Plant-Based Diet and COVID-19 | Dr. Neal Barnard

the covet 19 pandemic is proving that it is far from over we are seeing case rates again starting to explode as hospitals in some areas of the country are struggling to find enough room for all of their infected patients but amid this bad news there is some good news that is coming from two studies out of a mountain of research studies that show what you eat could in fact be the first line of defense against covet 19. so to talk about these two studies and where things stand currently we have dr neil barnard with us here today dr barnard thank you so very much for being here great to be here chuck these are some really interesting studies and it kind of goes back to what it is that we've been talking about throughout this pandemic and and that is the healthier you are the less at risk you seem to be so if you wouldn't mind can you talk to us a little bit about these two studies and what it is researchers have discovered yeah and let me preface this really by saying we've kind of suspected that diet ought to be a big actor here because when people are overweight when they have diabetes when they have hypertension particularly when these things are really out of control kovit just becomes so serious and and often fatal but when people have these things under better control they do better that suggests that if your diet is really good these conditions are going to be better but the question really then was well what if you actually are following a mostly plant-based diet will that help you and the answer seems to be yes the first of these studies was involving healthcare workers there were healthcare workers in six different countries they tracked what they ate and they rated them for more plant-based or based or less plant-based in other words if you were less plant-based that meant you were eating chicken and fish and beef and cheese and kind of neglecting your vegetables and fruits and then if you were more plant-based that meant you were vegan or closer to it and the people who were more plant-based had a 73 reduced risk of severe covet but i got to tell you the flip side of this was they looked at people who were doing keto or low carb diets and they did substantially worse a 48 increased risk of severe covet so don't go there so let's first study the second study just came out last week and a fascinating study a huge study more than a half a million people were studied in the uk and the us and it was done in a cool way everyone volunteered to track their symptoms as the pandemic was kicking in and they did it through a smartphone and in the course of this long huge study more than 30 000 people developed covet so who were they and they first rated what they ate with what you call a food frequency questionnaire how frequently do you eat steak how frequently do you eat fish how often do you have cheese how often do you have spinach how often do you have brown rice and you do a detailed food frequency questionnaire and they then rated them for were they less plant-based or more plant-based and the first finding was the people who were more plant-based had a nine percent reduced risk of getting covet of any severity okay not huge but we'll take it but then they looked at who gets really sick and with severe covet the people who are more plant-based had almost a 60 reduced risk of developing so both of these studies showed the same thing and in almost the same quantity that if you are really following a plant-based diet the the more you get there the less likely you are to have severe covet and that stands up even if we control for the usual things vaccinations and physical activity and so forth so uh good news uh yet another reason to follow a healthy diet and it seems like speaking of of healthy i want to key in on that word health it seems like this pandemic has really kind of forced us by and large to take a good strong hard look at our own health do you think that that's kind of an accurate assessment do you think that by and large as a society we're really starting to think about some of the choices that we've been making chuck i i think we're in two different groups i think there are people who frankly have been sitting home during the pandemic eating badly gaining weight neglecting their medical treatments um and those people are in in bad shape and there's been a lot of that and studies have come out looking at diet quality and by and large it's been degrading in a lot of countries however within that there is a very large subset of people who are the most health conscious they have ever been and these are the people who are going to websites like like ours these are people who are watching exam room uh exam room live and listening to the podcasts and and reading the books and watching the movies and and trying out healthier things um and so those people i think really are doing what they can not just to keep the virus away but to improve their health in many other ways because the same diet that's good against coven is good for your coronary arteries and good for your waistline we'll be talking a little bit more about that a little bit later on in this segment but i think that a lot of people are hearing right now about this delta variant and they're hearing that these case numbers are exploding and this thing is it's just spreading like wildfire and we're starting to see numbers that we haven't seen for months again and we're seeing mask mandates come out and it's got people a little bit rattled so can you paint a picture for us as to where things actually stand right now in terms of the virus yeah uh we should be nervous about it now we're not where we were before but let me first show you globally um the reported daily deaths so if you look back at say january february they're worldwide we were at 13 14 000 people dying a day globally and then it slid down in in march it came back up again in april and uh and may and then it came out came down the newest downward trend has been due to vaccination which has been uh proceeding so uh fairly quickly at first slowing down now but now where are we we're in august and if you look at the projections way out to the right the red dot that's shooting up that's if people just don't get vaccinated and don't do social distancing and don't wear their masks any more than they are now things are getting a lot worse and you notice the projection gets worse than we were in january the bottom line that green line is the projection university of washington uh projection if vaccines become very popular and people are are masking up and really taking care of themselves the middle line is where they think it's going and where we think it's going is probably you know continuing uh death rates uh a bit worse than where we are now but let's focus in on the united states the united states we saw again the same huge uh peak in january february and then it has settled down and right now we're at about maybe 300 deaths a day that's going to go up to about a thousand according to the best projections we have and it's going to do it in about four weeks time um so people are nervous about that i mean it's an amazing thing to think that a thousand a day is good compared to january but can you imagine losing a thousand people a day best projections are that's what's gonna happen starting about 28 days from now yeah and a lot of this does go back to the delta variant i do believe um in terms of how transmissible uh the delta variant is uh i think i've seen the cdc report somebody had put this out there they had gotten their hands on some sort of internal cdc document that said something to the effect of it's uh more transmissible than the chickenpox certainly more so than the common cold or flu and that is the big reason why things are spreading um the way that they are right now but i also wonder about the vaccinations and how that is either i mean how effective are they against this particular variant that's really the big question here uh short answer both of the things you said are are exactly spot on the the the delta variant is extremely transmissible but the vaccines do seem to be effective let's put a little asterisk on that though let me walk you through it real quick on the alpha variant that's that was the original one uh was followed by many others and the ones i have on the list here are by no means all keep in mind viruses don't live outside the human body they somebody sneezes that virus has got to find somebody else to live in and that new person can be sometimes a new species if it goes from a bat to a human and so the viruses are inclined to mutate to be able to overcome the immune defenses that's why they're always changing they're trying to outwit the defenses of whomever they find themselves in so delta is the bad one now uh marked by words it is not the last by any means but delta is out and does it work um back in uh the beginning of last month we had some pretty good data suggesting that it's the efficacy of the the pfizer vaccine not quite as good against delta as it was against alpha for infection overall but the good news is that it's pretty effective against severe disease so a person who catches it much less likely if they're vaccinated much less likely to need hospitalization much less likely to die um however chuck i got to tell you um we all got a cold bath um the july 4th um weekend and um in the couple weeks that followed there were some events in providencetown massachusetts that really took everyone by surprise there were almost 500 coveted infections it was all delta and three quarters of them were in vaccinated people so what is this about well first of all a little bit of good news there were only five hospitalizations nobody died but it suggested that even if you're vaccinated you might get this virus so what about well to make things even worse the reports that have been coming out just in the last couple days are that the people who were vaccinated and got sick they were carrying the virus pretty much like people who are not vaccinated so that made some people think oh then why bother getting back why bother getting vaccinated here's the key vaccinated individuals are much less likely to get sick in the first place and let me show you what i mean um this graph shows you inhale the virus it it replicates in your body it stays there for a while you're shedding it the whole time and eventually your immune system knocks it out if you're vaccinated this curve is much it's a very different shape um you you inhale the virus it's still in your body but you knock it out much faster and you don't transmit it as long why because your immune response is earlier and stronger because you're vaccinated so there are some people who are still going to get sick even with a vaccination why because well number one the vaccine was it refrigerated properly was it expired did you get both doses if the vaccination itself was not done well you don't have a good response secondly the person this is probably the biggest thing there are people where they just don't mount a very good immune response they get the vaccine and for some reason they're the one in 20 people where it just doesn't work very well and third the virus the virus is changing and it is more transmissible and a little bit more deadly than than the alpha variant but what that means is that all the people who've got a good vaccine and they're able to mount a good response those people are not going to pick up the the virus in all likelihood but that may be one in 20 who does due to the vaccine the virus or their own inability to mount a response they're just almost like an unvaccinated person so this isn't an argument against the vaccines the vaccines are very effective but it means they are not 100 effective let's stop right there and talk about the vaccines i mean obviously there is a lot of debate about that you see it trickling over in everything from your day-to-day life to headlines on espn's sportscenter you know who you see the nfl this year is talking about well if players can't play and the games need to be forfeited they're going to also then wind up forfeiting their paychecks i mean like so this is a it's a big deal in all walks of life and i think that we should take a second here dr barnard and talk about kind of the pros and cons give this an honest assessment of what are the pros of the vaccine and then what are some of the side effects that people are noticing with them as well so are you able to walk us through that yeah let me walk you through the side effects um first of all the good news is that most of the side effects are pretty mild there's a lot of them but they're not terrible um you get vaccinated you're the place where they stuck you it swells it's red it hurts a little bit uh you might have some fever you might have headache tiredness most people don't have any of this but many people have a little bit where for a day or so you feel uh off your game and the i have to say the uh kobe vaccines are by no means the worst if you ever had a shingles vaccination often people have to kind of write off their weak they just feel so bad um afterwards it's because of the immune adjustment but you do get these these side effects they're they're they're not uncommon luckily they're mild but let's talk about the serious side effects and i think it's important to pay attention to them because i think as physicians we're not doing our patients any favors by sort of cheerleading and saying that pharmaceuticals never have risks they do and there are some that are serious luckily they're really rare anaphylaxis severe allergy you're allergic to strawberries you eat a strawberry you have anaphylactic shock and that's that's bad this can happen with vaccines good news they're rare two to five cases per million vaccines most of the time people know about it but if you get vaccinated this is why you're going to stick around in the vaccine center for 15-20 minutes before they're going to let you leave they want to make sure that you don't have a serious anaphylactic reaction okay second there's something called tts or thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome this is the jansen vaccine it's not the pfizer it's not the moderna and it's serious but luckily there we have only been about 39 cases of it uh as of the end of last month as of about a week ago and out of 13 million doses only 39 cases so very serious quite rare uh next up guillain-barre syndrome for those who are old enough to remember this the h1n1 vaccine that came out oh call it three decades ago triggered the same syndrome guillain-barre is a syndrome of tremendous weakness can be serious usually it resolves on its own and you see it you frankly say with a lot of things you see it with infections and it can happen with vaccines and with again jansen there have been 137 cases on 13 million doses um again extremely rare but it's a serious thing when people have it okay here's um a little bit more common not as serious but it's myocarditis or pericarditis where the heart is being attacked this almost always resolves on its own uh sometimes treatment is needed and there have been about a thousand cases eleven hundred eleven hundred twelve hundred cases uh with pfizer and moderna but that's out of three hundred million uh doses now so again very very rare but but those those are the bad ones those are things that people are are concerned about um if you compare that to the risk of having a serious case of of covit the risk of getting coveted and dying it are much much higher of course um but chuck if you don't mind i want to walk you through um some slides that came from medical centers because people are going to ask the question is it a good idea to get vaccinated and if you're a health care worker or if you're just anybody and some really important data came out of two studies one in the us one in israel let me show you the israeli study first that if you could see the tan line that's shooting up that's cumulative cases in people who were not vaccinated the vaccine came out they didn't get it um and either they got symptomatic or they were asymptomatic meaning they felt fine but they were carrying a virus they were transmitting it to other people without knowing they had it that's those are the tan lines uh the blue lines at the bottom those are vaccinated people much less likely to get it much less likely to have symptoms much less likely to have an asymptomatic infection and then uh st jude children's hospital you hear about them on tv they're advertising a lot for donations for their charitable work uh when they instituted their vaccine program there were about 2 000 unvaccinated people follow them for 81 days the number who went positive uh 185 of them 79 were asymptomatic okay how about the people who got the vaccine at least one dose or two doses followed for the next 72 days there were 51 positives 29 asymptomatic well that doesn't sound so good does it get 59 people get sick even though they got the or at least they get a positive test even though they got the vaccine well if you look at those who actually had two doses not just the one dose it's cut to about 10. so what these studies show us is that when people are vaccinated they are a less likely to get the virus period be less likely to have symptoms and it really means that you're having an immune response that will knock it out sooner and make you less likely to give the virus to somebody else just out of curiosity what uh what do the physicians at the barnard medical center at the physicians committee what what is the policy there as far as who should be vaccinated 100 vaccinated um and and here here's the policy um we don't require that employees in general we haven't yet enacted a policy that employees in general must be vaccinated if somebody is a bookkeeper who works from home or something like that however every person who works in the clinic who will have any interaction with the patient whether it's at the front desk or taking a blood pressure or it's a doctor or a nurse or 100 vaccinated so what that effectively means that every single worker in the clinic is vaccinated and it's not true just there it's also true in our clinical research studies somebody's got diabetes they're part of a research study anybody who draws their blood anybody who's going to to interact with them in any way will be vaccinated and i have to say this does not mean that we don't think that there are issues about vaccines there are there are rare side effects that are that are in some cases serious however our job here is to protect our patients and to protect our research participants so when as hippocrates said first do no harm if somebody comes in we cannot in good conscience give them a caregiver who hasn't been vaccinated so we have a rule that all caregivers everybody who has any interaction with patients or research participants is vaccinated and we have no exceptions for any reason of any kind and that is very much in line with the joint statement that was put out recently i think by 60 medical groups including the american medical association that was calling on all doctors all physicians hospitals health care centers in general to make sure that anyone who does in fact have that interaction with patients also be vaccinated so this isn't just some policy that the physicians committee or those at bmc have come up with on their own this is very much in line with the majority of medical and healthcare workers out there correct yeah and we have we we really have no choice chuck i have to say um we could assign somebody to draw blood who has been vaccinated or has not been vaccinated we really have no choice they have to be vaccinated um we're a little bit different in the sense that um at some of these other medical centers some big medical centers they will require the whole staff to be vaccinated uh a bookkeeper who's working in the basement never sees anybody um will be fired if they aren't vaccinated however they they will make exceptions for religious beliefs or a physical issue like if you would get anaphylaxis from the vaccine you can keep your job but you don't have to be vaccinated and that would even go for a doctor so at many of the big hospitals a doctor who say has a religious belief that they shouldn't be vaccinated they could continue to work with us we don't have those exceptions um so every single person who has any patient interaction is vaccinated but if a person let's say a person refuses to be vaccinated we haven't had that uh with our with anybody at bmc but but if that were the case they would be reassigned to some role that didn't involve working with patients they would be doing books or doing a telemedicine or something like that and i guess let's kind of tie up some loose ends here uh as as we conclude things um and one of the questions that we've received on the show quite a bit is what is the likelihood that we will need vaccines into the future uh to combat the new strains of covet 19 that will inevitably pop up the same way that the flu vaccine changes every year to keep up with the various strains is that something that most experts say is indeed in our future we're at a fork in the road now where one possibility is that the vaccines will be so effective that herd immunity will take over and the disease will just die out that can happen there are infectious diseases that have all for all intents and purposes been eradicated from the earth um i honestly don't think that's going to happen and the reason i don't think it's going to happen is we don't have heard immunity yet we have enough people who who either haven't been vaccinated or the vaccine doesn't work um so the other option um or the other path is like influenza where influenza entered back in 1918 the spanish flu came and killed what 50 million people and then kind of waned as people got more immune strength against it but it never was gone and since that time it has con continued to mutate and every single year we get various uh new forms of it i think that's where we're going with covid um is that we're gonna we didn't have coronaviruses now now we got them i think we're just gonna um i think this is the new normal and how bad it is from one year to the next just depends on how many people have well it depends on the virus the the kinds of mutation it has and how many people are vulnerable and my final question to you is this just kind of want your educated opinion on this um i recently did an interview with dr vinita rahman who we work with um and that interview really centered around the weight gain that so many of us have experienced throughout the pandemic there was a study that came out that showed that the typical person gave a pound and a half every month throughout the first 18 months of the pandemic because of the various telecommuting the lockdowns the restrictions all of that we're all at home gaining a pound and a half per month and we know that obesity is a big contributing factor in terms of risk of covet 19. so just in your educated opinion how detrimental is that monthly weight gain to a person's chances of not just becoming infected but becoming severely ill with covin fat cells are in many ways the entry point of the virus you inhale the virus it's looking for uh what's a sort of a molecular welcome mat which is on the surface of the fat cell the more body fat you have the more you're throwing out this welcome mat and body fat in and of itself is a problem with regard to covid but it also makes everything else worse it makes diabetes worse and diabetes is a risk factor it makes high blood pressure worse high blood pressure is a risk factor so these are all some good reasons to eat beans and rice and broccoli and and fruits and all the things that you and i have talked about as helping people to shed that excess weight so i'm really hoping that when people are locked down they're not going out that they'll use that time to explore some some healthier new foods and and and and that that can turn that entire curve in the opposite direction people can be thinner and healthier than they've ever been and i will end with this just sharing an anecdote with you is you may not even remember this but when we were doing the live shows last year five days a week one day i asked you the question what would be the chances that i may even die if i contracted coefficient 19 if i still were in that unhealthy 420 pound frame and you paused for a moment and it was really hard for you to even articulate and answer how much greater those odds would be than they are today and someone who heard that emailed me and was like that was the wake-up call that i needed to adjust my diet changed the way that i was eating and i'm pretty certain that this person definitely went from gaining a pound and a half a month to losing perhaps two three pounds a week because they changed their diet and are leading a healthier lifestyle so they wanted me to share that story with you and just say thank you as well so we are doing good work my friend that's that's fantastic thank you chuck for getting the word out as you have it and and also thanks to that that listener for for making that change and i'm sure that everybody that that person interacted with was inspired and that they in turn are are making changes and that's one of the greatest things i have to say about this kind of work if i were just handing out metformin prescriptions or the cynical lisinopril prescriptions or something like that that might affect the person that you give it to but when you give what i'm going to call a diet prescription a healthier way of eating that rubs off on everybody who knows you rubs off on your family and you never know quite how many lives you'll say but it's plenty all right and if you feel like you've enjoyed this you've learned today raised your health iq go ahead and like this video and subscribe to the channel and then share it with your friends and loved ones as well dr neil barnard thank you so very much for your time my friend thank you

Channel: Physicians Committee

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Length: 27min 39sec (1659 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021