Neal Barnard, MD | How Foods Affect Hormones

thank you so much for coming I was sitting at my desk one day phone rang and it was a young woman on the other end of the line who said I need your help and as she described her symptoms they didn't sound very pleasant she she said one day every month I just can't move many women get menstrual cramps but for maybe one in ten it's off the scale can't function and that was her situation she had a business trip the next day and she said could you give me some really heavy-duty painkillers so I can get on the plane and I said I can sure but then how do we stop this from happening next month and the month after that and the month after that what else can we do so I did give her some painkillers but I also said would you like to try and experiment with me for the next four weeks no animal products and keep oils really low she said I suppose oh I guess and she tried this she called me back four weeks later she said this is amazing got my period no symptoms at all next month same thing next month same thing and if she deviated from the diet with a little more greasy foods she really paid for it at the end so I in a little while I'll tell you why I made that particular prescription but I thought well this is one person who benefited but how many other people would benefit so I connected with Oh years foods I connected with the Georgetown University's department of obstetrics and gynecology and I said let's do a randomized clinical trial of this so we brought in a group of women everyone had moderate to severe menstrual pain every month and half of them are asked to go on the diet that I had suggested and the other half took a supplement which in fact was a placebo or a dummy pill and after two months two cycles they switched the diet group started the supplement the supplement group started the diet so everyone was their own control and we published the results in the journal obstetrics and gynecology and to make a long story short the diet worked it reduced pain intensity and reduced the duration and it even reduced PMS symptoms leading up to to this in the course of this study something else happened we asked all of the participants to not use any hormone medications because we were positing that the foods were affecting their hormones but if they were on say birth control pills or some other hormone then we wouldn't know what was the diet what was the medication so we said please don't use any any hormone pills if you were sexually active please use some other kind of contraception and one of the women in this study said dr. bind I'm don't worry about me she and her husband had given up the idea of having a family years ago she said we both been evaluated it's not him it's me I just I don't ovulate I'm infertile we don't use any contraception no pills no nothing happened for years the second month that she was on the low-fat plant-based vegan diet she came into our research center and she said dr. Barnard I've got I got bad news I got good news and I said well what is it I'm dropping out of your study because I am pregnant as a surprise she was not infertile she had a beautiful baby and then another one and another one what she was was out of balance that her hormones that were not behaving it was not something just in her DNA it was something on her plate that that that was able to change so okay we've talked about menstrual pain we talked about infertility and things but what is this about hormones what are hormones anyway well hormones I think of as being kind of like a letter goes from the post office out into the hinterlands hormones are made somewhere in your body and they go in the blood to somewhere else in your body to give the messages like the hormones in your ovaries estrogens come out may affect the reproductive Anatomy or in a man's body testosterone is made in the testes and it goes to the rest of his body to make him run for president or where he'll fit in clothes or whatever Ben do at times like that not making any political comments in some cases though you don't have enough letters in the mail and so your hormones are not working enough in other cases you got just too many letters in the mail and your hormones are working overtime in either way you're not in balance okay so back to Robin who called me up um here's what's happening in a woman's body over the course of the month at the beginning of the month she has very little estrogen in her bloodstream as estrogen is the group of female sex hormones estrogen estriol I'm just going to refer to them all as estrogens there's not very much and then after the next two weeks it goes up and then it's drops really quickly acutely because the ovary is releasing an egg and then over the next week the the uterus is the most optimistic organ in the body every single month it's committed this could be it this could be the big one so the amount of estrogen rises in anticipation of a blessed event so the rise in estrogen thickens the uterine lining thinking that pregnancy could ensue and then several days later the disappointed uterus discovers we're not pregnant again this didn't work and so the amount of estrogen Falls and the end menstrual flow proceeds but this can all be changed by what you eat the whole curve goes up and the whole curve goes down so the way this looks anatomically is this is the uterus those are the ovaries off on the side and depending on on where you are in the month that uterine lining will thicken up but let's say I'm eating a not so healthy diet what can happen is it thickens up too much and as it does it releases maladjusted chemicals called prostaglandins that cause pain so that's what was happening as the young woman was calling me on the phone to say I'm miserable prostaglandins were just wreaking havoc with her so I thought okay I think I know how to dial your estrogens down and it has to do with what you eat you with me so far okay so what is it that about hormones and how can I use foods for this because if I can tackle the hormones that cause Crayons then I can tackle a lot of hormones including the ones that might cause cancer or other things all right I'm getting ahead of myself how do foods affect hormones let me share with you a story this is Katharine Catherine grew up in Louisiana she was in the Air Force she was an aerospace engineer and she was one of the first people to go into Iraq in 2003 because she designed the military bases for viddy Air Force and when you're in a war zone and you're eating what the military gives you and you're working really hard you don't gain much weight you stay trim and sort of some variant of healthy however at the end of her tour of duty she went back home to Louisiana and her friends all said Catherine what did you miss while you were gone she said you know what I missed I missed cheese I missed macaroni and cheese and cheese snacks and all the things that we just didn't have and so her friends took her out to eat cheese dinners and and one of her friends actually gave her an entire case of macaroni and cheese dinners forty-eight of them that she ate for 48 days straight yes she did she gained weight but she also developed some symptoms where her stomach started to hurt her and it got worse and worse and worse and as the months got but it went by it wasn't getting better so she finally went to see a gynecologist who did a laparoscopy that's where you make a little incision below the belly button you look inside with the scope the doctor did this send her into the recovery room and when she was able to talk he said you have endometriosis cells that line the uterus have escaped they go up the fallopian tubes we believe and they implant all around the abdomen they can implant on the intestine they can implant on the ovaries they can implant on the fallopian tubes and strangle them leading to infertility in addition to terrible pain so that's what endometriosis is and you can treat it with painkillers you could treat it with hormonal treatments none of which was helping Katherine so eventually the doctor said I've got one other treatment we can just go in laparoscopy laparoscopy remove your uterus in a hysterectomy and that'll cure the problem she said well my husband and I are newlyweds and we weren't really thinking we we're kind of hoping to have a family but as fate would have it she just really couldn't get better medically so she scheduled a procedure for six weeks from this point during that six weeks point six week duration a friend said Catherine I want you to see somebody about your diet and she met with a dietician who said don't you know about this diet plant-based diet get rid of all the animal products including cheese keep oils really low she thought all right I'll try and rather reluctantly she started to this vegan diet very little oil very healthy diet and she found it wasn't really that hard but more importantly she found that she felt better and she started losing weight and her energy was better but her pain was getting better day by day by day but six weeks came up and she thought dutifully she would go to the hospital and just do this procedure and get it done with so she went in to the operating room she was anesthetized the doctor made an incision about an hour later she woke up in the recovery room and the doctor had his hand on her shoulder and he said Catherine I didn't do it I didn't I didn't do the hysterectomy your endometriosis is effectively gone her mother was sitting with her in the room her mother said she went vegan the doctor said stop it foods do not cost endometriosis and a diet change is not going to cure it there's only one explanation this is a miracle so I think that's in her chart that she had a miracle and so anyhow she lost a lot of weight she felt great she never had a procedure she's got three kids now and she doesn't have any endometriosis anymore and in fact Katherine now works for the physicians committee with our food for Life program teaching other women how to take back their health okay so I mentioned that she loves cheese so what's the deal with cheese does she sent hormones well yes cheese comes out of milk milk comes out of the cow cows are impregnated annually and so for nine months out of every 12 dairy cows are pregnant making estrogens it gets into the blood plasma and from the blood plasma it gets into the milk and the longer the pregnancy proceeds the more estrogen there is now it's only it's for only a trace but it's there and in fact some dairies have gone to the FDA and said we want to label our milk as hormone free because they don't inject bovine growth hormone but the FDA has said wait there is no hormone freed milk because the cow is making estrogens whether they're pregnant or not but when they're pregnant they make more and more and more and it gets into the milk and it gets into the cheese okay wait a minute so we're talking about estrogenic disorders that seem to be related to milk cheese animal products maybe and maybe not just for women researchers in Rochester New York looked at into a fertility clinic and they brought in a group of men and some of them ate relatively little cheese and some ate a lot of cheese and the sperm counts on the men who ate a lot of cheese were noticeably less than the men who ate relatively little cheese raising this theory that the traces of estrogens in milk and in cheese are just enough to take a fragile thing like a man's fertility and knock it off kilter or the regulation of endometriosis and a woman or her sexual cycle these off all of these things could be knocked off balance by hormones that nature didn't think she would get by the way speaking of men vitamin V the kinda goes into the doctor's office and he says doc I can't raise the flag anymore the doctor knows what he means he writes out a prescription for Viagra and it to the guy the guy winks at the doctor and walks out of the room if this is a good doctor the doctor will suddenly drop his pen race out of the room grab his patient before he goes down the elevator and say I forgot to tell you one thing please come back in the patient sits down and the doctor has to explain to him your erectile dysfunction is not caused by performance anxiety it's caused by narrowed arteries you've got atherosclerosis this is from cholesterol and fat its narrowing your arteries and the most narrow arteries are the ones that go to your private parts and that's the male sexual anatomy is a hydraulic system it was obviously designed on a Monday because things are going wrong with it all the time but the main thing is if you don't have good blood flow it just like doesn't do its thing right so if you have narrowed arteries so you don't get blood flow there the doctor explains to the patient you've got narrowed arteries in your heart you've got narrowed arteries in your carotid it's going to your brain meaning you might have a rectal dysfunction now but in two to three years you're gonna have a heart attack or a stroke you're a high risk patient so take your bag if you want to but we've got to talk about reversing your systemic atherosclerosis which will kill you please see the dietician before you leave you've just saved this patient's life erectile dysfunction is the canary in the coal mine of systemic atherosclerosis are you with me it's making sense okay all right so note to self skip the cheese what else affects our hormones though um your body has certain amount of wisdom it tries to get rid of excess hormones your liver you know we don't respect our liver it really cares for us things that we swallow it tries to just get rid of them including excess estrogens and the estrogens go through that green down the biliary tree this is the common bile duct and from there it goes into the intestinal tract and the estrogens go around and then out.you you literally flush them down the toilet however this depends on something it depends on fiber fiber is in your intestinal tract and it carries the estrogens out but here's the trick fiber is only in plants it's not in animals at all and so if you had salmon for lunch or an omelet or cheese or something like that there's no fiber in that and so the estrogen in the intestinal tract is absorbed back into the bloodstream and it goes back to the liver eventually and it goes around and around and around and a woman that has too much estrogen circulating 24/7 and same with a man too much testosterone circulating 24/7 I've often wondered what would happen to politics in this country if men had a little more fiber in their diet but that's another another comment so spam animal plant what is it fiber yes no no trashcan goodbye see you anyway so um KFC I'm sorry gone but also some plant things have had the fiber removed in the process of refining so we're gonna get rid of them - okay so um we've been talking about estrogens in foods and we've been talking about how the body has a way of getting rid of them getting you back into balance but there's yet a third thing and that's it in dairy products but it's not the fat and it's not the protein something else Daniel Kramer at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston started looking at the loss of fertility as you know when a woman is in or maybe she's in her early 20s she had she's at maximal fertility but she might say you know I'm starting my career this is not at the time when I really want to take time off and raise the family I'll put that off and as she reaches 30 and 35 her mother says you know don't let this we don't wait too long the biological clock is ticking your fertility is declining she's I know I know I know Dan Cramer looked at the drop in fertility between the late 20s and the late 30s in a woman's life and in Thailand where the diet is not an ice cream and cheesecake diet there's relatively little dare consumed during that time period the late 20s to late 30s the drop in fertility about 25% in Brazil a little more cheese a little more rapid drop in fertility in the United States a lot more dairy products especially milk high fat low fat and whatever and the drop in fertility is about 80% during that time period and then dr. Kramer filled in lots of other countries and the pattern is not perfect but you can see that there is a pattern that with more dairy there seems to be a more rapid loss of fertility why is that he laid the blame on sugar lactose sugar lactose is the dairy sugar and it's the most plentiful nutrient in milk there's more of it than there is a protein or fat or anything else and in your digestive tract if assuming you can digest lactose it breaks into galactose and glucose and galactose is toxic to the ovary so what he believed and has suggested and there's substantial evidence that this is true that if the more you expose the ovaries to galactose the more you knock out fertility you're not gonna faster and faster and faster well infertility won't kill you but researchers looked at the same kind of relationship with ovarian cancer and this was a Swedish study looking at women who consumed less than two servings of dairy a day two to three three to four and four or more and you could see ovarian cancer just goes right up with it there are also some rare genetic conditions where kids can't eliminate the lactose effectively and they they have massive infertility and higher much higher galactose toxicity so you hear people promoting milk for calcium and all kinds of other reasons but at the same bargain they're they're promoting something that has estrogens that has other poisons to the body okay we've talked about cramps and erectile dysfunction and infertility none of those things are gonna kill you but what about breast cancer and estrogen is a sneaky hormone all hormones if you have too much of them they can kill you if you have too little you can it can be fatal as well you all in every case you need to be in the sweet spot that's true for insulin if you have too much it can be fatal if you have too little it's same story with estrogen they're tiny these these little estrogen molecules can sneak through the cell membrane and once they're inside the cell they can go through the nuclear membrane and they can attach to your DNA damage it causing cancer cells to arise I'm talking about your own estrogen not necessarily estrogen that you've swallowed and studies show that the higher your estrogen level in your blood the higher your risk of postmenopausal breast cancer okay so let's say a woman has been diagnosed with cancer in the past and she's got one thing on her mind which is is this cancer ever gonna come back or am I going to be able to survive this the woman's intervention nutrition study brought in a group of women a very large group more than 2000 postmenopausal women they had all been treated for breast cancer and what they asked them to do was to make some pretty big diet changes and really cut the fat content in their their meals and what they found was that their risk of a cancer recurrence was cut by 24% we'll take it for estrogen receptor negative cancers it was cut by 42% and estrogen receptor positive cancers down by 15% so this was not a vegetarian or vegan diet but just these rather modest changes of cutting fat were helpful on the flip side researchers started looking at well what makes you more likely just succumb to your cancer and they came back to milk this was a California study that looked at women previously diagnosed with cancer and those who drank the most milk products and a particularly fatty dairy whole milk and butter and cheese and so forth they had a 49% higher risk of dying of their cancer compared to women who generally avoided these products okay so when you go home after this lecture and you talked to a friend about this they'll say wait a minute it's soy soy the product have you heard people talk about soy products soy has let's see what is it what did I read in men's health soy has estrogen in it or something that'll give you man boobs you know I'm talking about and if a woman consumes them she'll get cancer what they're talking about is in 1931 I believe it was genestein which is an ISO Flav own was discovered in soy and it does look sort of like estrogens this is estradiol and in lab studies people discovered that in fact it does attach to the estrogen receptor so if a man consumes tofu he's going to get man boobs apparently well if someone suggests that to you you can do an experiment that I think will just prove it go to the beach in August and you'll see some kind of heavyset guys who have taken their shirts off and they some of them do have some breast augmentation go up to one of them and ask how much tofu have you had this past week tempeh miso edamame and what he's gonna say is Etta what way do you like burgers that's me um what has happened here's what's happened that's a fat cell he's been gaining weight from eating cheeseburgers fat cells are not innocuous blobs of calories they are little factors and they take his testosterone and they convert it into estradiol you're with me testosterone in a man's body is converted into female sex hormones causing him not to just have fat around his breast area that's breast tissue that he's developing the same thing will happen in women as well okay butBut what about cancer could soy cause breast cancer well we've had enough time to sort this out and it turns out on the basis of many studies a high soy intake in if you could compare say Asian Americans who who consumed lots and lots of tofu and so I know compared to others um the high soy consumers have roughly 29 percent less risk of developing breast cancer compared to people who ignore it and then researchers have looked at women previously diagnosed with cancer those who avoid soy have the highest mortality those who consume a lot of soy whether it's tofu or soy milk or miso or whatever they have the lowest mortality and that's true whether it's estrogen receptor negative or positive tumors these are just two different varieties of tumors but in both cases it seems to work so in your car you have a gas pedal and if you step on the gas it goes but you got another pedal in your car right and it is the brake SOI hits the brake um it does attach to estrogen receptors you got alpha receptors you got beta receptors it attaches to the beta receptors and it helps slow down cancer growth totally not optional you don't have to have it all though soy is very handy if you have soy sausage it beats the heck out of pork sausage one day they like snow tires out of it probably they make all kinds of great things but it does not cost cancer if anything it's cancer preventer okay um so we've talked about estrogens and testosterone let's talk about thyroid hormone um so many people have thyroid issues but they're vague it your thyroid gland is at the base of your neck and it regulates energy in the body so if your hypothyroidism your low and you feel weak and you feel sensitive to cold you might be constipated you might have weight gain you might feel depressed your skin and hair change and doctors won't know what to make of this because these are sort of everyday symptoms but sooner or later the doctor will do a blood test and that will tell the story the opposite can happen if you're hyper thyroid the thyroid is cranking out too much thyroid hormone and that means you can lose weight sometimes you can gain weight your pulse will becoming irregular you'll find that you're nervous you're irritable you feel warm you're basically just kind of revved up and the doctor can do some tests and it's a not of terribly difficult diagnosis to make so why are so many people having thyroid problems well problem number one is obvious from the hormone itself those big purple blobs that's iodine and back in 1924 the Morton Salt Company said let's put iodine in salt and so people were getting plenty of iodine and they had more than enough to make thyroid hormone however I started using Himalayan salt or sea salt or other kinds that are not in fact iodized so I might not be getting the iodine that I need and so my thyroid hormones are starting to go a little bit out of whack now milk actually has some a little bit of iodine in it and the reason is that cows are not super hygienic the toilet paper roll never seems to be adequately filled so that when they milk when they put the milking thingies on down there on the odor before they do that to kill any fecal bacteria they spray them with iodine containing disinfectant some of which leaks into the milk so you can get iodine that way see my favorite and more hygienic source am i cheering you up sea vegetables have iodine they have a lot so you go with your friends to the sushi bar don't have the fish sushi unless you're really well insured but the the nori that they wrap around it and by the way not just nori but the wakame that's in the miso soup and that kind of thing the error made it's on your seaweed salad um they are very very high in iodine and so when people were coastal living coastally the seaweed that anybody could easily gather was a very high natural source of iodine but if you grew up in Fargo like I did there's you don't recognize any of this stuff and you can easily become hypothyroid okay but the bigger reason for thyroid problems in the United States has nothing to do with iodine it has to do with antibodies antibodies are torpedoes your body is invaded by a virus and so you make antibodies to kill that virus or a bacterium or or a cancer cell but sometimes antibodies attack you and there wasn't any virus at all and doctors can measure these in blood tests somehow your body is making antibodies that are attacking your own thyroid some of them shut it down some of them unfortunately will hit the gas pedal and cause the thyroid to create gout too much thyroid hormone so could foods be the cause of this antibody reaction the reason we thought may be yes is that most autoimmune reactions seem to have a dietary link we've this with asthma and by the way if anybody has a child with an Osama run do not walk to a completely plant-based diet and see if that doesn't help your child first times rheumatoid arthritis or Sjogren's disease these are autoimmune conditions where a diet changes seem to help because you're eliminating a trigger for antibody formation so researchers in the Adventist Health Study too brought in a large group of people more than 60,000 and they looked at thyroid conditions and they classified people based on their diet and they found that the people who did the worst were the lacto-ovo vegetarians these are the people who are skipping the meat and they're replacing with huge amounts of cheese and the people who did the best weather the least hypothyroidism were the vegans and then they looked at hyperthyroidism they found once again the vegans do the best they're not they're not exposing themselves to animal antigens and the omnivores seem to do the worst so we clearly need more research here but we've had more than enough for people to start trying this on their own so this is Mike Mike is a neurosurgeon in North Carolina and fit at age 52 he was in generally good health but every year he'd have physical and when you're as doc said Mike your thyroid is a little low and the way they measure this is with a blood test called TSH or a thyroid stimulating hormone TSH pushes the thyroid to get active and if TSH is getting higher and higher that means that for some reason your thyroid is sluggish and needs to be pushed really hard so his TSH was going up and the next year and the next year and the next year after five years is doctor said let's face it you've got hypothyroidism why don't you let me let me write you out a prescription for thyroid replacement well he decided to try a dietary approach as kind of a coincidence and he went on an entirely plant-based diet joined the the vegan subgroup and what happened was that his TSH fell back down into the normal range he lost a lot of not a lot of weight cuz he would never really have anybody lost seven or eight pounds he wanted to get rid of and he got his energy back okay um other people found much the same thing I personally think we need more research in this area both on hypo and hyper thyroidism but we know more than enough now before we say to a person you're gonna have to be on medication forever or you need surgery or you need radioactive treatments let's have a look at what's on your plate a one more hormone I just want to share with you a few things about insulin the National Institutes of Health gave us a grant in 2003 to see if we can improve the dietary treatment of people who have type 2 diabetes and we tested the best current diet that's cutting calories and limiting carbohydrate and so forth versus a completely plant-based diet and this will not be on the test but what we what we track is hemoglobin a1c which indicates your your blood sugar control and the red line is the control group on the conventional diet and they improve they did well they they improved by about 0.4 absolute percentage points the vegan group dropped by three times more about 1.2 absolute percentage points that drop is better than any oral diabetes medication you could get and that's just from eating beans and asparagus and brown rice and fruit and things like that no calorie limiting no medication changes to show what this means this is a man named Vance who was one of our first research volunteers he came into the study he said diabetes it's been in my family like his dad was dead at 30 he was 31 when he was diagnosed he came in to see us in his late 30s he said diabetes means I'm gonna lose a leg means I'm gonna go blind so anyway he joined our research study and he was randomly assigned to the vegan diet and after about three weeks he said you know this is pretty easy diet said what do you mean people think of a vegan diet as meaning you have to have a taste for folk music and tie-dyed shirts you have to be kind of half philosopher to go vegan right he said look instead of eating meat chili you eat bean chili um he said previous diabetes diets had told him cut calories count carb grams calibrate your insulin doses da da da so you don't tell me to do any of that instead of alfredo sauce its tomato sauces this is not hard and over the course of about a year he lost 60 pounds his doctor his outside doctor stopped his diabetes medications and his a1c dropped from nine and a half which is out-of-control diabetes to five point three now if you're not familiar with these numbers I got his lab slip and I paced around in my office for about 20 minutes staring at this lab slit that is that's not diabetes that is a normal value this man had a terrible family history and he himself was diagnosed with this disease and was out of control before he came in now he's on no medications at all and he has absolutely no trace of diabetes in his body here's my question do I tell him he doesn't have diabetes anymore I know that sounds like a funny thing to say now but at the time that what everyone said is once you're diabetic you'll always be diabetic don't you tell that patient that they're cured and and that there was some logic to that because the idea was people with diabetes need to take it seriously they need to be really careful they need to be careful with their medications and their exams nobody ever thought that the disease could go away my dad my dad grew up in the cattle business but he left the cattle business I'm happy to say and he became he went to medical school he became the diabetes expert for Fargo North Dakota and all throughout the eastern part of the state people would come see my dad at 6 o'clock every day there abouts give or take he would open the front door and come in and sit down his medical bag never once did I hear him say that any patient ever was cured never once did anybody really get better my dad's job was to fight a slowly losing battle trying to keep people from having symptoms trying to keep their feet attached trying to keep them away from dialysis as long as possible trying to keep their vision as long as possible knowing that in almost every case they would lose ten years of life or 12 or 13 years of life and that the same problem would happen in their kids I never heard success so here I am looking at chances lab slip thinking I don't he's got diabetes anymore and of course now it sounds silly because we see this all the time diabetes we have shown and proven to be a two-way street but it will never be a two-way street if we don't change him by the way when I asked his permission to share his story with you he said make sure you tell everyone that my erectile dysfunction went away too so okay all right so let me show you the cause of type 2 diabetes um you have glucose in your blood whose which is a good thing it's job is to get into this this is a muscle cell this big thing your muscles run on glucose just like your car runs on gasoline so the glucose has to go through these funny little channels to power your cell and insulin is the key that's going to open them up with me okay so the insulin is made in your pancreas it arrives at the surface of the cell just like a key and then it opens these channels and lets the glucose in the reason that the insulin is not working in type 2 diabetes was something my father never heard of because they didn't have magnetic resonance spectroscopy at the fargo clinic when you take a patient with type 2 diabetes and stick them in a magnetic resonance you stick them in a huge magnet and you're looking inside their muscle cells and what you see is fat they can be real thin but them inside the muscle cells are particles of beef fat and chicken fat and fryer grease and olive oil extra virgin olive oil extra extra virgin olive oil it's building doctors hate words like fat because it has only three letters so we'll call it intra Mayo cellular lipid but it's fat in its fat inside the muscle cells and it's also inside the liver cells and our group working with the Yale University has shown that when you change your diet you can drain that fat out and so diabetes becomes a two-way street you're attacking the cause and correcting the cause and how many people have type 2 diabetes go and sit down with a doctor and have this explained to them no that doesn't happen they read in a magazine that you shouldn't eat bread that has nothing to do with the cause it's your body can regulate this hormone once you bring it back into balance ok so does this matter I'm an argue that does matter this is this is Tony saddle arrow anybody know Tony Sadler anybody you've heard of him um Tony saddle arrow was a very good doctor he was the head of Methodist Hospital in Philadelphia and at in his mid forties he was running the hospital they're building a new wing and every year he had an employee physical and so including a chest x-ray yeah he went down had a chest x-ray he went back up to his office he was doing things in his phone rang and it was the radiologist who was a friend he said Tony get back down here okay Tony rent went back down to radiology and the radiologist put his his chest x-ray on the screen and he said Tony what do you think of this and dr. saddle arrow looked and he saw densities all in his chest and to a doctor this means do I have cancer and he didn't wait they went ahead and did a bone scan that very day and they found he had metastatic cancer in his sternum in his ribs and in his skull and it turned out to have started in his prostate gland now a lot of men have prostate cancer and if you're 80 years old this very slow-growing cancer is probably not going to kill you and so doctors take their time about doing surgery they track a blood test called PSA and if it's not rising too fast they just let it go because this cancer is so slow growing but he had such an aggressive cancer it had already metastasized when he was in his mid-40s this this was an extremely aggressive cancer and this was a death sentence he had a matter of just months to live so in a moment he went from being an active productive doctor to being a patient who was about to die and to make everything worse his father had lung cancer and did die just very shortly after his own diagnosis so Tony drove up to New Jersey from Philadelphia and he buried his father and he consoled his mother as best he could and he thought in the time I got left I'm just gonna run that Dharma hospital as best I can and turn it over to somebody else so he got on the New Jersey Turnpike and he started driving down to Philly and he saw a couple of hitchhikers beside the road and he picked them up mostly just have somebody to talk to and as fate would have it they had just gotten out of macrobiotic cooking school and they said doc so you got cancer okay you know brown rice tofu we can eat these things you look gang a little young you gonna be these are the most annoying kids you could imagine they didn't understand that he is a doctor he doesn't need this this getting his chakra aligned mumbo-jumbo to try to make him feel better about some kind of quackery but as they got out of the car they pried loose his address and they promised to send him a book which they did sixty seven cents postage due um and so he read the book and he thought this is just silliness except there was a story of a woman with breast cancer who happened to be a physician who had done very well on this diet and he thought well that's curious I'll call her up and he did and he rang up her home and her husband answered the phone he said is doctor so-and-so there yes but she can't come to the phone she's very very ill and the her husband explained that she was dying of her breast cancer and so Tony said I got it okay never mind I'm sorry for bothering you and but before he hung up he said wait a minute I read about her in this book that she was supposed to be an example of how good this diet was and her husband said yeah she did great she was on that diet and it was the best thing that ever happened to her just turned her around but she didn't stick with it she's dying now Tony thought okay my choices are I'll try it so he went to the macrobiotic cooking center and he learned how to make brown rice and that night he blew up his pressure cooker and his heart mended he was just all thumbs he found there's like impossible and every day he would go into the physicians dining room with his chopsticks in his brown rice and the the doctors would kind of say look at this poor slob who's you know let's humor poor Tony in his dying days but Tony didn't didn't die a macrobiotic diet is a largely plant-based diet that goes from the ancient Chinese medical principles kind of distilled through Japanese cuisine and so they were extremely down on dairy they're down on meat very big on grains and vegetables that kind of thing so this is what he's eating and he started to feel better start to feel in fact a lot better his aches and pains went away and at three months and four months at six months tony was still alive and after a year he just felt like old Tony so he went back down to radiology and he said let's look they redid the bone scan and this made history because his cancer was no longer detectable and this was not just somebody this was the president of Methodist Hospital in Philadelphia who to him this happened so he said alright I cannot keep this a secret he wrote a book called recalled my life and he went on all the talk shows saying I don't know how this works but we have to study this we have to understand this I'm an N of 1 let's bring people in and figure out how this works and and this it's very well written an engaging book about his story so I read this book and I called him up and he was vibrant and I went and visited him and I'd looked at his scans and it's true um this man was cured or seemed to be cured at least but as I got to know him and we compare notes and so forth and time went by one day he told me something kind of frightening he said I've been well for so long he'd been about ten years I decided to stop the diet what you know I I want to see how I am with if I kind of liberalize this a little bit and he didn't do very rapidly started to get edema in his hands which he couldn't really explain and his energy level was going down he could feel something was not right um so he tried to go back on the diet and his macrobiotic counter said Tony curing cancer once is a really good thing shirring it twice is really hard and I talked I call him up one day little not too long after this and his voice was strange like a person on drugs I said Tony what's with you so I'm sorry it's the narcotics said what do you mean she said my cancers back weeks later he was dead um now you cannot know from one person did diet cause his cancer although we do have very good studies Harvard has two very large studies linking dairy products to prostate cancer and also linking certain compounds to protecting against prostate cancer like antioxidants like lycopene they reduced the risk but you can't know if that was the case in his case and you cannot know if the diet is what cured him if there was some other thing some other reason and you also cannot tell if had he continued the diet would he be alive today but what we do know is that we have more than enough evidence and more than enough explanatory biological mechanisms to say that medical science can no longer ignore these and rely simply on detecting it and zapping it we've got to look at what the body can do for itself and my message is this the body can heal if you cut your hand a band-aid doesn't heal you built into your DNA is all of the instruction that the skin cells need in order to rejoin to each other and the broken blood vessels will reattach if you break your leg the cast doesn't heal you built into your DNA is a program to allow that bone to rejoin arteries can heal but they but they will never they will never heal unless you get the cholesterol out of your diet and the animal fat out of your diet and the menstrual pain and the fertility issues and even the cancers you the healing capacity of your body has to be supported and it is so easily frustrated by diet choices that we make all the time is the equivalent of having a broken leg and an insecure cast it never allows it to be stabilized or picking out a cut so that it can never possibly heal that's what we do with the foods that we choose and that we feed to our families so what's a healthy diet healthy diet is four things it's fruits and grains and vegetables and legumes one of the goom's what are they beans peas let that grow in a pod beans peas lentils okay so in our clinic it's a Barnard Medical Center we have thousands people who come in and with many many medical problems and we talk about a healthy diet and they wonder how can I do this you want me to go vegan I'm gonna get divorced I'll have to live in the garage what do I do so what we do is we break this into two steps and I have never seen anyone unable to do it if you're in this audience because you were dragged here by somebody else but you're kind of intrigued and thinking maybe there's something to this here's what you do yeah there's a two step method for just trying it up for yourself you first check out the possibilities and what you're gonna do is for seven days take a piece of paper like this and fill it out looking for things that are plant-based that you would like what do I mean I mean for breakfast they every day I've cornflakes with milk I'll try almond milk I don't know is it any good I don't know you could go to the store and buy it or oat milk or hemp milk or rice milk or soy milk whatever give it a try um next to it are the vegan sausages I don't know if they're any good I can try it you got seven days to fill out your list every night I eat an Italian restaurant and I'm a angel hair pasta and now I guess I could try the arrabbiata sauce which they tell me has no animal products or I go to the subway and I make a submarine sandwich I guess I could throw off the ham and have the vegan sandwich instead all right so we're filling it out and there's what you discover very rapidly is that there are lots of lots and lots and lots of healthy choices and by the way in my new book your body and balance Lindsey Nixon made all the recipes for it and when she sent them to me she sent me a note saying dr. Bronner I didn't tell you this that my own cramps went away in the course of eating a low-fat vegan diet so these are everyday things anyway the point is there are lots and lots of wonderful foods that you can use including at restaurants when you eat out lots and lots of choices so you got seven days to try it out if you go to the sushi bar your you'll find that if you could get your iodine and lots of exotic things that we never had in Fargo North Dakota including maybe even Taco Bell not the pinnacle of culinary art but they've got vegan things for you so after seven days you discover you've got your list filled out that was the first step now step two is let's do a three week test drive we're gonna do it all vegan all the time but only for 21 days and 21 days you can do anything plus you already picked out the foods so let's try it at the end of that time two things will have happened the first is you are physically healthier you just you feel better you're losing weight if you have diabetes your blood Sugar's coming down but the other thing is that your tastes are changing and they're changing a lot so we have some other things that you can use other resources we have an app called the 21 day vegan kickstart which you can get on your smartphone it's free that nobody is selling anything it's menus and recipes and all kinds of stuff this is my new book which I'm hoping you'll enjoy and share with others for clinicians we have the nutrition guide for clinicians everything from Alzheimer's to varicose veins it's a free download we have nutrition continuing education for all those doctors who didn't learn this in medical school we will help you for free the AMA accredits that and also credits our international conference on nutrition and medicine it would make your heart sing to see a thousand or more doctors in one room all deciding maybe we're doing too much with bills and not enough with food let's change that um the last thing that I want to just spend just a couple minutes on if I may and that's to say we need to change the world that we live in a little bit you might think that hospitals would take advantage of the teachable moment where the patient is in the hospital and whatever they're there for now is the chance to hook them on healthy food but have you looked at hospital menus lately some of them are not so healthy for you including processed meats um this is my hospital the George Washington University Hospital there's a helicopter bringing them in more bacon and sausage I took this picture in our own Hospital cafeteria bacon causes colorectal cancer it clearly increases the risk of many other forms of cancer as well and by the way let me show you this from the New York Times cancer increasing among meat-eaters one hundred thirteen years ago hospitals haven't changed in this time I want to tell you something things can't change I wrote a resolution that I brought to the American Medical Association which years ago was silent on diet and I want to tell you something the American Medical Association in 2017 passed this resolution saying that that we call on US hospitals to improve the health of patients staff and visitors by providing plant-based meals low in fat sodium added sugars by throwing out a bacon and the sausage and the ham and the hot dogs completely and having healthy beverages yes the world really can change and yes I I praise my colleagues at the AMA for doing that they've done a lot more this is Albany I mean Albany as you know and many of you helped with this last year's get the Governor Cuomo signed a bill saying that hospitals have to provide plant-based meals so I applaud those of you who made this happen but we've we've really got to change this world and that means three things it means learning understanding information now there are limits to what we know and we have to be humble about that and we do need more research and we have to explore and and and and and learn as we go but then we have to connect with other people and we have to share information the people who need this message the most are not in this room the people who need this message the most are 12 years old and in school they're eating chicken nuggets and on the way home - getting string cheese and their parents put a cheese pizza in the oven and then they turn on the TV and half the commercials are snack foods and the other half the commercials are medications - under the effects of the snack foods and that's the world that kids grow up in and they've never heard any of this and the girl is now 16 she's got menstrual cramps you stoled that's just what it's like to be a woman the couple is dealing with infertility and they're told this will be hundreds of thousands of dollars for you likely and somebody has a cancer diagnosis in their family or they themselves have it and they're told here are your options it's chemo it's radiation yes those are important in many cases but if we're not focusing on food then we are deciding that we do not care that the body has healing properties of its own that are more powerful than anything else and need to be shored up so we have to make some noise and that's what it is so I'm hoping that every one of you will take your personal megaphone which might be your Instagram page or it might be Facebook or Twitter account or whatever it is let's make some noise let me also ask you to please join us if you would when you can turn on your smartphone and actually go to PCRM dorg slash balance i join our network and we have lots more resources there and also an opportunity to sign up for more alerts we are working on legislation all the time including here in New York we've got a bill coming in shortly that would require doctors to actually have continuing medical education related to nutrition three hours a year it's a start we are gonna get pushed back like you've never believed but I think we can win it if we just insist that this is the case we recently did a poll sixty-four percent of doctors actually support it but the medical community itself the organized medicine is not yet there so help help us to arm-wrestle this Governor Cuomo signed the bill hospitals need to put it to work let me ask you to help us arm wrestle with the hospitals and the big area that then has to be schools there is no reason that a seven or eight year old child should get a great education and even a look at their morals but they're getting foods that are going to make them unhappy and hurt them and possibly even kill them later in life we've got to change that so I want to thank the JCCC and I want to thank all of you for allowing me to share this time with you tonight thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Physicians Committee

Views: 803,999

Rating: 4.8815794 out of 5

Keywords: Neal Barnard, Dr. Neal Barnard, Neal Barnard MD, plant-based, diet, health, healthy, healthy diet, hormones, thyroid, infertility, menstrual cramps, Endometriosis, hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism

Id: 0s5vzsabNpI

Length: 54min 20sec (3260 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2020