'Nutrition is the Most Effective Medicine' with T. Colin Campbell

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so you know I got a bunch of stuff I wrote down I got three pages I got to go quick but I decided it's okay if I'm a little random today so let me just start with something personal five years ago this month I couldn't take ten steps without my chest just seizing up why would you clap it's not really okay I'll I'll let you know when to clap okay so I was in the middle of night about a week ago I woke up and I looked at my beautiful wife and I said I am so happy because I feel so good now clapping and I really mean that I want to share this with everybody here you know clearly you're here to hear Colin Campbell Joel Khan I can't wait for you to meet mama says Meg and I'll be quick but I'm gonna just say this again to everybody which is five years ago I couldn't take these ten steps without stopping and I have never felt better and I literally go at it every single day wake up and go at it again and I want to keep doing it every single day because I feel great thank you before I introduce Meg I would like to just have one more moment with you which is knock knock knock knock a little old lady hey I didn't know you guys could yodel thank you I know that's your way of saying good good job all right so I'm about done let me just say this so eight months ago maybe even longer I saw the mama says and it was you know no oil plant base to your house fresh I called him up I said hey send me some you know I shared our website with them they sent it to me I ate it I'm like oh my goodness is this good I really I was like whoa this is good stuff because I really don't do a lot of cooking and then all of a sudden we just had to we got busy and I'm so pleased so very pleased today to introduce Meg from Mama says she's gonna spend a few minutes describing her food explaining how to order it it's now on the PB NSG website yes we get a little kickback for doing it so I encourage people to overeat okay and I want to say thank you everybody for being here on a Memorial weekend they said that we couldn't get 400 we got 6 700 yeah yeah thank you everybody here's Meg thank you so much my name is Meg Donahue and I am the co-founder of momma says calm and the mama says stands for do like your mama says eat your fruits and veggies go outside and play and we got started because in 2012 I got a call that no child wants to get my mom at 80 had congestive heart failure she had 10% heart function her kidneys were failing and she was being released to hospice care so I come from a very big Irish Catholic family football-playing family and I said how can this be this is this is a woman who was an athlete she was vivacious she was always the correct weight she was doing yoga in the 70s what is going on has anyone survived this and so basically we said let's find a Hail Mary pass my dad coincidentally was drafted to the Detroit Lions so we were a big football playing family he ended up not playing there but I have a secret sentimentality for it so we said let me do the research and I went down a lot of rabbit holes but what I came across was the work of T Colin Campbell dr. Esselstyn dr. Cohn the.you know the people who have done all of the work before me and they said you know you can reverse heart disease and that was not even in my concept and I worked in the organic food business for a lot of years we had a big company organic food company but I never heard this and we said we're gonna try it so I gave my mom my 8 year old mom I brought her back to my house and I said I'm gonna feed her these little whole food plant-based smoothies and soups and I fed her like a little bird because she was too sick she couldn't get out of bed and after about 3 months her health began to stabilize so they were still running back to the intensive care there were a few close calls big family calling them all in we think this is it but she's kept getting stronger and after about six months she was walking around my driveway and she is 87 now she's a rock star she still lives with me her heart function is near normal and we're at one of the top hospitals in New England it's Dartmouth Medical Center and she has a heart function that's near normal her blood pressure is normal 120 over 60 she swims four times a week she's taking up ukulele it's a thing in Brattleboro Vermont and she's great you know she has a life and what happened for me is I said wow I was really overwhelmed because I also have we have four generations in our little compound and I realized this is kind of hard to do and then I realized why don't more people know about this if my my mother could survive at 80 why don't more people know about this and I went to Cornell I went to the T Colin Campbell I got my plant-based nutrition support I'm not in the support group plant-based nutrition certificate and I said we need to start a company that makes it easy to do this so we created a company that was the one that I wanted so that when I got home I would have food that was familiar that had no oil we say this whole food plant-based no gluten no preservatives no processed sugars no BS no bad stuff that was fresh and that was something that my football-playing brothers would look on their plate and go this looks great not this is salad where's dinner and that's so that's what we decided to do and we had a background in food so we knew that if we could if we could give somebody else the gift that my family got just by making it easier for them to eat this way one or two three times a week then we felt like you know we are doing something very important in our life and so what we do is we you just go online and you can go right to the PB NS G's website and there's a link there and you just it'll take you right to our site you order whatever you want we ship it to you it's all fresh two weeks shelf-life in your fridge we ship it to you it comes to you you eat the food you take the shipping packaging and we give you a label to send it back to us because that was another thing we realized that we you know the planet is important and we wanted to make sure that people could recycle and that it could be easy so we pay for it to ship back to us and we recycle everything properly and the last thing I wanted to say is that you know we're we're just tremendously impressed with the work that's going on here and in with Paul because he's amazing and so any pbn SG member that orders through this site we're also going to add some free a3 side to any order that comes through at any time for as long as you order so thank you I don't want to take up too much time but I so appreciate it and just go right to the site and we hope to see you there all right before we get dr. Cohn on I forgot one thing why don't couples go to the gym because some relationships don't just don't work out all right everybody knows dr. Joel Cohn dr. Joel Cohn this is all yours thank you thank you Paul he's a good man at five years.the 550 he's gonna get because the power of whole food plant-based no SOS it is a truly great honor to be able to share the stage with a great man is coming soon I started eating exclusively plants in 1977 so I had to wait 29 years for the first edition of this book and I can remember so clearly and you should get the second edition even have you the first edition because dr. Campbell has grandchildren no it's good to buy books and update but I remember truly reading it in that first part about dairy intake in type 1 diabetes and I know you know I've been um doctor all these years and I read nutrition literature and just blew me away continues so great gratitude for forming my continued interest in education every day learning something new so I'm gonna do how many people know the word hutzpah okay I'm gonna thank you it's Friday night you know we have to have a little gathering and light candles I'm gonna have hoods but because I'm gonna teach how to analyze science with one of the world's pre-eminent sciences here and I'm gonna let him criticize or comment and maybe give an ovation or an herb Asian after it whatever it feels like but I am challenged as a medical doctor I don't have an mph I don't have a PhD we get very little statistics and then once you're done you get nothing other than Pharma education that's not farm that's Pharma and there are some real good drugs in case any of you work for pharma but that's all we got usually at Capital Grille over big steaks that cause aging but nonetheless I've recently encountered a couple explanations for how to analyze medical science headline six days ago eggs reduce heart disease well what do you do with this it's all over the place you know I can get on and write a blog and get some exposure I have to really study and think about it see what other people are saying but what about you and this is just a construct but these are brand new slides I just made them last night if they bomb I won't be back til next meeting so there are a lot of fad diets and one of the reasons is the health of America is obviously suffering we learned this week everything's this week for the third year in the row the lifespan of United States has dropped okay we spend more money than last year we live less than last year that's concerning and we know obesity rates it was announced again World Health Organization this week as an absolute crisis going on with obesity in the world let alone the United States people are searching I mean some people are trying very hard and trying to eat very well some of you in this room are trying very hard and yet it isn't working and there's a lot of complex equations my favorite medical article this week wasn't medical it was a headline in Barcelona Spain the European Society of endocrinology announced take your shoes off when you walk in the house that's honestly true and that was an endocrine academic meeting because they round up in your backyard or your neighbor's backyard and the Scots fertilizer on your grass is on your shoes it's in your house it's in your skin it's disrupting your endocrine system and it's getting in your fat stores and you won't lose weight little tips it's a crazy world so there's fad diets because it's not all working and I think whole food plant-based no oil diets are the answer for everybody but there's still a struggle to get the last part of health together because it requires sleep and fitness and love and protection from all these environmental toxins so we got all these crazy things so the current one is this one and I had to put a sign slide up because I got the head of the nutrition department with you know decades of ro1 funding from the NIH so it's very sexy right now to talk about keto and ketogenic but I want you to read the second bullet point this is a backup mechanism to fuel our body when we're in great distress we're starving there was probably a lot of ketosis in Auschwitz it was not a popular diet and for a number of reasons you're probably not gonna read a book - which diet program I don't mean to offend anybody but Biafra diet program when you're starving we have a backup mechanism short term to utilize fat stores to fuel our body now with glucose because you're not eating much with the fat you have and you break it down you create ketone bodies that can fuel your body and the other situations when I've encountered more often a patient in the emergency room looking real dry complaining of a lot of urination fruity breath weak in their blood Sugar's 1200 and they're being diagnosed for the first time with diabetes could be type 1 it could be type 2 they're in what's called ketoacidosis that's not sexy that's not Hollywood that's not very attractive but everybody right now wants to do keto which is an extreme response that our bodies have thank God when we are unable to process or don't have access to carbohydrate-based foods doesn't mean carbohydrate-based foods are bad cuz all through our legacy we had periods hopefully just days where food was sparse and we starved and we were hungry or we developed diseases alcoholism can create the same trigger in the same pathways so if we had of the top 100 books on Amazon for right now are teaching the keto diet I mean if it was called starvation diet by aphrodite alcoholics diet or you know be like a diabetic in crisis diet it wouldn't be so popular but it is popular because Madison Avenue makes it all slick doesn't mean there's science so what do we do with that you know there's the problem on the right the low calorie high carb awful carb diet of potatoes and brown rice and peas and beans and fruit and what we got to do dr. Robert Atkins and now you rename it the keto diet you can rename it the Verta diet an online program to teach type 2 diabetics how to lose weight and reverse your diabetes with low carb you know you're burning the fat you lose the weight everybody says it's got to be great how many people started the Atkins diet in the 70s and are still doing it everyday and have maintained their weight and are even still alive because if you started the Atkins diet in the 1970s I would give you an award if you can say I've eaten that way for the past 35 years and look at my clean corn arteries now one case report in the world of reversal of heart disease with low carb high fat diets like are so popular and that's how you define a keto diet yet it's everywhere it's LeBron James this is Halle Berry you know pick pick your star of the day that's talking about ketogenic diets I I push my carb intake so low might leave a few leafy greens but don't touch fruit fruit is terrible it's full of sugar I jack up my fat 60 70 80 % maybe add coconut oil butter MCT coconut oil avocado oil maybe I just eat meat all day long I just got off Twitter is that gonna go with dr. Sean Baker who eats only meat breakfast lunch and dinner he's in or the Pedic surgeon he lost his license because he has a problem up here so he meets three times a day for a year and he went on a podcast and said of course I didn't check my blood work I mean why I don't know how he had a bowel movement during that year and and he's so ugly I don't want to think about it publicly or privately but that's how crazy the world is and Shawn Baker's after me right now I'll show you why in a minute I don't care because somebody has to call out so this is a suggestion there is a world famous scientist and somebody was up front talking about him a minute ago who has appeared on the scene like a bright light not a vegan not a just like dr. Campbell who I think would resist a label he's a scientist who knows the pathways about chemistry the favored health and illness dr. Longo is a 50 year old PhD at University of Southern California in LA and half a year in Milan he has done some of the world's most groundbreaking research on Aging I'll show you a little bit in a minute he's actually been nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine he wants something called the Jubilee award it happens when you come in number two that was in 2016 because of Japanese scientists one in the same field on something called a Fuji he says this is how you analyze eggs reduce cardiovascular disease are the ketogenic diet is great for your health and you'll live forever you go to the first pillar which he calls a new word not gerontology Juve ontology what's the biochemistry of staying young what makes sense does read and meet three times a day in eggs favored known biochemical pathways well you have to be pretty bright on that stuff hurts my brain very honestly but I'll show you at least one example you can do that second is epidemiology something like Loma Linda Evans's health they take surveys of people they ask who's eating high carb low carb and they get to the bottom line of associations to people he low carb live longer or live shorter now might because their lifestyles different their smokings different their their demeanor their optimism but anyways they answer the questionnaire high carb plant low carb animal and you can make some associations clinical studies like the rare randomized study there's a famous study called predamond that used the Mediterranean diet and jacked it around a little bit and abused it one of the most interesting is what old people do that have been studied in our healthy older people the Blue Zones and centenarians owns dr. Longo adds his own hometown as a Blue Zone Dan Buettner would question that maloca in Calabria Italy but seriously to people in Okinawa eat meat three times a day when their health was really good in the 50s and 60s two people in Loma Linda or Nicoya Peninsula and Costa Rica or Sardinia or Icarus Greece do they eat a low-carb diet and push away the bread and they push away the brown rice and they push away the potatoes because those are awful awful foods of course not and then the last part is the hardest part which is looking at this in a big picture the environment the animals the whole production of food which is a pressing problem if we all ate meat three times a day like Shaun Baker the world would be done pretty soon from just production and damage and destruction but what I got really excited about so maybe dr. long goes wrong maybe there aren't five pillars although it'd be hard to question his science so this is from dr. Michael Brown dr. Michael Brown MD trained me when I was in Dallas Texas in 1980s he won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1985 along with joe goldstein for the whole cholesterol and cholesterol receptor science that has changed America maybe you like it because it prompted the first statin maybe you don't like it but it change it as listening to a lecture of his last week called a century of cholesterol and it's very interesting lecture it's on YouTube a century of cholesterol goes on for an hour he gave us speech in Grand Rapids at the Van Andel Institute last year he said I analyzed science with four lines not five pillars but four lines there has to be biochemical experimental if he applied this Kido craze and said show me the biochemistry that all this meat and butter and cheese and added high-fat oils that redundant but avocado and coconut oil causes biochemical pathways that slow aging and reverse damage let's do it but it doesn't exist genetic data epidemiologic data and clinical trials it's right there he didn't put centenarian in there for whatever reason but they are so similar I sent that to dr. Longo I said you know I doubt you know that Michael Brown on his own a Nobel Prize awarded physician and a Nobel nominated PhD have actually said you know you can jump to conclusions with the science too quickly with a headline with an association you have to look at the big picture so for example how does whole food plant-based stack up when you look at these five pillars or four lines biochemistry well this is the research that got dr. Longo on the map which is that and it's you know it overlaps and I won't even say how it overlaps the dr. Campbell's because he can speak to him more but that specific proteins found in meat particularly serine valine and something called three and then can trigger pathways of Aging which have influences now igf-1 some you've heard of insulin-like growth factor-1 mTOR and they directly lead to the growth of cells propagating cancer and the aging of cells by accumulating debris there's a second pathway dr. Longo identified called the wrasse protein kinase a pathway that's triggered more by added sugar but these diets which are low in sugar okay we'll give them half a point there but they're extremely high in protein can't possibly be good long-term for aging that's why centenarians societies don't exist that eat a keto type diet long-term great backup system awful awful plan what about centenarians for whole food plant-based we have them we have Loma Linda this is data from Loma Linda ninety six thousand people those that answered food questionnaires I eat vegan that's about 10% of the people in Loma Linda lived significantly longer than those that answer night omnivore that started the whole Adventist Health Research plan because that's some pretty amazing data this is an hour from California and the longest lived people in the United States are only an hour from Hollywood and they do something very different they plants they happen not to smoke and drink much alcohol and they have a strong sense of community but we've got the centenarian pillar we have epidemiology whole food plant-based this is a really cool graph if you look at the green it's increasing percentage of calories from unprocessed plant foods in various countries and the red is the rate of death from heart disease and cancer and this is epidemiology this is Association maybe people in Laos don't smoke and it has nothing to do with the fact they eat plants but it sure looks suspicious they eat plants and they don't get heart disease and cancer and here we are next to hungry eating a whole lot of animal products and little unrefined plants one and a half servings a day and we get all these chronic diseases so we've got the epidemiology we got randomized trials everybody I hope recognizes Dean Ornish land now this is Gemma 1998 if you eat a whole food plant diet your corne arteries are 37% blocked in five years if you eat a cardiology diet that your cardiologist is eating arteries are 51% blocked that's randomized that's the kind of hardcore science that has never been done for the low-carb movement despite their noise on every social media outlet there is so we've got that boom and now I just got to tell you this week and this is what I was just fighting on Twitter this is a major article came out yesterday so I just wanted to throw it in since I saw today this is a study now you can eat a whole food plant-based diet that isn't low in fat and we've all heard dr. Fuhrman lecture and there's a little disagreement in the medical community and the expert community about avocados and olives there's not so much about nuts anymore dr. Ornish is publicly blessed nuts dr. Esselstyn secretly blesses a few nuts dr. Fuhrman would tell them come on guys loosen your tie a little and have an avocado now and then but I tend to agree with dr. Fuhrman cuz there's data that avocados lower cholesterol and improve endothelial function but it's awful but this is a diet randomized plants legumes whole grains 20% of calories from fat it's actually pretty low in research you know doc se da Cornish got it down about 10% dr. Bernhard gets it down to about 10% of people follow Okinawa was 10% so 20% in science is pretty good versus a control diet your chance if you've had breast cancer being a live long term is dramatically different that's a hundred and seventy ladies that are alive not dead because they chose to eat as we teach in this program that's data yesterday it needs to be blasted on everybody's Instagram everybody's Facebook everybody's Twitter which I've already done on all my channels and they're fighting back because I tagged Gary Taubes and other people that have unbelievable platforms to bury data like this we should be proud keto diet one pillar two pillar three pillar four pillar doc Longo calls it a half a pillar diet and you should just disregard it no centenarian no biochemistry no randomised trials of any consequence very little epidemiology and a couple of case reports now I will say there is something emerging called vegan keto diet and it's interesting and it's early in the game but eating a diet of only plants but enough avocados nuts and seeds maybe even some other processed versions of avocado that drive the calories up dr. long goes teaching this for five days a month not for 30 days a month and he's shown that it does trigger a ketogenic response with all the downside of the animal foods and you never would do it long-term very bad idea to take a dramatic hostile response mechanism and use it non-stop so I said this on Retro podcast about six weeks ago I don't know how a physician could possibly in good conscience recommend an animal-based low-carb ketogenic diet because people who are doing that are just not analyzing five pillars four lines and that's how you evaluate science thank you very much hello everyone my name is Ken Lee so I was given less than five minutes to introduce dr. T Colin Campbell and I thought wow five minutes that's just not enough time to summarize his contributions to plant-based nutrition and at the same time I thought well this man does not need an introduction because he is the man he is it he's the face of whole food plant-based nutrition right and he's actually the one who came up with the term whole food plant-based back in the early 1980s yeah so yeah dr. Campbell earned his PhD in nutrition biochemistry and microbiology from Cornell University in 1961 and he went back to Cornell in 1975 as full professor with tenure at the very young age of 40 and he has he devoted his life to scientific research in nutrition and to seeking the truth and he served on nutrition panels with organizations like the National Academy of Sciences he's written over 300 research papers that have been published in peer-reviewed journals and he's written three books the most famous of which is of course the China Study and a PvP he's working on another book which is very exciting and he's of course appeared in documentary films like Forks Over knives and plump urination and he has changed and he continues to change people's lives including mine through his work some of our PB n s3 members have submitted their stories of how their lives have been changed by dr. Campbell's work and I'm sorry I don't have the time to read everyone's response but I would like to try and capture the essence of what people had to say by reading just a couple here so one person wrote after reading the China Study in 2010 my world completely changed she went on to complete the T Colin Campbell plant-based nutrition certificate which I also highly recommend and she writes it's amazing to me that reading a single book could change the trajectory of my life I am now 100% vegan and my knowledge and beliefs have expanded outside of just health to include care for the environment and our animals and I wonder what would have happened if I didn't read dr. Campbell's book and here's another yeah here's another one I'm proud to say in my 40s I have more energy than most 20 year olds better muscle tone better stamina and even better skin I'm nourishing my body the way it was meant to be nourished and loved I owe my entire life shift to 100% plant-based - dr. T Colin Campbell he is a hero of the plant-based world for his wisdom his integrity his thankless work and his dedication to the truth and these sentiments are shared by the others who submitted their stories so thank you and I owe these sentiments as well just like many of you I changed my diet after reading the China Study and whole little over four years ago and just by changing my diet it opened up this whole new world that I had never known existed before the benefits of hopeful plant-based nutrition or the benefits of this lifestyle change go beyond physical and mental health I have come to understand and appreciate the impact has on our environment and on our relationships with the beautiful animals that we share this planet with and and his work was an impetus for this huge paradigm shift that I have experienced and I'm indebted to his work for his perseverance his scientific integrity and most of all his humility so I cannot thank dr. kambou enough for the knowledge that he has given me and the connections that I have been able to make including PB and SG because of it I am completely humbled by his presence please join me in welcoming my hero dr. T Colin Campbell PhD [Applause] thank you so much Kelly and thank you Paul Thank You Joel and thank all of you for coming here I'm really quite overwhelmed just to see so many passionate people talking about this and beginning to believe that using it and so forth I've been around this field a long time and I never thought in the beginning that I didn't be close through talking about something like this but now it's come to a point it seems to me that we've got to get over the job and that on that point I do want to recommend that recognize Paul's work here he is the greatest organizer of efforts like this of anybody in the country thank you thank you I also sure to add something else too and that's this stupid cane I'm sure some of you it probably wouldn't ask it but you wonder why am i up here this age talking about health was this cane in my hand so I thought it should say something about it first off so I don't have to ask as the answer the question is more than once but secondly the story is a little bit germane to what I'm going to talk about oddly it was about someone over a year ago I decided to play some racquetball with my grandsons both of them in their 20s both of them outstanding athletes and my son I used to play racquetball some and so I thought you know I'd like to watch I just show him I can give a few points on him but I didn't quite get that way because I tripped and fell and broke my hip and so the next morning I was in the hospital and they were working around to see how many pins they should put in like in my hip and the doctor came out of the room and he didn't know who I was or what I was doing and he just came out of the room I saw my wife there he went like that he says I've never seen anyone in my career your age was such strong bones and so instead of putting out two or three pens he put in Ford said that bows are so strong and so my wife said to him you know why they're so don't you keep in mind he's a surgeon working on bones he says why he says because he doesn't use dairy and that it was a bit shocked to that you know that I mean we we supposed that strong bones because they used their of course I got off dairy about 20-30 years ago at least even though I started out in the dairy farm myself was I started mentioned that to you because that's my story then thereafter after I got done I had a few days I had to go through the recuperation on a walker and that sort of thing it really healed fast they couldn't even see the fracture and after about three months and I thought it was going to go back and do some running I was told to do physical therapy I just had to skip that I'm gonna go back to my running so I started running again I know it was a dumbest thing I could have done that by passing it finally got to a point where doing that I've messed the muscles up in my leg and so now have to deal with the tendons that's been injured because of that but in a case I decide to tell the story because for me it was affirmation in a sense for myself that not using dairy you can have strong bones that's the part of the story so there's a title I have nutrition is the most effective medicine we know so why is it not taught in medical schools I can I've concerned myself a lot since I closed the lab down some years ago with questions concerning you know why don't we get to know this so what what is the problem how is this so difficult when this information is so powerful and we showed it with a couple of ideas I call them hypotheses we have a hard time in science getting away from using the word hypothesis because that leaves open the possibility we might not be right so it's our belief system but in any case the whole food plant-based diet creates more health than all the pills and procedures combined I don't know whether you've thought of that I think many of you have but I think it's time to put that right out there I really mean that and we can defend it on really good evidence no way or however is that in the world of health is a gap in knowledge so impressive for some observers like yourself and many others yet on the other hand be so rejected by another group of people a larger group of people unfortunately but the gap between what we have come to know really know well between that point of view and the traditional point of view that it doesn't mean anything it's really it's really odd it's really strange so I think one of the efforts we're going to have to exercise in the future with through organizations like this is to bring together somehow reduce that gap in knowledge between something that's real compared to what we saw only think is real now I want to add a couple words of caution I obviously have been at science I'm very much prejudice in favor of science and to me that means really sticking with the data really looking at hard if you have the opportunity of doing experimentation or participating with people to do that it gives you an opportunity to check on questions and actually organize research and actually measure things to see what what what's what so I'm all about diet not only about science as a basis for this move and I think as we go forward into the future we're not going to be like make progress of the rest of our country or citizens if you will unless unless we really found it on the best possible science not on conjecture or ideology or that sort of thing we've really got to look at the facts to see it works so I'm going to just make some comments here that maybe the controversial it's not I'm not new to controversy I guess you could say but I'm gonna make a couple of comments here is that as I have in the last 15 years 20 years or so been more public about some of the things that we were learning I've learned that there's a lot of enthusiasm a lot of people talking about this but unfortunately we're not quite getting the science right so I I want to take the opportunity from time to time to make a course correction if you will incidentally I forgot to say when it came here to Detroit as I was coming here today this morning it dawned on me that the first professional lecture I ever gave to a you know big audience the convention was 50 years ago this year here in Detroit so I'm back home in any case I get to afford qualification up here and it really has to do with our use of the words a bigoted vegetarian I didn't do the research for that purpose I didn't even know that those words existed in the beginning as you can see in a moment I'm sure many of you know this story but in any case they've great they're great traditions their great efforts going into more or less the right direction but I don't want this idea to be considered big into vegetarian because it tends to be focused on sort of what one particular point of view dressed up with some science of course but not necessarily getting to where I think we need to go the reason I say that I've said it for some time I only learned about vegetarians and vegans late in my career but in any case this information came out in 2016 was which affirmed something I had sort of come to believe the namely in 2016 there was this publication showing the content nutrient content of four different kinds of people all in the same study this is the famous epic study in Europe big studies the largest study this kind in any case meat eaters vegetarians billions and whole food plant-based bite but by a people plant-based diet people not that they were in the study they were not they have never really been kids been part of epidemiology studies I should tell you but in any case I'm putting a number there because that's sort of a target number that we like to work towards in any case for meat eaters vegetarians and vegans look at the total fat content for all three it's the same not that that is the answer to all this business it's not it really isn't such one component but it's a really pretty good indicator the kind of dies for talking about you for some wonder you know me I mean vegetarians and vegans are consuming diets about the same fat content of meat eaters it's one of the reasons I like to go back to the science and really have a look to get the science right so we could realize what we're talking about the sugar content of these diets was the same so here the V diets if you will those vegan-vegetarian communities are consuming diets with the same amount of fat and sugar as a meat eaters now of course vegan diets have less protein and particularly animal protein is significant it's helpful there's no question about that but in reality we need to do more we need to pay attention to the science there is a figure than I think most of you know this that among the vegetarians in this in this world if you will it's been pretty well documented that about 90% of vegetarians are still using dairy so they're really quite compromised in terms of the health that they can gain the other 10% are called vegans if you will and of course they don't use animal foods and many of you may put yourselves in that category that's your practice and that's certainly a step in the right direction but unfortunately when people go that far and they're doing that sort of thing they still hang on to their addictions salt sugar and fat and so if they don't get it from the meat that in particular then they usually slosh on a lot of extra added fat and the whole question concerning you know what is fat it what is fat how bad is that you know so forth and so on that's a long discussion I won't have time to get into that here but one of the things I'd ask you to keep in mind when we're talking about fat as it relates to health or is the dietary composition keep in mind there are soot there are many classes of that we can talk about and work out the details a little bit but two classes that I find particularly interesting to keep in mind very practical ideas and that is we could talk about total fat fat in the foods we can talk about added oils or added fat to different classes of substances and so when you start making generalizations about what that does or does not do first we got to first describe betwee and what are we talking about and then talking about the information that context now as I say I guess I said it was 62 years ago actually I started my career and at graduate school at Cornell University and had come from a farm milking cows and I was the first one in my family to go to college my dad lifelong farmer his father before that my grandfather was all of us were farmers and so I came from the farm being very naive country boy and the first one in my family is either go to college it's create a certain degree of naivete about what the world real world is about in any case on the farm to the extent that I thought about this question I can't say I really did that much but basically it was all about the best American diet or the good ol American diet was the diet that had a generous amounts of animal protein we just called a protein it turned out that of course it was animal protein and most people thought about when they talked about protein so that's my background me up there about I should like to say eight or nine years ago on the combine and then on the right as he is my thesis my doctoral dissertation my doctoral dissertation was designed with my major professors was to show the animal protein was the most important nutrient we could consume it was our diet so I came from that background all about animal protein trying to promote it basically in any case I was then a little later when I got my first faculty position at Virginia Tech I was working with my senior colleague who then became the Dean at the time working on a project in the Philippines with the State Department to attempt to try to set up a nationwide program at the malnourished children and there in the Philippines as other poor countries especially with this particular problem the idea was and we all thought this a nutrition it was a sort of mantra of the day the idea was to make sure these kids got enough protein that's why they had problems that they did that was called kwashiorkor essentially it was a title for it at the time it was said to be a protein gap in the world and so that's what we're doing we went to the Philippines I saw a lot of these kinds of kids it had a made an imprint on my imprint on my mind for the rest of my life it's a group of people that we just have to be aware of but it's kind of a background Sara sort of setting that if still it was emphasizing protein but then I had was wearing a second hat they are L was had been involved in starting a career in cancer research - and I was setting up a laboratory in Manila analyzing for some chemicals in food that might cause liver cancer well things were pretty common the Philippines and then with these two has nutrition aside coordinating these nationwide program is setting up Mothercraft centers we called them together with setting up the Lovett ER for detection of cancers I got the impression that's not it was strictly anecdotal first time I learned this was must my medical college on the golf course of all places I didn't believe it but it seemed that the few families consuming the most protein a Philippines like we do they were the I got the impression at least that they were the ones who had the children who are most likely to give the liver cancer so the crazy idea it had I mean we just came there but then this study came out there's an experiment animal study from India in 1968 when they were also interested in understanding better what causes liver cancer and this was an experiment animal study so cancer first off when I get back to this in a moment cancer starts we saw that newett then in those days and we elaborated much more than a years to come but cancer starts with a mutation you know some chemical comes in and changes the DNA of the normal cell Converse it to a cancer cell T will as I mentioned more about that later but in this particular study aflatoxin AF but had two groups of animals both exposed to aflatoxin he gives rise to liver cancer right the question that Indian workers posed for themselves is that it take gave them more protein to get less cancer that was the spirit of the day protein did everything protein was the best possible thing we make sure we got enough so they did a study notice too they got the same exposure to carcinogens okay that gives rise to liver cancer the animals given the regular levels are protein the 20% of total calories if you will I can't get thing up there but in any case you can see it the animals give her the 20% protein up total calories all of them got liver cancer the animals get 5% none did that together with white impression I sort of just impression on the golf course that day and sort of hearing about their children maybe having the most protein maybe seem to have more liver cancer that was enough for me at least to go home and organize a research project because here we're going to the Philippines and making sure that while he's starving and now there's chill Durrell to get more protein animal-based but primarily by the way and that's our charge but on the other hand I wanted to know I just wanted to get so we were fortunate I got a grant from NIH that was to continue for the next 27 years that particular grant and we started exploring this question what is this relationship between protein and cancer nobody talked about that essentially or as heresy it was it was ridiculous oh I should tell you when I told you about that being here in Detroit those many years ago I was speaking at the veterinary Congress that year and coming back on the plane I saw was sitting next to an old colleague of mine and much older gentleman and myself at MIT and he had been working this theory too and he was kind of checking up on me he says Connie said what are you doing I'd gone off my good job at Virginia Tech and I told him what I did I said you know just aflatoxin thing which he had worked on to I said this study that came from Mindy he said you know don't don't believe that just crazy they got the rat numbers mixed up he thought you know the whole idea of protein increase in cancer was nonsense and in fact the Indian workers themselves when they did that work they didn't believe it and then went back and modify the study in such a way that got the opposite result so I just sort of British to your attention because the resistance in science in the professions to the idea that protein might be a problem it was total it was total and so just a mere idea of thinking that maybe protein would cause more cancer was a tricky path to take but that's what I did and that in turn then led to a lot of the things I've gotten involved in over the years and that was the name of the I was a project that went on for all those years and by the way we got generous amounts of funding in our research mostly Cornell University for those all those years and all of my research was funded by the public taxpayer so thank you to your parents grandparents that's where it came from I didn't ever took any money from the industry so that what that turned out to be not so big a deal than at the beginning but later it became quite significant as you'll see so we did the study we did the study in many ways to see if in fact a high-protein diet really increased cancer so the first thing we did was to look at the formation of cancer early on and this particular experiment here we did it in many different ways I just want to show you just a quick snapshot of something it was quite startling the cancer starts a genetic mutation they said before that's exposure toward anabolic chemical causes cancer if you will so another the y-axis is the cancer index I call it they cancer index and here is the first twelve weeks first three months of the cancer forming so we wanted to see what effect does protein have on that early cancer it turned out the five said 20% animals those cancer were really just starting to shoot up start to grow rapidly the end was that 5% nothing both sets of animals had the same exposure to the chemical carcinogen it was all determined by protein that was really startling and as I say if we went on and did this in many different ways that were period fifteen years I had a number of doctoral students who did your thesis on this and the more we looked at it more profound it became but no one want to talk about it no one wanted to talk about it I realize that might be true so here's what something we did here we didn't think different ways and I just want to show you one really quickly the question we were asking was what if we changed the diet so we started out with 20% which would've died for 5% 20% 5% in other words that this came to an observation that today I'm going to suggest as a major significant observation it's gotta be taken into account because what this is showing the cancer is forming as a function of protein or in this case let's say more broadly it's a function as a function as it's progressing as a former as a function of nutrition not two genes say mutations genes cancer was occurring in this case not because of the genes it's occurring because of nutrition nutrition so that was one observation among many others in a set of the similar nature the next question was we'd like to ask in science what is the mechanism because I'm still having a hard time with this I'm initially going against the grain of what I had believed and thought but so we wanted to know you know what is the mechanism I'm talking about but basically what is the about chemical event or physiological then if you will what is the event that actually allows that protein to do its business this is tradition incidentally for the entire drug industry in particular when somebody sees something some effective let's say you try a chemical this is that when they see something a little bit odd or maybe the interesting they can really basically only develop the idea further if they can understand what is the mechanism so we wanted to look at the mechanism as I say this is a number of different studies over a period of about 15 and to do that here's the traditional model that we used was cancer starts out and we divided in three stages it's kind of arbitrary but the first stage we call initiation that's when a mutation occurs and then your system altered in between when the cells once converted into a cancer cell they start dividing dividing dividing and then go on to a trimmer right and then last bit that last dotted line on the right that's when the theory a human for example you know to get to a point the cancer is growing growing they don't know it it's suddenly something shows up it's the time when in fact they start realizing they have something going on and they go to the doctor to see about it that we call that progression so that's the model we use I wanted to see if I can understand what was the mechanism biochemistry was very much my background to but I want to understand what was the mechanism so we started looking for him first off the high protein that increases the rate at which the chemical carcinogen goes into the cell oh I said that's the answer that's pretty neat now if we you just maybe get a chemical we can block it so it's actually increasing the amount of course center we get exposed to every day coming into cells but then when they st. still inside the cell these chemical carcinogen from the environment and so forth they go into the cell and they get converted or that we say metabolized by an enzyme to produce a product that's actually more active we call activation so these car series that we consume they get activated wouldn't get his cell the enzyme is converting it over here and that product that it is so reactive for those of you in chemistry is electrophilic it's so reactive you don't need it inside that binds and zaps the DNA it binds to us and that's where the start of the mutation occurs that enzyme we called Vic's function toxins MFO it turned out the high protein diet increases the amount of enzyme present which means it goes faster activation faster it changed the enzyme structure so therefore it and they didn't work faster that way now we've got three possible making which one is which one is the key here and more interestingly why does the high-protein diet increase the rate was a gruesome sell at the same time change you know in an unfortunate way it increased the amount of the product that forms to give rise to cancer so we kept on looking and so then we looked at extent to which this reactor probably bound to the DNA that's the start of the mutation mind you this is going on in your cells right now as you sit there we're all being exposed to some dental carcinogens okay and this is kind of going on in our cells we get some activation and we get the product it's going to bind to the DNA so it's cause it's the beginning of invitation we learned in fact that the high protein diet the more protein diet is the higher the amount of binding to the cell so in other words we're learning that this is cook this is creating more and more mutations but then this comes in really kind of odd and normal life you know this is there's the kind of things going on a lot to some extent in all of our tissues but in nature we have been provided with a mechanism a fail-safe mechanism but if I can call it that we are provided with a mechanism to revert to reverse that it's very efficient I'll - no stuff going on in our bodies right now I can I don't know what the number is like 99.99% of that binding is repaired so no problem however occasionally one cell is just dividing at that time when that's stuck there that damaged DNA it's converted over to the new cell what now we got a full-fledged mutation now we've got a new cancer cell what did a high protein died eight here this DNA repair system we have is beautiful nature the high protein diet compromises it it attacks the system we have there are bodies to protect us that was startling here the high protein diet is turning things on record in the system we have for keeping things under control so then they said okay let's look down here and by the way I couldn't decide at this point in time which is those mechanisms I was really count which one are we going to attack if we want to do something about it so we went to the second stage now when the cell forms and the cancer cell forms you know and now we're in the promotion stage that's when these cells start to delighted to see well as they start to divide now they have the characteristics of being called a cancer cell and the body knows it now our immune system knows when they seize cancer cells around we got another mechanism another failsafe mechanism to protect us by the odd did by the obvious name these cells are called natural killer cells so the means new system is produced and all of a sudden it kind of produces more of natural killer cells and whatever little cancer cells are forming our bodies it goes in and kills them great that's fantastic but the high protein diet compromised that too so high protein guys doing everything against you know our interest and compromising the tube mechanism that we have to help us out and then did some more thing we kept on going I mean this was kind of fun because I had a question for each of the graduate students that would come in and do doctoral dissertation they spent three or four years working on this so it's very nice because it was opportunities to for them just you know study this in some depth in any case the high protein diet increased the rate which the cells actually divide that's good for growing even an adulthood young we want ourselves to divide but we don't want them to divide too fast if we got cancer so the high protein that was increasing the rate at which these cells to bite and then the high protein does do something more is increasing what we call option free radicals that's just bunch of stuff that actually pushes cancer we've known that another says and then finally it increases an enzyme we call IGF I'm not giving all the detail every time we're looking for a mechanism we're finding one you see it changes in a fascinating way that we've actually used calories there's some evidence in science that you increase calories it increases cancer not very good but there's some of that the high protein diet actually changes the way in which the energy is over the calories are used and every one of those cases this was something that a light came on I'm asking myself what are we doing here I want to find out you know what is the mechanism and it suddenly dawned on me there is no such thing there's no such thing this is turning out now to be a very significant observation in terms of what you even think about cancer or think about nutrition a new fur comes in it doesn't operate just but one thing or two things we simplify things and everybody has their favor simple observation so the proteins coming in a tsunami isn't going all going wrong and you look at this ten times more or less we did this every time we look for something the high protein that was turning on the probability of cancer so that therefore explaining what we have seen within networkers and that was this talk about for me to when I come into this you know I may be in fact funny sure he gets there weren't why we keep on doing this here there's no I can't find anything it's very untraditional kinds of expectations in the case of science so I guess some things I'm just going to add two things along the way because some of the observations we made turned out to be prescient or turned out to be really significant not just for this model here but for cancer in general I would argue and ultimately for other nutrients and ultimately for other kinds of diseases this cancer thing it was kind of interesting it works so I say cancer begins with a mutated gene Bush development controlled by nutrition not the genes and some of you may not have recognized this all that much to the public literature but that's really significant because the entire cancer industries I will return later there's premise on the assumption a cancer is a genetic disease period that is called Hugh multibillion-dollar problems we're going to have to rectify so here we go that's one thing to say cancered vote therefore is reversible by nutrition that's what this showed yes narrowly focused but we did some other work with other nutrients and all the cancers and so forth we learned that nutrition what you consume on a daily basis controls whether or not that cancers going to grow or not and if we're doing the wrong thing and we're going forward with cancer if we change our diet we go back the other way the whole idea they can't serve maybe as a reversible disease this has done 3035 years ago at that time I didn't have to benefit I've known a lot of the things we know today but it was very exciting to see that and here was a clinker for me and it says the protein we were used tonight we're just well you know I'll dose about some resources just using protein you know cheapest where we could get it or whatever we're using casing casein is main protein to cow's milk my coming from the farm obvious I'm kind of wedded to dairy and stuff like that all of a sudden to see casing doing this and it's so powerful and then without getting in all the details I know now this is common this is common and common activity for animal-based proteins plant proteins did not so we this is back in 80's so Israeli soy protein and wheat protein which doesn't cause cells to divide so fast we already knew that and so we tried sewing week they did not turn on this cancer and they did not exercise these mechanisms like the casing did they did nothing even when they're fed at 20% so this is all animal protein kind of diet I'm tempted to me at this point in time I'm really realizing that if this can be generalized other situations and we're on to something really pretty substantial know now 30 more years later I'm convinced that this is real so animal protein increases the plant protein decreases cancer development just alone okay let's set that aside that's a pretty important observation however now I just have you consider a little bit about this five percent twenty percent stuff what does that fit into our scheme of things incidentally rats and people have the same requirement for protein all of us some of us act more like rats and others more ways than one but in any case here's this here's that here's a scale of dietary protein concentration in reference to some ideas you may have heard of see we got two-ply percent there and then I'll clear some words about the twenty percent less elaborate on this a little bit five to six percent protein that's percent of calories that's the minimum we need for good that's um that's the minimum we need otherwise we die if we didn't have protein we were died so protein is essential nutrient so now like my conversation is changing a little bit we're talking about them that the kind of protein and not a protein so five percent was determined in nineteen forty approximately early forties to be the amount that is minimum for her knees fly to six percent that's not much less how does that five to six percent compared with what we actually do well for one thing when that was first done many many years ago was done in an experiment and so the researchers who did that over and over and over once who did that and then they want to make a recommendation of the public how much protein we should consume they took that number and they added two standard deviations to it to be assured that you know most of you get enough protein that number turns out to be the recommended daily allowance the RDA that level of protein that's not what is it nine percent and it depends some what's around there that number is actually not the minimum protein we need which everybody says it is that's not true the eight to nine percent protein is almost the ideal level of protein as I'll show in a moment so where that's where we should be somewheres in that territory they go on though I'm doing little bit superficial about this because I want make that point we'll come back and visit it but here's the range of protein in our diets ninety-two ready for you 98.5 percent of us we're living in the territory of consuming between 11 and 22 yeah we ideal levels of 10 that's pretty high in fact the average level of proteins around 17 18 percent I said where does that come from all of it essentially comes from animal food because we worship that nutrient we believe so much in it we say we have to have the protein where do I get my protein from and we keep on doing that and everybody face we have to give them a little food so anyhow having said that you know we only need eight nine percent protein now what jumps show up here in a different territory a little bit did make a point in 2002 that was that that was actually the two-thousand-year-old published 2002 but in any case you've heard the Dietary Guidelines that come every out every five years and they used they had the RDA there they had this they had that in night and 2002 they decided to change the way we tell the public how much protein they decide unless let's set a range they're sayings they said safe limit you know here's a lawsuit for certain consuming here is the highest that's safe and permissible that was done by the recommended dietary guidelines committee and that range went from about 10% to 35% and you haven't seen the data and I'm going to show the moment going above 10% protein can be a problem and the main thing to keep in mind okay there's rats is that whole plant-based foods provide all the protein meaning to you and this whole idea there's some how will you want to get a protein but how many of you have been asked by your friends and family where do you get your protein from telling the eat just plants that's all this if we eat certain kinds of plants fairly rich in protein like the legumes and the bran layers let's say of whole grains and leafy greens or so forth we can get our protein up that maybe 15 16 17 18 waking it up there it's not too difficult but that level of protein is not a problem it was coming from plants if it's coming from animal sources we have a problem a huge problem and so all of a sudden we're now having our our whole idea is expanding into a sort of total dietary composition and you know I'll come back to that little bit later on so that's that so I'm gonna leave that with you basically that we have for 100 and whatever it is 75 years since protein was discovered we have believed we have to have as much protein we can get it was discovered in 1839 and the chemical that was found in food he causes dogs to survive that chemical was first seen was the stuff of life itself so these early researchers said the stuff of life itself later they said it's the stuff of civilization itself it became true and just in our psyche to believe in this yield and so in any case I'd let me come back to that so we've lived before a long time was the idea that we need as much protein if we get and most people thought protein was getting from animals they didn't know it's from plants so now we know we can get all the protein he from plants from from plants so now let me turn your attention to one more idea these I'm talking about these things because from my perspective I'm trying to understand the principles the principles that actually applied not just these experiments but principles are loaded cut larger context for other diseases of nutrition so forth here's a study here this is you know when we started talking about the relationship of food was disease especially cancer and heart disease and so forth foods are made up of nutrients so in 2002 actually I was a member of a 13 member committee of the National Academy of Science who wrote the first report on diet nutrition cancer and we talked about the importance of consuming vegetables and fruits and so forth so we're the first ones to do that officially in a sense but we talked also about a little bit about the biochemistry these nutrients fat how much protein how much fiber how much so well in any case there was a very engaging group of people they took a report it was on the cover of Time magazine and Newsweek and you name it it was everybody thought we had so suddenly maybe moving toward the holy grail of finding out what cancer goes but what some people did they looked at what we said and they said oh you're talking about something it's got mmm antioxidants in it or this or that too much fat and too little fat and all of a sudden the conversation focused on one nutri at a time that's what happened and it caused tremendous misinformation for the public years going forward so the idea that you could take a nutrient out put it in a pill and get this was a new idea and they said well that she was pills through that so they did this study here on beta carotene which is an antioxidant that's from plants and it tends to put repressed cancer development and heart disease and so forth I said they did a study as you can see they're published in 1994 they they took a group of smokers who were very susceptible to diet in terms of as effect of causing the cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and there were some studies at that time show that smokers who consumed or beta character had more in her blood they had lower risk of getting lung cancer mmm that was a true thing there were 22 studies that showed at that time the early eighties higher beta carotene in her blood mean were consuming more plants that's deaths is really quite significant because there's some studies showed that biggest study of all showed that heavy smokers who had the highest level of beta carotene is a long MNO blood did not get lung cancer there Glenn cancer was not increased by the surrogate smoking which is a lot of carcinogens as another story but in any case they decided to do a study and so there's some big study 29,000 people smokers and they gave me they ate food officially during this time and they measured beta-carotene intake you know cuz that's the target that's what there is concern was beta-carotene doing and they did supplement the date of carotene include actually decreased lung cancer rates and smokers and was significant but to beta-carotene in the pills actually increase lung cancer that very startled the commuters the time cause of cure but to beta keep when you've consumed hot here's what let me translate just really quickly foods high in beta-carotene plants or associated with less disease because the beta carotene and lots of other chemicals like it called as the Oxus they repress disease development it works in food nutrients working for you take it out and put until it doesn't it could do the opposite thing but still even though that was told it was advertised and that was kind of results we were getting the industry has now grown to worse in the neighborhood 30 or 35 billion dollars a year Chris people are still taking their supplements instead of change their diet that's that's my point it became a diversion that people thought well have I do that you know I'll still eat what I want and of course the advertising people let people believe that beta-carotene also increased total mortality and was just the thing is significant now there were lots of studies that were showing after that you know these really rather bizarre things vitamin E a good vitamin increases hemorrhagic stroke by 74 percent calcium invited being increased you can see it there well all of a sudden was coming out and this is just a small sample nutrient supplements are not doing what Whole Foods do so the idea is whole foods don't take out the nutrients and do something special with it Whole Foods actually what really needs it to work that way so let's move on here so this is just a sample of some things that were as they start coming to my my attention we did in fact when my youngest son Tom who at the time was in theater he was right and helped me write to China study because he could write her but he got so enthused about this by the way he went on to get his medical degree and now he's a big medical school organizing research efforts of his own but that's enough aside when Tom and I were writing the China Study I was getting very impressed now with what I just showed you here but lhasa data suggested that food is pretty important especially plant-based shows and i wanted to know the extent to which if there was any evidence in the size of it literature at that time them i have suggested in years past that this food effect was so important I saw I knew some of the stuff but we did went back and looked systematically as to literature as we could at the time and it turns out the literature at that time 2002 3 some words in there we found evidence that basically a whole food plant-based diet in the context of extrapolating information from other kinds of studies that kind of diet actually shows that a whole food plant-based diet prevents suspense and are cures all these diseases now some of them are nasty some are lethal some of nuisance kinds but the idea is a breath of affection you know drugs is premised on the assumption will use of one chemical to do this diet no it's just everything working here together as no show in a moment so here's something another take-home message nutrition of whole food plant-based foods resolves a broad range of illness and disease that right there is a really rager major consideration because that's not what drugs can do you see we live with it in the world's drugs to solve our problems they can't do that nutrition is that's why I say so far superior do drugs because when we would put him together in the form of the right kind of foods and we get this really from alternate I think dr. Cohn you said someone said that your somebody autoimmune diseases or something like that yeah we're seeing these guys like like your friend apparently reported and we're see it was hard to see if you see it with cancer we see it diabetes and hopefully so forth and so on so the breadth of effect is broad this is something really important now stop and think the other thing you know nutrition can turn on and turn off disease progression dr. Esselstyn harnesses and dr. Ornish with heart disease they were shown that I didn't know them at the time they were sort of just testing a diet and that's what they were saying reversing disease I say the whole this whole thing applies to just very broadly to all the diseases so the efficient of whole food plant-based diet prevents and here's the biggest here's the big deal this is the message going forward we talk about the whole food plant-based diet Deana means by which we can prevent future diseases that's a fair statement I mean I ran rollers told her sad you know years ago that each of vegetables but here's the here's the part of the story I think really deserves attention the kind of food consumed in the right way or foot blemish diet actually could be used to treat illness can you imagine what that means the application to medicine here's that here's of system we're relying on these of drugs and so forth and so on were attacking one disease at a time all that kind of stuff but in reality eat the right food just eat the right food and then if you have an illness coming on or you're to have it just switched totally over see what happens any kind of results were now saying it's just you know them you already many of you already know what happens now I want to just change the conversation a little bit Chris Frank a I've gotten frustrated with my own community in nutrition because we we do research looking at one thing at a time we did that I've we weren't working with that but we started learning some things along the way it's not a very good way of doing things it's good enough to learn about some details but ultimately you have to put it together we have to synthesize the whole now to get to that point here I want to share with you something that you may know no let's say I got to hear a theoretical pathway you have a nutrient consumed in food what happens to it when comes in our body so we consume the nutrient let's say a spoonful we have food and we know how much a nutrient a or nutrient X is in there couple we know how much is there we can do that when the food goes in we get it digested that means that's the process by which the stuff in the food is released to be used in the intestine then it's absorbed because the the the the cosas between the you know the intestinal contents of blood that is transporting some ministers of transported in an active form and i have to form both with the ratio of which switch then it goes into the cells and bodies deciding where to put that nutrient which which cells it should go to then when he gets inside the cells and wow just everything is happening and finally secrete here's my point we know from science that when a nutrient goes from one stage to another it can vary or a microsecond by microsecond basis they conveyor it vary by easily twenty to thirty percent in other words there you say calcium well i calcium does not get a joy very well somebody else said no dad says absorb quite well we get in endless arguments they're all meaningless because the body is deciding at every nanosecond in time how much goes from stage one to stage two is Tracy this is happening and it's constantly you miss having her right now and what as a result the amount we consume has really no relationship to the amount that really functions because we make that assumption all the time we can assume this about it's going to be this amount functioning you know we get some dose response relationship but we don't know what's happening inside of the cell the dynamic is infinite and science will never be able to define they studied conditions where we know how things go and which way now that the example I just showed you is just theory well supported theory wondering if we were able to know how much crosses each boundary at some point in time and the National nanosecond be different if we added an evolution now we had endless new truths so our whole effort and science session the trishul size to identify which nutrient does what where how much it required that sort of thing it's nonsense and so we set aside nutrition we just use drugs we use foreign chemicals which is worse you know they try to do this business let me elaborate on that just a little more so the body adjusted not a new trip passes through each stage by plus or minus 20% if as I say you study that 100 units up to the top and then the first stage you could be anywhere some 9210 and what is left over and then just that by 20% you can see what the point I'm trying to make we cannot know methodologically how much to treat goes where and we had more nauseous and make something more complicated so this is given rise for me to another concept what nutrition is the county get out of the business to talking about individual nuisance whether we're talking about dietary recommendations or whether we're talking about the amount of nutrients on the side of a box food box package that's useful incidentally to some extent but in any case we can't rely on all that kind of stuff and we can't you can't know this thing so the image that I find really attractive to think about in this context it's to look at cell a cell is what we call in our science we call it the basic unit of biology it's where everything happens you know we have ten to a hundred trillion cells in a body anybody can imagine that number far beyond comprehension every cell is like a universe every cells like universe just as complex it's the big unit of essentially look out zillions of things going on inside the cell this and that and everything else what can no and so all this stuff is happening at all these are 10 to 100 trillion cells and then each cell not visible can easily sit on the head of a ten so you got all the cells we've got one cells in our body we can't even see even one and there's just a just an ungodly amount of numbers and everyone is like the universe it's like a micro universe okay and then on top of it we know this quite well two cells talk to each other so we're talking about a dynamic system on our bodies where once we consume food the body's deciding on how much if it goes here there or someplace else and then the body is deciding itself deciding well what do we do with this do we much Apple is it this way or that way or some other way and so all of a sudden we're in a world that I call holism spelled with a w if we leave it just H like the dish there is like to do that creates complex because we've had the conflict in science between science and religion for millennia I want to get away from the conflation and so I'd like to put the W in front western dictionary and Oxford Dictionary did not do that I looked at it emotion I wanted spelt with a Debbie because this is my concept of holism and I couldn't find any of those dictionaries spelling was W so I put it in error put presses run and I'm just kind of hoping to the dictionaries well in your next edition take it seriously but in any case this is a concept everything is just working just fabulous wait and it's all integrated all their stuff there's somebody not somebody don't say that but there's some kind of force that's controlling all this massive amount of changes occurring we're not a recipe we're not a recipe we just have infinite ingredients ingredients changing all the time doing this that everything else and to illustrate that point here's a series of reactions inside of the cell and I think many of you may have heard the krebs cycle how many know the krebs cycle you know that was okay so quite a number of you do this is like the basic kind of bad chemistry no one has reactions occur in a Cell I talk biochemistry for quite a number of years and when I was in this back in the sixties some of this stuff was just unfolding at the time and there was a company that used to make these charts himself those of veterans in business words know he grabbed to get the latest chart put her on her on her walls and have the most up to date chart and it was kind of expanding you know more more reactions more reactions I thought it's all very very much fun learning about those individual reactions and how maybe you don't think so but I did yeah it was it was fun to see you know how did they work and you know we listened that and how they converted things and usually all the information blown out of context of course especially gotten the newspapers but all this kind of these kind of really being added and you so it went on is over a few years and finally got to that and that's just a mini steel that's the only tiny bit of what's going on that's that tiny bit so that's going on in that phrase ourselves nobody tremendous amount of reactions just go all this way that way had changing every nanosecond well I mean who's in charge here is it our heads are we trying to imagine you know we trying to calculate how much is this how much does that this does this and this is that so my point is this infinitely complex and so I asked this question how come one reaction to tell all without side effects that's the drug intercept formula they see something wrong and they learn something they learn a little bit superficially that they're learning a little bit about doctor that's treating oh okay here's a reaction here's here this this is the one there's a key reaction we learn - not true so they make a chemical to block that reaction and yes they can get some desired effect more or less for short well put the body's smarter that's why 85% of the drugs routinely are rejected after years and all these drugs have side effects so we want to take the drug model to get a lot to be alive and survive the healthy and resist disease we can't use that model the drug model is dead and over I wish but it's just theoretically it is the wrong model not to say that we can't use drugs from time to time I know there are conditions in the short run but these drugs are used to being used to treat symptoms not the end part of the whole process of creating long term health so this is a drug protocol wrong I say strong this is a nutrition protocol when we eat food all the good things that we need under there and it's grabbing these nutrients and adjusting how much goes from here to there organized and how they work together stuff like that so the nutrition protocol is a really a piece of beauty it tasted beer its nature eat the food that we need to we learn that we should be eating and the body will take care of itself we don't need to go to third party people like me or another scientist or medical people to tell us you know how much of this is that or something else just eat the right food and you're really marvelous things happen so give me a couple examples and then I'll sit down medicine is what I call reductionists what that means is medicine the whole practice of medicine usually drugs for the most part tilts its focus on this philosophical idea that we can use a single chemical to create this kind of response no it's very reductionist so I'm not sure I'm sure all of you know that concept and it we use drugs to sort of exercise this kind of thinking so for example let me give an example of where we did something that was not appropriate here's my old chart and back in I don't know was the 80s actually much before that but there certainly during the 80s there was a lot of interest growing about the fact that high blood cholesterol was related to heart disease that came out of the Framingham study and some other studies higher cholesterol was not good and people started to think that cholesterol in the blood is causing heart disease by you know clogging up arteries that's what they said that was a common belief very simplistic idea but nonetheless that would that became current let's figure out a way to block the cholesterol from being made in our bodies so they found a reaction where the cholesterol synthesis starts it starts like they're that acid sylco a if you can see it goes through a series of steps of gradually synthesized synthesized synthesized and then you get a chemical that blocks say the idea was you you won't fly southern rocket and they found something it's called steps stands are being used to block electro as if that's going to be the be-all and end-all of reducing heart disease before we have side effects from statins right a lot of people can't use them at all doctors who know much about this they know enough not to use it themselves so it's become you know tens of billions of dollars industry and leading people to believe that if they just you says we're going to be all fine and dandy there's some folks that actually want to put on public water supplies get kids to use it it's a reductionist idea trying to attack a big world problem everybody there's a little evidence that they can reduce heart disease so the story goes like eight nine percent or so that's about the best evidence or some of some of that you're sort of much but we can't tell from those studies whether something else they're doing necessarily that we ever yet measure so any how are you allowed for the possibility that statins can reduce cholesterol yes it does it does reduce cholesterol something that isn't necessarily lead to less heart disease now let's turn our attention to cancer which is more and more in my territory and this is something that's I don't have all the charts I'll show you you remember that old model there you know different reactions remember the one down here lower kit Nets would kill us that activity that's part of the immune system have you heard of immunotherapy another way right now cancer is treated by chemotherapy radiotherapy or surgery right that's the bulk of it but now all the story has has it that you know if you read the newspapers even there's a new territory very exciting for the future it's called ml therapy immunotherapy for the most part is hinging on the idea if we can get to human the the immune system very complex in itself by the way forget the administration and produce more natural killer cells so they can kill all those cancer cells that are forming on your body so in a sense they're going to rely on a system in our body to produce the things that need to be produced but they're using drugs and other means to do that that is self is very reductionist one predictor is not going to work you might see some results from time to time even spectacular results in short-term but it's not going to work so that whole idea is called precision medicine initiative it's a popular term that came out at the end of the Obama administration and they got caught up so much so that Joe Biden and the administration at the time appropriated another 4.8 billion dollars to the cancer industry to start figuring out ways to develop that Imanol therapy an idea it's just so now let me any come back to what I said in a big I hope this is not too confusing for you in the interest of time I wish we could talk for two weeks or five weeks or two years so I'm sure I'm leaving some confusion on the one hand but on cancer I just said chemotherapy do you know what it costs to make one chemotherapy agent right now is two and a half billion dollars one chemical two and a half billion dollars on average these figures of our of 2014 very well represented very very good empirical data in other words published and so forth so we're spending a heck of a lot of money on them making cancer drugs to make chemotherapy agents to kill cells essentially in love it and the reason we want to kill cancer cells is because we don't know where people don't know that we can reverse cancer by nutritional means something we can do every day women our work which was published in the 1980s this is where I find some frustration publishing the best possible journals I told her elsewhere but no one and the cancer industry wants to hear that they want to keep wanting they can these shrubs because that's where the money is so this here is Heller Harold Varmus just former director of the National Cancer Institute which is the Institute and funded most of my research and I've been on the committees of that Institute I've been on the committee's that actually determine who gets the phones and who don't have don't policy committees all that so I've been in that humidity and I find it absolutely staggering that's the fundamental almost biblical idea and the cancer industry is this stated by the former director of NCI he says we now recognize that cancers are fundamentally diseases of the genome natural generation I just showed you here is not he says fundamental of the genome and that understanding cancer begins by identifying abnormal genes and proteins that confer the risk of developing cancer so everything's about genetics we're going to find out which gene does what and then we if we can find it this set this set of genes here is not one and inhale it's bloody cheese if we can find that these genes cause this cancer maybe we get some chemicals in there to do the number on that anyhow it goes on he says everybody identify and analyze these mmm we'll define how we diagnose cancer right now they're very busy spending billions of dollars hundreds of millions at least of doing research and figure out better ways to diagnose cancer so we can get on with it idea then treating it once we get it we meet how we diagnose cancer and determine how we develop and use targeted therapies that's a fancy word that everybody likes uses a targeted drug therapy just what I said going after one thing at a time that's a whole drug understand the case of cancer just one thing and so about let's see what is it now maybe 10 years ago now I think the report is there was a big study done by some researchers in Australia United States to say they asked this question they were a little concerned that all the chemotherapy will use it now when patients is not working they were concerned about so they went back and gathered a bunch of data from the United States in Australia the biggest database that could get their hands on and they examined the effect of chemotherapy on a total of 22 different cancers and they just a big there's a big project huge project and they'd looked in the aggregate as a number of they looked at they'd look for the chemotherapy agents for each cancer they summed it all up do you and then they asked themselves how wells are working and here's how they decided to do it they wanted to know the ability of these chemotherapy agents as a group to increase survival beyond 5 years so we call a 5-year of survival rates so they must have all this data and here's the conclusion they got all they came with air of agents working together for all these different cancers increases 5-year survival by two point one percent totally insignificant in fact there's some evidence that had they done nothing out of the debtor so here we are treating millions of people cancer patients with this drug these drugs they coming up with the sort of stuff like this and not telling the public so it raised a question why are we doing this who who's making these decisions why are they ignoring nutrition as a possibility the same as it did in nutrition heart disease anyhow the dream gene idea is so infused so suffused our research community and the public dialogue and the professional tymberlee itself the hoard is change change change changed and we got it we're going to go and go begin o test of ourselves and find out what's our risk of getting cancer and and hoping and we're going to get a chemotherapy agent no I'm not I have to tell you the bad news is that's not gonna work we've got to change the way we think about it ok enough for that my idea of a holistic Tricia model it's a different it just it really I can't emphasize how how different this is this from my wife they can the homeless nutrition multiple issues mechanism of disease reversals all that hopefully plate they said this is a highly interactive integrated homeless system and just added in a little bit extra into it without making protein or cult it's been a cult ever since 1839 and most people say consent you know protein is animals from animal sources that has driven from a scientific point of view and a public point of view that is driven to a great extent that kind of debt we've become accustomed to this used as justification for eating that kind of food for whatever reason we may have in our minds so I think it's very different now reductions medicine here's what reductionist medicine is I don't mean to attack the whole medical system I actually have lecture to at least 115 medical schools since jaundice they came out and I tells us there or to so I don't know whether they're buying but no I actually actually see a different committees I talked to I've really see some promise in the medical communities when I first started doing this I didn't get any answers no questions I thought I'd screw it up and then I come from find out they were seen there listening no those realizing they're not getting trained in the descrition they're listening and then the first thing I saw as far as our motion is concerned I think I sense this was anger some I'm getting quite angry why weren't we taught us in medical school you're that kind of thing and now that we've gone through that transition period from my perspective now maybe wrong but it's what I see he's gone through that position now were physicians who went to medical school to serve people I'm thinking of doctors as very noble people cite if I can then whatever they do good work that's what they wanted to do but they weren't given the tools or the information to do what they could do best so here here's a summary we don't should let one disease one cause I've said enough there that's that's the model this is why homeless nutrition is not taught in with gushers medical schools medical school is all about reductionist medicine you look at one thing at a time targeted drug therapy you're this chemical that drugs and so forth that's the way it's taught there's no room than that kind of thinking for thinking about holistic written the source ignored nutrition has a different face on it it can deal with all these problems in a very broad way simultaneously simultaneously and not only can it actually work to prevent future disease it can be actually be used to treat existing disease just think about this think about all those things I just said we're talking about a whole new technology some might want to call a disruptive technology in a sense I said just a different way of thinking about if we were we to know this and we're our professionals to know this and I'm talking about people in my community - we were just basically at fault just as much as anyone else always relying on this one one thing at a time anyhow that's why it's not taught and on top of we have 28 National Institutes of Health Agency's 20 different agent one for cancer one for heart disease one for this one for that we don't have a single of those 28 institutes which I have one is called Institute of nutrition so think about doctors can't get reimbursed for teaching nutrition that's a big that's a big ticket item of the 130 or 135 or whatever it is number of Medical Specialties there's years to support the structure for reimbursement doctors of those hundred and thirty you would think there would be one a man in there we called nutrition there's none so nutrition has been excluded from the medical system and there's a reason for it there's a reason for it because it's Prevost on the assumption that the best health can come when we discover you know all the intricate details of disease formation and health and so forth and how it works so I always throw up this just for you thinking I can't get in these details but they have a little bit of shock value because unfortunately we in our in our trade well you know we go out and talk to the public and so forth and there's a lot of good good people coming out in recent years talking about this yet very enthused about it and the you folks are I'm sure it's serious about it maybe some of your physicians that's Graham that's really great but week have carried along from history some ideas that are false and that causes problems because when we have a leaky idea then our opponents are going to jump on it attack us that's exactly what's happening let me show you just I wish I had a lot of time to talk about that but here and what a lot of people believe that cancer is caused by carcinogens and fruit that's the major cause the cancer do you know we don't we don't have really any significant evidence that environmental chemicals is a major cause of cancer a tiny little bit might my college at Oxford Sir Richard Allen service repeater within my work they estimated way back for the Congress and 19 1981 that no more than two or three percent for example of all cancers are caused by genes from environmental chemicals so environmental chemicals that bad as they are and we don't need them we need you to keep them under control that turned out to be a divisive discourse for us to think it oh it's always can environment chemical we blame somebody else for this what's causing cancer no it's not true that's not the major of course the major cause is the nutrition that we have experienced and the food we use that's what other people didn't want to face they'd like to change their diet to get that good nutrition so I say that's not right mind you on its own yourself for provoking full of thinking but just just take it consideration what that might mean health health and disease I'm sorry should say heart disease I'm sure I'm sorry about that heart disease that caused by dietary cholesterol you know we've lived with the general presumption that you know the amount of cholesterol consumed causes our disease right that's a big thing have you ever cholesterol causes heart disease let's limit the amount we control let's just take it out of food if we can give that of food and this stuff we form our bodies let's use a drug by the way in the classical sense of causation we're an agent if there's a cause if you take it out something happens poor or gets cholesterol cholesterol we consume is not a cause of heart disease we made that mistake over a hundred years ago there was pretty good research that that shine shown it wasn't cholesterol that causes a rise of cholesterol in the blood it wasn't cholesterol that started early heart disease guess what it was animal protein animal protein and all the other changes that it causes in the diet as a function of consuming consuming animal protein so I I questioned that heart disease again on my apologies that should be heart heart disease caused by dietary fat I say also or saturated fat that's wrong to the agent they've took the fat that actually is likely to have a greater effect on our overall health it's a Pauline said that's what plants plants oh my gosh this everything's going to hell in a handbasket no it doesn't when we consume all the plants together as Whole Foods the probably etc are doing the good things we see that when we add a lot of oil a lot of which are the omega sixes pro-inflammatory so the right relationship of fat saturated fat or polyunsaturated fats has to be kids in the context of the bedroom which would use it which diseases so I'm telling you I've just for discussion targeted drug therapies I already said I don't consider that the best strategy for treating disease and oh yeah I want to put that last time Paul dad sat for Hansard cancer more than satiric that's we got really good data to show that I'm really convinced of that but they says that it's consumed at higher levels which we tend to do because we added add all this oil is one of the reasons I happen to subscribe very much to this idea of asthma killed my colleagues don't use that as oil that's that's another issue kind of stay away from the other well the fat in the plants that's a different story I know my good friend dr. Esser thin and and some may have a slightly different version that's what I'm gonna stick by my argument that even a little bit of nuts avocado is okay and coconut because it's whole food it's got all the package together and whatever theoretical possibilities or of the fat in those foods to cause problems is tends to be attenuated and of no concern when you eat a whole whole food plant-based diet so I say that one there's probably true I've got a couple of papers they just published last year and on one of the reasons I get kind of exercised about this because I published five papers last year 2017 and the intent was kind of to grasp some of these things that I become so trouble with for so many years some happen to do with history some happen to do as a nature's made and I'm know working on a new book I hope we can do it get it done it's not going to be a big book but I want to take these six papers that we did as a centerpiece that were Chapter II maybe six chapters maybe eight then in between I will weed in there the personal experiences I've had in this community which is not very pretty working between government industry and science because there's a personal story since the stuff that's going on in between to deny information to the public which troubles me the most and there's reasons why that happens this is a pet papers today of you reading this kind of thing oh I call it the truffle Renaissance and public health policy if we have think of nutrition differently there all of a sense now said Wow where did why do we remember all that here's another one cancer prevention treatment the holistic nutrition actually the first study of this kind of thing is now being done formally by my son at the adverse of Russia so he has the funding he's going to be working on women's metastatic breast cancer just giving him the whole food plant-based diet we see what happens is the first stage so now I'm going to conclude with something that is a whole subject in itself it's sort of the glue between the chapters I just mentioned it has to do with I've seen this in my lifetime when I was a student in the late 50s early 60s I tended to assume the extent to which any of us did I tend to assume that professors all had the right to speak honestly that's what universities are for right they they're supposed to be thinking objectively and honestly so forth and the vast number of my colleagues and universities are really good people they really find hard to do that however things have changed and this here is a display of some real official information on a percent of the back of the appointments that are the green that is on tenure tracks and the percent of non gender fractions you see from 1975 to 2011 the tenure-track faculty and to 1975 see the green is up there 56% on tenure-track he used to be I think 90% just a few years before that now split they say put his time past suicide was going down right now the only ones of us in academia who have you know the full full boat as a full professorship was total was tenure and therefore are free of this it's only 9% of us left of all the faculty so now the academics are on hire their own hire essentially they're on contract if they start saying things that there's not popular they didn't industry they can be fired they don't get the next contract in the next appointment renewed it's that simple so in this country we have lost academic tenure now I know there's problems with tenure but it's coming we paid a huge price because my colleagues and I know this from lots and lots of personal experiences my colleagues can not speak up quite like I do it's just too much difficulty hey so corporate funding of research is increasing that was a very methodical operation occurring during the SEVIS especially especially with Supreme Court justice power under the Nixon administration some famous stuff was written it was it was almost orchestrated it was by design that we had to attack you know academic or academia because they're going too far off the side so the straight line so I end up with this to some of the books as you already heard about so we got a course mentioned a couple times here by people so online course we offer CME credits for doctors and professionals and stuff like that we our course is part of the Cornell University online program has about 200 and some courses at Cornell online courses ours is one of the 200 it's much much to the chagrin of some of the administrators of Cornell who I know well in fact it was a news release they put out on this a couple of years ago talking about this great success that we were having the president Cornell who's a vegetarian by the way blocked it would not allow its publication because he said he was relying his advisers whose advisers the Dean of the College of Agriculture was into livestock the director of nutrition who's the guy to bait that 2002 report shows which consumed all the protein we get so there's another whole story but the infiltration of the academic community is quite frankly hideous and as time passes we're having more and more difficulty trying to tell a whole story we can rely on local disappea PSA's and we argue about everything under the Sun doesn't help to pull people that much there's my story thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Plant Based Nutrition Support Group

Views: 56,440

Keywords: Dr. Joel Kahn, T. Colin Campbell, Longevity, Plant-Based, WFPB, Health, Nutrition, Support Group, Community, Michigan, Whole Foods, Vegan

Id: jD6TB_elbqg

Length: 118min 25sec (7105 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018