How Many Calories Should You Eat In a Day? | Dr. Neal Barnard

[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 this is the healthiest half hour anywhere online today we appreciate you joining us right here on facebook and on youtube as we attempt to raise our nutrition iqs together and joining us today with some knowledge to help us raise those iqs is dr neal barnard we're going to be opening up the doctor's mail bag and answering your questions including how many calories should you be eating every day he's got the answer to that plus we're going to help out a nurse who works the overnight shift and is wondering what's the healthiest way to eat if your schedule is a little bit wonky then we're going to talk about nuts and how much you should be eating those every day what's the limit there and a whole lot more so let's go ahead and dive right into the doctor's mailbag right now and welcome dr neil barnard to the exam room live dr barnard thanks so much for joining us today my friend hi there chuck good to talk to you today and if you have a question for dr barnard go ahead and submit that right now you can put it in the comments or the chat box or you can even tweet it to us using that hashtag exam room live send that on over to me at chuck carroll wlc or at pcrm and we will get to as many questions as we possibly can before the end of the show but dr barnard i want to start with the top question of the day and it comes to us from a viewer on instagram wondering how many calories they should be eating in a day oh first of all let me praise you for your sophistication because most people don't even think about things like that um and so you're you're going in straight into the details most people consume at least in america somewhere in the range of 1800 to 2000 calories in a day however let me encourage you not to strive for a particular goal because it really depends first of all on how big you are a bigger person needs more calories and also how active you are if you're running a marathon you're going to be burning twice as many calories or more than uh compared with if you are sedentary so the rule of thumb of course is if you're eating a healthy plant-based diet then the normal homeostasis mechanisms kick in meaning your body senses that it needs more calories it makes you hungry you eat more food and where this system fails is with overly calorically dense foods fatty foods animal products have no fiber so they kind of defied the system but if you're eating normal high fiber plant-based foods system works out pretty well even if you don't kill calories well let's go ahead and flip that question over on its head because we have a great follow-up here from janna she wants to know how many calories should a person eat if they're underweight do the same principles apply there yeah the same principles do apply um so you'll want to be eating vegetables and fruits whole grains and beans and if you eat a normal amount of them and you're not restricting it all in other words you're not trying to lose weight here i'm thinking about certain eating disorders where people are are restricting to to keep their weight down out of fear of of excessive weight gain and that kind of thing but assuming that's not you uh your normal hunger drive will will bring you up to where you should be and you might be thinking well am i underweight or or am i not go online and search for a bmi calculator your body mass index it's not perfect but it's a pretty good way of gauging if your weight is where it should be and so on a bmi calculator you plug in your height and you plug in your weight and it'll say uh what your body mass index is and if it's between 18 and a half and 25 that's the weight range where you're going to be in pretty good shape with regard to long-term likelihood of staying healthy so that's really where you want to be now i implicit in your question is i'm trying to gain more weight and what you will discover is if there is more fat in your diet even if it's extra virgin olive oil or less healthy kinds of fats the fats are the ones that are going to cause the weight gain the most rapidly so nuts and seeds and guacamole are the things that tend to fatten people up before you jump in though and think hooray that's what i'm going to do and i'll eat these foods i'll gain weight the weight might come on where you don't especially want it as opposed to being an even kind of weight gain so um the basic rule of thumb eat uh when you're hungry stop eating when you're full and if everything you're eating is beans vegetables fruits whole grains your weight will take care of itself i think that we're on a roll here with these kinds of questions vicki here you you mentioned nuts and then she just matter of fact popped in she wants to know she's watching us uh on instagram is there a limit to the amount of nuts that we should be eating in a day in terms of saturated fat yeah 37.5 nuts per day okay i'm sorry i'm sorry just i'm i'm playing with you chuck um okay uh nuts luckily most nuts they do have a more fat in them um than say vegetables or fruits so we limit nuts particularly for people who are trying to reverse their diabetes or lose weight and the reason is as you know with diabetes we want to get the fat out of the muscle and liver cells when you do that insulin sensitivity comes back if you pack fat into those cells your insulin sensitivity is harmed um and so for those folks who are who are struggling with diabetes we keep the nuts and things out of the diet and obviously all the animal products go too for people who are trying to lose weight they'll discover that going vegan is great but they'll want to also keep the nuts and the guacamole and the oils in general to a bare minimum now let's say you don't have diabetes you're young and you're you're reasonably thin and you're feeling okay uh how much can you do nut wise i'll tell you i think there's sort of a good rule of thumb a little arbitrary but not bad and that's maybe about an ounce per day of nuts what is an ounce an ounce is the palm of your hand before you reach the fingers so you pour the almonds walnuts cashews into the palm of your hand once it hits your fingers stop um and then the next suggestion is don't eat that because if you do you'll fill your hand again and that's our kind of addicting so instead of eating it crumble it up and put it on your oatmeal or put it on your salad and use nuts as a flavoring or as an ingredient and that way you'll get the vitamin e that they have that's good uh without being so likely to over dose on them which will happen if you're using them as a snack food on their own so i would say for a healthy person not trying to reverse diabetes or lose weight an ounce a day is not a bad thing man but i'm telling you nuts can be a dangerous thing in my house especially the dry roasted unsalted plain old-fashioned peanut i love those things and it's so hard to limit it to just one ounce a day what to do you can and the smokehouse people they have figured out how to drive you know people's nut desires into the stratosphere so yeah you got to be super careful with those things man it's a it's a real thing um before we get to this next question dr barnard i just want to take a second to say thank you to jesse this is jesse's question and the work that she's doing right now as an icu nurse is more important than ever so jesse thank you so very much for what it is that you're doing and thank you very much for joining us here today with that said her question is is there an optimal way to eat if i'm working overnight my schedule is 7 p.m to 7 a.m okay um well first of all let me echo what chuck just says thank you for for doing that work that you're doing um it really depends a little bit on if this is a one-time thing where you work weekend nights and the rest of the time you're on days or if you're on permanent nights the reason that i make a distinction is if you're on permanent nights you're going to really want to adjust your schedule so it's just like a day job only it happens when it's dark outside so you've got to pick times to eat that are regular for you if it's an unusual kind of thing for you where it's just every other weekend or something like that you might find it most easy to stay to your daytime schedule stick with it that way and just get through the night as best uh as best you can without regard to trying to change your diurnal rhythm for such a short period of time question now from elliott uh wondering about the magic of cholesterol stay with me here here it goes his question is i know a very low-fat vegan diet can unclog arteries but where does that cholesterol go once it's cleaned out it's pulling the houdini here so what did your body do with all the cholesterol that it's removing um okay this will not be on the test but what your body does is it finds cholesterol particles and it removes them and it carries them off uh to be disposed just like other things that are in your body so your body has uh particles called lipoproteins um that will carry uh cholesterol away and it will be disposed it goes back to the liver and it's metabolized and reused cholesterol is a funny thing it gets us into tremendous trouble if you got too much in it it will lead to atherosclerosis that means heart disease i mean strokes other problems but at the same time cholesterol is used by your body to make hormones cell membranes makes vitamin d out of cholesterol so your body will take that cholesterol and use it for what it's intended for as opposed to the things where it'll cause problems next question comes to us from lj well i'm sorry we're gonna go to candace here is keto a healthy way to lose weight with diabetes uh if not what diet is okay a healthy diet for diabetes is a low-fat completely plant-based diet and as we've described on this show and uh and on other podcasts that chuck and i have done together what you're doing with a vegan diet meaning no animal products is you're eliminating all of the animal fat and that'll that along with keeping vegetable oils really low does something in your body that other guys don't do it starts to remove the fat it's been building up in your muscle and liver cells and that fat that fat in your muscle and liver cells is what causes your body to not respond well to insulin get that fat out and your body responds better and sometimes diabetes even goes away now ketogenic diets they've been they're popular for people uh for a few weeks and then they get frustrated with them in many cases and they abandon them um and abandoning them is a good thing we don't recommend ketogenic diets at all and here's why uh they're based on this idea that if you take out virtually all of the carbohydrate from your diet so you're not eating any fruit anymore you're not eating beans you're not eating whole grains um you're not eating any starchy vegetables you're going to lose weight is the theory and that's true because most of what you eat are the things i just mentioned and they're gone so you tend to lose weight and if you're not presenting any normal glucose to your body your body starts to make something called ketones that seem to reduce the appetite swell so people who do this over the short run they tend to lose some weight over the long run they don't actually lose any more weight than other diets and here's what's bad is that over the long run there's something that seems to change on a more ongoing basis and that's that your cholesterol level gets worse specifically ldl cholesterol or bad cholesterol tends to go up with these diets you don't want that if you've got diabetes this is going to sound a little bit harsh but how diabetes kills a person it's not through a high blood sugar usually it's by cardiovascular disease so it increases the risk of a heart attack or increases the risk of a stroke or kidney damage by by affecting the arteries you don't want to have your cholesterol level rise that that's exactly the opposite of what you want and that's what these diets unfortunately often do and even looking out at 12 months 24 months on these diets the cholesterol levels stay high for many many people so don't go near a ketogenic diet would be my my suggestion instead go to a healthy plant-based diet you'll see lots and lots of resources on how to do that at pcrm.org a great response there and in it you mentioned two things that debbie is wondering about diabetes and starchy foods she writes i am a type 2 diabetic and i'm feeling like i'm brainwashed not to eat these starchy foods are they okay yes they are okay um there are healthy starchy foods and there are some that are not so healthy but in the healthy category beans starch typical starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes and things are fine now there are a starchy doughnut not your best choice but grains and beans and vegetables and fruits are the foods that you want to eat how do we know that um back almost 20 years ago the national institutes of health funded our research team here at the physicians committee to do a head-to-head test of a healthy low-fat vegan diet comparing that to a more conventional diabetes diet for people who had type 2 diabetes and the vegan diet was dramatically better why because type 2 diabetes starts as fat builds up in the liver cells and in the muscle cells that stops your insulin from working we didn't know that back a generation ago we thought well gee uh maybe i'm eating too much sugar maybe that's what caused it no the problem is that the fat builds up inside the cells and as it builds up the insulin doesn't work anymore so on a vegan diet how much animal fat is there there's none and if you keep the oils low you get your insulin insulin sensitivity back it's the best way to go and as a bonus it's also the way to baby your arteries so whether it's the big arteries to your heart the arteries to your kidneys the arteries to the brain or think about those tiny little blood vessels in the back of your eye or the tiny little blood vessels in the kidneys you want to baby those blood vessels and a vegan diet doesn't have any cholesterol in it it doesn't have any animal fat in it and with this a person with type 2 diabetes can a live a normal life and b dramatically reduce the likelihood that their life would ever be cut short by any of these complications all right now let's get to lj's question uh she is saying menopause and a vegan diet what should or shouldn't a menopausal woman be eating okay um if you don't mind at the risk of sounding a little self-promotional i wrote a book on this topic called your body imbalance and the reason i wrote your body in balance is because i was struck by the fact that hormonal conditions are everywhere we've been talking about one diabetes the insulin hormone is not doing its thing um in menopause if you've got hot flashes what does that mean that means that the ovaries which used to be producing estrogens have gone on strike basically or they've retired and so your amount of estrogen is falling and you're having the the results of it so what what happens multiple times throughout the day uh the blood vessels in your skin suddenly widen out it's called vasodilation and that's just like a radiator being opened up and so you feel as hot on the outside as you are inside your core temperature that's a hot flash it doesn't last too long but uh when it's done then you've got chills and if it happens at night it's going to disrupt your sleep and you're going to think this is just horrible will this ever end um so there are a couple of things to think about here and you'll see more about this in your body imbalance if you'd like to have a look at it thing one a researcher uh uh from canada years ago went to japan and started interviewing japanese women their diet was not completely vegan but it was um at that time very predominantly plant-based lots of rice lots of vegetables not much meat really no cheese or ice cream to speak of and they really didn't have hot flashes other countries china rural mexico where the diet was mostly plant-based relatively little hot flashes but if they would westernize bring in the steak bring in the chicken bring in the cheese the hot flashes would start to come in so there's something about a plant-based diet that seems to help second thing soybeans when women consume a fair amount of soybeans it turns out that hot flashes are helped as well it doesn't seem to help everybody but it helps a lot of people um so we have actually recently been putting this to the test in a randomized trial here at the physicians committee if you would like to try to do the same three steps number one no animal products and just try if this is new for you don't make a long-term commitment just do it for two three months say eight twelve weeks no animal products keep oils really low and have about a half a cup of cooked soy beans every day that's not a lot pressure cook them on a sunday a portion them out in little like individual ziploc bags and have about a half cup each day and just track your hot flashes as the days go by if you want to you can after you cook them you can roast them throw them in the oven and a baking sheet lined with parchment 350 degrees for 30 minutes 45 minutes something like that and just use them as your snack food the combination of a plant-based diet and the added soybeans for many women seems to help their hot flashes enormously and if you give it a try let us know how it goes next question is i think it's it's a clever way to ask probably the question that vegans get asked more than any other uh exam roomy watching us right now on youtube rights i've heard that even though plants have all the essential amino acids they aren't as bioavailable as animal protein is that true and if so is it something that vegans should be concerned about okay well thank you for asking that um it's not something to to think about at all it's it's not a problem at all but for people who don't know what we're talking about uh proteins in your body whether they're the proteins that make up your skin or the proteins that make up your muscles or the proteins that are used to make hormones all proteins are built from what are called amino acids those are the the building blocks they're kind of like individual beads that join together to make a necklace and that necklace is the protein chain now you need the right number of beets and you need all of the right variety of them and some of them are called essential amino acids here's the point plants have all the essential amino acids now you'll see a little bit different makeup in say rice compared to beans compared to broccoli but most plants have all of the essential amino acids and a healthy plant-based diet of even a minimal variety of plant foods brings all of them to you so no it's not something to think about at all most people get far more protein than they need and you are not going to run protein deficient if you're eating just a normal amount of food and it's a variety of plant-based foods don't worry about it not a problem you know what dr berner we might have a professional athlete with us here today william on instagram uh sent in a question wanting to know should professional cyclists take iron supplements oh neat question uh good to hear from you william um no i wouldn't take iron supplements unless your doctor suggested recommends that you do um now but you're kind of thinking right uh that athletes often do run low in iron compared to other people and you'll see this um let's say a woman is now running she's training for marathons and whatever she's she's she's running low and her doctor says good heavens you know we're going to put you on on an iron supplement the reason i don't recommend iron supplementation for for anyone as a routine without testing uh is because iron is toxic iron increases the risk of heart problems it increases the risk of brain disease or it's associated with alzheimer's disease so like a lot of other metals copper is another one zinc is another one your body wants a little bit but it does not want too much what do you do if you see your doctor and your doctor says you are anemic you're not making enough red blood cells the doctor has to learn why and the doctor will do some pretty easy tests typically to to discover the source and if you happen to be low in iron then the doctor will talk about eating the right foods like green leafy vegetables and beans to make sure you're getting adequate iron now if you're a man and you're not having any monthly menstrual blood loss obviously um the likelihood of being iron deficient really pretty low for women a little bit higher but nobody really should be supplementing iron unless the doctor says you actually need to supplement because you're low because the risks outweigh the benefit all right uh really quick before we get to this next question uh yes or no you need some fat in your diet yes you do okay then this question from dino is an interesting one wants to know is it healthy to eat a zero added fat diet okay well now added fat is different from sort of the intrinsic fats if you take a take yes take a sprig of broccoli send it to a lab and you wouldn't think there's any fat on there and you didn't add any you didn't butter up your broccoli before sending to the left but they're going to tell you you know what that broccoli is maybe seven or eight percent fat as a percentage of its calories there are intrinsic fats in broccoli and spinach and all the green leafy vegetables there are traces of them in beans traces other than whole grains even brown rice about maybe five percent fat as a percentage of its calories um what's that fat uh the alpha linolenic acid that is the sort of the fundamental omega-3 is found in those green leafy vegetables there's not a lot but proportionate to the total fat content of those foods it's a substantial proportion and so that's fine but you asked about added fats so that's drizzling the olive oil on your bread or something like that no there's there's no need for that at all uh okay so zero added fat diet let's ask about another interesting diet this one comes from bill wanting to know whether or not there are any dangers to your health if you eat a predominantly raw diet you still include some cooked foods especially starchy foods but still a predominantly raw diet he wants to know whether or not that's a healthy decision yeah i think i think it's a great thing to explore um and let me plead a little bit of ignorance here because i don't think we know the exact right answer on this and i'll tell you why first of all i am quite convinced that we didn't evolve along with sterno on the planet in other words we weren't cooking foods until in the kind of historically relatively recently um i mean obviously people have been cooking for a very long period of time but the other great apes the other animals don't cook food and and we didn't either early in our evolution um and so you would think well we ought to do well on raw foods and um true enough but the problem is i don't know which those foods are um if you look at the food say that our cousins eat chimpanzees or gorillas they're quite different from the foods that are available to you in omaha we presumably started out our sojourn on earth in africa probably eastern africa and if you look at the foods that people might be eating in say north america they're different foods uh take a tomato take a peanut these are foods that are north american foods central american foods they're not african foods at all so yes i think raw food is a good idea but i have to confess i don't know which foods they really are but you can certainly explore them you can add them to your diet and the one thing i would encourage you to do is to still continue to make sure you get good complete nutrition have a variety of foods eat enough foods to make sure you can maintain your weight and do take supplemental vitamin b12 you need it for healthy nerves and healthy blood and you're not going to get it if you're not supplementing it or having fortified foods and you know we can go on from there with with other steps but those are the main things let's go ahead and take that question about the raw diet do a 180 on this one as well we have a follow-up from someone wondering whether an exclusively cooked diet is a healthy option um yeah you can do fine that way um and for some people in in some extremes uh on the planet it's gonna be pretty hard for them to get fresh foods but to tell you the truth i suggest that the more you do have uncooked raw foods in your diet i'm talking about leafy greens and fruits and so forth i think that's really a good thing and not something you would want to omit but there are people who live a long time much of their life without having much in the way of raw foods and they generally do well rules still apply vegan minimize the fats don't forget your b12 and we have time for a few more questions so if there's something on your mind that you would like to ask dr barnard go ahead and post that in the comments or the chat box and again tweet it to us using that hashtag exam room live here's another popular question uh this is from someone wondering whether it's possible to take too much b12 maybe uh great question and that's really a very current question i i if you had asked me that two years ago i would have said nah b2 if you have too much b12 you just excrete the excess no problem that may be true but after when was this maybe about 18 months ago something like that a paper came out looking at people over the long run who had extra high b12 levels and they didn't seem to do so well they had higher mortality compared to other people so it may well be that b12 is like so many other vitamins where you need a certain amount not much you need a certain amount but you don't need a huge amount so what does that mean in practical terms the recommended daily allowance is 2.4 micrograms per day for adults and so you go to the store and you think gee i can't find anything you hear that's small um the multiple vitamins are pretty small but all of the b12 supplements are 200 or 500 or a thousand micrograms a day um a thousand is really too much unless you have a specific medical condition where you can't absorb b12 that's what those are for um there is um a some room for error because your your body's absorption of it is going to be limited but what i would suggest you do is to take about 100 micrograms a day have that be your dose and if you went to the store and you picked up something that's got 5 000 micrograms a day i might even micrograms in a pill have that eat maybe every other day every third day um until the bottle runs out and then go back and get a small one i don't don't have that much every day on an ongoing basis we will be smarter about this in two or three years but for now it looks like it's good to get it's essential to get the amount you need i would would not really overdo it let's stick kind of in the same supplement type of question here uh this person is wondering whether it's better to buy soy milk that's been fortified with calcium versus the non-fortified soy milk what would your suggestion be you can um and calcium is something we all need in our diets and green leafy vegetables are of course nature's source in fact that's where cows get their calcium they're eating grass and so forth but hopefully we're not eating grass but we're eating broccoli and kale and collagen if you're eating lots of that and beans and other high calcium foods you're going to do fine uh but if you want to have supplemental calcium the supplement that's added to soy milk is fine and there's one thing i like about it is that it comes with your meal it's built into the meal if you take a calcium supplement between meals it seems to be increased it seems to be associated with increased risk of kidney stones if you take the calcium supplement with meals it seems not to be so i i've been a big believer in having your supplements with the meal why because then it adds to the other nutrients that are there as opposed to giving your body a huge wave of that nutrient all at one time all right we're going to take two more and let's go back to the iron thing we tackled it from one approach earlier in the show but now let's look at iron from another perspective millions of kitchens across the world have cast iron pans in them and someone is wondering whether or not a cast iron skillet is healthy or should they get rid of it no don't get rid of it what you should do is take that cast iron pan and think fondly of your grandma who gave that to you because this was her pan um and take it and put a nail in your wall and hang it up there and remember her every time you see it um don't cook with it um and because if you do cook with it the foods absorb the iron and if you are a woman in your reproductive years you'll have a certain amount of iron loss every month that will help you get rid of it but if you're not in your reproductive years anymore or if you're a man you're accumulating excess iron from the pan and that's going to increase your risk of alzheimer's disease and heart disease according to the best uh research that we have if you if you use a cast iron pan once a month probably no big deal but if it's your go-to pan every day you're getting more iron uh than you than you really want to be having let's wrap things up with one of my favorite questions this one comes to us from anjali wants to know whether frozen fruits and vegetables have as many nutrients as fresh ones yeah they sure do um now when you go to the store you look at the fresh produce and it is gorgeous and beautiful and you think there can't be anything more nutritious and you know that's true um but if you're buying frozen and you're thinking well this is so much more convenient for me uh i can keep it on my in my freezer for a long period of time and and i'll use a little bit and it's not going to go like like rubbery broccoli or rubbery spinach or something where you couldn't use the fresh up the right time frame don't feel bad about using the frozen because what do they do to give you frozen vegetables they harvest them they freeze them there's not a big delay if you're getting fresh sure it's fresh but it came from the fields into a truck into a warehouse and finally got into the store so there's a longer delay and there's more loss of nutrients in the process so fresh and frozen should really be thought of as nutritionally equivalent and the producer tells me that we still have a lot of good questions coming in so here's what's going to happen if we didn't get an opportunity to answer yours on the show today we are going to save it and do our best to get you an answer on an upcoming episode you have my word on that so keep on posting your questions in the comments and the chat box and we will do our best to get you an answer when we open up the doctor's mailbag once again and a quick scheduling note here you may have noticed since the new year began we're not doing live shows every single day now so here's what the deal is we're doing shows mondays wednesdays and fridays with the exception of this week which is a little bit weird because of the inauguration so uh we will be doing live shows every monday wednesday and friday so make sure that you join us right here on facebook and on youtube for those and of course brand new episodes of the exam room podcast are out every tuesday and thursday and every tuesday indeed includes tuesday and that is when we revisit uh the conversation with dr will bolsoewitz where we opened up the doctor's mail bag with him answered a whole lot of gut health questions including including how to deal with gas when you're first adopting that plant-based diet all right nobody wants to clear a room and dr bolsewitz has tips for how you can avoid doing that so all you need to do to get in on the fun is head over to apple podcast or spotify wherever shows are available hit that subscribe button when you look for the exam room podcast by the physicians committee and if you would be so kind please also leave a five star rating and coming up on friday's show back here on facebook and youtube i'm going to be joined by dietitian lee crosby and she has 10 count them 10 things you need to know about going vegan so that is at noon eastern 9 a.m pacific go ahead and like us on facebook or subscribe to this channel right now on youtube set a reminder so you can join us then but for today that is all the time that we have my friends i want to say thank you one more time to dr neil barnard for helping us raise our nutrition iqs and to the crew behind the scenes that makes the magic happen thank you as always and to you my damn roomies appreciate you being here as well for everyone at the physicians committee i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll talk to you again on friday but until then stay safe take a stand and keep it plant-based

Channel: Physicians Committee

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Length: 34min 12sec (2052 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021