How to Achieve Easy and Permanent Weight Loss with The Power Foods Diet with Neal Barnard, MD

and welcome to Chef AJ live I'm your host Chef AJ and this is where I introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that I think you should know about my guest today is a legend in the plant-based world I know you know him his name is Dr Neil Barnard and he has a new book coming out any day now well not any day it's in two months but that's any day now right around my birthday too what a great gift for me please welcome Dr Neil Bernard it's so good to see you it has been far too long great to see you AJ yeah so what you've written like 17 books haven't you oh something like that sure wow how how do you have time well you know it it is an important thing because you really have to make sure that what you're saying is Well researched and that it's um uh that everything's accurate and also you want to make sure that if you're talking about foods and recipes that they're all carefully tested and they're fun and the people really like them and that's what this is really all about because the point of the book um which I've called the power Foods diet is about foods that cause weight loss in other words it's not about not eating or starving or denying yourself it's about certain foods that actually cause weight loss and we're going to build them into our routine and watch the pound Bel away well I'm sure people want to know what that is especially this time of year we recently had Dr Doug Lyall on and he said that the number one personal goal at least in the United States is weight loss and I I feel like the Obesity rates just keep climbing you said it it's everybody's big preoccupation and that's really what motivated me to write this is because people do the wrong things they hurt themselves they decide I'm just not going to eat anything and then they starve and that slows their metabolism and it's can be really rough or they'll go ketogenic and their weight goes down and their cholesterol goes up um or they'll do all kinds of cooky things or they'll they'll go Mediterranean thinking well everyone says it's good but then it doesn't work for them very well because Mediterranean diets just aren't so hot for weight loss and people tend to blame themselves so we're going to try to get all that negative stuff off and bring some positive stuff in and that's all about eating the foods that love you back absolutely well I can't wait to you I do you have a cover at least to show us I'd love to see what it looks like yeah let me let me show you one um how about if I give you a little um two- minute introduction to the book and at the end of that I'll show you what the book looks like fantastic is that good sounds good can I share my screen oh please do okay okay this is a blueberry I hope you can see my blueberry there AJ and there's a whole bunch of blueberries and the reason I'm showing these blueberries is that back in 2015 researchers from Harvard published this study this will not be on the test but here's what they were looking at it was researchers at Harvard looking at over a hundred ,000 people in the nurses health study health professionals follow-up study and they tracked them for a good long time 24 years but what they looked at was what they ate particularly changes in Fruit intake changes in vegetable intake over time and changes in body weight and then they put the two and two together to see if people ate more of this did they lose weight if they ate more of that did they gain weight what was the story well there were a whole bunch of foods that seemed to be associated with weight loss and the number one weight loss food was berries wow yep and that could be blueberries could also be something like strawberries and it could even be blueberries inside a muffin um depending on what else gets baked into that muffin but here's the deal inside blueberries that dark blue color comes from anthocyanins and anthocyanins are one of Nature's pigments and they're in blueberries there's a related anthos in that GI strawberries they're kind of uh dark red color and in the Autumn the leaves are colored by other anthocyanins but what they all have in common is that they're antioxidants and researchers in the UK two years after the Harvard study said let's look in more detail what they did they published in the American journal of clinical nutrition they brought in twins almost 3,000 twins AJ yeah don't try this at home and it was called the twins UK registry and what they did is everyone got a dexa scan that allows you to look at abdominal fat thigh fat body composition overall and through the dexas scan what they discovered is of the twins the twin pairs the one who had the higher anthocyanin intake that's blueberries strawberries raspberries the one who had the higher anthocyanin intake had about 9% less abdominal fat now keep in mind these are genetically identical people but they're not identical if they're eating differently and more anth thein cause weight loss so strawberries blueberries raspberries there's even anthocyanins that give paars that are little blush grapes okay fair enough but it's not just berries cinnamon researchers started looking at cinnamon and they found a compound which they called they give it this kind of kooky name it's an alahh so they named it a cinam alahh um and what they discovered is that it increases metabolis inside your intestinal wall you have a receptor called the trpa1 receptor sitting there in your intestinal wall the cinam Malahide comes down attaches to it and when it does it increases adrenaline in your blood which boosts your metabolism just a little bit so researchers thought well wait and wait wait wait wait if I'm eating this and it increases my metabolism that means weight loss right well will it researchers published a study and they did a random randomized trial 2017 116 people in it they gave them three grams of cinnamon which is about a teaspoon per day and over a 16we period they saw a weight loss about not quite eight pounds in the intervention group now that's impressive and I I have to say when I first saw this I was skeptical I thought it's too easy but unho many many Studies have been done finding much the same kind of result and then hot peppers uh you might have had the experience AJ of you're sitting at a restaurant and your jalapeno burrito comes and you had just a few extra jalapenos and you start to feel hot well it's not just hot on your tongue your body temperature actually does increase a little bit and that's due to capsinoids which are the hot and hot peppers they also reduce the appetite but they increase your calorie burning speed and that's true whether they're pickled or raw or whatever the heck it may be so I got all excited about this and AJ here's my book The Power Foods diet the goal was to look not just at blueberries and not just at cinnamon and not just at hot peppers but there are dozens of foods that if you build them into your routine each one has a slight weight loss effect and so I worked with Dustin Harter whom you know and Lindsay Nixon whom you know and the great just terrific recipe developers and Dustin and Lindsay came up with more than 120 recipes and the whole idea is if you eat more of these Foods you're going to lose weight and they are out of this world so Dustin came up with a blueberry syrup and Lindsay came up with some french toast and you put the two together and it's just delicious and it's super super super easy I don't want people to think you got to be a junior Chef take some blueberries they can be frozen blueberries fresh little vanilla extract little cinnamon throw that in there too a little maple syrup if you want pour it over the top of your French toast which is easy to make too and when your friends are coming over you know this is not diet food let's put some vanilla extract in there some mints yes they're going to lose weight if they eat this way but you want people to feel like this is delicious food so let the weight come off let the health come back but do it in a really delicious way and Dustin came up with a triple berry sorbet which is blueberries strawberries raspberries few bananas in there for kind of substance just a little cranberry juice or cherry juice little maple syrup or these are the funnest things especially if you had kidss coming over they're blueberry pops super easy some blueberries some bananas some pears and a little almond milk and a spritz of lemon juice so fun so um also in the par Foods diet I'm I'm going to walk people through not just recipes that are uh really easy don't require any preparation I have some recipes that are elegant when you're entertaining and a lot that are kind of in between where if you like to to make something nice you can do that so everywhere from convenient to more complex but I also want people to know how to use these Foods some people haven't really thought about it so I'm going to say when you go to the store don't get the shriveled up dried up blueberries get the really plump ones with a little gray dusting and here you don't have to get organic for everything but for blueberries I want you to get organic and there's a reason if you are buying a banana and the banana was sprayed with pesticides well you're not going to eat the the peel same with an orange you're not going to eat that but with a blueberry you are not peeling your blueberries so um whatever is sprayed on the outside you're going to get so buy the organic ones do not put them on the countertop they're going to shrivel quickly store them in the fridge but do not wash them don't wash your blueberries until you're just ready to eat them because if you wash them the day you buy them and they stay in there for three days they're going to get a little bit of moldiness on them from the water don't do that uh Frozen fine very convenient very healthy and when you're turning them into muffins please don't add butter don't add greasy stuff with cinnamon the one you want to get is cilon cinnamon do not get Chinese cinnamon Indonesian cinnamon Saigon you you can but they're not true cinnamon they're it's a a cousin called cassia and there's some possibility of toxicity when you're having higher amounts once again organic makes sense with cinnamon particular store it out tight keep it in a dry cool place and you're going to be fine so that's power Foods so let me unshare and we talk more about that is oops my turned my camera I love your picture that I I can't wait for the book to come out the recipes sound fantastic but you're not suggesting that if somebody just eats you know blueberries with French toast if they're following the standard American dieting lots of animal products and oils that that in itself will help them lose weight no that is what I was saying I'm saying that that in itself will help them seriously but you want them to change a little bit further don't you then from eating the standard American diet and add AJ you are reading my mind exactly so each one of these helps chip away the effect of blueberries the effect of cinnamon the effect of of hot peppers and there are many many others each one of them is a piece of it but you can completely undo that benefit let's say you take your French toast and you have a big hunk of pork sausage next to it that's not that's going to really undo the benefit so it's also important to know the things that are working against you but there really three ways these foods work and the first one is that they're appetite Tamers um there are we did a study where we looked at people who were just following a totally plant-based diet so you're eating vegetables you're eating fruits you're eating grains you're eating beans what do they have in col they've all got a lot of fiber fiber has almost no calories but it's very fill and so over time what you see is that people's appetites get tackled by the high-fiber food If instead you were eating Vita or organic salmon that you got at Whole Foods well however they may Market it it's got zero fiber so by the time you get filled up with it you know you've gotten a lot quite a lot of calories so the first thing is their appetite Tamers the second is a discovery that some re researchers at tfts did did that was really quite amazing they brought in individuals and they found that if you ate a lot of fiber high fiber foods it act the fiber actually traps calories in your digestive tract and Carries those calories out with your waist what I'm saying is you're actually flushing calories down the toilet what they did is they brought in in volunteers half of them went on the white bread diet they got um white bread white rice things where the fiber had been removed and then the other half of the people got the high fiber diet brown rice rice whole grain bread things that had the fiber intact and they actually took fecal samples don't try this at home and they measured how much of their energy how much of the calories and the food went right through their bodies and ended up in the toilet without getting absorb and what they found is that when you eat a high-fiber food some of the calories in your digestive tract get grabbed by the fiber it carries it out of the body you can't absorb those calories and that change alone is good for about 100 calories loss every day and the third thing after I've tamed your appetite after I've trapped your excess calories the third thing is that I want to boost your metabolism and your metabolism increases after a meal not if you eat butter not if you eat grease those do not boost your metabolism but if you have healthy complex carbohydrates and plant-based proteins you can get a boost in your metabolism it's good for about 200 calories a day so back to your question AJ is is this going to cause weight loss each part alone does its B 100 Cal 100 calories 150 calories of calorie trapping 200 calories at Burning after the meal you could cut your appetite by easily two or 300 calories a day you feel the same you feel great you feel full after each meal but you are losing weight because you're tra you're trapping calories you're taming your appetite and you're burning calories faster and that takes care of it well sign me up well actually I don't need to lose but but you know what I mean I mean it sounds amazing what about keeping fats and oils on the lower side because I I've heard you had conversations about that before at least when I've I've interviewed you before at least for people that want weight loss yeah it's it's an important thing um all fats all oils have nine calories in every single Gram now not all oils are created equal if you have coconut oil it's really high in saturated fat it is going to make your arteries narrow it'll raise your cholesterol levels and I don't care how well they Market coconut fat or palm oil let's say oh they're natural you know I got it at the health food store D these things have a lot of saturated fat in it it's going to raise your cholesterol however let's say I get extra virgin olive oil it's much lower in saturated fat instead of being what 80 some per saturated fat like coconut fat it's down to 14 however even though it's lower in saturated fat extra virgin olive oil is not one bit lower in calories it'll still fatten you up just like coconut oil so we're going to keep all oils really really low and so when Dustin and Lindsay made their recipes they're not adding oils to these things you can make foods absolutely delicious without any adding any of that stuff at all it's a lighter flavor and one the people really appreciate that is great I it would be so fun to be in one of your studies how does if somebody lives in Washington DC can they participate well we're doing studies all the time we're we're launching a new study now with type for people with type diabetes and they come in and we're measuring uh a number of things in their bodies and uh the usual things we're looking at their dietary intake and their weight and their cholesterol but as you may remember from our previous conversations we found that what causes diabetes type two diabetes it starts as insulin resistance which comes from fat buildup inside our cells and we can actually measure that with something called magnetic resonance scanning and so you look inside their muscles look inside their liver cells and you see that they're filled with fat particles then we change their diets if it's a plant-based diet a vegan diet there isn't any animal fat in it at all and if I keep oils low then the fat in their cells starts to dissipate and that's what we're doing so the point is that this kind of diet doesn't just help you lose weight but it helps tackle diabetes and so many other health conditions right so you know I think it gets confusing because as you mentioned earlier people do these keto diets which are very high in fat and they lose weight and so people wonder well maybe that's the way to go because they seem to result in fast but not permanent weight loss uh some people lose weight with them some people don't there's okay well there's a long there's a long line of disciplin J Atkins dieters out there um people who who tried it for a little bit it didn't work for them and they you know go into any Thrift Shop you'll see a whole lot of those books that have been just turned in and people have given up on it however I don't mean to say that that some people don't lose weight on it they will because the the carbohydrate blaming approach says that carbs made you fat so don't eat an apple and don't eat a banana and don't eat an orange and don't eat a pear and don't eat any any bread and don't eat any rice and don't eat noodles and carbohydrates are 50 or 60% of what you eat so if you take all that away you will lose weight the problem is that what's left for your average mediator once you've taken away all the starchy Foods what's left is meat and gravy and not very healthy foods their their overall calorie intake is less but what's left is not very healthy so their cholesterol levels in many cases will go up yeah absolutely and this way of eating is just to me so much more satisfying I I mean it's been almost 50 years for me I can't imagine eating just a bunch of meat and fat yeah um but it you know for many people it's a new thing and so we have to help people to figure out how to begin it in in a good way and what we'll often do is um for a person who's totally new to it they may be 50 or 60 years old and they thought you know I really want to re reach my health goals but I'm not sure about what how a vegan diet would work how do I start what we'll typically do is encourage them to take a week and during that week take a piece of paper and just write down breakfasts and lunches and dinners things that have no animal products in them but that you actually would eat so let's say I'm having corn flakes in the morning morning now with milk how do I veganize that well I put on almond milk or soy milk or something like that okay fair enough or I could have a bowl of oatmeal instead or I could have my waffle recipe or whatever it might be um or if I'm having Jimmy Dean pork sausage that's an animal product but the store has Morning Star veggie sausage very good low in fat you know it may be a little processed but it doesn't have any cholesterol and no no oink in it no moo in it and we'll give that so after about a week people have a list of vegan things that they really enjoy and then what we often encourage them to do is take three weeks now and eat those Foods let's go completely vegan but if it's only three weeks I mean you can do anything for three weeks and so people really commit to it plus they've already got their list of foods they like and at the end of three weeks AJ people's lives have transformed they've already started to lose weight even though it's just been 21 days they're blood sugar has come down their energy is better and the second thing that happens is their tastes have changed because they haven't been eating greasy Foods they really come to prefer the the healthy tastes that they're having now well it's already a bestseller in on Amazon and I've been putting the link for pre-order in the chat and the show notes so I'm sure it's going to do very well and we have a question from a live viewer about the blueberries do they have to be the wild blueberries and do they have to be organic to work okay well thank you um they work whether they're organic or not um what we believe is is doing the the the good here is those anthocyanins which are there in the non-organic varieties too plus the fact that they there's not much fat you can't really squeeze a lot of fat out of a blueberry um and it's high in fiber however the reason I encourage you to get organic yeah it may cost a buck more or something like that at the store but the reason I favor organic when it comes comes to berries is that as I was mentioning a little bit earlier let's say you go to the store and you get an orange and the orang is not organic meaning they sprayed the Orange Grove with with pesticides when you get the orange what do you do you peel the outer surface off of it and you throw it away now if you get a blueberry do you peel that no you don't you're going to eat the whole thing so if there are pesticides on the surface you're not going to get them from your orange cuz you peeled it but you will get them from the blueberry so I would encourage you to get organic if you can't get organic and blueberry or you're unsure because you're at a restaurant um it's better to have the blueberries than not have them but but the organic ones are always the best thank you uh Monique who's watching live says is it okay to use coconut oil for oil pulling or oil pulling I'm not sure what that is maybe you could it's something I don't know about oil but I'm going to tell you what you can use coconut oil for you remember I said it's going to raise raise your cholesterol it'll raise it a lot it can easily put 10 points on your cholesterol level so here's the legitimate uses of coconut oil you can make a candle on it you can put it in your hair you can wax your car with it and wax your shoes and that's about it thank you uh Dixie says do you consider potatoes a weight loss food yeah I do um surprisingly enough because potatoes get a little bit of a bad wrap people say oh you know that's just junk food what they're thinking of is the person took an innocent potato and they cut it into little slivers and threw it in hot grease and out it came as potato chips and they salted it up so it's got a lot of salt it's got a lot of grease that innocent potato is now really a bystander for processing but the potato itself is a healthy root vegetable let me cheerlead for the potatoes in a couple ways number one it's got a lot of fiber in it it's got a lot of clean uh complex carbohydrates which is great for energy and write this down there is more protein in a large potato than there is in a large egg the egg industry will tell you oh eggs are a great source of protein you go to the store or go online and you look at a large egg it's got maybe five or six grams of protein in it look at a large potato it's got about seven grams of protein in it so Pro eggs um potatoes are a great helpful food the real issue is what goes on it what happens where I grew up in North Dakota you took this beautiful baked potato you put it in the oven you took it out we cracked it open put butter sour cream cheese Doodles Baco bits you got to look around wasn't there a potato in here event you know before those fatty toppings are what kill us um but the potatoes itself potato itself is fine you might remember the comedian pen Gillette who was he had a big weight issue and he thought I want to take this weight off and he ate almost nothing but potatoes and lost weight he's not the only one other people have done it too you want a variety of plant-based Foods you want vegan foods in the whole rainbow that nature came up with but potatoes should be part of it they're they're terrifically help right um Monique clarified that oil pulling is swishing oil in your mouth for 20 minutes apparently it's good for mouth Health would seem like she'd still absorb some of it uh new one on me um but let if you might find that oil leave a little bit of a bad taste in your mouth when I tell you this um let's say I take an olive and Olive has traces of oil in it no big deal um it's not a huge amount how many olives can you eat well think about it did you ever eat one Olive at a sitting or two or three yeah you might have did you ever eat 12 or 13 now you're kind of pushing it well let's say I have a factory and I take 10,000 olives and I press all the oil out of it I stick it in a bottle and I call it olive oil even if you use a nice seductive word like virgin on it it's still a refined product in the sense that you have thrown away all the fiber throwing away all the pulp you've thrown away the whole Olive except for that oil it's now concentrated calories and that's why when our research team did a study of the Mediterranean diet which favors some some healthy foods I mean there's vegetables in it and fruits in it and so forth but there's some chicken in there some fish and often a lot of olive oil in a 16-week trial we found that people who wanted to lose weight but went Mediterranean really didn't lose weight effectively at all and it's because of the animal fat that's in the fish and the chicken little bits of cheese they're eating and the uh the olive oil as well so I would really view oils including olive oil including coconut oil including all of them as refined foods that nature didn't bring you a factory brought that to you yes thank you oh one of the viewers on Instagram is asking how they can be a subject in one of your studies they are a type two diabetic oh well thank you um if you go to our website pcrm.org and you'll see research studies listed there we are just now actually recruiting for a diabetes study as I mentioned earlier this one is in Washington DC we sometimes do have studies for people who are in other locations this one's in Washington DC but if if you're there and you've got type two diabetes we'd love to talk to you that is great you know people are still no you know you've written so many books and so of so many other books from the plant-based doctors and documentaries but people still are afraid of carbs I it's it's it's so strange to me that I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Dr Walter kentner I had two of the doctors that worked with him on the show and people that just eat white rice lose weight I I don't get why people still are so afraid to eat complex carbohydrates um yeah there are a lot of mysteries I mean many people imagine if they they pray to God that their their High School football team is going to win the game people have all kinds of ideas about things that that may not actually work out so well in the long run um and this idea that carbohydrates are something to be avoided or fats are to be revered those are are things that are a bit mythological our team has put these to the test and what we find is that when we increase carbohydrates um by that I mean what I'm talking about is healthy fruits healthy vegetables including starchy vegetables like carrots and potatoes um or beans noodles they lose weight very very easy and our mathematician friends will show why a gram of carbohydrate does it have the same calories as oil no a gram of oil a gram of fat a gram of butter has nine calories a gram of carbohydrate has all of four and by the way that's true not just for starches that's even true for pure sugar if you took packed sugar I'm not suggesting you should do that because it's highly refined as well but it only has four calories in it as well so carbohydrates are among your best friends thank you Marcy who's watching live wants to know how long does it take to notice weight loss on a plant-based diet well it starts on the first day um now I don't encourage people to really try necessarily to lose weight super fast if you're let's say it took you a long time to to gain weight and you were gaining maybe a pound or two per year well let's say you lose a pound a week um after a year that's about 50 some pounds that's pretty good so typically the weight loss Will begin on day one but we want it to to act I would encourage people to go for about maybe even a half a pound or a pound per week just let it gently come off you don't have to starve yourself to make it Happ an extra fast right I think that's a lot of times people want it very quickly and they they give up because it doesn't come as quickly as they want yes but you know that's the beauty of a plant-based diet because with this kind of diet it's not really effort it's not that you're starving at off and feeling hungry and miserable all the time and it's not that you're feeling a need to exercise it off exercise is great but the foods themselves if they're carefully chosen will do the weight do the weight loss for you yeah fantastic this question was said to us in advance when Melanie knew you were going to be on the show and she said she's looks forward to reading your new book I've been posting the link you guys can pre-order it from the chat or the show notes and she said she heard a local doctor say that in general one should never take B12 alone it must also be taken with always be taken with all the B vitamins like in a b complex pill what are your thoughts on this I never heard that yeah well it's a terrific question um the beauty of it is that B12 is very highly absorbed whether it's taken with other things or not so it's okay it's okay to take it alone um and even people who are up in years um and who are not absorbing B12 from food there theyve been an omnious diet and they're running low on B12 because they're not absorbing it very well anymore uh when they take it as a supplement the absorption is really very strong so it's it's going to be fine either way thank you okay oh this is not about weight loss but um Marlene who's watching live would like to know should I take replacement hormones for better health during and after menopause oh my goodness sakes um what an important question thank you so much for raising that you know many women at around age 50 when they reach menopause are hit by hot flashes um and you feel kind of terrible um you're sitting in your board of director meeting making a presentation and suddenly it's as if the room turns on fire um and or you're trying to sleep and every two or three hours you wake up in a pool of sweat and hot flash is can to really be uncomfortable and so doctors then will often recommend hormone replacement therapy and their idea is that nature forgot to keep you signed up for estrogens after about ag50 and so if you just swallow it or put it on a patch that those extra hormones will make you feel better the problem well there are many problems with this one is um there's substantial evidence that uh women taking hormones are at increased risk of certain kinds of cancer and recently the question of increased risk of dementia has been batted around and some data said no it's going to reduce the risk but there have been two big studies that suggested an increased risk of dementia from people taking hormones um by the way I mention that at our conference on August 15th the International Conference on nutrition in medicine in Washington DC uh we will be having these researchers there sharing these data so bottom line uh women need help if they' got hot flashes and have other symptoms but in my opinion taking hormonal replacement bills is not the way to go about it uh we did a research study where we brought in 84 women who were going through who had gone through menopause and they had pretty bad hot flashes and what we did Drew on an interesting science which is if you look around the world you see that in some areas people really didn't have much H flashes women in rural Japan uh prior to westernization didn't really have much in the way of hot flashes uh because their diet was more plant-based people in rural Mexico didn't have much hot flashes as long as they were eating black beans and corn tortillas and not having much Western Fair so our intervention was three things and if you have hot flashes here's what I recommend you to do number one no no animal products at all just don't take this on faith just try it no animal products at all number two keep oils extremely low and I'll I give you tips on how to cook without without oils number three have soybeans mature soybeans a half a cup of cooked soybeans per day you can go on Amazon and you'll find for example a Laura brand non-GMO soybeans put them in your instant pot cook them for 40 minutes and use them like a medicine so vegan diet very scrupulous ly low oil and have a half a cup of cooked mature soybeans every day and what we found is that the moderate to severe hot flashes drop by 88% uh for some women it starts the first week for many it takes four or five weeks to or maybe even longer to work but that way you don't have the risks of hormone replacement therap if a woman is wants to use um some hormone replacement perhaps for sexual functioning because she has some vaginal dryness in that case you don't want a pill you just use a local cream so that you're not so that's what I was going to ask you because I've had a lot of urologists on the show that really recommend either the UVM or the estrace which is uh topical not because they they they have a lot of science showing that it it prevents UTI especially in people with chronic UTI and the the beauty the beauty of that approach is you're using something local you're not just swallowing it because the whole idea is not to treat your whole body part part this idea is you're just treating the part of the body that that that could benefit from it thank you Anette says should all the five foods you mentioned be eaten every day well the the the Staples that you really want to have every day come in four groups the fruits the whole fruit group the vegetable group The Bean Group that's beans peas lentils and whole grains have those every day build your menu from those now if you decide I'd like to have blueberries today but tomorrow I'll have strawberries or I'll have raspberries or maybe I won't have berries on that particular day that's okay the whole point of the power Foods diet is that there are about 30 foods that are like blueberries like cinnamon like the hot peppers that I mentioned that they have a weight loss function and my job is just to tell you here's where they are here are some recipes that make them absolutely out of this world thank you Dustin thank you Lindsay um and you you pick and choose and you put them to use as much or as little as you want to and the the weight loss comes more or less automatically great thank you uh farm girl says that some people say that raw is better than cooked for health reasons but I love and prefer my veggies cooked and don't mind eating more vegetables to starch to compensate for the extra calories is are raw is raw better is raw more healing yeah what a great question um I have to say I think there is something just to be said that raw would in theory be better I mean we did not evolve with Sterno so um we presumably we're eating raw vegetables and raw fruits for much of our time on Earth the problem is this we don't know which ones those were um for example if a person has a salad and they have cut up tomatoes on their salad a tomato is a North American food well people are not originally from North America people evolved in Eastern Africa and we got restless and we moved up and uh went up into Europe into Asia and over the bearing Strait and all different places and Europeans came and invaded and um we've moved all around um so the foods I'm going to suggest that the foods that were there in Eastern Africa when our species was more in its early years those might be the raw foods our bodies are designed for but we're not entirely sure which ones they are the health value of cooked vegetables is very high and in some cases even higher let's say if I have uh tomatoes that are broken up and cooked a little bit the lopine that makes them red is liberated that's an antioxidant and there's actually more of it if if the the um if the tomatoes are cooked so cooked is fine uh I do think it's good to include a fair amount of raw veget raw vegetables but some of them don't digest well broccoli cauliflower brussels sprouts if you try to eat them raw your tummy is going to give you a little bit of an issue yep someone's asking is bino safe for gas due to beans and legumes I Googled it and it says it's not vegan If That Matters to someone yeah well well um there might be a more a simple approach for a lot of people when they greatly increase their Bean consumption their stomach will Rebel a little bit and that's because your sudden beans are the start the fiber Champions there's fiber in whole grain bread there's fiber in vegetables and fruits but beans have more of it than anything and so if suddenly your gut microbiome gets this huge importation of fiber it ferments it and it makes gassiness so the trick the trick to it is number one start small a little bit of beans goes a long ways number two make sure they are very well cooked if you are cooking beans don't have them be Al Dente if they crunch they're not digestible and sometimes when you get a can of beans and you open it up some of the manufacturers cook them well and they're nice and soft for others they're it's almost like they're giving you a can of peanuts you don't want that um and over time what you'll discover if you start small and have them well cooked as time goes on your your gut microbiome will adjust and you'll find that you might be a little bit better off with some varieties than others but you'll be fine thank you one of the viewers is asking why do beans get a bad wrap from a doctor who shall remain nameless oh yeah well there there there are do there there is a doctor who talks about lectins in beans and goes on and on and on about the danger of it um there are lectin um in a lot of foods you you cook them and they're gone um so I have no idea um when you look in epidemiologic studies people who eat more beans are are healthy and are particularly healthy in a a wide variety of ways high fiber zero cholesterol no animal fat beans are Health Food thank you Mercy wants to know are mushrooms good for us you know the one thing that mushrooms have gotten um some notoriety for or some Fame for I should perhaps say is is cancer reduction there have been a number of studies suggesting that women consuming more mushrooms um have a reduction in breast cancer risk now here is something where I think they should be cooked uh if you gather a whole bunch of raw mushrooms they have traces of her alahh in them which disappear upon cooking so if you want to put them in your vegan strogen off you go right ahead thank you Mo'Nique says she really likes the recipes in your books and she makes your bean-based waffle a lot oh how nice thank you well you are going to absolutely love the power Foods diet you know when I worked with Lindsay I worked with Lindsay on my previous book um which is called your body imbalance and all about how hormones can be adjusted and I worked with her again uh in the power Foods diet but I also worked with Dustin Harter who works with the Physicians committee as our our culinary genius and the two of them together came up with the most wonderful recipes everything from salads and soups to main dishes and sides and desserts and and as I mentioned earlier for the person who wants to cook we have easy recipes for a person who wants to kind of put on airs for their guests who are coming over we've got some elegant recipes but for the maybe 50% of people who say for me it's really got to be convenience we have recipes and tips for people who really want to work get in and out of the kitchen or do it at a fast food place do it at the convenience store so you may not be cooking at all so we've got tips for everybody and we want to say a big thank you to Dustin and to Lindsay for working with me on the power Foods diet it's been been really really fun and the response to it so far has been really great oh fantastic I can't wait to get my hands on it but I see it's also available in Audible and I tend to like to do that yep yep I hope people enjoy that and people need to know when you buy an audible book you still get the recipes so just so you know so that's you know I we recently had Dr Doug Lyon and there was a question and I remember it now that we said when when Dr Barnard comes on we're going to ask him because somebody was asking about because you you you talked about hormone so much in your previous book that is the reason that uh young girls are reaching puberty so much younger have anything to do with milk it could well um and not just milk but particular milk fractions like cheese um this goes back a long ways if you go back to say the mid 1800s or the early 1800s girls were not reaching puberty at 11 um in some cases it was 17 or 18 um and it's gradually descended through the decades and today it's not at all unusual for a girl of 11 or 12 or 13 uh to be reaching puberty and yet if you think about it wait a minute why would you be reproductively fertile at 11 because you're not ready to be a mother at 11 you can't raise a child and take on the responsibilities of adulthood why should you be sexually mature and I don't think that that's what nature had in mind at all um I think that this is a change and if you look at the diet back in 1909 the US government track started tracking what Americans eat and in that year the average American ate some cheese about 3.9 pounds per year in other words they might be eating it in Switzerland but they're not eating it in Nebraska not very much cheese was not our thing 3.9 pounds per year well the US government has been pushing US Foods us agricultural products including cheese and today your average person does not eat 3.9 lb of cheese in a year we eat close to 40 lb that's good for about 70,000 calories worth of cheddar or Brie or camire or Vita or whatever your particular brand is um and so along with all those calories comes estrogens uh the cows just to be a little bit um graphic if you don't mind AJ um to get cheese or to get milk cows are not going to automatically give you milk a cow has to be impregnated and on farms they don't really particularly feel like getting preg so what the farmers do is they chain them by the neck and they stick the the farmer sticks his left hand up the cow's rectum and through the rectum wall you can feel their uterus and you hold it steady with your right hand you take what looks like a knitting needle and jam it through the cow's cervix and you inject seam and you took from a bull the cow is now pregnant nine months from now she will give birth and the male Cals of course are taken away and killed for ve U the female caps are also taken away and they're rais raised on milk replacer in isolation until they are ready to be impregnated so Mom is now uh she's she was pregnant she's now given birth she's now lactating and then within about three four months they'll impregnate her her again and the reason I'm telling you all this is she is making estrogen and she's making more estrogen during her next pregnancy and they've been milking her since she gave birth they milking her into the next pregnancy they keep milking and milking and milking and while she is now pregnant with her next calf she is creating a lot of estrogen it gets into the milk the milk it turns into cheese it carries the estradiol estrogens with it estrone estradi and others and if you drink a glass of milk if you have some yogurt if you have some cheese or if you give it to your seven-year-old daughter or your 8-year-old son the estrogens come right along with it will it affect them there are the dairy industry says no no it's not very much it's just a trace of estrogen it's it's really not not much the fact of the matter is it's enough because your body already has all the estrogens that nature wanted you to have and if you're adding more to it this could be the reason why we have two big new research studies showing a link to breast cancer with Jerry we have changes in uh in menstrual function all kinds of other things so so getting away from Dair is one of the best gifts you can do for yourself and an even better gift you can do for your children thank you ad says she can't afford organic is it okay to eat conventional produce if if you're in a place where conventional is all you get or all you can afford by all means have it it beats the heck out of spam in Vita yeah true that thank you all right let's see I was looking for some more qu oh yeah here we go oh where can we find the bean based waffle recipe what asks Carolyn oh thank you I have to say all of my books have lots and lots of recipes in them and I hope that you'll take a look at at all of them because they they're they're really good and I've worked with many different recipe developers so this book is called the power Foods diet this is the one that I think is I think is probably the Pinnacle of of all of them but the one just before that is the one we're talking about have a look it's called um your body in balance and it's about getting your hormones in Balance whether that hormone is insulin for diabetes or estrogen for cramps or menopausal symptoms or for men erectile dysfunction or thyroid hormone that kind of thing thank you and yes Karen you do get the recipes they're not printed for you but there's a link anytime you buy audible that's the case in my book any book that has recipes and Clark asks what does Dr Barnard think of consuming AI flour oil Corella powder Moringa powder amla powder which are often considered superfoods yes I have to say I am not an expert on on really any of those um uh and so I I don't think i' would say anything very intelligent about any of them okay thank you and somebody's asking what do you think of adding flax Chia and hemp seed to your food I think it's fine um they are good sources of Omega-3 um if you Ed enormous quantities the fat content could actually build up but let's face it how much Chia do you eat how much flax do you eat maybe a spoonful so it's perfectly fine yeah absolutely there's a question from an Instagram viewer are there some foods that can improve hypertension oh all kinds of things sure um things to include things to get away from the things to include you already know vegetables and fruits will reduce blood pressure part of the reason is that when fruits and vegetables grow out of the ground they don't have a lot of sodium in them sodium raises blood pressure plants don't have a lot of it what they do have is potassium that lowers blood pressure they're loaded with it so fruits and vegetables are good what's not so good you already know that sodium raises blood pressure if you get away from Salt added salt that's going to help but here's the thing it's not the salt you're adding at the table the amount that you add at the table is Trivial compared with the amount that they added in the kitchen or the amount they added at the factory they took a can of green beans which had basically no salt salt in and there's almost no sodium in the bean but they put in a huge amount before they seal up that can because they know that makes it taste good and that's true for canned soups and lots of other things but the good news is that you can look for the low or no sodium varieties and you'll be fine but the last thing I want to mention is if you haven't yet gone vegan do yourself a favor here's what happens your blood your blood pressure is high um when a person gets away from animal fat there's not a lot of that waxy fat getting into your body your bloodstream your blood flows more readily why because without that animal fat in it the viscosity of the blood the thickness of the blood diminishes your blood becomes it flows like water instead of sort of sludging like grease so when you get away from animal products especially the cheese the meats and so forth your your blood flows more readily and your blood pressure comes down so put this all together have your vegetables and fruits they are great get away from added uh sodium added Foods cheese is one of the worst it's got a huge amount of sodium in it um but when you get away from the cheese and the meat together your blood viscosity goes down and your blood pressure is going to come down all of this said do not fire your doctor and don't throw your pills away high blood pressure is dangerous so your blood pressure is very likely to improve but work with your doctor and reduce your medicines only when the doctor says you're doing well now with time time for us to slack off on your medicines a great many people can reduce or eliminate their prescriptions but uh do it and do it in consultation with your doctor not on your own and speaking of doctor you have the Barnard Medical Center now so people can come in to see a wonderful plant-based doctor is that correct and I don't know if you do any virtual visits we do all kinds of it yes the Barnard Medical Center you'll see it uh online Barnard medical.org and we've got terrific Physicians and dietitians and other here in the clinic and uh we see people live and in person um at our our clinic on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington DC but we do a lot of work with tele medicine so let's say you're in San Francisco or let's say you're in LA or you're in New York or you're in Florida or wherever you are go on Barnard medical.org and you can make an appointment and we take most insurances it's a nonprofit clinic but we got the greatest doctors and would love to help people out that's great well Dr Jim Lumis now has a regular slot on my lineup so we're very excited to to welcome him so a lot of the people are saying they appreciate you telling the truth about Dairy is as sad as it is so thank you for that and you know while all your books are wonderful I might say that my personal favorite is breaking the food seduction because you're one of the few doctors at least in the plant-based space that really acknowledges food addiction and I'm curious what role do you think that plays in people's difficulty losing weight even with the right food sometimes you know some people might say well uh you will find people occasionally who are really addicted um to to Foods almost like a drug and you know what I don't think that's true I think what is true is that everybody can be addicted to foods like a drug not just a few people everybody can why is that because there are foods that are being marketed very much in the same way as drugs people will take something like chocolate or other things and there are people working long into the night to figure out exactly the combination of sugar and cocoa butter that you cannot resist exist um these things salty snacks all kinds of foods that people get hooked on but they have in common is that they were not things that were there during our early Evolution think about it what do people get hooked on um alcohol cocaine heroin all these things did not exist early on people didn't have a glass of wine until they figured out how to ferment grapes and then uh or things like tobacco it took time for people to discover these things and when they entered our cultures we didn't have ways to defend our ourselves against them so you can have um you know a terrific upbringing and so forth you can still get booked on Foods it's not your fault it's not your parents fault it's not your upbringing it's the foods themselves that are addictive as drugs and unfortunately we live in a culture now that brings them to you um when I was a kid we didn't have convenience stores on every corner but nowadays you'll find junk food at the gas station all you want to do is fill your tank but they want to sell you M&M all kinds of other stuff so that's that's world that we live in nowadays um can people eat unhealthy foods every now and then be okay sure they can but if it's get if it's getting a life of its own and your thighs are expanding before your very eyes and you're feeling crummy and your life is being ruined and you're getting Health uh health problems then that's the time to take stockach and decide do I want to break free and my suggestion this is going to sound unamerican I don't think moderation is such a great thing for everything you know there are some people say well okay let me just cut down what you're doing is your bark in with it um let's say let's say your seven-year-old daughter likes to play the violin and she's been playing the violin for about four hours now you say sweetheart you got to set the violin down because I know you got some homework and we're going to have dinner in a little bit no she say all I want to do is play the violin well violin is is a healthy thing and if she can moderate that fair enough what if all she likes to eat is broccoli well great that's healthy but she's got to eat some other things too U moderation is important for broccoli but when your daughter says to you Dad how many cigarettes should I have you sayn you shouldn't have any well but Dad you said moderation moderation applies to good things you want some exercise you don't want to exercise 24 hours a day you want some you want some broccoli some fruit some beans some grains moderate amounts of all these things but if something is bad for you you want it out of your life because what happen s unfortunately is that small amounts kind of whisper in your ear and it becomes a larger amount and a larger amount and a larger amount and pretty soon uh you just really miss them when they're gone and it's better not to tease yourself thank you one of the Instagram viewers is asking if leafy greens can slow the progression of cataracts you know I don't think the answer to that is really known but but leafy greens to are rich in antioxidants and C cataracts are AE a the formation of free radicals inside the brain inside the eye in response to ultraviolet light um and there have been a couple of things that have contributed we believe a high antioxidant di is helpful um however we also have some evidence surprisingly enough that Dairy may be a contributor um I think we need more evidence on that but that's another reason to avoid Dairy thank you do Mara is asking if you have a dietitian at the Barnard Medical Center that can actually help with weight loss and help with building muscle mass yeah we sure do um yeah if you go on Barnard medical.org we can hook you up with dietitians and AJ I'm glad you asked me about this because we've set up a new service called the preferred dietician referral PDR preferred dietitian referral if you just Google that preferred dietician referral. org um you will find dietitians who themselves are experts in plant-based diets and follow them themselves I'm about a vegan diet the reason we set it up is there are a lot of our doctors at the Physicians committee who want to refer a patient to a dietitian so that the dietitian will help them adopt a vegan diet but not all dietitians are very good with it some don't follow it some believe in other kinds of diets we thought wait a minute we need a better referral so we set up preferred dietitian referral to allow people to find a dietitian who they can work with right in their own State who may be licensed to do tele medicine right where they are and they can see them now so PDR phys preferred dietician referral. org thank you I I will add everything you've been talking about the links to the show notes as soon as the show is over and Stephanie who's watching live wants to know what do you think about wheat germ and how would you add it to the diet um you can you don't necessarily have to because if you're having a whole wheat you're getting the wheat germ as part as part of it some people isolate that and they add it often more as a flavoring than it's anything else nice last time we talked you and like me you enjoyed Savory breakfasts rather than sweet ones is that still the case yeah I have a sort of a breakfast routine that I fell into a number of years ago and it's got three parts and the first part is some sort of plant protein and I find that that's sort of makes me feel good and energetic the rest of the day and when I say plant protein what I mean is I'll take some tofu or some Tempe and I'll put it in my non-stick pan and I'll Grill it on both sides and I may have it with a little bit of soy sauce or some ginger or some nutritional yeast and then the second thing I've gotten into having some green vegetables in the in it for breakfast I know that sounds funny to a lot of people it doesn't sound funny to me I've been doing it for 12 years and so is my husband same year exactly um broccoli asparagus kale spinach any of those things I might spray them with little brags or something like that and then the third thing I'll have some sort of carbohydrate um and that's where I'm building glycogen for my run that I'm going to do tomorrow morning um and that can either be fruit like a papaya or some mangoes or any other kind of fruit or a big bowl of oatmeal or some dry cereal or something like that so the three parts are a plant protein a green vegetable and some kind of starchy uh vegetable or some fruit and if you're feeling mentally a little bit out of sorts because you're only having some toast uh or something like that for breakfast try this and see if you don't feel better I don't think there's anything weird about vegetables for breakfast when I've traveled to other countries that's it's always been part of a healthy breakfast it's here that breakfast is basically caffeine sugar and flour so kudos to you Maryann would like to know are there foods that can help you avoid anxiety or maybe even treat anxiety I don't think we fully explored that I think it's a great question and I think it's sort of at the frontiers of nutrition research now but I'll I'll share one thing with you about 10 15 years ago we did a study with Geico the car insurance company because our diabetes work funded by NIH had just come out showing that a plant-based diet a lowfat vegan diet could was was very effective for improving diabetes and causing weight loss so our friends at Geico uh said let's do a study together and working with Geico facilities in 10 different cities we found that you could in Implement a healthy diet at work everyone got together once a week they learned how to go vegan they loved it it was great they lost a lot of weight their blood sugars got better but we also looked at anxiety and we looked at depression just because I mean you can be at work and you've got the world on your shoulders and we found that both anxiety and depression tended to get better and the answer the question then is why the short answer is I don't know but I'll tell you what I think is that anxiety and depression are two sides of the same coin uh if a person is feeling down and depressed very often there's something it's it's not just that that you kind of pull the plug on their mood there's something troubling them something that is not getting right um and anxiety and depression go together all the time and to some extent they although they can be fueled by real life events let's face it there's a lot wrong in the world but the other piece of this is you have a mental chemistry that allows you to kind of surf along the problems of day-to-day life and uh when we have uh too much inflammation in our body particularly from animal products in inflammatory chemicals don't just affect your joints and your your physical body they also get into the brain and depression has an inflammatory component so if people are on inflammatory diets they feel crummier when they're on an anti-inflammatory diet they feel better um the last thing I'll just mention is you heard me talk about plant proteins if they're not in your diet put them in your diet start your day with it and start a meal with it if you're just eating a lot of sugary stuff a lot of people feel unsupported with that so if you're having bread and not that not that bread is terrible it's okay but you might need to have if you're just having starchy food your your brain often makes excessive serotonin and although that plays a role in mood regulation if it's out of balance with the other uh neurochemicals you don't feel well great Dr Barnard I we have so many more questions but I want to respect your time maybe you'll come back right when the book launches that week if you like or Dustin can come make some recipes whatever I can do to support you and thank you for all the wonderful work you've done well thank you AJ I look forward to our next visit together and thank you AJ for all you do you reach so many people you inspire them you give them information but you know what you make it fun and it's been great being with you and I try to make it delicious thank you so much Dr barard thanks all of you for watching another episode of Chef AJ live please come back tomorrow at 11:00 a.m for board certified urologist Dr Ashley Winters and she's going to talk about how your sexual health predicts your cardiovascular health you won't want to miss it thanks everyone take care bye- bye

Channel: CHEF AJ

Views: 72,529

Keywords: easy weight loss, permanent weight loss, achieve weight goals, vegan lifestyle, plant based weight loss, vegan weight loss, The Power Foods Diet, vegan diet, plant based diet, whole food, healthy diet, healthy vegan diet

Id: rC2ZnfOinXI

Length: 61min 26sec (3686 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024