy whole food plant-based diet one of the nutrients you should be getting in abundance is fiber and june is wondering how important that particular nutrient is how how important fiber is when it comes to improving diabetes very important uh fiber helps you in lots of ways you know it helps your digestion and it can help your body to manage the absorption of sugars to to a degree but here's the key you don't have to go to the store and get a fiber supplement fiber comes to you naturally it's part of fruits it's part of vegetables it's part of whole grains beans are the fiber champions so if those are part of your daily routine you'll be getting lots of healthy fiber all right now you're talking about fiber a lot of people wonder though if fiber can kind of slow that blood sugar spike right a lot of people are wondering well what happens when i take all of those healthy fruits and vegetables i put them in a blender and i make a smoothie with that on vegan zombie question at 12 18 wondering specifically about beets but really we can talk about really any fruit any vegetable here do blended beets give a blood sugar spike um generally speaking um i think the smoothie and that kind of thing is is okay um the caveat i have is just what you're getting at is i took something that would take me a while to eat and now i blended it into something that i can drink in about 20 seconds so it is it is um a faster hit of sugar than you would have had had you eaten the whole fruit that said i don't think i don't think that smoothies are necessarily a bad thing but be careful about what you put into it and how quickly one is consuming it it can be a little bit more it ends up being more food than you otherwise would have had everybody wants to know how long how quickly this could work for me you just mentioned when it came to weaning somebody off of medication it should happen pretty quickly but mckinley at 12 21 is wondering how long it might take somebody to see their blood sugar levels normalized once they go on a whole food plant-based diet okay great question um if you are thinking about doing this if you have diabetes now what you what i would strongly encourage you to do is to to now let your doctor know that you're doing it your doctor will be thrilled uh because they know that vegan diets are the greatest thing for people with type 2 diabetes but let your doctor know that you're doing this because not that it's dangerous but but your doctor is going to have to deal with your medicines and bring you down on medicines at the appropriate time and that's true for blood sugar medicines your blood sugar is going to come down it also can be true for blood pressure medicines as your blood pressure comes down so uh the reason i say do it now is that for some people this effect occurs within the first couple of days um case in point a person's on insulin they're taking a lot of insulin and they start on this healthy diet in some cases their blood sugars start coming down within just a matter of days and so you call your doctor's office say here's mine i did a finger stick here's my blood sugar and the doctor is going to say okay drop down from this level to this level um what you don't want to do is to just kind of do all that judging yourself so your doctor should help you with that but but it can happen really very fast um now how how long does it take to get down to where you want to be everybody's different it really depends on where you're starting let's say you've got a lot of weight to lose maybe 100 pounds or 150 pounds you'd like to really get rid of that takes some time for that to come down and it takes some time for the fat to get out of your cells but start that process now time goes by and we see really huge results within a matter of just weeks for people so give it a try be patient don't push it but make sure that your diet is a really healthy diet no animal products keep the oils low and let nature take its course all right now i don't want to throw a bucket of cold water on everything that you just said but we do get this question like we have here from julia from time to time julia says been eating a whole food plant-based diet but my blood sugar has actually increased what advice could you offer okay um it really depends on a couple of details first of all if your blood sugar was already in the normal range and it increased a little bit in the normal range that's okay things bounce around a little bit but if you had an abnormal blood sugar and you went on a whole food plant-based diet and somehow didn't come down the only question i would have is what's in this whole food diet because remember what the problem is the problem is fat that's building up inside the cells so if in my diet there was organic peanut butter and guacamole and oils fat fatty foods that will cause the problem too so we're talking about plant-based vegan no animal products but also keep the oils really low and that means nuts and avocados and foods with added oils a rule of thumb if you really want to tackle your diabetes if you're eating fruits and beans and grains they're all fine same with vegetables but if you're eating a packaged product um vegan pizza uh look at the label and favor the ones that have less than three grams of fat per serving if you do that what you'll discover is that the fat content content of your diet goes way way down and that that helps everything that helps weight that helps blood sugar it helps blood pressure too all right we've talked about carbs being a whole carbs being a good thing for people with diabetes mckinley though wondering about two specific foods here wondering about potatoes and about oatmeal uh can those be part of a healthy diet for someone who's trying to improve their blood sugar yeah they sure can um if you have type 2 diabetes i would go ahead and have them um the question really is what goes on top you know that innocent potato goes into the oven if it comes out and gets butter added and cheese doodles and sour cream and all that kind of stuff that's not good um there was nothing wrong with the potato the problem is all the toppings and we kind of do that with carbs don't we we take butter we put the butter all over the bread we take spaghetti and we put oils and meat and cheese all over the top so that the carbs themselves are really innocent bystanders so um they're fine uh one caveat if you have type one diabetes and that's where your body's really not making insulin anymore different people have very different uh experiences and for one person oatmeal is it works pretty well for another they're going to get more of a spike um than they would and just kind of see see what's uh what's right for you uh let's see interesting question here from kim we we asked um how quickly you might see improvement with diabetes once you adopt a whole food plant-based diet and you talked about how fat plays a factor here even more so potentially than sugar but kim is wondering not just how quickly diabetes can improve but how quickly we can see fat then be eliminated from the cells once you start eating that low fat diet we have not done enough studies to give you a really good time frame um and and the reason for that is that the magnetic resonance spectroscopy scans cost cost 2 thousand dollars per test um so so researchers do what what they'll normally do is they'll bring and this is what we do we bring in participants and we test them say at week zero and then we'll test them again at week 16 and during that period of time you could see the drop but we don't test them say every day or every week to know just how rapidly it occurs but but here's what we did here's what we do know is that drops occur very rapidly and you can see the scanning changes within a matter of just a few weeks all right so we're talking about fat here we have a couple of people right now in the chat wondering about a specific type of fat talking about omega threes and they're wondering one how important are they two what role do they play and three does somebody on a plant-based diet need to supplement with them okay omega-3s are healthy fats and there's one of them called alpha-linolenic acid this will not be on the test but alpha linolenic acid is the one omega-3 your body really does need but no do you need to supplement no you don't need to supplement because it's in foods if you get some broccoli send it to the laboratory you would think there's no fat in it the laboratory will tell you well actually it's maybe seven or eight percent of its calories are fat and a lot of that is this special omega-3 alpha linolenic acid and so you don't need a supplement you just need the the foods that have it now some people will eat very concentrated sources seeds nuts do have a lot of it in it but to tell you the truth my favorite sources are green leafy vegetables because their natural tiny traces of oils are proportionately really quite high in in the healthy omega-3s without the excesses that could cause weight gain let's take a question here from little bits of bliss at 12 24. she says she just got a copy of your book of reversing diabetes and it says rarely should you eat nuts she's wondering if that even includes almonds i'm breaking your heart aren't i helmets are delicious especially you know they salt them up and they make them smokehouse flavor and it's pretty easy to overdo it but yeah what you'll do what you'll discover is if you're having trouble getting your weight down or your blood sugar is not really coming down where you want it um what i would suggest you do is set the nuts aside for a while and see how you do and for many people that kind of unblocks the the the problem one caveat to that though um i mean almonds are healthy food uh and almonds walnuts they're really fatty which means they're high in calories but they're healthy and one of the healthy things they bring to you is vitamin e vitamin e is an antioxidant it's associated with reducing the risk of alzheimer's what do i do if you're at a normal healthy weight and you want to have some of these in your diet i suggest about an ounce per day and an ounce is just the amount that fits in the palm of your hand without hitting your fingers almonds walnuts other kinds of nuts will provide that and that's that's healthy think of it though as an ingredient not a snack because if it's a snack you'll eat the whole bag you know what i'm talking about i know peanuts are the downfall of me but i i know almonds can be for just about anybody as well um speaking of almonds do the same principles apply someone is wondering do the same principles apply for almond milk yes they do but if you look at the label on almond milk you know it's mostly water and they might have some sweeteners in there they may or they may not and so have a look when in fact when you're comparing the different non-dairy milks look at the fat content and especially the saturated fat content that ought to be zero or really close to zero and the one big violator here is not almond milk almond milk's gonna be fine the bad guy here is coconut milk yup coconuts uh the coconut oil is very high in saturated fat and they will tell you all day long it's healthy um it's natural skip it shine your shoes with coconut oil if you want to put it in your hair do not eat it it will raise your cholesterol and people should be avoiding coconut milk carolyn is asking what the name of your book was it's right here it's uh dr barnard's program for reversing diabetes revised edition came out just a couple of years ago i believe um i could be wrong so don't quote me on this but i believe there is a link to that right now in the show description if you're watching this on facebook or on youtube so go ahead and pick up a copy i can't recommend that highly enough um dr barnard we only have a couple of minutes left here on the program today and i think a lot of people are surprised about the connection between blood sugar diabetes and alzheimer's disease there was a study that came out not too terribly long ago that showed that if you have elevated blood sugar at middle age you're at a higher risk for developing alzheimer's later in life what is the connection between the two you're right and it's frightening because we think well i'll start worrying about alzheimer's when i'm maybe 75 and i'll take some steps to try to reduce it and um the study that you mentioned showed that if you have a high blood sugar at midlife or even early adulthood it's a predictor of alzheimer's risk later on and this adds to evidence there was a kaiser study kaija permanente about 10 000 people and they showed the same was true with cholesterol high cholesterol predicts alzheimer's risk too and the cholesterols were taken when when the participants were around 40 years of age so there are a couple things that are going on we have known for a long time that diabetes increases the risk of alzheimer's disease overall it roughly doubles the risk but it also means that all of the things that threaten our blood vessels high blood sugar high blood pressure high blood cholesterol all those things are threatening our blood vessels they don't just threaten your heart the kidneys they also threaten the brain so what's good for the heart it's good for the brain and so if you've got diabetes it's not it doesn't have to be a it doesn't have to be a terrible sentence what we do with diabetes is we get on a healthy diet the diet can improve the diabetes sometimes make it go away but most importantly reduce these long-term risks whether they're risks to the heart or risks to the brain let's talk about really quickly here somebody has multiple chronic conditions misty is wondering in particular in addition to diabetes about kidney disease stage three kidney disease whether a whole food plant-based diet might be able to help with that as well run do not walk to a vegan diet absolutely in fact everybody who's treating people with what what what they are thinking is number one i gotta reduce the the the factors that are causing the kidney to wear out diabetes is one high blood pressure is another so we want to get the blood pressure down we want to get the diabetes under control and we just talked about the diet to do that the other thing is that animal protein will wear out the kidneys too in people who have lost some kidney disease huge harvard study years ago made this point very strongly in people who have lost some kidney disease due to infections due to trauma due to diabetes or hypertension one of the big predictors of further loss of kidney function is animal protein get the animal protein out of your diet and you want to protect you want to save those nephrons those filter units in your kidneys animal protein threatens that getting the animal protein out of your diet will help um so it's it's a it's a great thing to do and all the side effects of a plant-based diet are good ones they help our body to to regain his health and the last time this will be our final question the last time you were on our show it was a really popular episode where we were talking about foods that can lower cholesterol and so we have a question that came in a follow-up from julia who was wondering whether it's possible to have cholesterol that is too low she said she's been advised that hers is borderline low because it's 116. so just generally speaking here not speaking specifically to julia but is it possible to have cholesterol that really needs to come up a little bit to be at a healthy range no um your that cholesterol is fine um your doctor is envious because it's lower than your doctors but that cholesterol is perfectly fine and if you live in omaha that's a really low cholesterol if you if you lived in rural china that would not be a big surprise uh because people who are eating lots of rice and tofu and so these kinds of things and they're not eating much dairy or meat or whatever they very often have very low cholesterol levels along those along that range so um the only the only exception i would say is there are some people who have who are very sick let's say their liver is completely shot and they're not able to make cholesterol in those rare cases you'll see a low cholesterol that's a sign that they were otherwise sick but if you got that way from a healthy plant-based diet it's just your body is saying i'm making the cholesterol you need you don't need any more so if you thought you needed to go to the store and get a cholesterol pill forget it you can just brag about your good healthy cholesterol that you've got i see so many people right now who are joining us live today this is fantastic it makes me think that man this is this is a great topic that people have been waiting for and i think that there is certainly room for a second show a follow-up to do on diabetes again so uh if the exam roomies who are watching right now if you would like for us to do a follow-up episode just type yes right now into the chat box let's see if we can go ahead and make that happen for you if you would like but for today we got to close up the doctor's mailbag and also a quick ask if you like today's show you feel like you've raised your health iq go ahead and subscribe to our channel like this video do us a solid that way and dr barnard as always when we do these live q and a's can't do it without the support of the gregory j ryder memorial fund because their support of the exam room live and the physicians committee as a whole is helping to raise our health iqs it really does it makes all of these shows possible and the cool thing about the writer fund is that they support organizations like ours that carry on the love that greg had for animals and they're doing this in the most extraordinary ways they're doing it by promoting not just plant-based health but working to end animal abuse while emphasizing programs that promote systemic change and also benefit us as human beings and you can visit them right now online at the gregory j writer memorial fund's website gregorywriterfund.org that's gregoryrider spelled r-e-i-t-e-r-fund.org while you're there check out everything that they're up to allison and the team there is just doing so many incredible things subscribe to their newsletter stay up to date with that and again alison and everybody over there at the writer fund i cannot thank you enough for everything that you do and as always dr barnard i know that you're a huge fan of theirs as well let me second everything that you just said chuck thank you allison thanks to everybody at the gregory writer fund for for making the world a better place it's wonderful to see and we really appreciate it and don't forget if uh you wanna relive all the fun that we had today go ahead and subscribe to the exam room podcast on apple podcast or spotify wherever shows are available hit that subscribe button and when you do please also leave a five star rating because every new subscription every five star rating helps people who need this information the most find it the higher we climb in the rankings the easier it becomes to put it right in the palms of people who are struggling with their help with their health and we want to be able to give them the help that they so desperately need so if you can take a second to just subscribe we would greatly greatly appreciate it and for today that is all the time that we have i want to say thank you to the crew behind the scenes that makes the magic happen and to you dr barnard once again for bestowing all of your wisdom with us today and answering so many questions and to you the exam roomies thank you so very much for making this show the the healthy juggernaut that it is and for everyone at the physicians committee i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll we'll talk to you again soon but until then keep it plant-based

Channel: Physicians Committee

Views: 308,764

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Id: yMu_gt1vB60

Length: 41min 35sec (2495 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 30 2022