How Much Fruit Should You Eat In a Day? | The Doctor's Mailbag with Dr. Neal Barnard

[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 and school is in session and the professor of nutrition leading the class today is none other than dr neil barnard we are going to be opening up the doctor's mailbag and answering your questions so if there's something on your mind related to health diet nutrition go ahead and post that in the comments or the chat right now you can also tweet it to us using the hashtag exam room live and i got to tell you we already have some great questions coming in including one from a viewer wondering how much fruit should they be eating every single day is the recommended amount that we hear is that enough is it too much we're gonna find out in just a little bit with dr barnard also have questions about iodine and b12 some questions about diabetes and fruit a whole lot in store for us today so get your question in again post it in the comments or the chat right now or tweet it using the hashtag exam room live but let's go ahead now and begin to raise our nutrition iqs let's go ahead and welcome in dr neil barnard to the exam room live how are you today sir great chuck how are you doing i'm doing phenomenal it's so good to see you i feel like we haven't done one of these shows in in quite some time so it's good to be back in the saddle my friend you bet great to be with you today all right let's kick things off let's not waste any time let's get right to the question the lead of the show this one comes to us from christian wants to know how much fruit should we be eating in a day okay um so how much food should a person be eating in a day really depends on on how much you want in other words there's nothing toxic in fruit such that if you were to eat a little bit more um then it would be harmful to you and if you ate five six seven eight pieces of fruit in a day it wouldn't it wouldn't harm you our biological cousins chimpanzees spend probably half their time eating fruit so it's really it's really not a problem sometimes people wonder about the sugar that's in fruit and there are natural sugars that are in fruit but surprisingly enough in research studies when you feed them to research volunteers you discover that the absorption of the natural sugars and fruits is very slow and steady it doesn't hit you like a punch the way uh let's say you got a soda and or you ate some sugar itself uh you get this real big speak spike in your blood sugar you don't see that with fruit it's much more gentle we call that a low glycemic index so if you like fruit have at it and that's a perfect segue to a follow-up question from shahad who writes that her husband has type 2 diabetes but eats a whole food plant-based diet and loves fruit eats eight servings of it every single day still she's a little bit concerned she wants to know even though uh you just said what you did should he still be limiting his fruit consumption um i don't think so i think i think it's fine um to have fruit i would i would mention that in the studies that i described earlier where you feed research volunteers various fruits and you see their effect on blood sugar there are two fruits that stand out as spiking blood sugar a little bit more and that's pineapple and watermelon but both of these are have so much water in them that it's hard to eat a lot of it so that you have really a very substantial sugar uh intake so we're going to give a green light to fruit and are there any fruits that you would recommend more than others say make sure if you're going to eat anything make sure it's citrus kind of the same way if you're going to eat any vegetable make sure it's a leafy green yeah great question um there's a huge variety and i think variety is is is the best thing the whole citrus family is great but but it's by no means unique um there are a couple of things that happen to be fruits that people don't think of them as and those are avocados and also olives and they are fattier than most other fruits so for those who might want to really be careful if you're trying to lose weight or trying to reverse diabetes and speaking of losing weight we have a great question here from kind counselor wants to know dr barnard will you please address weight in older individuals i'm 73 i'm vegan and i'm finding that my body is resisting weight loss yeah your body's looking out for you it's trying to preserve your your the amount of body fat that you have and the reason for this is that our bodies evolved a very long time ago when starvation was a real threat and so our bodies will actually try to preserve the very fat that you want to get rid of because your body's designed to do that and it'll slow your metabolism and increase your appetite even without you knowing it in order to keep the body fat that you have about the same so what can you do you can trick your trick your metabolism a little bit trickier appetite by um really reducing fatty foods and the the fatty foods since you're already vegan animal fat is not an issue for you which is great um but by avoiding the use of oils and cooking and avoiding nuts and nut butters and and guacamole that's really about it avocados um or really minimizing those foods um the reason for that is that those are the foods that our appetite tends to call for uh when it wants to rebuild our body fat stores and it can be unconscious you'll just discover you suddenly got a taste for peanuts um and it's this is your body fat saying i'm starting to shrink i want to build myself back up um by minimizing those kinds of foods you'll really minimize your your calorie intake because every gram of fat has nine calories stored in it but every gram of carbohydrate has only four so you go toward the fruits the beans the vegetables and so forth and you'll discover that for most people their weight starts coming down really pretty well you know when we're talking nutrition and plant-based diets protein is bound to come up so we have this one from esprit de corps wants to know is 20 grams of protein every day enough i doubt it i don't think so um the according to the us government uh the amount of protein that a person needs for for let's say an average sized woman 46 grams a day for an average size man 56 grams a day now uh in the spirit of your question is maybe i don't really need as much as that that is probably right because the 46 and 56 grams per day targets that the government set for women and for men um they had a little bit of a or maybe more than a little bit of a buffer so that if you didn't quite get to 46 if you're down maybe 40 or something like that you'd still be okay but 20 is really low and also it's hard to figure how you could get to 20 grams because grains and beans and vegetables and even fruits do have some protein in them so it's going to be hard to get down that low and and you would not want to um aim for the 46 or 56 and if if you're somewhere in that range you're going to be fine all right i want to go back to what it was you were speaking about earlier as far as a variety of foods you said variety seems to be the key here uh somebody by the name of fruity fairy uh writes can i eat 2 000 calories a day of exclusively fruit or are other things essential here so what would you say to somebody who wants to be a fruitarian today's show brought to you by the fruit industries do we have a sponsor i was unaware of it [Laughter] no um well first of all um okay let's reel it back in for a minute fruit is great but fruit should not be all you eat um there are really four food groups that are important for healthy grains beans and and when i say beans i mean the whole legume group that's lentils peas along with beans so grains beans vegetables and fruits um so i mentioned our chimpanzee cousins who will eat a lot of fruit but that's not all they eat um they eat leaves and shoots and blossoms all kinds of stuff and you should be too so um don't forget your vegetables don't forget your beans don't forget your grains and and within each group have really quite a wide variety of them of them so not just one grain not just one vegetable but have variety in each group and have all those four groups don't forget your b12 i'm sure that'll come up too interesting question here for you coming from shirley writes as a type 2 diabetic is it better to have lots of small meals or three big meals every day there's been a change in scientific thinking on this if you'd read the literature maybe 15 years ago 10 years ago everyone was pushing multiple small meals and the idea was that at no time of day are you giving yourself a huge bolus of food and and it seemed like there were some health advantages but in the past couple years there have been some studies have that have gone exactly in the opposite direction they've said have large meals and few of them so in some cases just say two meals a day uh one in the morning one may be in the early afternoon and that's it and dr hanna kaligova who's been on exam room uh many times and is our head of clinical research studies at physicians committee has done a lot of work on this area and it does look like having relatively few meals and having them be larger does have some some health benefits that said uh if weight is not really a big issue for you and you're generally healthy you can eat really when you're hungry because everything you're eating is something good for you b12 time crest a question from christian will fortified plant milk give us enough b12 uh probably not um unless you drink a huge amount of it um now i'm all for b12 fortification um for those of you who are a little new to this b12 is something you need for healthy nerves and you need it for healthy blood and if you're not getting it you can have nerve symptoms and you can have anemia and so forth so who makes b12 animals don't make it plants don't make it it's made by bacteria and so some people will say well before the advent of modern hygiene we would get b12 on the plants that we would pull out of the soil um maybe even on our fingers or in our mouths the b12 producing bacteria would be there for us well with modern hygiene that's gone and i'm not sure that was ever really an uh an adequate source anyway so in theory meat eaters get some b12 because the bacteria in their gut will make b12 and it gets into milk or gets into meat but even there a lot of them run low because they're not absorbing it very well from those sources often due to a lack of stomach acid or because they're on a medication like metformin that will interfere with midform uh we interfere with absorption so what do i do real easy you go to the nearest drugstore or health food store you buy a b12 supplement and the supplements all have way more than you need the amount you need is 2.4 micrograms not not not milligrams but micrograms per day 2.4 micrograms that's the amount of adult should have for good health so you go to the store and the smallest one you'll see is like 500 i think good evans um or a thousand or two thousand just get the smallest one that they sell or go online you get one that's maybe about 100 micrograms fine take that every day if it's a really humongous one like two like a thousand micrograms take that every other day would would be a good practice um and that's that's going to do it now if you look at soy milk as you were describing or nutritional yeast or other foods many of them are fortified with it but the amount that's there the little label will give you the percentage of the daily value and you'll see for most of them it's not 100 so i would get a supplement too follow-up question from pam here speaking of supplements wants to know if it's better to take a b12 supplement by itself or should you get it as part of a b complex vitamin uh either way it's fine because when when you get b12 itself what are you getting you're getting b12 if you get b complex you're getting the other b vitamins with it but the b vitamins are widely available in vegetables and fruits i'm talking about things like folate niacin these are are b vitamins that are widely available in other foods so you don't really need to take them as a b complex if you do it's safe won't hurt you so b complex is fine but the b12 alone will have you covered a lot of people turn to a plant-based diet looking for health benefits one viewer wants to know flat out how long does it take in order to see these benefits all right you're starting your plant-based diet now and you're setting your timer at zero and as the clock starts sticking what do you see um one of the first things that happens is a very small but perceptible loss of body weight that will that will happen the first week it for many people happens the first day um don't weigh yourself every five minutes you know weigh yourself once a week um and it will be slow and and steady if it's not happening then look for the fatty foods as we were describing earlier uh do a search and destroy get the oil and and fatty foods out of your diet um oh go ahead chuck no i i thought that you were finished i was just going to jump right in and move on but continue my first hold on hold on my verbosity filter must not be working today um a couple other things uh we talked about the weight kicking in um your cholesterol will start dropping but don't measure your cholesterol will bounce around a little bit i would suggest not bothering to measure it unless you until you have been on a completely plant-based diet for maybe eight weeks or something like that if you check it sooner you will see changes but let it stabilize more give it eight weeks 12 weeks or something like that blood sugar blood sugar is a funny one for the first couple days it can rise a little bit if you have diabetes now and you go on a plant-based diet if you're insulin resistant that's the hallmark of type 2 diabetes your blood sugar is probably going to rise a little bit and that might frighten you a little a little if you do a finger stick and you see my blood sugar is a little higher than it ought to be um be patient with it follow a healthy plant-based diet keep going and after about three four days it turns the corner and your blood sugars start dropping what's happening the fat is coming out of your cells it's coming out of your muscle cells coming out of your liver cells and now your insulin resistance is diminishing and those cells start taking in the blood sugar so for most people their blood sugar starts dropping within a few days and you can check a new hemoglobin a1c after about three months and you'll see the results and then there are some things that take much longer opening up your arteries again uh the beginnings of that will happen uh like a person who has chest pain their chest pain goes away it varies a lot but typically four or five six weeks into the diet but uh when dean ornish measured reversal of atherosclerosis he gave it a year um for all of these things i've been talking about some serious health issues like diabetes and angina and other things in all of these cases follow your doctor's advice um don't cancel your doctor's appointment and don't throw your medications away thinking well diet do it um you need to have the best of all possible medical worlds and and change your diet along with the changes your doctor is recommending not instead of them all right next question this is a great one it comes to us from kathy wants to know do fruit vegetables grains and legumes have to be included in every meal ah great question no they don't um let's say your breakfast is um corn flakes with soy milk what is that corn flakes are a grain and the soy milk is a legume product because it came from the soy bean um let's say for dinner you might have had a pasta with a tomato sauce and some asparagus on the side so there you got your vegetables and a grain and the tomato counts as a fruit um but you might want to have say your mangoes or papayas or apples or peaches uh as a dessert or as a snack as opposed to as part of the meal so no they uh have them as part of every day but not necessarily part of every meal we have a follow-up to the protein question that we asked earlier this one comes to us from starla she wants to know do you need more than the 50 grams of protein recommended if you work out every day you may um the more people work out the more protein that they need but um it's it's rather like oxygen you know if you work out a lot you need more oxygen right so what does your body do it increases your breathing you're breathing faster and faster you're taking in more oxygen your body is pretty smart so that when you're exercising a lot your body will take in extra calories it makes you hungrier so because if it didn't you would waste away so the added protein that you need doesn't really have to be planned as a protein shake or something like that it'll it'll just come along with the food that you're eating because you're now eating more food to nourish your exercising body here's an interesting question you know us humans we want exact numbers you know like right on the money and so this person is wondering about a good balance for their diet say they want to know my plate is 75 carbs 15 protein and ten percent fat is that a good combination i would try to get your fat down to nine point seven percent and your carbs up to seven seventy five point three no i'm kidding um the short answer is yes those numbers are great um it sounds like it's straight out of a textbook for what a healthy diet should be those numbers are great but you don't have to hit them on the money um a healthy diet because it's vegetables and fruits and whole grains and beans it's quite rich in healthy carbohydrate that's the best fuel for your body that's the fuel your your brain works on that's the fuel your muscles work on so carbs are good despite the fact that sometimes fat books give them a hard time um you need a little bit of fat um and so 10 has got you easily covered and the rest will be protein so you're you're doing great fantastic question here from nikki she writes i am wheelchair bound with zero activity but i want to go plant-based however i'm worried about not being able to burn enough calories can i tweak my diet to work for me okay um yeah first of all i'm sorry to hear that you're dealing with this particular challenge but you'll be glad to know that when we've done research studies where we brought people in and changed their diets and we've tracked the benefits in virtually all of our studies we ask our participants not to exercise and the reason or not to change their exercise so let's say i have somebody who's totally sedentary we say this is not the time to increase your exercise because if you do it will confuse our study it'll confound the study so when we have found that a plant-based diet helps regulate body weight or brings down blood sugar blood pressure blood cholesterol all of those are found independent of whether a person exercises or not and we have a lot of people who like you have been unable to exercise to any meaningful degree and that can be because as you mentioned uh you're not uh able to to to move without your wheelchair um there are people who have got such bad neuropathy that they're really having trouble ambulating some folks are have such serious weight problems they haven't been able to do meaningful exercise either but in all these cases the benefits really do come through you don't need to tweak it but the thing i would recommend is to eat for your appetite if you are don't eat for entertainment in other words a lot of us go to the refrigerator and we think about it we're not really hungry we're just bored don't do that so when your body is calling for more food you're having your normal sized meals that's good and and we won't want to be eating beyond that point this is another good question and it goes to the heart of i think what people look at as clean eating they want to do this thing as healthfully as possible but richard raises a great question here wants to know are canned legumes and vegetables still nutritious sure um what they did is they took the bean and put it in a can and sealed it up and sent it to you um where they run into trouble um is they will add things to it particularly salt and the salt the beans in their natural state almost all plants in their natural state have very very little sodium that's why it's part of why they're such so great for lowering blood pressure but the manufacturers know that you like salt and so when they're canning your vegan soup or your green beans they throw extra salt in there you can rinse it off to a degree or you can choose the non-salt added varieties uh sarah wants to get an early start uh on health for her kids uh wants to know is it okay to start vegan food for a six-year-old abs oh yes well yes the answer is absolutely and let me preface everything by saying that your child is lucky to have you as a parent because there are a lot of parents who haven't figured this out until their kids are like much older than that if then so yes um children can be vegan from conception by that i mean is that if mom's not eating any animal products during pregnancy and the baby is breastfed and the baby's solid foods after breastfeeding are all plant derived that is a great diet in fact that's the best kind of diet but let me give you the rules for any age after breastfeeding the rules are for food groups vegetables fruits whole grains and beans and make sure that your child has vitamin b12 that's as important for kids as it is for adults it's important for pregnant women it's important for nursing women important for everybody and a simple way to do that is just with the flintstones type vitamins or any pediatric vitamin it's it's it's um not only going to provide the b12 you need but it provides the reassurance that your child's grandmom needs to make sure that you know that their worry is your child getting complete nutrition you can say yes you know uh and you're you're uh if your pediatrician is not very well educated it'll reassure your pediatrician too so the four food groups vegetables fruits whole grains beans don't forget your vitamin b12 and you've got a lucky lucky child there next question my heart really goes out to this person looking for some help here edith wants to know what if you cannot control your appetite so what advice do you have for those who really feel like they're eating is out of control yeah um let me give some initial comments but chuck if you want to weigh in on that um as well i would invite you to because you've explored that and talked and thought given given a lot of thought to that as well um just for a start what we've been talking about is what a healthy diet is and when people eat healthy grains and beans and vegetables and fruits the payoff is enormous um but there's a psychological side of this apart from the physical side which is that we have cravings for certain foods and what we're doing is we're looking for things that give us dopamine in the brain and in the same way as cigarettes we'll do it or alcohol will do it foods do it too and it's it's specifically overeating and also eating certain kinds of things um people are by and large not binging on tangerines and iceberg lettuce um we are binging on salty greasy things and especially sugar sugar fat mixtures like a cookie um or cheese these kinds of things sometimes meat cheese combinations and many people of course have written on food addictions and i don't have a magical solution to it unfortunately because the reason is that industry is trying to get hooked um there are industries out there that are working very hard to find exactly the right combination of cocoa butter and fat that makes uh or cocoa butter and sugar that will make a candy bar absolutely irresistible and they place them in stores in exactly eye level and they're going to do everything they can to get you hooked and and the human mind is a fragile thing that can easily be hooked into things um my i'll give you a couple of suggestions though and then chuck i'll be interested in your thoughts um i found that for many people it's really useful to try to explore the reasons for it and come to understand uh what what issues might have fed into this and you you'll find you can spend years in psychotherapy trying to understand it but um understanding is not the same as being able to control something so sometimes it's really handy for people with any kind of addiction whether it's tobacco or alcohol or food to set up a fence and that is to say i just can't have this at all um so i'll tell you a story it's true that's true when i was a medical student i would i smoked cigarettes you know we weren't stupid um all the medical students and some of our doctors with the attendings would smoke too we weren't stupid we knew it caused cancer but we figured well it takes time to to uh for cancer to develop i'm under so much stress now i'll quit in a couple years well eventually you realize you gotta quit and so i did and we all did but i learned something about myself and something i think about most everybody which is that if there's something that's physically addictive like nicotine you're better off not having in moderation you're better off having none and so for many many of us are a little we'd like to think about moderation and all things moderation and addicting things is just a way to lead you back to a daily rut that you're gonna get stuck in so if there's a food that is that you love that doesn't love you back and it hurts you don't moderate it don't have a little bit just put a wall between you and that and just do not go there that's a little painful sometimes and there are times where you might make a mistake and regret it later don't moralize with it this is biology this is not morality um just set up the events again keep those words out of your life and hopefully you'll be able to meet your goals so those are a few preliminary thoughts chuck do you have some things you'd like to weigh in with yeah absolutely that is that is great advice i think that moderation is the reason why we have the term yo-yo dieting you know if you take those foods out of your diet altogether you're gonna be okay specific to food i had a similar uh story to to dr barnard with quitting cigarettes and i call this my one nacho theory because this one time i had lost 60 pounds was feeling fantastic and i thought man i've got this i can have one nacho and what happened that one nacho became second and then a third with nacho cheese and before you know it i was right back at the taco bell drive-thru up to my 20 a day in taco bell in my 10 000 calorie diet after that losing 60 pounds and it was because i had that one nacho and so you just it's going to stink there are going to be days when you are going to whine and cry and want to bang your head against the wall you're not crazy that is perfectly normal but i would encourage you to rethink i'll end with this rethink your original question what if you cannot control your appetite well what if you can that's the thing you can control your appetite that's the way that you need to look at it is it going to be easy absolutely not but you absolutely can so just head down grind it out eliminate those foods and i promise you over time you will be okay so edith best of luck to you i promise you there's no magical formula for this it's just make up your mind really really emphasize that willpower which you already have and you can do this thing all right time for a couple of more questions before we wrap things up here's a question dr barnard from aaron what are your thoughts on pre and probiotics for weight management uh i got to tell you the world of research has advanced and as it has my own thinking about this has has changed a bit um and just so that everybody knows the terms we're talking about um when people talk about probiotics what they're really referring to is bacteria that you take as a supplement and they go into your intestinal tract and they're friendly bacteria that help you um and we used to say that you should take those if you had an antibiotic that knocked out your gut bacteria take the probiotics and you'll repopulate your gut researchers recently did a study oh this is maybe six eight months ago where they showed that they re the restoration of normal gut flora does not require the probiotics at all in fact you do better without them they they just find their then natural healthy bacteria find their way into your system so what you do need what the most important thing by far is to have sort of the right soil to plant your garden so imagine if you're planting cactuses out behind your house the soil they need is completely different from if you are planting tulips or roses and if you want healthy gut bacteria the soil that they're planting it is what you eat so if you're eating meat chicken cheese and greasy things in general it fosters the growth of really unhealthy gut bacteria um but if you're eating the foods that we've talked about vegetables and fruits and grains and beans they provide a lot of fiber and healthy complex carbohydrates that fast that foster healthy gut bacteria and they do it really fast within about two weeks time so do you need prebiotics yes but but prebiotics are vegetables and fruits and whole grains and beans so that's what they are do you need probiotics not in a pill not from a health food store they'll just they will come to you naturally now there may be some exceptions on science changes and there may be something that i'm not yet aware of but that's the science as we see it now all right let's uh go ahead and grab this one from plantevity uh talking about the thyroid i know that uh this is something that you wrote extensively about in your book your body imbalance langevity wants to know does an adult who had their thyroid removed due to cancer still need to ensure a source of iodine in their diet oh great question uh what your body is using the iodine for is constructing the thyroid hormone um and you are i'm sure taking thyroid hormone your thyroid was effectively removed for cancer good on you it's good that you you got that treatment um cures are what we expect um and now you have begun thyroid supplementation i'm sure and so you no longer need that iodine to make that um to make that uh thyroid hormone anymore so um you're gonna get your hormone whether you have iodine or not all right last question the honors go to brenda is a cholesterol of 115 too low no um uh it we can be tricked sometimes when we look at our cholesterol test it'll have it'll say your total cholesterol is 115 and the normal values are and so the this is just pre-printed text that's the same for everybody on their lab slips and it'll say something like the normal values for total cholesterol or i'm going to make it up it could be something like 150 to 200 something like that and so you'll worry well if i'm under 150 am i getting into trouble no those are just statistical norms that doesn't mean that there's actually a a problem by going lower but when it comes to cholesterol your body does need some cholesterol it uses it for making uh hormones and making cell membranes but your liver makes all the cholesterol you need and you can be we have people with total cholesterol's under 100. they do fine they do they do perfectly fine so not to worry all right if we didn't get to your question today we will save it and do our best to get you an answer on an upcoming episode nicole i see your question you just posted it wondering about leaky gut i promise you we will get that on next week's episode we're going to be joined by gastroenterologist dr will bulswitz doing a deep dive on the gut so i promise you nicole join us back here wednesday next wednesday at noon eastern 9 a.m pacific we will get you an answer then but of course you can keep on posting your questions in the comments section or the chat box or tweet it to us at pcrm or chuck carroll wlc just make sure that you use that hashtag exam room live dr barnard thank you so very much for your time and answering so many of these questions today my friend glad to do it thank you chuck all right man we're going to do this again we do the live shows on wednesdays the live q and a's every single week so go ahead like i said keep on posting those questions dr wilbuswitz with us next week we also have new episodes every monday and friday here on facebook and on youtube and tuesdays and thursdays on apple podcast and wherever you get your favorite podcast from you can find us there as well so we are raising your nutrition iq five days a week my friend but if you would like to take a more intimate approach with your health and work one-on-one with one of our plant-based doctors or dietitians at the barnard medical center you can do that as well and all you need to do to schedule a telemedicine appointment is log on to barnardmedical.org or pick up the phone and call 202-527-7500 to schedule that appointment and get a full list of states where services are available and indeed they do take insurance they can answer any questions that you have so 202 527 7500 or log on to barnardmedical.org for this show that is all the time that we have i want to say thank you one more time to dr barnard for joining us and to the crew behind the scenes that makes the magic happen thank you guys as always and to you my exam roomies thanks for hanging out and raising your nutrition iq right alongside of us for everyone here at the physicians committee i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll we'll talk to you again next time but until then stay safe take a stand and keep it plant-based

Channel: Physicians Committee

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Length: 35min 54sec (2154 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021