How To Balance Your Hormones: Neal Barnard, MD | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] delighted to have you back on the show your third appearance on the show I think the last time you were on was at least deep about a year and a half ago I think you know at this point lots of lots has happened since then you got this new book coming out which we're going to talk about your body and balance which is all about hormone health and the impact of nutrition and lifestyle on hormones and the downstream impact of that on everything that we're interested in here but before we dive into that because it's so topical and and and top of mind even though we're recording this well in advance of this coming out I think it's important to talk about this which is this study that came out recently that made headlines across the world that in so many words basically said keep eating meat there's no link between your meat intake and any kind of disease so walk me through this study how those headlines came to be and your response to it it was such a crazy scenario what happened was the annals of internal medicine published six articles from one research group headed by a guy named Bradley Johnston and right in Canada you Trevor X right who directs whatever that is so the first four of these six articles were meta analyses so there's nothing new what they do is they took existing research and crunched it in a new new way and what they found in these four articles was if you reduce your meat intake you actually do cut your risk of cancer cut your risk of a heart attack cut your risk of stroke and diabetes and that it's not chance it's not it's statistically significant meaning it's very unlikely that this is just some chance result however he did a fifth article where they looked at preferences and values and they looked at prior studies of meat eaters and they concluded meat eaters like meat right and in fact they think they need me of course he had a lot of meat eaters I did where do I get my protein that kind of thing so then they did a sixth article which was what do we recommend and what they recommend I'm not making this up they said the reduction in cancer and heart attack and stroke and diabetes isn't worth it if you have to give up meat and so they recommended continue eating meat including the most unhealthy forms like sausage and bacon the ones that are clear-cut human carcinogens and the I have to say I'm gonna point a finger of blame at the journal the annals of internal medicine because they were the one that back in I think was 2014 remember Time magazine had that cover story with butter on it a big swirl never I'll never forget that it said eat butter that was back same journal same journal II published and equally not so good meta-analysis saying they couldn't sort out the risks of saturated fat so go ahead and eat butter and then in 2016 2017 they published another article saying sugar is okay and that was by the way the same author whose Johnston Joe Johnston Johnston Johnston and it then came out that he was taking money from the food industry it was like a whole battery of conglomerates that included coca-cola and ConAgra etc he did disclose that did he'd make the disclosure with that study though I yes I think so yeah I think so but somehow it was sort of reported in the press and it was a while before you know if you're gonna say that dr. pepper is good for you look who's paying for it mm-hmm so they were kind of disgraced so then this new thing came out and the reason I'm gonna blame the journal is that the annals of internal medicine did not say these meta-analysis show that reducing meat would actually help you and if you want to reduce me it will help you oh by the way this was just the benefit of reducing what if you stop eating it completely the benefits are even even greater and they didn't dive into things like yeah meat eaters might think that they need it or it's a source of protein but there was nothing about what if you educate people is the is it not true that people are in fact changing their diet I mean look at the marketplace veggie burgers everything's just taking off so anyway they should have press release and the press picked it up saying new guidelines is there were no new guidelines this is just Johnston's idea and that you can just continue eating need for good health and I have to say I contacted the editor and she said you know you're right we went a little too far with that will change I don't think they did change it at all well a couple things first of all wasn't there an initiative or an effort to prevent that from being published in that Journal I had a time because I think I'm on that email chain that I believe you're on as well from David Katz and there was like a you know like how can you know before it was published there was an awareness that this was going to be coming out and an effort to let this journal know that this was going to be irresponsible the journal sent out this press release the journalists started calling experts the experts were disgusted by this they said we you're completely misinterpreting the science here and so David Katz and many others us lots of others wrote to the journal and said think this through a little bit before you say that people should keep eating meat look at your own science and look at the body of science they just ignored that ignored it I don't know if I don't know if it was clickbait or if there's some of the reason journals do want a lot of controversy and the press they like to have their name out there because it improves their what they call their impact effector compared with other journals but then when we dug into it a little deeper the New York Times did a story saying hey wait a minute this was the same guy right was funding for the sugar so like a couple weeks later that can of this article came out right but what didn't come out at the time and what did not make the headlines is that just six months before this article came out Bradley Johnston had signed a deal with Texas A&M University's AgriLife Program which oversees all their beef promotion programs and I know that that your listeners have never heard of this but it was very troubling Texas A&M University in Texas they promote beef and the head of that group is a guy named Patrick Stover who signed an agreement with Bradley Johnston and came on to the project and became a co-author and when you look at their disclosure forms when you do research you have to disclose your conflicts of interest and they say things like are you getting money from anywhere the answer's no is there anything even aside from money that could look like a conflict of interest like you run beef promotion programs for example no they wrote no none of that none of that came out yeah I sorry to interrupt but I as I recall from that Times article the letter of the law was that you have to disclose any conflicts of interest in the last three years right and he had had a deal that same deal that he had that was with respect to that sugar study that he did that had expired shortly beforehand so I was a little bit outside of that window so he his response was well that was more than three years ago I wasn't required to make that disclosure but but that's not in the spirit of what this provision is which is to basically say listen you know is there anything that you've done or or you know that could potentially compromise these findings that's right and this new this new thing was totally current it was current at the time and that was not in the New York Times article the New York Times didn't pick it up and what I'm saying is big the beef industry signs or not the beef industry Texas A&M University which gets beef checkoff money and promotes beef heavily signed an agreement with Brad Johnson's group six months later they come out with this study saying eat beef you don't want to give up beef do you and then the press goes well new guidelines I guess and it was it was really a sad situation so what maybe I'm mistaken but wasn't part of the study based on this built-in assumption that people were only are typically only eating meat like three times a week so for their guidelines to suggest like keep doing what you're doing is disingenuous because most people are eating me like 20 times a week I mean they're eating it probably twice a day they may be and and their own research did show that if you reduce meat consumption or you eat very little meat you do better than if you eat a lot and our research and that of many many other teams show that if you just throw out the meat completely replace it with healthier food so you do dramatically better so there was really not much question about getting away from meat was is a good idea but it was just the way that they characterized it in the guidelines that up with which were really meet friendly mm-hmm so in the wake of this this this article getting published in this journal there was a bit of a kerfuffle you know that resulted in these New York Times articles but also I think there was like 12,000 physicians that came out against this American College of Cardiology and of course you at PCRM you guys filed a petition with the FTC so explain to me what that's all about the Federal Trade Commission regulates advertising and a press release that goes out to the press to sell your journal until your website that's advertising so we went after the annals of internal medicine we filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission to say when you advertise yourself saying you've got new guidelines that you can keep eating all the meat you want whatever we said that that's harmful to people and it's also false now it may sound like it's a bit reaching to try to get the annals to be dragged to the FTC however we did exactly this with the dairy industry some years ago when they were advertising if you're trying to lose weight and dairy is part of your diet you'll lose more weight than if you're trying to lose weight and dairy isn't in your diet remember you might remember these ads that you know dairy helps you lose weight well if there just was no good science so and and the Federal Trade Commission ruled in our favor on that so we're gonna do the same now right so what's the status of that at the moment at the moment the FTC has it on their desk yeah we'll see what we hear it's so crazy I saw a tweet the other day from the Dairy Council or some milk affiliated organization that's a that said something along the lines of milk is better for hydration than water to me like if that's I don't understand how that could possibly be but that seems like a flagrant you know violation of FTC guidelines regarding advertising there's lots of goofy stuff and I have to tell you that goofy stuff comes out on the cycle if it's a five-year like 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 that's when the goofy stuff comes out mm-hmm because why Dietary Guidelines for Americans are reformulated every five years and so what we've been seeing is the articles saying new studies show that eggs are good for you there should be no restriction on dietary cholesterol dairies good for you eat butter so that was in 2014 going up to the 2015 guidelines revision so what they're trying to do now this Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee is meeting in Washington and they're gonna say what kids should eat in school and everywhere else and so the beef industry the dairy industry the chocolate manufacturers everybody is pushing on them with their guidelines that emphasize their product and then the reporters dutifully parrot this message and all that goes on that's a problem I mean that's interesting so it's very much like a presidential campaign here we are in the lead up to this 20/20 scenario in which the guidelines are going to get revamped and there are vested interests that have a lot to gain or lose based upon what ends up in those recommendations I'm pleased to tell you that Ukraine was not involved in this suffice so you know we don't know but but it I have to say it is disheartening because we all imagine journal editors are sort of above the fray and they just want to have the truth come out and that they're not out there Hawking an idea and whatever but it's it's been creepy to see I have to see yeah well if there's one thing I've learned from our social media infused culture it's just a hyperbolic the diet and nutrition wars are and the front lines are being waged on Twitter and you see these the vitriol that goes back and forth between these respective tribes and camps and it's you know as somebody who's relatively steeped in all of this I get confused and I and I wonder like who's you know who is being buttress by who and who's telling the truth and can we really know with nutritional science what you know with any sense of veracity what isn't true what is fact and what isn't or you know it and so for the average consumer I mean you know confusion is the product like the average person is just going to be left thinking like I can't trust any of this stuff because everyone's slinging arrows at each other all day long confusion sells the medians that the tobacco industry proved this the jury was in and out yeah there was no question that tobacco caused cancer but if the tobacco industry could have some studies saying well there's some doubt here some doubt there they don't have to prove it safe confusion is all you need to sell and if you can say well what they did say in this case bacon sausage these are the things that slam-dunk the the World Health Organization said they caused colorectal cancer period these new articles said well we're not 100% sure there's the data are limited and whatever so the confusion really sells yeah what do you make of this whole carnivore movement have you been paying attention to this at all and probably more than it deserves I think this too shall pass yeah it's fascinating what's going on right now and I think it's more incumbent than ever before for for all of us to pay closer attention and and read the news with a critical eye and also look for consistency of findings if somebody tells you vegetables are not good for you or you know an apple is going to hurt you or beans whatever I mean there's certain common-sense things that we know and the scientific studies are so clear and so uniform from observational studies to randomized clinical trials and everything that a plant-based diet is a healthy diet the closer you get to an entirely plant-based diet the better off you're gonna be well here we are you're on the precipice of releasing it's like your 15th book right yeah you're a busy guy which is amazing so explain to me what drew your attention to hormonal health and while you've chosen to put a lens on this at this time rich I stumbled into this completely by accident you know because we think about food as affecting your weight or your cholesterol but I was sitting at my desk one day and my phone rang and it was a young woman who said dr. Bryant I can't get out of bed I said what's the problem and many women have some menstrual pain but for maybe 1 in 10 or so it's off the scale cannot function for a day or two days and this was her she said my mother told me I should call you and you could help me and so I said well I can give you some painkillers for a couple days but I started to think about what are what are cramps and menstrual cramps to put it simply are the lining of the uterus is being thickened up every month in anticipation of pregnancy and it's hormones it's estrogen that does that and if you have extra estrogen female sex hormone that uterine lining thickens up a whole lot more and at the end of the month it all is disintegrates in menstrual flow but as it disintegrates that thick lining releases prostaglandins that cause cramping so she's telling me her symptoms I thought wait a minute I wonder if you got too much estrogen in your blood somehow and it ran through my mind that I remembered from physiology 101 that your liver has a way of removing estrogen it takes it out of the blood your liver filters your blood it pulls it out and sends it down through the bile duct into the intestinal tract and as long as there's plenty of fiber in your intestine it just flushes all that estrogen away the excess if there's not fiber in your digestive tract because you ate Velveeta for lunch then those estrogens go back into circulation and your your estrogen level stays too high so I said to her how about this let's try an experiment I'll give you painkillers a couple days but for the next month would you like to try a diet that might might help no animal products keep oils really really low foods as natural as possible four weeks later she called me back and said this is astounding my period came zero symptoms nothing and then in the months that followed same story but then she loosened up her diet a little bit the pain came back so I thought okay that's one person so I I connected with our friends at the Georgetown University Department of OB obstetrics and gynecology and we did a research study we brought in a large group of women they all had moderate to severe pain every month we split them into a placebo group effectively and a vegan group and it works on the first thing they notice is that PMS was was different bloating and water retention cut way down and then mood changes that they had been bothered by were reduced and then when we tracked their pain it was fewer days and less noticeably less intensity so we thought okay that's that's really important but but rich I gotta tell you something in the course of this study we told all the women please don't take any hormonal preparations in the course of the study because it's going to goof up our results and that includes birth control pills so if you're sexually active please use some other method because we don't want the hormones to interfere one of the women said don't worry about me my husband and I gave up trying to have a baby years ago it's not him we've been tested it's me I don't ovulate she just was not releasing eggs on any kind of ridiculous the second month that she was on the vegan diet she came in and said dr. Barnard I've got bad news and I've got good news I said what is it well I'm leaving your study because I am pregnant and she was pregnant and about eight years later I was giving a lecture in a different City and I didn't realize she had moved she came to my lecture and told me about her three kids what I'm saying is that hormones affect pain they affect fertility they affect hormone related cancers like breast cancer prostate cancer so many things and everybody is ruling these dials on their hormone levels by the food choices they make every day without having any conception of what is what is happening so the reason I wrote your body and balance is I thought well let's get your body in balance because all of these things make people miserable it's some cases they just make you miserable in other cases like hormone related cancers they can kill you so let's get this information out there and yes if people want to buy prescription drugs fair enough if you need to have a hysterectomy for endometriosis maybe but if we can if we can just change your lunch and your dinner and do it like that let's do that yeah I mean those are some pretty dramatic results so walk me through I mean the first example that you gave was the impact of increasing fiber into that person's diet but there the study that you conducted was going full vegan so those are two different things so let's maybe talk about just nutrition in general and its impact on hormonal health and kind of Maran she ate between those two things okay um the reason that we went full-on vegan is I gave you one example of fiber but it's not all there is to it this whole area started being studied Oh 20 years ago maybe more poor for cancer patients breast cancer patients have one thing on their mind which is I don't want my cancer to recur and so researchers have looked at dietary changes that reduce estrogens for cancer patients and they found two things the first is fiber which I mentioned earlier a high-fiber diet flushes these estrogens away quite literally but the other thing is fat animal fat and even oils vegetable oils for a reason that I don't know the mechanism we haven't figured it out if I take a group of women and I put them on a fatty diet their estrogen levels rise and you can do both together you could say high fiber low fat low you know high fat low fiber and you could see estrogen levels going up and down and up and down very rapidly so we thought okay I don't want any animal fat in your diet at all that means it's vegan but we went a step further and kept oils low uh-huh so what that means is that everything you're eating has fiber everything you're eating is from a plant there's nothing in your diet that's not a plant and so you're getting abundant fiber very little fat and we thought that would work the best and right it does right so high fiber low fat Hulk basically whole food plant-based diet and over the course of this book you kind of go through a whole battery of different you know maladies that I think are really [Music] affecting so many people right now I mean breast cancer is like one out of a true man or something that prostate cancer is one out of every nine men in fertility rates are insanely high right now there's lots of opinions about what's contributing to that beyond hormonal health weight gain thyroid moods hot flashes you know endometriosis which you mentioned menopause acne fibroids like the whole the whole thing right so you make this decision to divide this book up into basically different categories the first is related to sex hormones and fertility and ovulation the next relates to metabolism and mood so why don't we just like go through it I mean we talking a little bit about sex and hormones right now but this fertility thing is super interesting I mean I know I'm sure you know you know tons of couples that are having trouble conceiving and IVF and the like are are you know things that you're just hearing about more and more and more all the time and I think there are a variety of contributors and some may have nothing to do with diet that's possible or they may have to do with chemicals you're being exposed to without being aware of it but diet is a big part of it one of the obvious things is that people are gaining more weight than they used to and they're gaining weight earlier we see a lot of kids where childhood obesity has become a thing and if you look at when at what weight is your fertility the best it's actually not when you're a little bit overweight a personal I think wow if I'm overweight that's gonna be helpful in some way that when fertility for women is at its highest it's on sort of the thin side of normal with it you don't want to be overly thin that's not good but you definitely don't want to be overweight fertility is impaired and why would that be because fat cells are not just little lifeless bags of calories they are hormone factories and this is also true in men if you go to the beach you see overweight men with their shirts off and they've got some breast development and that is because as they've gained weight their own body fat is making estrogens causing breast tissue formation so in a woman you need a certain amount of estrogen you don't need a huge boatload because that will interfere with fertility and then there's a dairy connection which completely blew me away the dairy in this case it's not that it's there are hormones in in dairy there as you know they're estrogens in dairy and that's probably part of it but the sugar in dairy products lactose breaks down in your body to release galactose it's breakdown product and that's toxic to the ovaries it's linked to ovarian cancer it's linked to infertility and the most amazing thing if you look at countries that have the least dairy intake they tend to have a pretty good preservation of their fertility in a woman who's from her late 20s to early 30s she's gonna tend to maintain her fertility you go to a place like the United States where people consume a lot of dairy there's this enormous drop in fertility between the late 20s and the late 30s and it goes right along with galactose intake so my point is dairy doesn't do the body good yeah wow that's amazing so in terms of addressing that you you have dietary protocols but there's also life studies like look you got to exercise you got to lose a certain amount of weight there's a whole section on on chemicals which I want to get into as well because I think that's a big part of this that people don't talk a lot about but what was amazing is the reversals that you're seeing I mean this book is filled with all these anecdotes of you know patients that you've treated where the turnaround times are really quite rapid one yes they are in the menstrual pain study that I described briefly where the women their pain improved that was in the second cycle you know in eight weeks time will you get better if you go to 12 weeks and Sue sherry 16 weeks yeah absolutely but that the changes are quickened and one of those stories true story that I have really been struck by was that of a woman named Katherine Lawrence who was in the Air Force went to Iraq in 2003 she designed military bases and when she got back home her friend said Katherine what all did you miss when you're over in Iraq which foods did you miss and she missed cheese so she had a friend who gave her I'm not making this up 48 boxes those little blue boxes of macaroni and cheese uh-huh for 48 days straight she ate mac and cheese dinners that her friend pay for so anyway she gained weight and she started to get pain in her abdomen and it got worse and it worked and worse than it and it worsened with her cycle in particular and so eventually her doctor did a laparoscopy were you looking to the abdomen with a little scope and he gave her diagnosis and the diagnosis is endometriosis that's where the lining of the uterus is shedding cells that travel up and implant all around the abdomen and they cause pain because they swell with your cycle but they also will strangle the fallopian tubes causing infertility anyhow a lot of women have will have a trace of this for some women it is debilitating yeah miserable I'm talking about fistfuls of ibuprofen don't get you through the day and hysterectomy is basically the protocol that's often that's what was recommended in her and if painkillers and hormonal treatments don't work that's kind of your option and in fact she scheduled her hysterectomy however before she could have it a friend of hers said Katherine let's try a diet change that maybe this will help you well she went low-fat vegan that was basically it and started almost immediately to get better like you like you're saying rich that that it wasn't a long time and week by week she was feeling better and better and better she went back and had another laparoscopy so the doctor looked around in her abdomen and then sewed her up and the doctor went out to the waiting room to find her husband and said this is really amazing the doctor said her endometriosis has effectively disappeared and her husband said I'm not surprised you know she went vegan completely completely changed her diet and she's been feeling better and better and better and the doctor said no no no no no no it can't be that they can't be that the diet doesn't cause him if something was wrong with you it would definitely be because of the vegan diet but if something's good it can't be that the doctor said there's only one explanation for this this must be a miracle so the doctor I think wrote miracle in her chart and she never she doesn't have a endometriosis in you anymore it went away she never had the hysterectomy she has three children now and in fact she joined the physicians committee's Food for Life group and Katherine Lawrence lives in Dallas and now teaches other women how to take back their their health now let me be clear I I do want to say a word for not everybody necessarily gets better they're all kind and life is not fair and there's some people who may have endometriosis or cramps or fertility issues or what we're a diet change only does so much good or maybe not at all those people should not feel ashamed they're not doing it right or something our bodies are fragile things go wrong with it all the time just like your car it's not going to last forever for any of us but we've got some tools that are so cool and and my message the message of your body and balance is let's use foods to get you into balance not a pill yeah not something else let's use diet and lifestyle I was just speaking with somebody the other day a woman who is struggling to to lose weight and she feels like she's doing everything right and she was telling me how she was gonna go get a hormone panel done to try to figure out if there was something else that that she wasn't seeing or wasn't being addressed so talk to me about the the implications of your hormones being out of whack hormone haywire as you call it on waking and the inability to shed pounds we've done a number of research studies where we have compared various kinds of diets and the one that seems to cause the most consistent weight loss is one that has really two characteristics one is it avoids the animal products but the other thing is we do have to keep oils really low and that's an important message because many people will look at but I'm gonna call good fats like avocados and nuts and things and they are good fats but if a person is struggling with their weight those foods happen to be really calorie dense and it's super easy for your body to absorb it some people can eat those foods with no difficulty at all but some others they'll just find that that their weight loss starts when those foods are really minimized - another piece of this though there's some folks who they go to the doctor I've really had this unexplained weight gain or I just can't can't lose it and my energy is not hot not really very hot and my hair is changing there's something wrong wrong wrong with with how I feel the doctor says I think I think we need to do a blood test and the doctors comes out with a diagnosis of hypothyroidism and your thyroid is at the base of your neck and your thyroid regulates your metabolism if your body needs more energy or thyroids the one that's gonna give it to you and if your thyroid is not behaving you just don't have energy you can't you your your metabolism isn't stuck in first gear and 99 times out of 100 you get a prescription for thyroid hormone and what I'm gonna say is that we know a lot now about what actually is causing this and it's not a deficiency of that prescription so what is causing it if you could look around the world the biggest reason is a lack of iodine and in America it's a little bit different but just looking worldwide it's a lack of iodine and iodine is in the ocean and seaweed has lots of iodine in it and so if you're eating your seaweed salad or you're having your vegan sushi that nori around it at the wakame and your miso soup you're getting all the iodine you could ever want around 19 in the 1920s there was a lot of hypothyroidism in the United States that was solved by iodized salt the Morton Salt Company said let's put iodine and that kind of wiped it out for the United States however it didn't eliminate hypothyroidism from other causes and the biggest cause now is actually an autoimmune reaction where your body thinks there's some invader and you're you're like a bacterium or a virus and so your body is making antibodies to destroy whatever that invader is your body will make antibodies if a virus comes in and you knock them out right but in this case there's there isn't a virus and there isn't a bacterium there's something that got in your body that you're reacting to and those antibodies then go to the thyroid and attack your own thyroid gland it's the same as in rheumatoid arthritis you're making antibodies says something and those antibodies destroy the synovial lining of your joint and these autoimmune reactions there are many many of them they can affect your skin all kinds of stuff so we started to discover that there were people whose thyroids were clearly off I mean they were hypothyroid they then make a diet change and they're leaving certain things out and there are thyroid condition goes away now this is a completely new frontier I have to tell you about a year before I wrote this book I know I would not have said that this is possible uh-huh except that I've met so many of these people and what we here's what we believe is happening what we believe is happening is that the dairy proteins and other proteins are regarded by the body as foreign they are for it and so your immune system recognizes them as foreign develops antibodies against them and it's a those antibodies that end up attacking you it's the same process in type 1 diabetes a little kid 8 year old kid is fed cow's milk not not mother's breast milk milk from a cow body says wait a minute that's foreign I used to attack it makes antibodies to attack those foreign proteins those same antibodies then destroy his own insulin producing cells in the pancreas there's a we need more research on that but there's a lot of evidence that that's in fact the case kids who don't consume cow's milk have a lot less risk of type 1 diabetes so in the case of the thyroid these antibodies do two things they can turn it off hypothyroidism in some cases they turn it on too much hyperthyroidism so what we're what I think we need to do is a lot more research studies now yeah where we go into endocrine offices and instead of handing out prescriptions left and right we take 6 weeks 8 weeks 12 weeks and just see to what extent getting that junk out of a diet can cool down this autoimmune reaction yeah it's interesting that there isn't more research on this I mean you open the book by saying these are very recent findings a lot more work has to be done like your your your it's not a disclaimer but you're saying like look we're learning as we go here and this is kind of a new frontier but it seems like this would be something I mean hypothyroidism is something that affects a lot of people all these things are and in certain areas that we've talked about we have plenty of information diet and breast cancer I would view now that it's a slam dunk that a woman diagnosed as breast cancer would do very well to follow a completely healthy plant-based diet and frankly before the diagnosis ever occurs we should use that kind of diet to prevent it with regard to the menstrual pain that I described we have done of very careful randomized clinical trial that shows the diet works so I don't think anybody's gonna say that that's not true but but some of these areas like thyroid and also mood how food foods affect everybody knows that hormones can affect your your mood and how moody those moody days of the month and all that kind of stuff we did a research study at Geico the car insurance company because their their headquarters the other in DC right it didn't air they're in DC area they they're right there about three blocks from my office and so years ago we decided to do a study together where anybody at Geico who wanted to do a vegan diet to lose weight or to improve diabetes we'd help them do it and in the course of it it was an 18-week study and people just would you expect happen I mean they lost weight their diabetes got better but along the way we asked everybody to fill out just questionnaires on how they felt they didn't know what we were looking at but what we were looking at was mood depression and anxiety and both of those seemed to remit to quite a substantial degree they weren't brought in for that reason they did these were just people who wanted to do better now part of that could be that I'm losing weight my diabetes is in better control I feel better that's true the other thing though is that diet affects your gut your microbiome and if I repopulate your intestinal tract with friendly bacteria those bacteria are no longer making nasty stuff that kind of affect the brain yeah well that the the nexus between the microbiome and the brain is really fascinating and that that seems to be you know on the fan guard of emerging science and it's pretty cool to see what's coming out from people that are looking at that I hope that we look into it much much more there have been some very good researchers who have put this to the test independent from what we have done bringing in people and tracking their mood and changing their diet in a variety of ways and I have to say I hear again I think we need more research but what we have seen is quite consistent evidence that people on plant-based diets do feel better specifically with regard to reductions and anxiety and reductions in depression we also found reduced absenteeism but the ketogenic diet seems to have the reverse effect where people seem to feel worse now they're glad if they're losing weight or something like that but it's not a die to get the brain back into mmm into better function hmm one of the things that that you go into in detail in addition to increasing your fiber in your diet and reducing the fat you you get real specific on on the oil thing you know we're in a moment right now where there's a lot of confusion about about oils and healthy fats and this is a healthy oil as if we're suffering from an olive oil deficiency or something like that widespread acceptance of this notion that you know coconut oil is a health food so talk a little bit about that and also this part where you discuss omega-3s is problematic which I thought was interesting and I hadn't seen anybody kind of talk about that in that way oh you guys we all think about omega-3s is the healthy fat that we need that were you know if anything that's the one we're trying to get more of well they are you need the body has a need for two fats one is alpha-linolenic acid and that's an omega-3 the other is linoleic acid and that's frankly everywhere so you're not going to get low on that but alpha-linolenic acid is in lots of seeds and and plants of various kinds in your body lengthens it into the other omega-3s that you need like DHA for the brain and so some people have said well you know that lengthening process is pretty slow and so maybe I should take fish because the fish have the preformed DHA mm-hmm in them and they've been trying to sell this for all kinds of stuff and frankly it hasn't panned out very well for the fish oil sales people because DHA supplements don't really seem to reduce heart risk and at least so far they haven't been very effective against Alzheimer's and whatnot however researchers have discovered something really kind of frightening which is that if you have too much DHA in your blood or or if you're supplementing for men prostate cancer risk goes way up and at first this seemed like a fluke because funny things can happen in studies that you don't expect but it has shown up consistent enough that the researchers now believe it's real but we don't know we don't know why we and I can't explain it but the bottom line is if a person is supplementing DHA we suspect that at least four men that their cancer risk is gonna be higher and they might say okay when I rather get cancer would I rather get Alzheimer's and enter and and honestly I don't know the answer to that to that question yet but but I think nobody can fault you for saying all right healthy omega-3s their implants and if I consume those and I don't consume a lot of competing oils at the sixes yeah yeah potato chips anything that's that's got cooking oil soaked into it those things compete with your natural omega-3s for the enzymes that lengthen them so you don't wanna have a lot of other oil and in fact if you use no oil at all in your diet no it no added oil there's still natural traces of oil even in green vegetables that are proportionately very high in omega-3 so if you're eating lots of greens you don't think of that as being an oil source but it's it's a it's a source of the natural oils your body thought you're gonna have right so then as a takeaway no supplementation of omega-3 or an algae based one or do we need do we not need to do that if a person does supplement DHA and and the case can be made for supplementing it and some have made the case and the case is this that if you look at people whose blood tests are show they're low in DHA they're at higher risk for Alzheimer's than other people so some people would say get you could get tested you can call up laboratories and send them a drop of blood if you in fact just google DHA testing they'll send you a test kit and you put a drop of blood on it and they'll tell you if you're lower high if you decide to supplement DHA I would definitely do it with a vegan source if you go online there is vegan DHA it's as good or better than the fish ones and it doesn't make you smell like a fish market but whether it's gonna help or not is something that future research is going to have to show that we don't know yet all right let's talk about testosterone you know I'm 53 now and in my peer group I've got lots of buddies who are either taking exogenous testosterone or considering it and this is like a thing right so walk me through what's going on with men's hormonal health in the sexual context yeah um well a lot of things are going up the first the first issue is not even testosterone it's that men are exposed to estrogens a lot um the guy goes to the fertility clinic we're having trouble could you evaluate me too and if you check Hanks sperm count if he's a big cheese eater he'll have tend to have lower sperm counts then his friend who doesn't eat any cheese and what's that about it's not that he's low in testosterone he might think that's it it's not it's because the cheese has estrogens that came from the pregnant cow at least that's what we believe is going on because you see reduced sperm count poorer morphology which is the shape of it and poor motility the sperm just don't they don't grow or disposed to swim very fast yeah they're having trouble getting organized and it and it just starts with a relatively small amount of cheese just a serving or two of regular high fat cheese's per day will do that and so some guys will say well it's got to be soy that soy gave me the man boobs and all that kind of stuff and soy gets a completely not guilty verdict verdict on this as I'm sure you know that first of all women who consume soy have about 30 percent lower risk of developing breast cancer than women who don't have soy and women who have had breast cancer who consumed a lot of tofu and tempeh and miso and whatnot they have about a 30% reduction in their likelihood of dying of their cancer so soy is as a cancer preventive it does not cause man boobs if anything soy is sort of a break on estrogenic function soy soy has isoflavones that attach to estrogen receptors but just like your car has a gas pedal and a brake pedal soy although it will attach to the estrogen receptors it's not stepping on the gas it seems to be stepping on the brake so what about testosterone I honestly don't know what to make of this yet and science is marching forward because a lot of guys are taking testosterone and you'll see commercials do you have low tea could this be why our investments aren't rising could this be why you know you're having a bad hair day you know I mean I'm kidding but but it's about like that like if you just take more testosterone everything's gonna do better and what we've been worried about is are you are we going to be fueling prostate cancer by by injecting or by having guys take testosterone and from I don't know yet whether that's true or not I I would say this that in theory a high-fiber diet you would think it would reduce testosterone levels because your body filters out extra testosterone sends it down the testing tract fibers should carried away except for the fact that when you look at guys on healthy high fiber diets their testosterone levels are high stay tuned we're gonna sort this out at some point mm-hmm we know that erectile dysfunction is an early arbiter of arthrosclerosis but let's for the sake of conversation assume heart this there's an individual their heart is perfectly healthy they don't have any arterial damage but they're experiencing erectile dysfunction or their there they have low libido what is the hormonal in our interplay there and what have you learned about that yeah well testosterone does play a role there that's for sure but to tell you the truth it really is cardiovascular disease in the vast majority of cases the guy goes to the doctor it says doc I can't raise the flag and that people have wonderful my problem is there's nothing wrong with my nature and the doctor has to the doctor can give out a viagra prescription but that is a complete mistake if the doctor doesn't also give him a description of what's going on in his body which is that atherosclerosis effect all the all the major arteries of the body and the arteries that go to a man's private parts just happened to be smaller narrower than the ones that go to through the coronary arteries that go to the heart muscle or the cottage that go to the brain so people will correctly i erectile dysfunction as the canary in the coalmine it's a sign that something is wrong and so if a man has man mid-50s it starts developing erectile dysfunction this is not performance anxiety and it's probably not a hormonal issue it's probably the beginnings of atherosclerosis in that area and it means he's got it in his heart too and he's got it in his carotid is going to his brain and so that is a man who needs to read Caldwell Esselstyn book or Dean Ornish's book and and reverse that and in our research studies where we put people and vegan diets for diabetes or whatever the men start raising their Flags at home probably not out in public oh yes the point the point being that when you reverse reverse arterial disease erectile dysfunction gets better too one of the things that you talk about in the book that I had never heard before was that lower back pain is indicia of our thorough sclerosis and that freaked me out because I got a little bit lower back pain well there's lots of reasons to have lower back pain and you're entitled because you're an athlete well you have a you have punished your body more than just about anybody else but as you know you you break it down and build it right back up um but yeah this this started it started out with smoking that researchers looked at smokers and they have more back pain than non-smokers you think wait a minute cigarettes are not heavy what the heck could this be yeah and is it just makes them lazy and they're sitting around all day what it is researchers did autopsy Studies on people who had had lower back pain in life and after they died of an accident or whatever they looked into their lower back and what they found was amazing the the aorta comes off your heart and it rises up and then it does a u-turn goes right down your back and in right in front of your spine and your aorta gives out blood supply a blood supply to your spine the lumbar arteries feed every lumbar vertebra the very first place where atherosclerosis Mladic changes occur is in that lumbar a Horta and by around age to 18 or 20 people have paved over completely paved over one of their lumbar arteries it's just gone so smoking encourages anthros karate changes so does meat-eating and so if you don't get blood supply to the lower back then the discs that are the leathery cushions between the vertebrae they are in a precarious position they get fragile and just like a pillow the inside smooshes out because of its now fragile it's like a rupturing pillow and then that the the contents of the discs push against nerves and give you pain so my point is that if we don't smoke and eat a healthy heart healthy diet it can reduce the risk of lower back pain yeah it's amazing because I you hear about oh I have a ruptured disc or my disc rupture and I always thought well that's because of your posture or the way you're sitting or some kind of muscular atrophy or imbalance in your body I mean it can also be sitting in your Rambler at a stoplight and a semi tractor-trailer runs into you all right oh all these things can happen but your ability to heal is impaired if you don't get blood and oxygen and nutrients into your tissues and you need a good blood supply to carry toxins out right so yeah let's talk about skin and hair I know you know I've heard many anecdotal stories over the years when I got rid of dairy my skin cleared up which seems to make common sense because you're removing a product from your diet that is infused with natural hormones and probably artificial cleanse as well but talked to me about you know the hormonal systems that contribute to the health of those two things when Japan back in the 1960s 70s Japan had a diet based on rice and if meat was used at all it was not in these big hunks it was little bits that were used just to flavor the rice or flavor their noodles and then when McDonald's arrived and the other fast food chains arrived and and meaty business lunches became the order of the day the rice content of the diet didn't diminished and it gave way to meat into cheese and researchers started to notice a bunch of things there was more breast cancer more diabetes more weight problems but also dermatologist started to report that there was more hair loss and wait a minute what is all this about and we we still we still don't know all the details on it but it looks like like it might be aggravating the age associated hair loss the hormonal changes from from diet our aggravating age-related hair loss is that true who knows my mother used to always say you know out of my four boys you're the only one who kept his hair and I said that's cuz you're a vegetarian all your brothers are bald if they're listening they they have they have a very don't worry they're not listening they might be yeah I kept my hair longer than they did I still got a fair amount of it's like a pretty thick every time I see you you get younger so whatever your oh keep saying that rich anyway who knows yeah but we've but we the skin is strongly affected by what you eat the hormonal changes with hair loss could be part of it but then with regard to the skin itself I think it could be something different I think it could be not not so much estrogens and testosterones I'm guessing it could be more inflammatory conditions that if you look at acne it's just little inflammations all up and down and a number of people have found that when they follow a healthy plant-based diet it goes away now I want to stay tuned on this because I will see some people where they go in a vegan diet and especially getting away from dairy their skin just clears up miraculously I've seen some other people who say they feel that for them it's salt or it's oils or other things so I think it's good to be open to different things contributing to to these but it's quite clear that it's it's a response to something in the diet for many people the the case study that you use in the book is Nina and Randa they wrote their own book they did basically teenage girls mutual friends of ours and the acne that that they had was pretty severe right and the reversal was was profound they were miserable with it and and I mean any kid is self-conscious but they were also performers you know musicians and if we're not going to have a good stage presence but them it was V that the answer was vegan and low fat so they scrupulous he got rid of the fats and that seemed to to help them enormous lee so what can you say I encourage people to just put it to work and and try it out mhm because when you look at cultures that haven't have not westernized there very few left but they did not seem to have much acne until the cheeseburgers and right comes out yeah one of the things that that I've been struggling with lately is is sleep like I've been traveling a lot I'm waking up in different places all the time I'm on the move and my sleep despite best efforts and this crazy routine that I have to ensure a restful night is becoming more and more elusive and I know that it has to be related to my hormonal health or something being out of whack so what if what have you learned about not only the importance of sleep but how lifestyle and diet impact sleep and what's going on kind of hormonal II with that yeah there's a bunch of things going on let me maybe start and I'm not going to talk about you i'ma talk about other other other folks because some of this won't apply to you first of all people are having all kinds of trouble sleeping you are not alone but for anybody else I'm gonna say number one start with caffeine and and look at that because even if all you have is a cup of coffee in the morning different people eliminate caffeine at different rates and for a lot of people about a quarter that cup of coffee is still circulating in your brain at nine o'clock at night and so it doesn't mean you can't sleep but what it means is your sleep will be lighter and will be more easily disrupted and then number two is alcohol a lot of people will unwind with a glass of wine and that will make them fall asleep but in the middle of the night your liver transforms alcohol into something else called an aldehyde acetaldehyde and it's a stimulant and so four o'clock in the morning you'll wake up and it's kind of driving the brain and it's a certain kind of awaking it's not that beautiful isn't the early morning hours isn't the wonderful haha it's this kind of creepy feeling of having poison in your system and the more a person drinks the more this happens so those are just things I would recommend to anybody else to think about but physical activity is is really important none of this relates to you rich because your voice the caffeine does I drink caffeine in the morning I have a cup of coffee right here because now I'm in that thing where it's like I didn't sleep well last night so you need to my deals come in I gotta be on my game oh thank you yeah um physical activity is important I mean there are some people where all day long all they do is this you know they're we're gonna thumbs on their their handheld and they get Noah you know at no exercise they they're reading a book and then they close it and try to sleep there but if your muscles are tired they demand sleep its asleep is not just for your brain it's for your muscles to allow you to stop moving you're supposed to just be turned off and let's repair so if a person has not had physical activity I encourage them to do some some squats and push-ups something to just strain your muscles a little bit before you go to sleep and you'll find it helps the next thing and this will sound completely cuckoo but bear with me if you look at your dog or your cat it's getting toward evening and they stretch out their leg and they do a big on and then they curl if they go to sleep and you look at your child does this exactly the same thing they go through all this things are stretching on they do this kind of preparatory thing for going to sleep I don't know why it works but as adults what do we do we're watching TV we click it off and we put our head down and we don't go through them so when nobody is watching if you're having trouble sleeping when nobody is watching do this a half hour before your sleep time stretch out your arms in a huge stretch and open your mouth and make a big yawn it will be totally fake it won't be real but you're just doing it going through the motions do that four times and it will become real and you will notice that for some reason it turned on the sleep mechanism but now I know that sounds cuckoo but try it you'll see and the last thing let's talk about neural hormones in the brain neurotransmitters one of these is called serotonin and serotonin is involved in mood it's involved in sleep if a person eats a lot of protein of any source it prevents serotonin from getting to work and so you'll find that you have more trouble sleeping and this is why people discovered on their own that if they're having a kind of a carb heavy meal and the dinner they sleep better so if I have pasta and I have rice but I'm not having super high protein things I sleep better and the reason is that a high carbohydrate diet allows serotonin to become active in the brain and improves sleep yeah it induces that food coma basically yes well that is is all the blood going to your digestive system is it not and then um partly but but you know that some of the food coma is a different thing when people talk about say the post Thanksgiving dinner food coma that's not that is not from the the tryptophan in the turkey creating serotonin that's because they ate all that grease that got into their blood and their blood is now so viscous their their brain can barely be oxygenated that that's really that kind of food coma but but let's say you wake up in the middle of night it's 2:00 in the morning go to the fridge and just pull out some bread and have a couple slices of just plain bread lie down and the serotonin will just be formed and you'll doze right back to sleep mm-hmm how dare you suggest we eat bread I think yeah I think bread is amazing it beats the heck out of sleeping pills well let's kind of carbohydrate we'll do it we'll do the same thing let's talk about grains I mean grains have been demonized there's this you know idea out there that we should be removing all grains from our diet and eating this Lokar you know protocol so what say you I say nonsense first of all if you look at the populations around the around the world that live the longest the blue zones where this comes from Dan Buettner great work where he they marked in blue all the places on the map where people lived a long time their dietary staples are never meat not even fish it's always some kind of grain product legumes and so forth talking about Okinawa Costa Rica Loma Linda California where they lots of vegans and then if you look even further back we are not carnivores we are great apes along with chimpanzees gorillas orangutans bonobos they are not eating ice cream they're not eating pork chops they don't eat meat at all with rare exceptions they're phenomenal amounts of fruit that's their big thing and they'll eat leaves and so forth so we are designed in my view to be herbivores now the fact that people can lose weight on a ketogenic diet is simply a sign that carbohydrates are a lot of what we eat if you take all that away you are going to lose weight if you take away anything you eat you're more likely to lose weight but it's not a healthy way to do it tonight we touched on mood a little bit ago but I think it's worth diving a little bit deeper into depression because you know we are mired in a bit of a mental health crisis depression rates are through the roof and there's lots of ideas around what's generating this loss of connection and community and you know our addiction to our devices and our sedentary lifestyles etc but what does it look like from a hormonal perspective first of all it should be said that while it's true that stresses can can work on our brains there's no question about it and life is stressful for lots of people but depression is not just something psychological where my feelings were hurt or I've had a loss and so I'm miserable depression can be just flat-out physical and we learned this decades ago with a drug called reserpine it's an anti antihypertensive drug is for to lower blood pressure and people were put on this drug their blood pressure came down but there are moods which sometimes just collapse and what's that about well it turns out that the the compounds that affect blood pressure like norepinephrine for example will also affect mood and you take them away it's just like letting the air out of your tires so that led us to think all right if it's not just life events but it also can have something to do with physical things well what am i doing myself with more than anything else that you're dosing yourself with foods and one of the most shocking research studies came out of Scandinavia where they looked at women who had postpartum psychosis this is this is an off the scale serious and mental problem the woman has given birth to or three days later she starts to become delusional she's hallucinating her brain is just unplugged very very serious condition and the researchers discovered through blood tests that the women had what are called K zoom orphans in their blood kasem orphans come from milk products and we've identified them in she if a woman eats cheese or milk the casein protein breaks down to release these morphine like compounds that attach to the brain and can cause a variety of effects in this case it was the woman's own breast milk that they had given birth their body started making breast milk and some of it was leaking into their blood breaking down to release k so more funds that were poisoning their brains had caused him to be wildly while the psychotic so that the take-home message here is not don't give birth the message here is is that case orphans are serious business so I just described a really off the scale bizarre situation what about the person who's just dosing themselves with these things a little bit every day two or three dairy servings there are some case of orphans in milk when milk is turned into cheese there's a lot more of them and if you look at the rise in cheese consumption over decades it's parallels the rise in obesity and the rise in mental health issues and all kinds of other things I'm not saying there aren't other contributors there are but I have been struck by the fact that people are eating foods that frankly cheese is loaded with saturated fat so it slows you down it's going to interfere with your athletic ability because your muscles just can't oxygenate if you got Vaseline in your blood but the chemicals in it can affect the brain directly have there been studies that have directly looked at the implications of certain types of foods on levels of depression yes there will have been not enough but there have been studies that started out as observational studies looking at kind of like our Geico trial where we brought in people for other reasons and just notice their moods get better researchers have brought in people specifically looking at their mood and found that if you compare a person on a vegan diet a person on a pescetarian diet a person on a meat-based diet the vegans tend to have lower levels of depression and lower levels of anxiety there's still all kinds of reasons to be miserable particularly if you're vegan every 5 seconds someone is going to say where'd you get your protein you're gonna get tired of that and so there are reasons why is even you depressed we labor with these with these things but the vegans tend to do better and then researchers have done it as a randomized clinical trials not big enough not long enough in my view but what they have found is that when you start a person who is not on a plant-based diet on a plant-based diet and you don't tell them what you're looking at but you track mood it tends to improve and improve rather rapidly mm-hmm there are a lot of people myself included who are running and gunning all the time feel like it's indulgent to take a minute for yourself and this results in kind of a persistent state of chronic exhaustion that we kind of colloquially call adrenal fatigue but what is adrenal fatigue what are the adrenals do what is it renal fatigue and how can we address that or a sidestep that well the adrenals are they get their name because if their adrenal you renal is your kidney and adrenal means they're on top of it so they make a variety of hormones that affect they make sex hormones and they make other other compounds that regulate your body chemistry and the theory is that you're under stress and so your adrenals are running out of gas just trying to keep up with you and that eventually they just collapse from what you're doing and so the answer is to win the lottery quit your job moved to to Bali and everything's gonna be great maybe the next best thing is to eat in a more in as healthful way as we can I do I do think that that food is also not all there is to it I think we do need to sleep we do need to get some exercise but then give our bodies a chance to just recoup we do need a certain amount of fun in life I say this is a person whose abysmal at practicing these things only because I face the same challenges you do but I do have some rules that I live by and one is always vegan keep it low fat and no matter where I am or what I'm doing when the clock strikes ten I go to sleep yeah you can hold yourself to that it's it's a really hard thing to do but I'll get up early if I need to it just really helps because what you discover is if you're up till 11:30 and it's 12:00 and it's 12:15 you will discover if you track the next day you're you are not on your game as well as if you've gone to sleep at 10 yeah I found as I age that I'm a little less resilient yeah I'm very much a creature of my habits and my routines and when I'm at home and I can control my environment a little bit better that I do really well and it used to be if I go out of town and I'm kind of throwing off my thing like I can roll with it but I'm finding that I'm becoming less and less and less able to do that like I have to be much more conscientious about these things and create healthy boundaries when I'm on the road or when I'm in circumstances where I don't have as much domain over my schedule yeah and you're not alone in that although I have to say if you look at kids kids sometimes do terrible with that you put them in a different time zone there they're just comatose they can't deal with it at all and don't have sleep they'll have like sleepover parties and stay up all night and they'll be kind of fine you know like they get over it quick yeah so anyway I think it's important to respect these these diurnal variations that we that we have yeah other than making sure you're in bed by 10:00 what are some of your other habits and routines around so that's it I always have breakfast I always cook myself breakfast and one other little trick that I might mention for some people even though fruit and other carbohydrates foods I think are perfectly fine for health for some folks I find that there's a mood boosting effect to having specifically some plant protein early in the and early in the meal what I mean is this let's say my breakfast I started off with with some grilled tempeh or some tofu or something like that and then follow that with some green vegetables or some oatmeal or whatever it might be I find that I personally feel more balanced than if I didn't have that plant protein ahead of it and people can try this and see if it works for them and the the opposite example is in France where people start every day with just a pastry or something like that and and a really dysfunctional way of doing it is to do it with sausage or bacon where it's protein but it's a big mixture of protein and animal fat and cholesterol and glop that does more harm than good but with plant protein starting off earlier in the meal and earlier in the day I find that my energy is is better mm-hmm for the rest of the day not not a lot just just a tiny little bit right I like that I'm gonna I'm gonna try that yeah I mean I found something if I eat I can't do some kind of very carbohydrate rich meal early in the day I feel like it it takes a lot of energy for my body to digest that and I just don't feel ready for that but if you if I eat something that's higher in protein it just it doesn't give me that heaviness and I feel more energetic more quickly yeah you might like go to breakfast it's it sounds crazy if I'm if I'm on somebody's program other than yours rich and they asked me what did you have for breakfast I have to sort of make it up I blueberry pancakes something that sounds it something sounds normal but the truth is I'll start off with some grilled tofu or tempeh and then I'll have broccoli or Brussels sprouts and I load them up with Bragg's or vinegar something like that and then I'll have a papaya which growing up in North Dakota I never had papayas and so I'm making up for lost time now and the papaya is very high in carbohydrate the tempeh is very high in plant protein and the green vegetables are and in between there right and I do that every single every single day it's so exotic I like it it sounds it sounds goofy but I find it works for me let's talk about the chemicals section in this book I thought this was super interesting some of it you know kind of conventional with with not conventional wisdom just sort of widely accepted common sense but some of them are a little bit you know kind of a scan sin that I wasn't super familiar with them so it starts off with you talking about the perils of BPA which we all know like all the plastic that proliferate right daily lives so talk a little bit about that yeah it started out with Progresso soup you know Progresso is good soup you know it sounds a little Italian it's got to be a notch better than the other soups in this soup aisle you know the cans are even bigger so progress a lot to be good so researchers gave Kenneth enough Progresso soup to some research volunteers and they had them eat it every day and they found BPA in in their blood I'm sorry in their urine at ten times the normal level well BPA is as you said it's it's a compound that's used in plastics but it's also in the resin that lines the ke liner yes in the liner of the can and researchers separate researchers have said if you look at men who consume a lot of it there they seem to have more sexual dysfunction and the idea is it's probably an endocrine disruptor so Progresso has heard about this and by the way they're not alone if you go to the health food store you'll see cans marked bpa-free can and all the others that don't say that probably have a BPA in them but Progresso has issued a statement saying ok ok ok we'll transition toward the bpa-free free cans but that is that the oh well I can tell you another thing you go to the store and you buy your bpa-free can of green beans or soup and you walk out holding the receipt that you would sign your for your credit card the thermal paper has BPA in it too and it passes right through the skin and so researchers have looked at people who are like a cashier where every 5 seconds you know they're handing another receipt to somebody else and they're BPA levels in their body will rise from that so from now I'm sure that everybody now is going to go to the store and they're going to freak out about a can that's not marked bpa-free and they will refuse to take the receipt from the cashier that's it throw that away I don't want to touch it's not just receipts it's um ATM tickets everything that's printed in that way that's their note that kind of shiny thermal paper that's that's BPA but that's not all frankly I'm just concerned about what people have talked about for years which is just pesticides pesticides are used a lot and you can see why you go to the grocery store and every orange is identical and they look fabulous and they're beautiful and and there's no insect damage to them because they've been treated by best designs I think it does pay to buy organic I don't think it's even a question some people say is it worth it to get organic wait a minute someone's going to give you this food that has chemicals in it and this food that doesn't what's the Trice and the chemicals used are used specifically to kill things kill life on the plant and I think there's this idea that if you wash them it's fine but this seeps into the root systems and it's absorbed by the plant it's inside this plant itself yes now the Environmental Working Group has done a good job of of saying all right which are the worst foods and and the list will change from from year to year but if you go to the Environmental Working Group website you'll see the latest list but the rules of thumb are that if it's a fairly fragile plant one where you could imagine the insect going to the spinach leaves are just tearing them up as opposed to maybe a cantaloupe or they have more difficulty the the more fragile plants are the ones where you really want to get organic because that's where the farmers are using pesticides to stop the ladybugs from from going to them and the other thing is if it's a plant where you throw away the peel it is true that in some cases it's inside the plant in other cases it could sometimes things are added like waxes to kill fungi and things like that those are on the surface and if it's a grape you're eating that skin if it's an orange or not so you can you can use these kinds of decision makers but if there's if there's organic always always always I always get that and the extra value of organic products is by law Organic things cannot be GMO so you get organic tofu it is not GMO if you get chicken that chicken has been eating GMO soy that chicken has been fed all over life yeah and you you can be GMO free and not organic conversely yes so it gets tricky but i agree with you i mean if you if you want to learn more about that organic that that list you can go to e WT orga believes the website just felt that Dirty Dozen you know straw strawberries are always going to be at the top of the only buy organic list whereas like an avocado is going to be something it's going to be a little bit more safe if it's conventionally grown right exactly and by the way if you cannot get organic this that does not mean you should not eat vegetables if inorganic vegetables are the only ones you can get if if the asparagus there just happens not to be organic it beats the heck out of spam one of the things I have a hard time wrapping my head around is and I've heard you talk about this I've heard dr. Michael Greger and Caldwell elseis didn't talk about this is is the benefits of frozen fruits and vegetables because they're I guess because they're frozen shortly after being picked and somehow that locks in the nutrient value of them but to me it just seems like weird to buy frozen vegetables and fruit that are in plastic bags as opposed to I guess if you can't get organic or you know I don't know if that's not available to you but what it what are your thoughts on that III agree that that getting if something is frozen shortly after harvest that it may retain better nutrition compared to something that was picked a long time before you're gonna and that's in something good music distribution cycle before and you know some things aren't gonna disappear if you get some some greens and I don't care how old they are or whether they're frozen or not the calcium in them is not going away the iron in them is not going away those are elements and they don't degrade what does degrade is some of the antioxidants like vitamin C it's for and it will degrade over time the other thing is for me I'm at home for a day and a half and then I'm gone again so I find it handy to have frozen broccoli in the right in the you know free round kale and you're in your pantry I find it handy for that and you can get frozen things that are organic and so it works fine talk to me about citric acid this was news to me yeah this was news to me too um citric acid is something that you would think sit well first of all is in everything yeah that's the thing it's everywhere it's it well it gives a little tangy flavor and you think that comes out of a lemon or something like that what it does is it comes out of fungi in China it's it's genetically engineered product and most of it comes from Chinese factories and it's believed to be potentially toxic we first started to notice this I was doing some migraine studies and this isn't funny but I it just blew me away there were people in our studies who said it's citric acid and I thought no they have a soda was citric acid it triggers the migraine so that cannot be because we imagine it coming from Florida it comes from a lime or something it doesn't it's this weird the issue here is that there's citric acid in it but it's contaminated with mushrooms that are used as part of the genetic that yes part of the the GMO production of it and so the belief is that that's what you're reacting to so then you decide well I don't know if it's healthy or not I'm gonna try to avoid it and then you will be blown away by the fact it is in everything so anyway stay tuned I think we're gonna learn more about that right so so Maya meats but walk me through like what does it do it what do we know what it's doing I mean what it what is the hormonal dysregulation that's being caused by ingesting this um with with regard to migraine we don't know exactly but we've migraines used to be thought to be related to the circulation of the brain will change rapidly that the blood this is completely naive but the blood vessels tighten up and then they relax and you get this terrible headache we now know that has nothing to do that's not the whole story if it's part of the story at all we now believe it has to do with perhaps changes in the electrical function of the brain the depolarization of the brain and our question is whether citric acid is tinkering with that mechanism who knows stay tuned but there's no need for it in the diet just in the same ways there's no need for BPA in your soup I think some of these some of these chemicals will probably get a not guilty verdict others will be but I think it's good to be on the side to err on the side of caution um one other thing I think should be said there are some people who are worried about chemicals so much that they think that if they just have a steak that doesn't have chemicals or they have cheese that doesn't have some added chemical that that must be okay reality check the animal products are bad for you whether they have added chemicals or not and then the the sprinkling of additional chemicals that that aggravates the problem well if they're feeding on GMO crops all day and and feed that has you know been grown and fertilized soil then even though they may not be in fort of yes you know injected with hormones there's still a vehicle for that there's that but but yes and I agree with you completely but there's one other thing beyond that and that's to think of this a cow is a machine a pig is a machine if we start with let's say we start with soybeans and I can take those soybeans and I can grind them up and make soy milk and I can drink that and a person might say that's processed you took the soy beans you sent them to a factory the factory ground them up and put them in a carton I could take the same soy beans and I put them in a trough and they let a cow eat them and the cow eats them and it goes down the cow's esophagus it gets into the cow's intestinal tract which processes it in its own way and then it turns it into milk and so milk ends ends up in the cow's udder this is a gene producing this milky goo with estrogens added and cholesterol and fat and other things and lactose sugar and then it comes out and then you eat that my point is we recognize a factory as a machine the cow is a machine in her own right - and I don't mean to be disrespectful to cows but the most processed food of all is is dairy and is meat you take a chick and and a chicken and you feed the chicken grains and whatever and then the chicken lays an egg and and whatever it was in that grain ends up getting dramatically changed into feathers and and beaks and liver and all kinds of stuff and then my point being that animal animals no no I get it and a you know fish our great example of of how they can consolidate and condense you know the toxins that are in our ocean and then store them in their bodies and deliver them to human beings when they eat them in these you know toxic forms because they're so consolidated Dairy is the same way that that toxins tend to get into dairy into milk and the same thing tragically happens in a woman's body if she's been eating lots of chemicals that will end up in her breast milk and her first child is going to get a big load of chemicals that she has stored up over the years yeah what was the most surprising thing that you discovered or learned right in this book um how many people are struck by these problems and how quickly they get better Lindsay Nixon who maybe no recipes in them she did the recipes in the book and she's a genius in the kitchen she does such a wonderful job and and working with Lindsay was just super and she has books of her own that people should pick up so anyhow I called up Lindsay I said I want to work with you let's do some recipes great great great so we did that she she said by the way I'm one of your women examples I couldn't get out of bed I had all kinds of menstrual symptoms menstrual pain when I went completely plant-based totally vegan I improved dramatically and I am just hearing so many people who have had these issues and then so many other people who have the same issues now but ever tried to put it to work to put a healthier diet to work so my message is this whether a person tries your body and balance reads it and tries it or they just decide in their own way to get the animals off their plate to have as healthy a diet as possible so many people find that for the first time in years they're gonna feel good but my goal is a little bit bigger than that my goal is if we don't do this your kids are gonna grow up thinking it's normal to gain weight it's normal to feel rot and it's normal to be on medication when you're 30 it's normal to be in poor health and if I just give you a med form and prescription for your diabetes and synthroid prescription for your thyroid issues I'm not helping anybody other than you you know if we can change the way the family eats you're affecting everybody together I think that's a good place to end it but I do have one more question for you okay what is the study that hasn't been done yet that you would like to see be done that could really you know help reveal certain truths that we're aiming at right now I think I think we need to do more cancer studies and there was a real tragedy done a few years ago this is really bad on the woman's healthy eating and living study brought in a group of women more than 3000 women who had breast cancer and they randomized randomly assigned them to two groups one group got five a day vegetables and fruits and that was supposed to be the normal group no no change cuz everybody eats five vegetables and fruits a day the control or the experimental group was eight a day plus juices and then as time went on they found that when they looked at the dead who lived and who died of their breast cancer all the women had breast cancer to start with and then some of them went five a day someone ate a day and at the end of several years they found that it didn't seem to matter a whole lot which group you were in and the researcher said well I guess the die change doesn't really help that's it wait wait wait wait wait wait you've got women who have all have had breast cancer they volunteered for a study where you told them we're testing what vegetables and fruits do and they weren't eating five a day before none of them were and you're telling them to ramp up their vegetables and fruits and you just I think it's reasonable to say that five or eight who cares but to add this to your diet it is really important and the study had a lot of benefits from both diet change and exercise even in the control group that were good but because here's the tragedy because the a two day group wasn't dramatically better than the five a day group in their survival a lot of cancer researchers started thinking let's forget it let's not look at food let's go back to drugs of various kind and the desire that women with breast cancer have that men with prostate cancer have that that that families have if somebody's attacked by one of these conditions their their desire to get healthy is so strong that we can put that to work and rather than using people as recipients of prescriptions even though we may need those sometimes let's instead work with people as partners to help them to put the the best fuel in their body and see if we can't get better and I want to see an investment in that kind of research that is bigger than than what we've had in the past yeah okay well thank you for coming and talking to me well thank you rich for all you do I have to say people listen to to what you've said and you'll never know how many people you inform and intrigue and inspire and any given day a doctor might see 20 patients 22 patients to help some of them in any given day you see a whole lot more that see they don't see the base they start there they might be hearing it they see you yeah you you will never know how many people you have touched their lives but it's huge and I appreciate your kind of shape that well you have the exam room podcast now so you've dipped your toe into this world a little bit right we're learning from your example so check that out the new book is called your body and balance hits bookstores everywhere February do you have a exhibitory 4th February 4th please check it out you can learn more about Neil and our previous two podcast I'll link those up in the show notes or you can go to a PCRM dot org right that's it all right thank you come back again thank you rich I really appreciate it peace plants [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 731,755

Rating: 4.8209662 out of 5

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, wellness podcasts, plant-based nutrition, hormone imbalance in women, hormone imbalance in men, how to balance hormones in women, testosterone health benefits, hormones plant-based nutrition, neal barnard diabetes, neal barnard hormones, hormone replacement therapy, autoimmune disorder, hyperthyroidism, nutrition and autoimmune disease, rich roll neal barnard, pcrm, neal barnard podcast

Id: 133n0BTYXOQ

Length: 89min 11sec (5351 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Tiny_Pay]

Just another great podcast and Rich Roll asks all the questions I wanted to and should have would have but forgot to; Neil Barnard spearheading the coalition for responsible physicians is eminently placed to speak because within the system he looked the most powerful opponents to a healthy protocol in the eye and the other guy blinked, a gem, truly inspiring beginning to the decade.