Is Fasting Healthy and Other Diet Questions Answered | Dr. Neal Barnard on The Exam Room LIVE

welcome to the exam room live brought to you by the physicians committee hi i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll and we appreciate you raising your health iq with us right here on facebook and on youtube today we are going to be opening up the doctor's mailbag and talking a little bit about a lot of things we have a lot of ground to cover in fact including a question about fasting and did you know that according to the international food information council that fasting is actually the most popular diet in america it's not keto it's not atkins it's not south beach it's not even a plant-based diet it's fasting so what is all of this rage about well we're going to find out today i'm going to ask dr neil barnard he is our expert today he's here with us and we're gonna open up that doctor's mailbag so if you have a question for dr barnard go ahead and post it in the comments or in the chat and we will get to as many as we possibly can with the time that we have here today so let's go ahead and welcome dr barnard to the exam room live hello sir how are you doing today hi chuck it's great to see you it's good to see you too so let's start right off with the question about fasting and this is a question that comes to us from angela she says people are raving dr barnard about the benefits of fasting are the benefits actually real or is this another gimmicky diet um it could be either one um but overall it's real um fasting is a real thing um and there are some fast regimens are just as you said chuck very very common um for example uh five and two eat five days and then fast for two days so um typically it's not really fasting and in the in that you're not eating zero food for two days you're cutting way down you're greatly restricting over those two days or sometimes people will do a complete fast for a couple of days people can benefit from that and frankly we eat generally more than we need to so going without it's not a bad idea where people can run into trouble though is they anticipate those two days coming up so you guess what they're doing on the other five days in anticipation of it and a lot of people can't sustain that but i have to say where i've been really impressed with what fasting can do is on more extended fasts that are done in a very carefully supervised way for example there's a place called true north in california where people have a medically supervised water only fast and these can be varying durations and they're done in various ways but you see people particularly people would say autoimmune conditions where they often get dramatically better but a couple of caveats uh it's dangerous to do this kind of fasting unless you're you are supervised so you don't do this on your own you do this at a place that knows how to do it and the second thing is once you stop fasting you don't just go to the airport and go back home you've got to gradually bring the foods back in in an intelligent way and the fast does some things that are obvious it's going to calm your digestion you don't have things going down there anymore that's good but i think the big thing is you are no longer presenting to your body or to your intestinal tract lining that has to keep things out of your body you're not presenting them a huge number of dietary antigens talking about proteins in food that can trigger an immune response so when people have an autoimmune condition getting the foods out of their diet for a little while can calm the system down make a lot of people feel much better physically and also better mentally good answer here's another good question this one comes to us from heroesfit wants to know what is a simple way for vegans to get enough protein if they are allergic to legumes and nuts uh well first of all i feel your pain um because legumes that's a broad group all the beans peas all the lentils they're all in that group um if you have felt that you had an allergy you want to be sure that it really is an allergy before you actually knock them off your list if allergy means you're getting a little gassy when you overdo it on the beans that's not really an allergy that's that's just overdoing it a bit um but if you actually have an allergy you go to the doctor the doctor says yep you were wheezing you broke out in a rash or or classic allergy symptoms and you have to avoid them uh they're still you'll be happy to know there still is plenty of protein it's certain other foods top of the list the whole grains and the vegetable group now you're going to have to eat a lot of these things to make up for the fact that you're not eating any of the legumes anymore but protein wise you're going to be okay don't forget your b12 though that you still are going to need that regardless of whether you eat the beans or not so we just talked about one allergy now let's talk about another this is a good question from janice who's been watching the shows recently says for people who are allergic to soy what would you recommend for hot flashes great great question um for those of you who don't know what we're talking about we just completed a big study in women who had really pretty bad hot flashes a lot of women sail through menopause without hot flashes but those who have them really wish they didn't um and what we did was three things completely vegan diet no animal products at all not even a little minimizing oils so no greasy fried onion rings and third soy and the soy products we used were non-gmo whole soybeans you cook them up in your instant pot and have a half a cup per day that combination knocked out the moderate to severe hot flashes by 84 which is really impressive uh for some women i mean they just don't have them anymore it's it's for quite often life-changing but if let's say you can't have soy because you're allergic it's not a common allergy but it does happen and the first caveat is the one i expressed earlier make sure you really are allergic to soy before you cross it off your list forever your doctor can can easily help you to figure that part out let's say you can't have soy at all do the other things that i mentioned vegan and keep the oils really low see how that works for you but if you are able to consume other legumes go for it a lot of doctors have found although soy might be the best being from the standpoint of knocking out the hot flashes many of them discover that there are benefits from other legume cousins of soy black beans pinto beans chickpeas navy beans it may be dose-related so if you have them a couple times a week you might not notice very much if you have a bit every day you might notice the bigger effect and you might have a small amount but a couple of times a day like just a quarter cup in the morning quarter cup later experiment see what works for you i like the fact that there are so many different options there so often people think that when they have to go without one thing it means that they have no other options and so why even bother but you just rattled off a whole bunch of options there for people to give a try that's that's very promising speaking of giving a try paulie is now ready to give a plant-based diet a try she's heard us talk a lot about low-fat here on the show and so what paulie is wondering dr barnard is what is a good measure of low-fat in low-fat foods what a great question how low fat do you need to be it really depends a bit on you um for comparison let's say you were switching from chicken fat to olive oil now that's a good switch no question about it olive oil is way healthier than chicken fat here's some numbers the saturated fat which is the bad fat that elevates your cholesterol it's linked to alzheimer's disease that's about maybe 30 percent of the fat in a chicken not good switch to olive oil you cut that from 30 down to 14. so olive oil is way better corn oil soybean oil they're similar to that they're they're fairly low in saturated fat but there's a however here first of all they're not zero saturated fat so if you're having even that 14 saturated fat and you throw that away your cholesterol level is going to come down a little bit more but more importantly oils affect your body in certain other ways they're dense and calories just like butter or chicken fat or beef fat plant fats have nine calories in every gram so if weight control is an issue you want to go low fat if you have diabetes if you have hormone related problems menstrual pain menopausal symptoms do it not only vegan but also avoid the added oils and you're going to find that you do better now i don't encourage you to actually figure out the fat grams that you're eating i don't think that's really necessary in your total diet but there are a couple of places where you might want to think about it if you're buying say produce an apple broccoli or cauliflower or an orange stuff like that there's no nutrition facts label on it so you don't know how many fat grams there are in it and frankly you don't care because there just isn't much fat of any kind in in almost anything in the produce aisle but let's say you go over to the vegan pizza aisle and you're thinking is this a fatty pizza or not it depends on how much they added to it so look at the label if it's got more than about three grams of fat per serving i would suggest you set it aside if you're trying to lose weight or trying to tackle diabetes or something like that so three is my magic number per serving of food i would avoid coconut oil and palm oil completely they are almost as bad if you did the math and you did what i'm describing and you didn't add oils when you cook because you got a good nonstick pan and that kind of thing and you're avoiding the few plant foods that are fatty peanut butter nuts in general avocados um your diet is going to turn out to be about 10 fat as a percentage of calories or a little bit lower than that that's a good place to be um and if you're thin and healthy and everything's going well you might you could liberalize it a little bit more without any big issue probably so there you have it all right we have another vegan newbie uh hanging out with us here today with the roomies this is a question from ida ida wants to know which vegan foods are good for calcium you take out dairy a lot of people think well i'm never going to get calcium again not necessarily the case though yeah well you know the cow that makes milk the cow's making milk and she's not um drinking milk herself where does she get her calcium she gets her calcium from green leafy vegetables and you will too now your vegetable choices might be different from her she eats grass you're going to eat broccoli but green leafy vegetables have lots of calcium so broccoli um and cauliflower is an honorary green vegetable but you'll also see kale collards brussels sprouts on down the line they have lots and lots of calcium and from for most of them it's really highly absorbable that's true for the cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and brussels sprouts have adam beans have a little bit of calcium too and if you want to go crazy with it you'll see calcium fortified soy milk or other calcium fortified plant milks they're fine you don't necessarily need them my suggestion would be to have the green leafy vegetables front and center in your diet on an everyday basis i don't know if it's a new season because it just turned fall and people are getting a jump start on the new you kind of thing before january rolls around but wanda is also new to a plant-based diet and wanda is uh 68 she's wondering how much vitamin d3 should she be taking every day ah great question um first of all what do we need it for we we need it to make up where the sunlight left off um sunlight on your skin is nature's signal for making vitamin d in your body so if you are out in the sun getting maybe 20 minutes half hour of sunlight directly on your face and arms that's the vitamin d that your body is gonna use and that's fine but let's say you're indoors or you're going outside but you're using a sunscreen the sunscreen blocks the uv rays that make vitamin d so a supplement makes sense and the amount most doctors would say to have about 2 000 iu's international units of vitamin d per day as an effective dose and a safe one if you go higher than that 5000 or more there are some risks of overdoing it on vitamin d let's go ahead now and take a question from dana and i think that this is one that a lot of people are wondering about whether or not they're new to eating a healthy diet or they've been eating a healthy vegan diet for years and years and years and years and dana's question is what should you do if you can't afford to buy organic um i have to tell you um if the choice is have um a food that's got chemicals on it or food that doesn't have chemicals on it i think it's always good to get the one that doesn't have the chemicals on it now there can be a price difference that difference is gradually coming down and it's more than made up for by the fact that some foods vegan foods in general are really cheap i'm talking about beans and rice and a sack of sweet potatoes these things really cost pennies and so if you're not buying the meat and not buying the cheese and the animal products you'll be saving money that hopefully the organic is more affordable okay that said if your choice is between non-organic vegetables and spam or animal products in general have the non-organic vegetables organic is better but vegetables are always good whether they're the organic variety or not so um there you have it i think it's always good to choose organic when you can but if you can't get it whatever vegetables there are are good for you a couple of weeks ago you and i did a show where a viewer wrote in an exam room he wrote in asking about which foods were good to boost the immune system and zinc came up during that discussion and so tamara has a follow-up to that she wants to know how can vegans get enough zinc to ward off respiratory infections or really any infection for that matter yeah well first of all i don't really think necessarily zinc alone is going to do it we want to do a lot of things we want to keep oil low that's another reason to avoid oils because researchers found that too much oil in the diet interferes with white blood cells which are the cells that make antibodies but zinc is you'll see it in whole grains a variety of other foods that's really the source i would suggest not taking a zinc supplement one exception um you got a cold despite your best efforts you're sneezing and sniffling and your nose is running and whatever you've seen at the drugstore coldies and other brands and all they are is supplemental zinc and it's true when you take these it's often a little sugary lozenge and you have them throughout the day they do shorten the cold um but i would suggest not making that part of your your daily routine apart from that you want to just get it from natural foods whole grains are good source speaking of warding off infections we have a question here from our friend allison she writes flu block vaccine is egg free but i find it is hard to find flucylvax however is a little bit easier to come by is that also vegan friendly oh what a great question bad news good news the bad news is that all vaccines are animal tested the manufacturer may say we don't want to do animal testing we're against it we don't think it's necessary the fda will not let any drug on the market including vaccines without animal testing okay that's the bad news the good news is um once they're on the market they don't typically do any further animal testing so whether you take a vaccine or not it's not going to affect animals really to speak up but are there animal ingredients in them and you mentioned flu block that's the one that we prefer here at barnard medical center and we stock it all the time and the reason that people or one of the big reasons for developing flu block was the old-fashioned way of making flu vaccines used eggs one to two eggs per dose and a lot of people are allergic to eggs um and a lot of people just don't want to have an egg derived substance and so the manufacturers wanted to find an egg-free way of making it and flu block is it no animal ingredients at all no eggs are used nobody is harmed from this vaccine but if you can't get it you asked about flu sylves and there is something called flu silvax tetra no animal ingredients no further animal testing it is vegan and if it's more available go for it it's perfectly fine let's take a question from an exam roomie who's tuning in today on youtube this particular person is wondering about protein shakes right zen says what is dr barnard's opinion about protein shakes i just drink them as a treat and not necessarily for the nutrients that they have um perfectly fine um if it's plant protein it's harmless and well you may not need that extra protein but it's not going to do you any harm let me mention one other thing though you might say well i kind of like to taste i'm not worried about my protein intake but i like the taste there's one other possibility there are some people who find that a little dose of protein um plant protein gets them on a little bit more of an emotional even keel i'm talking about a person who for whatever reason they felt like gee today i kind of got out of bed on the wrong side today i've been a little grumpy and grouchy all day today what's what's the deal the next day they get up and they do something different they have some plant protein early in the day uh some tofu scrambled tofu for breakfast or or grill some tempeh um if you never did this you just slice some tempeh and marinate it in some soy sauce and grill it in a non-stick pan it's kind of kind of like bacon what you've just done is you you've dosed yourself with plant-based proteins which goes it goes into your body and it blocks the production of serotonin well serotonin is sort of your nighttime neurotransmitter that makes you go to sleep and if it's activated at seven in the morning you're gonna feel kind of out of sorts and grumpy and and having a little protein will uh block that you don't want the protein to be pork sausage um because those things do a lot more harm than good um but if it's a little plant protein that can work for you so when you have a protein shake and you say i just like it i feel better with it it could be that that little extra dose of protein is not gonna is blocking this the serotonin production in the course of the day and it's making you feel just a little bit better when it's nighttime you can do the opposite you can avoid the high protein foods have the high carbohydrate foods that fosters the production of serotonin makes you sleep better we have done close to 300 episodes of the exam room now and this is the first time i'm ever hearing that i can recall about protein being a little pick-me-up and how that might be beneficial in the morning that that is tremendous it's it's really quite a surprise and um researchers have played around with how can different foods affect neurotransmitters and and this has been uh really quite an interesting one and i don't encourage people to just take this on faith try it yourself um i've had a number of women who have said to me it makes me feel on an even keel particularly during that time of the month where uh in the premenstrual period they would say i'm just feeling not quite myself and and they find that it helps then but you can do it anytime let's have some fun with the with the time that we have remaining we we have some funny questions in the bag man so they took their funny pills today uh question from genie wondering why am i craving cooked spinach so maybe why do we crave certain foods i guess for genie spinach is her jam i don't know uh you said it it is a funny question but you know it's it's sometimes hard to figure why certain foods call to us um what you're tempted to think is your body knows that you're low on something and it just kind of reorients your antennae to seek that out and there is truth to that um if you look at what people eat from day to day their nutrient their food choices might vary a lot one day i'm having italian the next day i'm having sushi or you know whatever it is but their nutrient intake doesn't really change that much meaning the amount of protein and fat they get very similar from day to day the amount of the different micronutrient nutrients they're getting pretty similar from day to day why because when your body is low it says hey wake up that's the food that i want now unfortunately your taste buds are easily seduced by things that you don't need um you don't actually have a chocolate deficiency you know you don't have a french fry deficiency mechanisms for homeostasis as we say but um but you do in fact have um the ability to sort of seek out certain nutrients and it could be that's what spinach is doing for you and same way as uh did it for popeye well that that's funny oh my goodness uh okay so uh we know that spinach may be genie's jam but courtney is wondering what is the one food that you cannot live without what a great question you know there are so many i i'll tell you something funny though um when i was a kid i grew up in north dakota and uh in north dakota the diet i grew up in fargo maybe people have seen the movie that's where i grew up um the diet was pretty much the same every day roast beef baked potatoes and corn um except for special occasions when it was roast beef baked potatoes and peas and that's what we ate all the time however when i was in high school a restaurant set up on main street in fargo called the mexican village and that introduced me to something called the jalapeno which all the big nordic population fargo does not eat that kind of stuff but it came into my life and i don't know if there is vitamin j in a jalapeno i'm not sure why they're kind of addictive but i got hooked on spicy foods and um that was my introduction to that so to this day i always have a bottle of my jalapenos that i'll put on my uh bean chilies or something like that really love them oh jalapenos are delicious absolutely delicious there is no vitamin j there isn't oh man about that chuck oh man oh my goodness um okay let's let's uh take uh what do we have here about five minutes left on the show a question from heather and heather wrote in she said look i have tried to lose weight in the past been successful in the short term only to gain it back and then some in the long term and now she's really taking a good hard look at her diet studying nutrition and her overall health got a little bit discouraged though with what it was that she just heard from a friend she wants to know is it true that the body makes fat cells easily but can never get rid of them the fat cell itself isn't going to go but the fat cell can shrink um it's like a balloon a balloon mean you may never not get rid of the balloon but you can deflate it and that happens uh minute by minute they the excess fat that you consume is stored or is burned and so it comes and goes all the time but if you've had some challenges with this um you are not alone let's face it so many people have issues with their weight and and we wish that we could conquer these a little bit more easily modern life presents things to us all the time but my suggestion is don't starve yourself eat adequate amounts not necessarily overdoing it yourself like oh i'm feeling fat so i'm not going to eat you know for the rest of the day that sets up hunger that's going to drive overeating tomorrow i wouldn't do that instead what you want to do is to be on a pretty much an even keel of a healthy diet go ahead and eat breakfast eat lunch eat dinner have it be completely vegan no straying away no straying into the animal product world but also allow your tastes to go to very low-fat foods many of us have gotten hooked on a certain kind of taste you've probably seen this with people who want salty foods when you get away from salty foods the foods just seem bland but you'll eventually adjust to the lower salt taste you come to prefer it uh that's true when you reduce the fatty content of your food too if you choose lower fat foods at first they won't seem quite as rich but after a couple weeks you'll come to prefer it what have you just done you have set your tastes to prefer the foods that are filling but not really very calorie dense and you'll discover that if you can retrain your taste buds to prefer the low-fat foods you'll discover that the weight loss is a more consistent phenomena and you can stay on an even keel that way it's a good good thing to do and have at it see what happens you talk about retraining your taste that reminds me of the term that was used growing up and that was an acquired taste as in you may not like something the first time you eat it but if you eat it a second a third a fourth time pretty soon you're gonna be a big fan of whatever it is and it could work the other way too um i mentioned my north dakota home um in north dakota if somebody serves green beans at a cafeteria you know what's in them green beans but the first time i was in the atlanta airport i said what's that in the vat of green beans and the answer was a bit of fat back and i thought what the heck is fat back i discovered that sometimes people have a taste for for all adding all kinds of things that the food doesn't really need and so people's tastes can drift in a really unhealthy direction but they can go back to a healthier direction when you start leaving the grease out of your foods um they taste better when i was a kid my mother walked in in our house one day and said henceforth we are having no more whole milk her idea was that we should have skim milk and she served it and we thought uh it doesn't even look right it's kind of blue tastes terrible but within about a maybe three weeks or so a month we were totally adapted and one day she poured us some milk that tasted horrible it turned out she brought back whole milk by mistake and it now was greasy now the point isn't that milk is good whether it's whole milk or skim frankly you should skip it all go to soy milk go to almond milk go to hemp milk whatever it is those are better choices but what i discovered from that childhood experience was that your taste for fat if you bring your fat content of your food down your tastes will adapt to that level and your weight will adapt to that level too let's go ahead and take a question from jihani the next to last question this is a good one and one that we have addressed on the show before but with so many people now looking at adopting a plant-based diet to help with their diabetes it's an important question as ever gianni i went vegan about a week ago and i do have diabetes but my blood sugar in the morning has improved for the most part but some days it's still a little high what could be causing this okay um let's assume if it's type 2 diabetes um it is type 2 okay great uh type 2 i don't mean great i mean i'm sorry that you have to deal with it but but it can improve dramatically type 2 diabetes starts out as insulin resistance which just means that your cells are filled with with particles of fat you can't see it it's it's inside your muscle cells or inside your liver cells and as fat has built up over the years in those cells your insulin isn't working very well and what that means is then you'll eat some bread or some rice or something that shouldn't cause a problem but it makes your blood sugar spike because because that sugar that comes from the rice or bread can't get into the cell where it belongs now you're on a vegan diet hopefully a low-fat vegan diet the fat that's in your cells will start to dissipate start going to start going away when that happens your natural insulin will work better and it can bring the sugar out of your blood pack it into your cells and your blood sugar is going to go down now this will change from hour to hour and day to day based on what you eat but if you avoid animal products completely there's then there's going to be no animal fat in your diet keep oils low there's not much of any kind of fat in your diet stick with that you will discover bit by bit your blood sugar will get under better and better and better and better control make sure your doctor knows that you're doing this if you're on any kind of medication because your need for medication is likely to drop if we didn't get to your question today have no fear we will save it and do our best to get you an answer on an upcoming episode and also if you unfortunately right now are experiencing hot flashes have no fear because relief could be on the way dr barnard on the heels of your book your body and balance comes the 100 free uh fighting hot flashes with food class series and that's beginning on tuesday october the 2nd absolutely free a four-week series that's really going to offer a lot of women who are suffering right now some help i'm really hoping people will join us it's free it's invigorating we're going to knock out hot flashes but we're going to feel a whole lot better in general no doubt about it and we're going to put a link to register absolutely f r double e for free in the episode note so make sure that you check out that series and also dr barnard we can't finish today you you said thank you to allison earlier in the show and let's do it formally now a big thank you to the gregory j ryder memorial fund for their support of the exam room the gregory j ryder memorial fund if you're not familiar with them what they do is they support organizations like the physicians committee that carry on the love that greg had for animals which was second to none and they do that by promoting a plant-based lifestyle and tackling animal welfare issues and if you would like to support the gregory j ryder memorial fund i encourage you right now head over to their website gregoryriderfund.org that's r-e-i-t-e-r gregory writerfund.org and sign up for the newsletter while you're there and dr barnard that is all the time that we have today my friend i appreciate you hanging out and answering so many questions for the roomies it's been fun thank you so much chuck and thanks to everybody for joining us today we'll do it again soon for everyone here at the physicians committee i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll thanks so much for watching until next time

Channel: Physicians Committee

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Length: 31min 45sec (1905 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021