Foods That Reverse Heart Disease | Dr. Neal Barnard Live Q&A

in the u.s somebody has a heart attack every 40 seconds and just as an unhealthy diet can help contribute to a heart attack a healthy diet can help prevent it that's what we're going to be talking about here today hi i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll welcome to the exam room live brought to you by the physicians committee we appreciate you joining us and helping to make the world a healthier place today indeed we are going to be learning the foods that can help prevent and even reverse heart disease in a lot of cases keep that heart beating just fantastically even when you've been on a fast food binge for decades a lot of us have dr neil barnard is here to teach us that healthier way to eat what a healthier diet truly looks like and how you can avoid all of those traps that are in the mine field that is the standard american diet with that we do welcome dr neil barnard to the exam room live sir so very good to see you great to be here chuck you know i want to talk all about healthy diet what can help contribute to heart disease what can help prevent it and i also want to give the exam roomies who are joining us live the opportunity to ask you some questions here today so if you have a question for dr barnard go ahead post that in the comment or in the chat we're going to open up the doctor's mailbag and get to as many as we possibly can here on the show today so don't be shy about asking a question um dr barnard let's start with this i i was pulling some stats before the show and found that somebody will die from cardiovascular disease every 34 seconds that's almost 700 000 people every single year and 800 000 people will have a heart attack so how many of these cases can be prevented the vast majority you know what an important question chuck the vast majority can be prevented and what really is troubling is if you could look inside the hearts of kids in high school you start to see the beginnings of artery disease in those kids at this very early age they're not going to have a heart attack when they're 18 or 20 but the process has begun it's sort of like if a kid starts smoking at 12 or 14 years of age they're not going to get lung cancer right away but it'll happen later so the process is there but the good news is that it's largely related to what i'm going to call environmental issues the environment of your plate what you're eating and also the environment of um whether you're having cigarettes those are really the big drivers of it and the good news is that we can control those i want to pull up a video of what a clogged artery actually looks like this is a pretty good accurate representation what did you say yeah exactly so what actually is going on here what is that little deposit that seems to be stuck to the bottom okay um we have arteries that go to all the parts of our body you have arteries that go to your brain to give oxygen and and nutrients to your brain but you also have them going to your heart and they're called coronary arteries they got that name because they they crown the heart they go on the out they on the upper surface of the heart and so they somebody called them coronary arteries all it means is that these are little arteries that are giving oxygen to your heart muscle and over time let's say i've been eating some chicken and fish and beef and eggs and dairy products these are animal products they've got cholesterol in the food and those cholesterol particles end up in my blood they irritate the artery wall and the artery wall forms what looks like just what you showed um in that uh in the video it looks kind of like almost um what can you call it sort of a growing scar or a blister it's this growth the technical term is an atherosclerotic plaque but it's in the artery wall and it's cutting off the the the the opening of the coronary artery so less blood gets through and the bad thing is at some point that blister is going to break it pops open just like a blister can when that happens the blood around it will clot and that's just like a cork in a bottle and that stops blood flow so that the whole part of the heart that was getting oxygen from that one artery it's got no oxygen anymore you've got a matter of minutes before that heart muscle starts to die and that's what we call a heart attack the doctors call it a myocardial infarction but it's a heart attack it just means a chunk of the heart muscle has died and that's the process that people have in store if we follow unfortunately the things that are common in our culture which is meat eating and smoking yeah that's that i mean that's scary stuff to look at there to see that visualize what's actually going on inside of a person's body there and you just said the vast majority of these cases are preventable but it was just this week that some new statistics some projections were put out um that that looked at the trends on where we might be going in terms of our overall health and between the year 2025 so just a few years away and the year 2060 they're projecting uh heart disease cases to increase by 31 heart failure by 33 myocardial infarctions we're talking about 30 strokes even 34 you hear statistics like that as a physician knowing that so many of these cases are preventable that's got to evoke some pretty strong emotion it means the message hasn't really gotten through people have learned about smoking you know back when i was in medical school even even we medical students smoked well people have gotten the message most people have quit not everybody but most that's been a good thing but with regard to all the other things what we're eating cheese intake people cheese is one of those highest saturated fat foods it causes your cholesterol to rise cheese intake is going up and up and up bacon is going up sausage all of these things that are contributing to these problems are sort of fads and people laugh it off you can go into any denny's ihop you name it and you see people putting on their plates the very foods that are causing this problem and so we've really got two things one is some people really don't understand chocolate you and i are talking about they don't know what causes heart disease but the other thing is you get a big lag between knowing something and acting on it we knew that that smoking caused uh lung cancer some years before we decided okay i guess that means me um so all the statistics that you just presented are people who could prevent this from happening if they were to act on it now and act on it means getting the animal products off their plate and making other other changes that we can talk about too it's not just getting the animal products oh we're going to cover a lot we've got plenty of time here today before we get to uh the foods that you just hinted at that can help really prevent this unhealthy trend here and really improve uh our heart function here i want to go a little bit deeper and take a question from janet and talk about the other foods you just said the animal products that can help contribute to heart disease but janet is wondering what are the other foods that are most likely to cause heart disease so are there some specifics there like who are the real real demons within that animal food category okay uh well first of all even let's take an even wider lens it's not all diet remember when dean ornish showed that he could tackle all the things lifestyle things that were contributing diet was one the next part was smoking you do have to put out the cigarettes um physical activity is helpful and it doesn't mean you have to be going to the gym every day but a half hour brisk walk each day something like that was helpful and also dealing with stress um these things interact because if you're stressed you don't eat so well if you're stressed you might be having a harder time giving up smoking so these things work together within the diet the biggest source of saturated fat bad fat is dairy why am i saying that because all those particles of cholesterol that are clogging the artery the more of this bad fat that you eat the more the cholesterol particles form so saturated fat that's the fat that's solid at room temperature like you know cheese cheese is not something you can just pour into a glass cheese is a chunk of solid fat uh bacon grease those foods are high in saturated fat those are the worst of the worst but less some less someone think oh well i could have salmon or i could have uh chicken these are animal products they still have saturated fat in them give you a number uh beef beef fat is about 50 percent saturated fat and 50 other kinds of fat for chicken it it puts that number down to about 30 so about 30 percent of the fat in chicken even even without the the skin is still that bad saturated fat if it's olive oil it's about 14 so you see the idea um chinook salmon surprisingly high in saturated fat people think well it's got omega-3 it does but that's not most of it it's also got the bad fat too so animal products are a big problem but one let me raise an alarm here chuck um we talked to a lot of people who are going to plant-based diets great idea but there are marketers trying to target these people with products that are less healthy uh foods that have coconut oil in them or palm oil those are saturated fats too so those are things that i would avoid completely if you pick up a frozen pizza or some salad dressing or something like that or peanut butter look at the label if it says palm oil or coconut oil put it back on the shelf those are foods that are very high in saturated fat they'll raise your cholesterol that's interesting and um baker has a question kind of along those lines a smart person here uh wants to know even though an avocado doesn't necessarily have cholesterol because it's a plant food it still is high in fat is that something that may contribute to heart disease okay we're giving out phds in nutrition today that's great uh okay uh you're thinking right avocados are a plant they don't have cholesterol but they do have a lot of fat it's a you know almost all fruits are low fat the avocado is an exception avocados and coconuts the type of fat in an avocado is not as bad as the type of fat in dairy products or meat it's mostly what we call monounsaturate that's the kind that's in canola oil or olive oil but there are substantial traces of saturated fat in there too what does that mean an avocado is less likely to raise your cholesterol than beef fat or chicken fat would be but it will raise it more than than it would if you just didn't have the avocado at all so it's part of the it's still part of the problem but not as bad as the animal products the other piece of it is if you're trying to lose weight and weight is contributing to your risk avocados have all that fat good fat can can add to your thighs and your abdomen just like a bad fat can so if you're trying to lose weight i would get away from them all right so ease off the guacamole there for a little bit if you're sorry to break your hair okay so we've talked about a lot of the things that contribute uh we're kind of tiptoeing around the foods though that can help uh prevent and even reverse heart disease in a lot of cases janet is wondering if you can give us some more specifics there sure um okay i mentioned ornish's four steps plant-based diet exercise don't smoke try to deal with stress um but then david jenkins at the university of toronto came up with a really interesting thing he said wait a minute it's not just let's go vegan that's good let's do that to get away from the animal products but are there certain foods that have what i'm going to call special effects and he developed a portfolio of foods that he found especially helpful and among them are foods that are particularly high in soluble fiber oats for example if you stir up well let's say let's say you pour some breakfast cereal and it's corn flakes or wheat flakes they don't dissolve in the milk or the almond milk hopefully or soy milk or whatever they they might get soggy but they're still there if you make oatmeal it just kind of dissolves into mush the fact that it's totally dissolves means it's soluble fiber and oats and also beans are rich in the soluble fiber that lowers cholesterol in addition to the fact that it doesn't have any cholesterol or very little saturated fat so oats beans those are special effect foods that you can add um nuts may have a little bit of this effect but they also are fatty so they interfere with efforts to try to lose weight another one is soy products for reasons we haven't been able to figure out soy products will knock cholesterol down a little bit too over and above the fact that they don't have cholesterol and don't have any animal fat so those are some special effect foods that you can add in or really emphasize but the real key is simplicity when you're planning your plant-based diet the more it's foods you can recognize here's my green beans here's my corn here's my rice as opposed to foods that are processed where fatty things sneaked in in the factory the more it's simple the better off you're going to be all right let's give an exam roomy shout out to uh northwest back countries joining us today uh said they went whole food plant-based lost 50 pounds already this year still have another 40 to go also quit smoking and they're using a treadmill desk so you hear those things combined all of the changes that northwest backcountry has made this year how much healthier would you say their heart is here today compared to january 1st oh dramatically um dr caldwell esselstyn showed that when people make chains you throw out the animal products you keep oils really low you follow a healthy diet some people become practically bulletproof now i don't want to overstate it we still want to make sure that we're getting medical examinations and that kind of thing but heart disease is not something that's inexorable it's it's not necessarily progressive it can be reversed and the kinds of changes that you've made are fantastic all right timmy's got to follow up we were talking about red meat versus chicken and they're being a little bit less fat and chicken compared to red meat timmy wants to know then does that mean that red meat is more likely to contribute to heart disease than chicken yeah i think you can say yes but it's sort of like a cigarette without a filter is that worse than a cigarette with a filter yeah i guess so in theory but believe me um cemeteries are filled with people who had heart attacks eating chicken um chicken is not a health food chicken is a dead bird just like beef is a dead cow it's it's not it is not asparagus is my point it has cholesterol it's got saturated fat in it it has no fiber um and this is where medicine i think really made a wrong turn um back a generation ago they said well if you've got heart disease why not just switch from beef to chicken take the skin off your chicken and what they found was that didn't really lower cholesterol very much and so then patients would go back to the doctor and say i did what you said but the diet was a failure the diet doesn't try or the doctor doesn't try a vegan diet which has no cholesterol in it because that will really not knock the cholesterol back in those days uh the doctors would just give up and they would say well i guess you need medicine let me put you on a medication and once you're on a statin doctors are very reluctant to to stop it the wrong turn we made was we used a diet that was too weak switching from beef to chicken beef to fish doesn't really do it and the real proof of this is with a mediterranean diet when researchers have tested a mediterranean diet which really is not a beefy diet in fact it's not even very dairy rich a little bit of those but mostly it's fish and vegetables and fruits olive oil instead of butter but those changes are halfway changes too they haven't really gotten the animal products out and with the mediterranean diet the risk of having a coronary event a cardiovascular event it's reduced some but not dramatically it's nothing like what dr ornish achieved or what dr russellstone achieved so a plant-based diet is is really the diet of choice that a mediterranean diet is is to call it a halfway measure in my view is generous so here's an interesting question when you're talking about the amount of fat that's in again going back to chicken here i would assume that that is just an analysis of a raw piece of chicken right but most people don't eat raw chicken a lot of people particularly in this country eat fried chicken so when you're frying something on top of the fat that the food already contains what's the net effect there right well first of all if you ate it even just baked without adding any fat you're still getting a lot of fat in it let's say i take some chicken i throw away all the dark meat i even throw away all the skin and all i've got is some white meat chicken there it's still 23 of its calories are fat animal fat even before you add any to it but but chuck your scenario okay wait a minute if i throw that in the fryer you know i batter it up i throw it in the fryer yeah it adds a whole lot of fat to it now the fryer grease it may be saturated or it may be trans fats or whatever it is in no case is it healthy and same effect if you take a perfectly healthy potato you chop that up you make either french fries or potato chips you fry those suddenly that healthy potato not so healthy anymore that's right you know in fact a potato it's really a very low calorie food until it comes out of the oven and then the butter goes on and the sour cream and the cheese doodles and the bacon bits and all that stuff and that's that's where the calories are they're really in the toppings now with animal products is different because the the breading and the frying that that adds to the problems but the animal products itself in they always have cholesterol cholesterol is actually a sort of a molecular hinge the animal muscle in say a cow's muscle the muscles allow them to move their legs around or move their tail and the muscles have cholesterol particles in them the cholesterol is a little bit kind of a hinge in the muscle that helps the the muscle fibers uh to be flexible the the cellular membranes to be flexible and that's true in a chicken that the muscles that control a chicken's wings or a chicken's legs or a fish the fish is going to move their tail around they're not plants plants don't use cholesterol they don't have it it's a different biology but animals do so if you're eating animal products whether it's fish chicken beef pork anything they've got cholesterol in them uh let's take a question from janet she's wondering if there have been any studies or any research done on the role that maybe refined sugar may play in contributing to heart disease or is refined sugar kind of like that trojan horse that you've referred to it as with diabetes yeah i think it's a little bit mixed overall i think sugar has been kind of a whipping boy um in that people want to blame it for issues it was the sugar that that's going to cause all these problems so let me eat my grilled cheese sandwich it's got to be the sugar that's the problem or you're eating chicken nuggets but it's the sugar in the soda that causes weight gain in that sense the sugar was mostly an innocent bystander however there are a couple of issues one is the trojan horse that you mentioned people remember the myth of the trojan horse and the you know the horse was brought in uh inside the the the fort gates and out came all the soldiers to do the damage um if you have a sugary cookie um the sugar lures you in but all that butter or the shortening inside that's going to be the part that fattens you up really well that's where the densest calories are i don't mean to say the sugar's health food but but it's it's really just it gives it the taste and it's the fat inside that's the bigger problem now one other thing let's say a person eats a lot of sugar um at first the sugar just goes to power your brain i mean glucose is what your brain uses as a fuel so no big deal it powers your muscles it powers your other cells so sugar in that sense is good but if you consume much more than your body can actually use your body stores it and it'll first store it in a pretty good place it'll store it in your muscles as glycogen and it's there waiting for you to run your next marathon it's put some glycogen in your liver that's all good but eventually the sugar can build up and it'll uh your your liver can take that sugar and say i don't know what to do with this i'll turn it into fat and you can you can push fatty liver with a very high sugar intake so bottom line sugar is not the big issue for most people but in excess it can be a problem eleanor brass tax kind of a question here wants to know how effective is this healthy whole food plant-based diet compared to traditional treatments for heart disease oh what a great question um well there are different kinds of traditional treatments so maybe let's go through them i already mentioned that a mediterranean diet a mediterranean diet is attractive people like the sound of it you know you have a glass of red wine at sunset um so it's an easy thing to for doctors to prescribe to to patients who try it the problem is that that first of all people don't lose weight with it at all our team has has put it to the test and others have too it just doesn't cause weight loss why because you're eating chicken and fish fatty fish olive oil the calories just don't drop and people don't lose weight like they do with a vegan diet cholesterol levels don't fall either really not at all with a typical mediterranean diet however it will reduce the risk of a chord a cardiovascular event like a stroke or heart attack slightly not dramatically uh some of the other conventional treatments if if you have a high cholesterol and you take a statin like lipitor it'll work it will lower your cholesterol it really will the issue is that that's all it does it won't lower your blood pressure it won't make your diabetes any better it won't help you lose weight in fact statins cause a slight increase in the risk of getting diabetes and a slight increase in body weight so you know statins have a role but it's not it's it's not enough uh for us um looking at the other end of the spectrum what really works well i mentioned caldwell esselstyn and he published a wonderful article in the journal of family practice he looked at 198 people who followed really simple steps getting the animal products off your diet keeping oils scrupulously low having a lot of healthy natural foods a lot of greens broccoli and asparagus and bringing them into your diet now these aren't automatic for people so they need a little bit of education some support but people can do it what he found is that by and large people did it and among the people who did it the risk of any kind of recurrent problem was less than one percent um so in other words it is clearly the treatment of choice plant-based diet get rid of the oils if you do all that stuff and you still have a high cholesterol your doctor could prescribe a statin if you feel that's important but the foods are really where it's got to start oh by the way um if let's say you're sitting in the exam room and the doctor is talking to you about surgery you've got blocked arteries you need a coronary artery bypass graft there are there are cases where that's essential it's life-saving however um within the first year [Music] maybe 20 25 maybe up to 40 of um bypasses fail and by about five to ten years about half of them fail which means you do the surgery again um so we have to we we have to think about the drivers of this and the drivers of this are the things that are on our plates would i be correct in assuming here that such a high percentage of those surgeries fail because the patient is not making changes that would uh you know prevent the calcification that the clogged arteries from building back up yes chuck i got to tell you it's heartbreaking the patient might follow the doctor's advice and even follow the doctor's example but when the patient wakes up from surgery what arrives in the hospital is a tray of foods exactly like the foods that cause the heart disease in the first place hospitals are still serving bacon and sausage and meat and a plant-based diet is increasingly available but doctors and many doctors are promoting it very much but there are still many who are who are not and there are many who still imagine that heart disease is something you got because you're old um it's not it's it is a disease that comes from from food drivers it's just like uh overweight um or diabetes these things are can be two-way streets but it cannot reverse without some support and some guidance and some education you know it's funny you you mentioned that about hospital foods i was just doing an interview that will be released here uh next week with one of the presenters at our international conference on nutrition and medicine and she was saying when her own father had a heart attack she was just aghast to go into his hospital room and see a cheeseburger on his plate and and it's just like her mind was absolutely blown and there is that major disconnect still between what's on your plate and what's happening in your arteries and you know i i just think that it it speaks volumes that that sort of thing is happening at a hospital and so few people are talking about that which goes to the importance of our healthy hospitals program it sure does and some people have a sort of a charitable idea that that is not founded the charitable idea is my patient is suffering he's just had surgery he needs this is not a time to enforce dietary changes let me tell you something that patient going into surgery and coming out of surgery wants to live and they don't want to be coddled like a person who can't make any kind of changes a generation ago everybody was realizing i gotta throw away the cigarettes it's hard there's withdrawal you're over in a couple weeks fine when a patient understands that there are diet and lifestyle changes that can open those arteries back up and help you to live and help you to not have a heart attack patients are in they want that um they do need a pathway they need a little bit of support and they need their questions answered and they should they need to also taste okay you said that bean burrito's as good as the meat taco let me try it they need to try these things but what they discover and we see this in our research studies all the time and here at barnard medical center too the patients are thrilled it's absolutely life-changing to realize that healthy foods foods that can cause your body to to rebound are also delicious foods and foods that work really really well with people and and the one regret that people have is not having had this opportunity earlier in life because if kids were raised on really healthy foods and if the junk food was just not there it would it would have revolutionized the health the health of so many people it would have prevented all of these these problems these heartbreaks important question here from alicia who's wondering how long on average does it take to reverse heart disease great question well first of all what reversing heart disease means is those narrowings in the arteries those narrowings are the arteries are widening up so that more blood more oxygen can get through how quickly does that occur um let me answer it this way back in 1990 dean ornish did a study which he published in the lansing where he showed that 82 percent of people who followed these recommendations had favorable changes in their angiograms meaning the arteries are opening up i had the opportunity to interview all of the patients in that study because i was studying the acceptability how did you like it did you think this was worthwhile and the first thing we found is that the patients loved it i mean they loved feeling better and losing weight but all of the ones who had chest pain which means that the arteries are narrowed the chest pain was gone within about four to six weeks so what that means is that when you make these changes within about a month or month and a half the arteries are opening up enough that you're getting a surge of blood and oxygen so that that pain is just gone now it's not you're still fragile um the the reversal process is not finished and it's going to continue and so when ornish published his findings in lansing in 1990 those were one-year findings in 1998 he published a five-year findings and it looks to me like although the reversal process starts with literally within the first couple of weeks it doesn't complete or the reversal process continues well past the first year so people keep getting better and better and better and better and his five-year findings were that the the complications were just way way down compared to people who didn't make these changes so it starts fast but it's not done fast it takes it it takes continued uh continuing time but uh improvement uh on the way almost immediately and that's that's the important thing you know we talk about this on the show so often it's like we live in an immediate payoff kind of society we want it and we want it now and so to know that even though you're not at the finish line day one you know that you're taking big steps day one and and things are starting to open up and your body's starting to repair itself day one i think that that is incredible motivation for somebody who's looking to get on that healthier path absolutely well you know you can't feel the plaques in your arteries but when the chest pain goes away that means that means the arteries opened up enough that the heart muscle is now getting blood flow one of the things that we see in our research studies uh with guys a guy might have diabetes or extra weight when he goes on a vegan diet the erectile dysfunction very often goes away and the time frame for that is about three months four months something like that so what that means is that the arteries in another part of his body are opening up enough that he's now getting good blood flow there so those are the that's where you can actually feel the artery changes in your body and it's a gradual process but it's relatively quick and and these little changes have a huge effect this will not be on the test but in high school physics they say that the flow through a vessel like an artery is proportional to the fourth power of the radius what does that mean that means that if the radius of that artery if it opens up just a little bit the blood flow opens up hugely um and if it closes down a little bit it it's it's it's the opposite so a little bit of reversal goes a long way toward making you feel better uh we've used the term clogged arteries uh sophia is bringing another one to the table she's talking about calcification of the arteries and she's wondering whether that can be reversed so i guess can we start with what is our artery calcification sure you've got the artery blockage that we talked about it's i described it as sort of a blister in the wall of the artery what it really is is the cholesterol particles have irritated the artery wall and they're getting absorbed by white blood cells and it's making this big mess i'm going to call it a blister but it's a mis a mixture of fat and cholesterol and debris and some overgrowing muscle cells are that are in there and over time that will go away or improve a lot with the diet lifestyle changes in the meanwhile while you're still having your cheeseburger and this is progressing um calcification can occur what that means is that calcium deposits form either in that inner layer of the artery or in the muscle layer right under it and those can build up over time and they can narrow the artery however our goal is typically not to try to make all that calcium go away our goal here is to just keep all of those plaques regressing and um and stable because what's going to kill you is not that calcified artery typically um what's going to kill you is is a plaque that bursts it bursts open and then that leads to a thrombus or a blood clot and that leads to the heart attack all right we have time for a few more questions here so make sure to drop yours in the comment or in the chat uh real quick before we get to another question let's uh get a success story from jill erickson 12 17. jill and her husband joel are just incredible people um went whole food plant-based in 2016 after joel's widowmaker heart attack she says and joel get this dr barnard most recently learned that his risk is now in his words quote zippo uh he said that uh he's now 0.3 and normal is one between one and three so uh what what do those well first of all that's awesome joel congratulations uh but when he's talking about the risk being uh 0.3 what does that number mean um that means he's done that means well first of all congratulations joel and jill you are role models and everybody should be doing what you're doing what it means is that the changes that you've made are working it means they are doctors trying to make these mathematical models of what's your risk in the future and they do that so that they know what your risks are but they also want you to know that your risks are enough uh that you need to make changes you've made those changes um you've made those changes for yourself for your family and you you frankly you're inspiring lots of other people to do what you're doing so fantastic uh question from uh one is alone here 12 34 how much of this reversal how much of this healing is dependent on getting your body back to a healthy weight what would you say is the answer to that question getting your weight down is a good idea um but the changes in your arteries occur even independent of losing weight so what we've been talking about is a disease of the arteries i know that's a funny thing to say but if you were a little submarine going through the artery what would you you'd see is these huge big blisters in the artery wall that's what's shrinking because if it doesn't shrink if it keeps growing it narrows the passageway for blood and they can break open and cause a clot so that's we're talking about the same diet changes you make will cause weight loss too and the two will go concurrently and then the more weight you lose getting down toward a healthier weight the better off you're going to be because that in turn will bring your blood pressure down and bring inflammation down as well latoya is joining us a little bit late but still an important question we talked about this a little bit toward the beginning of the show but she's wondering whether an unhealthy junk food vegan diet can still cause heart disease uh well junk foods can do it a vegan diet doesn't have any more junk food in it than a non-vegan diet in fact for the most omnivores are you know people might be eating burgers and things and then they're eating the so-called junk foods potato chips and candy and all those kinds of things but if if you are following a vegan diet vegan diet just means the animal products are gone that's a huge step that's great congratulations but it's good to also take some additional steps too and that is if things like potato chips and candy are still lingering in your diet you'll want to get rid of those too and luckily as time goes on you'll find really good replacements for all of them one more success story this one from pat my husband has brought his cholesterol and blood pressure way down to normal following the esselstyn diet we're wondering how much fat from nuts like cashew cream is allowable to keep those numbers great just like they are oh great question uh first of all um with regard to nuts there's there's been an ongoing discussion about this and i think first of all nuts do contribute to weight issues um there are some scientists who want to try to make that go away they really can't if you're going to be eating a whole bunch of smokehouse almonds your weight loss is not going to go so well because they're so high they're so dense in calories they really are most of the fat in the nuts is not saturated fat but there is a little bit so keeping the nuts low is a good idea on the other hand our alzheimer's research friends say wait a minute nuts have vitamin e and vitamin e is good what's the answer the answer for a typical healthy person is about an ounce uh an ounce of nuts or sunflower seeds or something like that that gives you a pretty good amount of vitamin e vitamin e without the overdose and by the way what an ounce is it's the amount that's in the palm of your hand you pour the sunflower seeds in your hand your palm if it touches your fingers that's more than enough all right final question you just mentioned sunflower seeds this one comes to us at 12 32 from jesse uh talking about different kinds of oils she uh jessie's wondering is cooking with sunflower oil bad is that one of the oils that's on the mediterranean diet i wouldn't use any oils when you cook here's where we are okay so the worst things are cooking with butter cooking with cream the animal products are high in saturated fat coconut oil palm oil terrible don't eat them in anything don't cook with them don't don't use them for anything you know shine your shoes with them that's it um but then if you're using these liquid oils like corn oil they're still very high in calories and although they are lower in saturated fat they still have traces you don't need it if you're sauteing something sauteed in vegetable broth in water or get yourself a good non-stick pan if you have nightmares of the 1970s teflon pans where it's like chipping off in your in the foods that you're cooking the modern non-stick pans don't do that they're really non-toxic if you take good care of them they're going to be fine so it's really good to learn some non-oil cooking techniques and you'll be fine all right let's go ahead and close up that doctor's mailbag for today if we didn't get to your question have no fear we will save it and do our best to get you an answer on an upcoming episode and dr barnard i feel like we only scratched the surface on everything that we could be talking about here today um that's why i think it's really neat that dr kim williams who is a renowned cardiologist has devoted his life to this he's going to be joining us at the international conference on nutrition and medicine coming up august 18th through the 20th i know you've got to be jazzed up to see his presentation i got to tell you it's going to be wonderful um we are going to you're absolutely right there's so much more to talk about with heart disease dr dean ornish will be with us with a presentation on the first day and we're getting extra real quality time with dr williams he's going to be our honoree on friday night at the dinner he's giving a special uh presentation there and then saturday morning he's going to stick around and give us part two so it is going to be a master class not just in heart disease but in in health overall so it's been i'm really really looking forward to it and i'm looking forward to he's already told me i would love to stop by the exam room booth and sit down record an episode at the conference as well so the two of us are gonna be doing that if you're gonna be there join us live it's gonna be really just an incredible three days um really amazing that uh he's our honoree this year uh i mean just from his past appearances on the show i'm always blown away by how much he knows i mean this man has forgotten more than any of us really tend to know i mean he's just he's so so good at what it is that he does and he's so passionate about it um and if you would like to join us live in person august 18th through the 20th in washington dc at the grand hyatt there are still a few seats remaining but i'm telling you they are going fast limited seating this year dr barnard that means that you need to book your seat today save one of the few that are remaining you can do that at pcrm.org icnmpcrm.org icnm august 18th through the 20th at the international conference on nutrition and medicine and by the way you talk about that dinner that honors dinner friday night uh the food that's going to be served all throughout the conference is from our universal meals program dr barnard and i have heard it is fantastic um there yeah i haven't i don't think i've told anybody about this yet um david came in from the culinary institute of america in new york state he's coming down and he's talking about how they develop these foods and there is at the grand hyatt they have hired a new french chef with whom we met just yes we we you've got to see him chuck he he is out of this world excited about this and he's preparing the whole menu and we had a tasting and it is going to be great and i know it's funny to talk about a medical conference it's actually having good food people think it's like got to be hospital food it's going to be out of this world and the reason is that we're unveiling the universal meals program and so we want people to know about it we want hospitals airlines businesses to get pumped up about universal meals so it's going to be absolutely delicious yeah i had not heard that you are breaking some news here on the show today that's awesome yeah yeah it's gonna be it's gonna be very very special we've been down there working with them we've worked with them for a better part of the decade and then we had to take two years virtually because of the pandemic but we're back now and and it's going to be better than ever it's good what you said is is right we are greatly reducing the number of people we're going to allow in because of social distancing and all that kind of stuff but it's going to be a terrific conference all right so lock in your spot today you see the web address on the screen right there pcrm.org or you can click the link in the episode notes if you're listening to this podcast also dr barnard can't wrap up today without also saying a huge thank you as always to the gregory j ryder memorial fund for their continued support of the exam room live and the physicians committee it's not only helping to raise our health iqs but it makes this very show possible and a lot of the work that we do at the physicians committee possible because the gregory j ryder memorial fund supports organizations just like ours that carry on greg's love for animals by promoting plant-based health and working to end animal abuse while emphasizing programs that promote systemic change and also benefit people check this out right down this web address you can visit them online right now at gregoryriderfund.org that's gregory ryder spelled r-e-i-t-e-r fund dot org as always allison and the gang there just continue to do work that just blows me away so beneficial um and so if you would like to do that subscribe to their newsletter by the way dr barnard i don't know if you've seen that um but they they talk a lot about the contributions that they've made uh to the physicians committee and uh all the good that's come out of it in their newsletter alison is just so so so great at all of her support just absolutely gratitude absolutely greg had such a heart and allison does too and just really carried on this spirit of of kindness and compassion and and and education toward health and toward compassion for that that greg embodied so long so thank you for that yeah thank you allison and thank you dr barnard for being here and helping to raise our health iqs today you bet my pleasure time and to the crew behind the scenes that makes the magic happen thank you as always and to you exam roomies thank you so very much for joining us and hanging out and learning all about how to prevent and even reverse heart disease as dr barnard said at the top of the show so many of these cases are in fact preventable and for everyone here at the physicians committee i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll we'll talk to you again soon but until then keep it plant-based

Channel: Physicians Committee

Views: 259,840

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Id: Akg2WAyGK6A

Length: 43min 19sec (2599 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 03 2022