Healthiest Foods for Your Heart | Dr. Neal Barnard on The Exam Room Live

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome to the exam room live brought to you by the physicians committee hi i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll and this is the healthiest half hour anywhere online today we appreciate you joining us right here on facebook and on youtube as we spend the next half hour helping to raise your health iq today we are going to be answering your questions as we open up the doctor's mailbag answering those questions for us today is the one and only dr neal barnard and i got to tell you there are already so many good questions in the mailbag including we have a question from somebody wondering what the top heart health foods are so if you want to have a healthy heart what should you be eating we're going to get his take on that plus we're going to hear from a woman whose family collectively has lost more than 150 pounds together how great is that and she's looking for advice to even take their health to the next level so we're gonna find out how dr barnard can help them out as well plus if you have a question go ahead and drop that right now in the comments or the chat box you can even tweet it to us at pcrm or at chuck carroll wlc just make sure that you use that hashtag exam room live so let's go ahead and open up that doctor's mailbag and welcome dr neil barnard to the show dr barnard thank you so very much for being here my friend hi there chuck great to be back with you it's always a pleasure it's always such a grab bag when we open up the mailbag and we get so much feedback from listeners of the podcast and viewers of this show who love this because these shows really do cover a little bit of everything let's see how we do today all right let's start with uh that heart health question this one comes to us from instagram uh viewer wondering for opening narrowed arteries and possibly even reversing heart disease what are the top foods that we should be focusing on okay let's talk about some basic foods and then a few things for extra credit for the basics are get away from animal products and the reason you don't want any meat any dairy or any eggs in your diet is they all have cholesterol all of them and they all have animal fat in them and so the cholesterol in say an egg or a steak or some cheese that cholesterol adds to the cholesterol particles in your blood irritates your arteries narrows the arteries can lead to heart problems and the saturated fat the bad fat that predominates in dairy products and there's also plenty in meat and eggs that causes your body body to make more cholesterol so rule number one skip the animal products completely what does that leave you with grains beans vegetables fruits healthy things okay now in the extra credit category i'm going to say foods that are high in soluble fiber you've seen the ads for oatmeal it'll lower your cholesterol it's true the soluble fiber in it is something you can see when you're cooking it in the pan the oats get all mushy that's the sign a sign that this the fiber in it is actually dissolving in the water and making um sort of this special medicine that's gonna lower your cholesterol now the effect is not huge uh maybe a four percent cholesterol lowering something like that from high soluble fiber foods and aside from the oats the bean group is big in that category as well and soy products seem to have a special cholesterol lowering effect as well so those would be my tips get away from the animal products completely that way everything you're eating is cholesterol free animal fat free and it's got fiber and the soluble fiber things like oats and beans extra points speaking of cholesterol which you just mentioned we have a question here from cynthia wondering whether or not it's true that free range eggs have less cholesterol than other eggs mostly not true um that i'm hedging on that a little bit because chickens are bred in different ways and you can get a breed that has more cholesterol has less cholesterol the size of the egg plays a role too but the differences in all of this are really quite minor um cholesterols uh eggs are a cholesterol bomb they have an enormous amount of uh cholesterol in them and far more than than virtually every other food and the other thing is that free range is a myth go to pick up a package look at the packaging don't buy it look at a package of free range eggs look at look at the address and just drive there and say i want to see your free range chickens they are not loping over the hillside running freely they are in a little pen that might be on a piece of grass but they are not moving around very much at all um and so i'm sorry to say that the green washing or humane washing of the industry has really been shameless and they're selling you an egg and the only way they sell hundreds of thousands of these or millions of these is by having a huge number of animals in not very nice conditions so skip the egg ah and we're going to be unscrambling some more egg science a little bit later in the show you and i are going to be talking about a new study that was just released all about eggs that we found very interesting so stay tuned for that next question comes to us as well from instagram a viewer by the name of la frenchy get this dr barnard la frenchie writes my family started eating a whole food plant-based diet one year ago and to date my fiance has lost 55 pounds and my soon-to-be stepson has lost 85 pounds but i have only lost 10 pounds and my cholesterol is actually a little bit higher so do you have any advice that could help her catch up in the weight department and maybe examine a thing or two with the cholesterol okay uh well first of all congratulations on making the change um you're helping yourself and look how great your family's doing too that's that's fantastic now losing 10 pounds that's okay that's that alone is something to celebrate that's not failure that's great but you want to lose more than 10 pounds you already know some of the things that i'm going to talk about we want to get away from animal fat because every gram of fat has how many calories in it's got 9 this will be on the test oils also have 9 calories per gram and so getting away from animal fat is good but keeping vegetable oil is low too you're probably already doing that even though oils are healthier in many ways than animal fats to lose weight you want to minimize them all and that also means minimizing the foods that happen to be really dense in oils nuts nut butters avocado okay so let's say you're doing all that and that's going pretty well do look in your diet to see if some of those things are sneaking in um and look at the products that you buy at the store if you're getting a frozen pizza uh or a frozen burrito or something like that if it's got more than about three grams of fat per serving pick a different brand and the foods that have no label like the broccoli or the potatoes or something you can eat as much as you want of those things you might want to also increase more increase raw foods in your diet for some reason that i've never quite figured out when people are eating a raw carrot celery as lettuce and things like that for some reason they tend to do better than other people and lastly use the e-word um exercise does help um running a mile only burns 100 calories and that's not much but something about having regular physical activity somehow gets your appetite regulated a little bit and you'll see the effect on your scale it doesn't have to be huge but it's a great thing to to lace up your sneakers and get that brisk walk in 40 minutes three times a week or more if you're game point boy you want to talk about another health transition i'm just going to go ahead and say right now cheers to you rich get this dr barnard here is his question he writes i've been whole food plant-based for two years and lost 110 pounds he says his cholesterol has dropped to 118. he's even reversed diabetes but now his morning blood glucose is higher than when he goes to bed he's wondering is that anything to worry about is that something that he should address if so what can he do well first of all congratulations how fantastic i mean that weight loss is fantastic reversing your diabetes wonderful um i hope your doctor is standing up and cheering for you and telling the other people what you've done so that's that's great you know when i was in medical school we didn't think it was possible we didn't think it was possible to reverse diabetes now we know what's happening and and you are a testimony to that so that's great okay so you go to sleep you check your blood sugar it's uh whatever it is and then you wake up the next morning and it's higher what happened were you sleepwalking and eating donuts no that's not it um the reason that happened it's called the dawn effect meaning as dawn approaches your liver thinks hmm you'll be getting up soon you might need a little bit of energy so your liver takes stored glucose glycogen and it releases it into your blood before you're awake and this this happens every night so your blood sugar will start to rise now let's say it's six o'clock you take your but six a.m you take your blood sugar and a little bit higher you went back to sleep didn't even eat any breakfast you got up two hours later your blood sugar could still be higher so some of these variations in your blood sugar are actually your body regulating your blood sugar has nothing to do with what you eat so keep at it keep it vegan keep the oil to a bare minimum because that allows your body to use its insulin in the best possible way and congratulations with what you've accomplished that is a a heck of a transformation 110 pounds way to go rich that's awesome uh here's the next question comes to us from barbara right this uh wrote this at 1211 wants to know don't we need some fat in our diet you do and it's delivered to you um as a part of plants if you sent a leaf of spinach to a laboratory they would tell you you know it's about seven percent fat or eight or give or take uh you send some broccoli uh even beans maybe four percent fat something like that as a percentage of calories that's not much but it's what the body actually needs so your body needs two essential fats they're called alpha linolenic acid and linoleic acid and there are traces of these in plant foods that's what you need so when somebody send gives you a bottle of corn oil what they did was they took a lot of corn and they threw all the corn away they threw away the pulp they threw away all the fiber and they just concentrated that oil and tried to convince you that was normal or they just give you some extra virgin olive oil the only way you get that is you throw away the olive you throw away the pulp and the fiber and you concentrate just the oil that's not the way our bodies were built our bodies were built to eat corn or eat olives or eat foods in their natural state and and when when we eat the expressed oils it gets more concentrated this question comes to us from teagana comes to us at 12 13. wants to know dr barnard what are your thoughts on a raw vegan diet i think it's fine as a general rule i think having raw foods is a good idea um and part of the reason i say that is i am quite sure that our species did not evolve with sterno we were not cooking stuff until in the history of the world relatively recently um the question i have though is which are the foods that are best for us raw and i don't know the answer to that question the reason i i say this is uh human beings originated in the eastern part of africa and presumably and migrated out from there into all parts of the world and so once we ended up in the united states that was the first time people had tomatoes and peanuts and for that matter potatoes and lots of other things um i'm i'm i'm convinced that the raw foods that are best for us are probably those that were in africa at the time when of our evolution and i have no idea what those are the changes in food availability now are such that you can have foods as part of your life that were never part of our evolution having a raw tomato on your salad great but that wasn't in africa when we were evolving so bottom line i guess i would say more raw food better do supplement vitamin b12 you need that no matter what if you're having trouble maintaining your weight because raw foods really do tend to lead to weight loss for many people you might want to bring some uh cooked food into it um cooked grains cooked beans cooked greens um and see how you do yannick is checking in all the way from germany right now says uh been whole food plant-based for 10 weeks and i absolutely love it however i'm cooking lots of curry now and most of that requires a can of coconut milk should i try to limit that because of fat to just a few servings per month a few servings per lifetime i'm sorry i'm starting to break your heart look at look at the look at the label and look at the saturated fat number um if it is something very far north of zero um what it's reflecting is the fact that the coconut and like the uh like palm oil coconut oil palm oil um they just have a whole lot of saturated fat and that's bad for your heart and bad for your brain and i would add if you go over to pcrm.org recipes you can probably find a lot of good curry dishes in there that don't have an absorbent amount of fat in there as well so just because you're limiting that doesn't mean that you can't have your curry i promise you that my friend uh here is a question from vegan witchery on instagram checking in a little bit early from halloween but that's okay i just read that compounds and flax inhibit iodine uptake i ate a tablespoon of or a teaspoon yeah a tablespoon sorry of ground flax daily and the occasional sea veggie for iodine should i be concerned thank you so much uh great question um there are some foods that theoretically at least do slow down your thyroid gland's ability to take iodine from the foods that you eat now so i'm glad you're having sea vegetables that's great they are like the number one source of iodine they're a great healthy iodine source so that's great um the flax is probably not an issue it is true that flax cruciferous vegetables even soy will slow down the iodine absorption by the thyroid a little bit but it looks from my read of the literature that that's not really a relevant issue except for people with pretty marginal iodine intake um and if you're having iodine on a normal level which is sea vegetables great source some people use supplements for it some people use iodized salt like a third of a teaspoon per day it's a pretty good start so my guess is unless it's a really large amount of flax on a day-to-day basis i would guess that the effect would be not something you'd notice at all all right dr barnard time to talk about grab and go foods this is always such a popular talker especially when people are first transitioning over to a plant-based diet this is a question from brian on twitter wants to know is there a vegan protein bar that would be acceptable just to keep in the car for those days when we're stuck in traffic and real food just isn't accessible uh great question um yeah you're right you know my favorite go-to snack is um is to have fruit um and there are some fruits that travel better than others but having them handy when you're in traffic is the greatest thing uh but what about a protein bar if you want to have it um the answer really is look at the label if whether it's a cliff bar or a larabar or whatever it is look at the label and the ones that are lowest in fat are the ones you want to pick especially saturated fats so when you check the labels out you'll see they vary quite a lot and pick the lowest ones question from bradley can you be healthy and still lose weight even when you have vegan processed foods such as plant-based meats or cheeses from time to time absolutely for sure they vary all over the map some processed foods like the impossible burger its purpose in life impossible burger is there to seduce meat eaters so that happens to be one that is pretty high in fat including saturated fat so if you're already vegan it's not designed for you it's designed to make meat eaters realize that vegan is approachable um once you're um more comfortable with with plant-based eating look for the lower fat brands but but it's fine i mean you will see uh vegan pizzas and veggie burgers and things like that that are perfectly okay um to have now as far as daily use goes the more real the foods are the better so lots of vegetables lots of beans lots of whole grains lots of fruits include them in your routine don't forget your b12 but um to have some processed foods is perfectly okay question from a youtube watcher right now i'm not sure how white sugar inside of soda is different from the natural sugar found inside of fruit are our bodies processing the sugar differently as chemicals as the different types of sugar that they actually are or is it all the same the main difference is quantity pick up an apple or an orange or um a peach or a pear or just just about any piece of fruit um the sugariest ones might have 10 or 20 uh grams of sugar and something like that but go to the store and get a 20 ounce soda and look at the label and there's probably 60 grams of sugar in there and people have one or two of those a day so that's really the difference is the quantity now that said sugar is not for many people their big issue granted extra sugars like those added to sodas are not really health food but your body is designed to run on glucose yours your brain runs glucose as its favorite fuel uh your muscles too that's why marathon runners are carbo-loading in the days before their their marathon so sugar's not the devil and when it's in an apple or when it's in a other kind of fruit it's packed along with fiber along with other healthy nutrients and your body can use that in a really healthy way i think you described sugar once as kind of the trojan horse when it comes to diabetes you know it's not necessarily the main devil here it's everything that comes along with it and that'll be treating well if you're let's say you're making having a cookie uh people will say oh my goodness those cookies they're so full of carbs and sugar that's that's that's what's you know causing weight problems or leading to other problems and the sugar is not really health food but look at the recipe um to make those cookies you had you dumped in some sugar but you also threw in a whole stick of butter or a whole bunch of shortening and so like the trojan horse the sugar lures you in it makes you think i want that and it's all that fat baked into it that is going to get into your cells and cause insulin resistance that leads to high blood sugar and also leads to obesity and leads to high cholesterol we have a question here from vicki wanting to know about the keto diet what are your thoughts on that and does it uh help with diabetes and insulin resistance and are you aware of any long-term side effects so a lot to unpack there but what are your thoughts on the keto diet i would avoid the ketogenic diet um the notion of it is um really it's based on a mistaken premise which is that you gain weight because you're eating too much sugar or too much carbohydrate if you went back 50 years and looked at japan before westernization when the diet was based on enormous amounts of rice they were the you know rice carbohydrate they were the skinniest longest lived people on the planet and if some ketogenic author went there and said how dare you eat all this rice and you know when you look at what happened when westernization occurred and the rice intake did fall because it was replaced by more and more meat and dairy products their waste lines expanded breast cancer rates doubled diabetes came in a big way so the healthy carbohydrate is the fuel that our bodies run on very well but a ketogenic diet does have an effect because they say don't eat any sugar anymore don't eat a carbohydrate so you take away the grains from your diet go on take away the fruit take away the pasta take away beans and so forth you're not left with that much and so for many people they do lose weight but it's only because they are reducing calories if you eat the same number of calories you don't lose anything and is there a danger that sure there is because if you're doing it in the typical atkins way or the typical ketogenic way your meat portions are increasing because it doesn't have any carbohydrate and that means your cholesterol goes up so normally weight loss brings cholesterol down no matter how you get there but if you get there by a keto diet a lot of people have their cholesterol levels going up plus you just threw away some of your best cancer preventers the fresh fruit's gone the starchy vegetables are gone the beans are gone and you need those things so the long-term risks we suspect are cardiovascular disease probably alzheimer's disease and colorectal cancer and similar things so why go there you can go there with a much uh more pleasant diet that's also healthier in every way and that's a low-fat plant-based diet question from mariana here i was cutting back on sugar and carbs and lost about 40 pounds i went vegan recently but i want to stay low in carbs and sugars now i'm worried about missing out on certain nutrients what advice do you have for her um it sounds like you've been hit by carbophobia keep in mind as i was mentioning earlier that your in the same way as your ferrari is designed to run on gasoline that that's the fuel back at the factory that's what they said i'm going to build an engine that's what it's going to run on your engine is designed to run on glucose glucose is what comes to you in the form of natural sugars like in fruit or in natural starches as in grains or starchy vegetables and having these foods is a good idea and if you think well aren't they high in calories the answer is surprisingly they're the lowest calorie foods we have fat that's nine calories in a gram carbohydrate has only four and if it's a carbohydrate mixed with fiber like an apple the sugar is carbohydrate the pl is all that fiber the fiber has no calories effectively so those are the foods that are going to help you feel slim so i would suggest not rejecting them nature's handing them to you on a plate and it's going to take advantage of them question from arlene uh definitely check this one out if especially if you like to exercise she wants to know what are the best foods for recovery after intense exercise like a 10 mile run uh great question um i don't presume to want to second guess the experts on our staff like susan levin and jim loomis who have done a lot of talking about this so chuck you're gonna have to have them back uh for another show about about post exercise but my good exercising friends do talk about the need to um rebuild your body and to reconstitute your glycogen stores um glycogen as i was mentioning earlier that's your batteries that's the stored glucose and it's in your muscles and it's in your liver and if you went out for your 15 mile run you kind of used up your glycogen so you put it back in you put it back in with carbohydrate and that means starches like root vegetables grains beans fresh fruit all those all those things are fine now you might be saying well but i hear i need protein after my workout um the fact of the matter is your body was damaged so to speak a little bit in the in the process of all that exercise but the damage is small it's microscopic and so it doesn't call for a steak the protein that comes along with the healthy plant foods is more than enough to rebuild hydration is important as you've always heard both before during and well before during and after exercise too question from paula wants to know is it possible to eat too many calories when you're eating a whole food plant-based diet no oils but plenty of fruits and vegetables low in fat probably not um the normal homeostatic mechanism it's in the same way as breathing can you breathe too much um you know you don't think about it but your body is monitoring the oxygen level in your blood and if it gets a little bit low you start breathing faster you don't even know this is happening but it happens automatically even when you are unconscious you are sound asleep your body is still saying i think we need a little more oxygen in here and it gets it okay so your body does the same thing it's kind of looking at your weight looking at your your your body stores and it says you you've been exercising today you've been pretty active i'm going to ramp up your appetite a little bit and the same way as more breathing brings you more oxygen a little bit higher appetite brings you more calories but the beauty of a plant-based diet is that everything you're eating is pretty naturally pretty modest in calories and the fiber tricks your brain or tells your brain that you've had enough food and you can stop them where people run into trouble is with particularly animal products and really calorie dense foods because there your your body's telling you to eat more super easy to overdo it on those kinds of foods like cheese 70 fat so before you know it you know you you've overshot so no the short answer is no i think you're going to do fine and i will tell you i think that there are a lot of people who are maybe a little bit scared of not doing calorie counting after they adopt this healthy diet because you've been counting them basically your entire life up to that point and it's almost unfathomable that you would no longer need to do that because you're eating a nutrient dense diet versus a calorically dense diet so everything's kind of been adverse but it takes a while to reprogram the brain upstairs to not have to worry about that so much yeah i think that's really right with with typical grains and beans and vegetables and fruits your satiety mechanism is going to come in and stop you from overeating the only exceptions really are some psychological issues where people really are are overdoing it for more emotional reasons and that can certainly happen in that case you obviously want to get some help for that and and address that for sure um the physiological exception can be with those few calorie dense plant foods like nuts nut butters avocados and cooking oils those are the ones where there's a fair amount of fat the calories get packed in there pretty fast so but if those aren't part of your diet you're gonna you're gonna do fine i wanna say a quick hello and congratulations to ashioma who is uh adopting a vegan diet tomorrow so congratulations welcome we have a question here from sally wants to know speaking of fat and calories how many grams of healthy fat should a person eat every day how many grams of healthy fat should you have every day first of all i hope you don't count um and you just as we were talking chuck you don't really need to be counting any more than you need to count how many times you breathe or how much oxygen do you get um we we start counting these things with food because because in the past we did overdo it and we felt a need to count but once you're in a better relationship with your body you don't have to count at all that said um we count as part of research studies so that we're tracking what people do and your average american can easily be consuming you know 100 grams of fat in a day or something like that and around here we probably cut that down to about 20. 25 something like that let's grab a couple more before we close up the doctor's mailbag for the day we have a question here from charlene wants to know how can i avoid sugar spikes and sugar cravings i'm new to eating a vegan diet well first of all i'm glad you're doing it it's great you know the um it feels a little awkward for some people at first but not for very long you know you're going to get into it really well okay so um the way that your body regulates sugar is with um its insulin the insulin hormone which comes out of your pancreas and it arrives at your cells and it's just like a key that opens up the cell to sugar and so what allows your insulin to do its job right getting away from fatty foods surprising isn't it but when fat builds up in the cells insulin can't work anymore so when you're eating a plant-based diet there isn't any animal fat in the diet and the cells tend to respond a lot better to your natural insulin now the other piece of it is that if you're eating foods that are really high in refined sugar a soda or refined uh refined grains like a piece of white bread your blood sugars can spike and for some people not not everybody but for some people as your blood sugar is coming back down it can sometimes dip too low and as it's coming down cravings will kick in and all kinds of other mischief and so the answer to that is to be eating the healthier foods beans peas lentils those are the healthy legumes the high fiber grains and vegetables and all the varieties that come in all right and our last question for the day comes to us from patricia patricia is wondering if you can talk about post-menopausal hormones she says she can't seem to lose weight even when eating a whole food plant-based diet i feel your pain um men men and women both go through the same kind of thing whereas as the years go by they discover their metabolism seems slower you know when i was 14 i could eat anything but now that i'm 54 i just look at food and i start gaining weight um when we go on this this diet that we've been talking about avoiding animal products and keeping oils low two things will happen one is that you find that you're taking in fewer calories without knowing it that's because the high fiber foods are just really satisfying so that's the first thing but the second piece of it is that as time goes on your metabolism actually gets a little bit faster now not a lot but we measure this people come into our laboratory in the morning and we measure how fast they're burning calories and in the after meal period that's when a plant-based diet tends to cause a bigger burn and the way to make this kick in is to stick with it vegan all the time no animal products keep oils really low and what you'll discover is not only are you taking in fewer calories but you're burning slightly more calories after every meal now there's three meals a day so you get a little bit bigger burn after every one of them let's go ahead and close up that doctor's mailbag for today if we didn't get to your question don't worry we will save it and do our best to get you an answer on an upcoming episode and if you want to relive the fun that we had today head on over to apple podcast or spotify wherever you get your favorite podcast from look for the exam room by the physicians committee and hit that subscribe button because we will be releasing a full replay of today's show in podcast version first thing tomorrow mornings go ahead and subscribe to that now and if you'd be so kind as to leave a five-star rating we sure would appreciate that all right today we talked a little bit about eggs and cholesterol on the show and dr barnard there is an interesting new study that was just done over in europe looking at eggs and the effect that that has on our health not just cholesterol but specifically i believe researchers here we're looking at eggs and what we in the scientific health community will call all-cause mortality so what did these researchers find it was a quite a good study it was published in the european journal of nutrition and researchers looked at more than 20 000 people in italy and they watch them over time they tracked how many eggs they ate and they looked at who lived and who died and then they adjusted for all kinds of confounding factors like were you smoking and and other things like that and what they found was what we call a dose-response relationship which is um really an important thing to find the more eggs people ate the more likely they were to die so it worked out like if you were eating say two eggs a week not very much your likelihood of dying was substantially higher than people who avoided eggs completely and people who ate eggs say four times a week what's that about every other day we're about 50 more likely to to die during the observation period um of several years compared to people who avoided eggs now the egg industry would say ah it's just one study forget about it don't think about it actually the clouds have been gathering around the egg industry for some time there was a study let me show you this what came out in jama journal american medical association in late 2019 and it was the same thing and what they looked at was what happens if you eat a half a half an egg and the answer was you measurably increase your risk of dying over time now nobody needs a half an i give you a whole leg um and if you're doing that every day the mortality in the jama study increased was about 12 in the italian study it was worse than that is about 50 so what do we make of this what what they made of it the italian researchers they said we should stop recommending eggs um yeah they're cheap everybody gets them it's something we all grew up with but they have far more cholesterol than other foods is cholesterol good for you no uh you don't need any dietary cholesterol at all there's zero requirement for dietary cholesterol and there's no reason to be eating it and that's what they believe is causing the problem and is high cholesterol in your opinion the number one predictor of heart disease well high cholesterol predicts predicts a couple things if you have a high cholesterol level particularly ldl cholesterol bad cholesterol yeah it's a huge predictor of heart disease but not only that our friends at kaiser permanente years ago looked at people with high cholesterol and found they were also at high risk for alzheimer's disease and the kicker of that study was that the cholesterols they measured were when the people were 40 years old meaning if you have a lifelong bad diet with animal fat and and and high cholesterol foods like eggs that you are just we believe building up the damage not just in your heart but also in your brain so our recommendation is that people avoid these things and what is the target range for cholesterol that people should be striving for our friend richard hubbard uh wrote in and said that i believe he said his was in the 120s he thinks that that's pretty good is that too low or what is that well i mean that's that that's that's fabulous i mean you could auction that off on ebay um what the government what the government will say is when you get your cholesterol test they want your total to be below 200. um now i would argue that that that's a little liberal um that you might want to be way below 200 but but if you said 118 i mean that is very low but but not dangerously though i mean that's that's great there's a lot of people on plant-based diets around the world who have cholesterol levels like that um but the more important number is your bad cholesterol that's ldl cholesterol and there you you want that below 100 and some people will get it down to 90 80 sometimes 70. somewhere in that range and that's where you want it to be i'm telling you every time we talk about cholesterol on this program i'm reminded of the story that somebody told on the show a while back where they had switched up their diet adopted a plant-based diet their cholesterol plummets their doctor is actually instead of excited a little bit concerned and started to tell this person to begin to eat meat again so that they could continue to take their cholesterol medication that never really computed for me well it's that's kind of the way people used to handle diet well and some people still handle diabetes diets they would say make sure you eat enough bad foods so that your your insulin still has a has a role in your life so to speak um our goal obviously is to get you off your insulin if we can so um no you you want to follow a healthy plant-based diet that has no cholesterol no animal fat so your cholesterol is going to come down your ldl will come down for most people and hopefully if you have diabetes it will get better too all right let's switch gears now tomorrow is april and that is the month of all months to take a look at the environment and how our diet actually impacts our living conditions here on earth that's why tomorrow april 1st the physicians committee for the first time is holding a plant-based environmental summit this is very exciting we have a lot of leading experts in the environmental field who will be speaking at the summit which by the way is completely free dr barnard will be presenting there dr michael greger will be presenting ocean robbins will be presenting so many people who are very knowledgeable about this very topic we'll be speaking at this summit so what i want to do here as we close out the show is actually give you a little bit of a preview of that summit so let's go ahead and roll that trailer right now [Music] we have changed the way animals live on a global scale a global shift to a plant-based diet could reduce greenhouse gases caused by food production by 70 percent every bite you take is a vote you're voting for the health you want and you're voting for the world you want the health of our bodies and of the earth are one and the same and there you go you see that web address right there pcrm.org climate summit absolutely free event highly encourage you to register for that kicks off tomorrow so pcrm.org climate summit reserve your spot today and for today that is all the time that we have my friend i want to say thank you one more time to dr neil barnard for joining us here on the program and to the crew behind the scenes that makes the magic happen thank you guys and to you my exam roomies thank you so very much for hanging out and helping to raise all of our health iqs together greatly appreciate you being here as always and for everyone here at the physicians committee i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll we'll talk to you again soon until then stay safe take a stand and keep it plant-based

Channel: Physicians Committee

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Length: 40min 34sec (2434 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021