Reversing Middle Age Weight Gain | Dr. Neal Barnard Live Q&A

welcome to the exam room live brought to you by the physicians committee hi i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll we appreciate you joining us to help make the world a healthier place gaining weight getting healthier getting a little bit bigger around the abdomen maybe in the backside maybe the belly is it just an inevitable part of getting older like is there anything we can really do to stave off packing on the pounds once we hit 40. well a study out of the uk says that middle-aged men say hey weight gain is inevitable no matter what it is that we do so that is what we will be talking about here on the show today is getting heavier a natural part of aging and we're going to be joined by dr neal barnard here on the exam room live in just a little bit we're also going to be opening up the doctor's mailbag so that is your opportunity to ask dr barnard anything that is on your mind so if you want to drop something in that mailbag you can post your question in the comment or in the chat you can also send it to me on twitter or instagram anytime i'm at chuck carroll wlc so let's go ahead and welcome dr barnard to the exam room live sir good to see you again great to see you chuck and i i think weight gain correct me if i'm wrong that is something that you covered in your body imbalance as we get older correct yes that's right and i'm so glad that you introduced it in the way you did because many people have this idea that it's just something you're stuck with today we're going to try to you know poke a little hole in that balloon here um but let's let's talk about this study first out of the uk and there was a quote from one of the participants that really stuck with me um really kind of spoke to the old overweight version of myself and this gentleman said what gets me the worst is going to buy clothes you go into a shop you see a really nice suit and you know that they won't have it in your size he says i have a size 54 chest and it's just getting ridiculous this has to stop but the same gentleman was among more than a handful who said no matter what i do i'm going to pack on the pounds because of stress at home and stress at the job so the first question dr barnard comes to us from howard and it is are you genetically more likely to gain weight once you hit middle age oh it that's a great question and it's on so many people's minds because that's that's really their experience and this is true for kind of anybody a guy is getting a little bit what he thinks is he's a little older because he's not 45 or 50. and between uh perhaps raising children demands at work maybe less physical activity he notes he's gaining a little bit of weight um but a woman hits menopause and she thinks wow with all of the the changes i'm going through i noticed that i don't lose weight as easily as i did before and so people often imagine that it's got to be sort of genetic programming that i'm going to gain weight however we've intervened in these cases and we've actually put diets to work and i'm not talking calorie cutting diets and i'm not talking uh massive exercise programs and that kind of thing what we've used instead is really two things avoiding the animal products completely so it's a vegan diet but also keeping the fatty foods really low even even the sort of healthier fats the vegetable oils as well as the animal fats when people do those two things together i don't care how old you are the weight does tend to come off and perhaps just as important or more as or or more important is that it tends to stay off so in other it you know it's not just a weight loss diet on a temporary basis it's getting down to the weight that you want to be and staying there a lot of people will say well i'm getting older my metabolism is slowing down and so they'll look at metabolism them almost exclusively as a reason why they are gaining weight how much stock should be put in to a slow metabolism when it comes to weight gain well it can be slow um and the reason people will say that is i used to eat the same thing when i was 16 and i didn't have any problem and now that i'm 46 or whatever it is now i just look at it and i start to gain weight and their metabolism may actually have slowed down what they're missing is that it didn't slow down because of something on the clock it slowed down in part because of what they are eating here's how it works you eat some greasy thing chicken wings or cheese or steak or even fried things like french fries the fat from those foods gets into your cells and that causes not just insulin to not work as we've talked about before but it makes your mitochondria not work now when i say mitochondria people might remember from their high school biology those are the burners inside your cells you pack the fat in your burners inside your cells they're not tearing up the calories anymore and the answer to it is to get all that fat out of your diet that that allows your burners to recover and so your metabolism will recover to a degree when you make these changes it happens rather rapidly and it's especially noticeable in the after meal period so that after breakfast after lunch after dinner you're going to be burning calories faster wow that's that's free calorie burn right there man that's pretty good um take a question from kim oh boy this is a good one dr barnard kim is wondering whether it's possible that some diets work for some people but not others well that is a great question all diets can create um or i guess i should say that that all diets can have little bumps in the road here or there even a really healthy vegan diet let's say a person does it and they're in a group of another 12 people and 11 of them are losing weight like crazy they're on a vegan diet they're keeping the oils low everything is going great they're losing a pound or two pounds this week and the same next week then and then you're the twelfth person and it's not happening for you and you're thinking why not we see this all the time so simple solution what we do is we say let's take a piece of paper write down everything that you've eaten for the past day and then we look for the contraband and what we discover is the person says oh you mean fish i can't that's not part of the diet no you know i thought i needed the fatty fish for the omega-3 or something like that okay get that out the weight loss starts or it could be something like um guacamole avocado is a healthier kind of fat than animal fat for sure but like all fats it has nine calories per gram so if i'm trying to lose weight even the avocado toast i'm going to kind of shrink that a little bit so you discover what it is that's getting in the way and people do well so if it's not animal products it's sometimes nuts or oils or something like that but then with with other diets you know the more conventional old-fashioned kind of diet you're getting the assignment that you should cut calories eat 800 calories a day and you think it worked for the guy on tv but for me i'm ready to eat the sofa um frankly nobody can can starve you know day after day after day after day eventually your appetite is just gonna grab a hold of the refrigerator and tear it open well kind of along those lines i want to take a question now from melissa who's wondering whether you can still lose weight while eating a large quantity of low fat low calorie whole food plant-based foods if a person is trying to lose weight and if you're eating grains and beans and vegetables and fruits and the and if you don't have added fat those foods even if you eat abundant amounts of them are going to help the weight come off for two reasons um the first is that they're they're very low on what we call caloric density you're getting a lot of fiber a lot of complex carbohydrates and these foods just don't have a whole lot of calories the calories are packed into the animal fat and into the oils and those foods aren't there so you're going to fill up sooner and the weight is going to come off for that reason and then the second thing is if you've been doing this for several days your metabolism does ramp up as i was describing before and it's really hard to avoid losing weight unless unless you're really pushing the foods a lot way beyond your satiety threshold yeah that's that's kind of a tricky one you know i think back to if i were in that position when i was still 420 i'm i'm wondering whether it would still be a good idea to gorge on food if it were still healthy even if it were healthy right because i think at that point you're still kind of entertaining the idea of unhealthy habits as i say too much of a good thing is still too much what didn't you say yeah i i do agree and what i've been describing now is the person who's responding to the appetite cues so you're full you stop but if a person is really pushing beyond the amounts uh and their stomach is saying hey look i've had enough of it and chuck i know that you and i have talked about this this before and you've experienced this and other people have too at that point you really do have to say okay i've got to stop now um i have to find some way so that i'm not really just gorging uh beyond the limits but but for most people um the foods that we've described fruits and so forth they've got fiber that fills you up they got a lot of water that fills you up if instead of those low calorie very filling foods you eat a high calorie food like cheese meat by the time it fills you up you have had a lot of calories so avoiding those is that's kind of job one yeah don't i know it and i think that when a person is in a position where they have been overeating for so many years the risk of them if even if they have good intentions with eating large quantities of healthier foods the odds of them reintroducing something like cheese or ice cream or hamburgers or steak french fries whatever the case may be it's pretty high and so then as you just said they're going to eat that same amount they're going to really fill up and then some on those high fat high calorie foods and it's just going to worsen the problem so you know there's there's a lot there also from a psychological standpoint that we don't necessarily need to address today but i mean it does kind of go to the fact that weight loss can be like a really complicated issue it really can be and i have to say i really like the idea of keeping a short-term focus a person doesn't have to think what am i going to eat in the year 2055. let's let's focus on today let's focus on the next couple of days and i've heard you say you know if i'm kind of a food addict and today is my first day without the food i crave i'm going to not have such a hot day today i'm going to feel kind of crummy and i just resolve myself to it that's the way today is going to be i'm going to miss it but it passes you're going into the tunnel you're going to come out of the tunnel and when you do you're going to feel so much better because you're broken free all right let's uh talk about uh bmi here i'm curious what do we know typically here when it comes to the bmi of those eating a vegetarian or even a whole food plant-based diet versus those who are eating the standard american diet we got some really good information from the adventist health study and and you know seventh-day adventists have been under the microscope of researchers for decades and decades because they are just everybody's favorite population to study huge number of people in california especially but elsewhere too and almost entirely non-smokers almost entirely tea totalers so they're great to study and what they have found is that within this group they vary quite widely in diet for religious reasons they're supposed to be health conscious vegetarian diets are smiled on but they're not followed by everybody within that population what you see is that comparing meat eaters people who eat meat every day to a person who eliminates uh say red meat and has just chicken chicken fish and maybe the next group would be just people who eat fish the next group down would be people who don't eat any meat at all but they have dairy products and eggs and ovo lacto vegetarian and finally vegans no animal products at all when you go down those five steps what you see is the bmi just drops drops drops drops drops everybody's eating the foods they want they're eating until they are full they are totally satisfied their physical activity may not differ very much but the plant-based diet is good for several bmi points much lower than the person who's a meat-eater and much lower even than a person who's a lacto-ovo vegetarian that's that's the cheese effect so yeah bmi very very strongly dependent on the dietary pattern you're following you're talking about uh adventist i was talking recently on the show about uh the longevity aspect of one of those studies i think this one was done out in loma linda and it looked at life expectancy for uh vegans and vegetarians compared to those eating the standard diet and for women it was more than six years uh for men it was nine and a half years i do believe so i would i would think that the lower bmi would be a big factor as to why we're seeing those extra trips around the sun all those things they all go together your bmi goes down the cholesterol goes down with it blood pressure goes down with it the risk of diabetes it fi it attracts with this um partly because people are thinner they're less diabetes risk but even if they're the same weight the diabetes risk is lower for people on a plant-based diet so all and certain cancers are less common so all of these things they help with longevity and they help with the different health issues that that can complicate later life too i've gotten this question a lot over the years as well you just said diabetes it popped into my mind question about sugar and weight gain is there a connection distinctly between eating an abundance of sugar a really sugary diet and packing on the pounds or is sugar kind of just a byproduct by and large of fatty foods sugar is an interesting thing you know your body is actually designed to run on sugar now what i'm the sugar i'm speaking of is glucose and it's in fruits and it's in starchy vegetables the starch breaks apart to release glucose and it goes into your blood and it powers your brain that's what your brain wants and and that's the healthy fuel for your body glucose is very clean burning fuel your muscles work on it a person who's going to run a marathon next week they are carbo-loading today they're putting sugar glucose into their liver and into their muscles in the form of glycogen so the point is sugar is not a bad thing but it's gotten a bad rep because people take sugar and they mix it into cookies along with butter and shortening and frankly that's where the calories really are um so people will blame the carbs but it's really the hidden fats that are that are the biggest driver of weight gain and we see this with um cakes pies a lot of baked goods and many other things now having said that i don't want people to imagine that sugar is always you know totally innocuous if you take a coca-cola or a pepsi or something you know those kinds of things um they're not actually the biggest driver of weight gain but that's just a bunch of sugar that the body doesn't really need at all we talked about nuts and avocados a little bit earlier patricia's wondering specifically though about some other high-fat plant foods and chia and flax seeds do you need to be cautious with those as well when you're trying to lose weight uh not in the portions that they're they're usually that people usually have they have maybe you know a table tablespoon or something like that they throw on the the amount of fat in that is really quite modest if you have about an entire ounce of chia seeds maybe nine grams of fat something like that um and so if a person's not going to use that much nonetheless i i can virtually guarantee there are people hearing this right now watching this right now they're like okay well even still what are some alternate sources for omega-3s we talked a lot about the importance of them the last time you were on the show yeah oh and don't get me wrong chia is fine and full and flax seeds are fine um but i got to tell you my favorite um omega-3 source is the last one anyone would think of and that is green leafy vegetables what they don't have any fat at all in them do they well actually if you send some broccoli to the lab they will tell you it's about seven or eight percent fat and a very large proportion of that fat is omega-3 what matters is not so much how much fat you're eating um well let me put it this way if you're eating a lot of fat you're going to gain weight but from a health standpoint what your body wants is a high proportion of your fat as omega-3 so if you're not getting very much fat because you're avoiding the added fats but the traces of fat you're getting are the ones from green leafy vegetables that's really high omega-3 proportionately and that's what's going to help your body now so you can do it with with green leafy vegetables you can do it with flax and chia that's fine some people will do it with supplements if you want but most people don't really need to do that they do sell the vegan dha supplements vegan epa supplements uh they're just like fish oil just without the about the smell so you can do that um one last point um there has been a literature that people are looking at about whether uh the omega-3s can protect against alzheimer's we don't question yet but uh some studies have suggested that people whose zions are really low in omega-3s might be at higher risk but when people go to the store and they buy fish oil and they start supplementing it turns out that some of these at least for the guys their risk of prostate cancer goes up from the omega-3 supplementing the dha and epa what do we do nobody knows the exact answer yet but what some people are doing is not supplementing until they test you can test there's one there are many companies one is called omega quant you go on their website you pay them a certain amount of money they send you a test kit put a drop of blood on a card you send it back and a week or two later they tell you here is your omega-3 level and if you're where you want to be you throw the card away and stop worrying about it if you're low you could decide if you want to restore your levels with say a vegan epa dha supplement a lot of people do that but again we've got to be cautious about it we still don't know entirely whether that is going to be beneficial over the long run we're not fully sure about what the risks may be i want to stick with alzheimer's uh right now you know we're talking about people feeling like weight gain is inevitable as they get older and i think that then they're concerned about other chronic diseases you know you get heavier you worry about having a heart attack but what do we know about the connection between obesity and alzheimer's disease does that increase the risk yes it does i'm sorry to say obesity makes so many things worse yes it will increase the risk of alzheimer's it will increase the risk of type 2 diabetes which in turn will approximately double the risk of alzheimer's obesity interestingly enough reduces the risk of breast cancer up until menopause but and we don't know entirely why that is but after menopause goes exactly the opposite direction if you're carrying that extra weight into menopause you're at much higher risk of breast cancer so the the answer to it really is is we do want to keep a healthier a healthier weight at every stage of life pre-menopausal there are also healthier ways to reduce a woman's risk of getting breast cancer correct uh yes and and the vast vast majority of breast cancers occur in the post-menopausal period so you don't want to be carrying extra weight into it or to put it the other way you don't want to have extra weight as a young woman hoping that that extra weight will in some way reduce your risk of breast cancer it just increases the risk of everything else let's switch gears take a question from peter this is an interesting one uh wondering whether it's harder to lose weight if a person is dehydrated do we know anything about a connection there well yeah many people have this experience where um they're noticing that they're eating and it may be that they weren't actually hungry um they might have neglected to fill their water glass and so they're actually just thirsty and the way they discover it is if they've kind of been neglecting this they start making sure they've got a bottle of water with them or a glass of water and they find that they're snacking less and less because they were just pulling the snacks out of their drawer to make up for the water they were they were missing apart from that i'm not aware of any relationship aware of any relationship between dehydration and weight gain it's really just eating when you ought to be drinking some some water all right mary wants brass tax answers here she's like gentlemen you're doing a great job but i need to know specifically can dr barnard rattle off a few more foods specifically that are really good for weight loss okay sure um well first of all it's a great question and i love making things practical okay let's break them into three categories the first category is you need foods that will tame your appetite that's so that you know i'm i'm now going to push away from the table plant-based foods are great and the ones that matter the most are the high fiber foods fiber doesn't have calories fills you up so i am going to pick blueberries as maybe my one of my favorites here they're a really high fiber food um but frankly you can do this with whole grain foods like brown rice you can do it with fruits and others but but blueberries are a good one because not only do they have a lot of fiber in them the neglected berry group has has also the the dark color the dark color and blueberry that's from anthocyanins and anthocyanins are very slight metabolism boosters in the in the bargain so i've got the fiber ii uh to help me to reach satiety for maybe a couple hundred calories sooner now the other thing is my metabolism is boosting and i mentioned blueberries anthocyanins helping there another one cinnamon it's not magic but cinnamon has been tested a lot and it does seem to be real it has a slight metabolism boosting effect and blood sugar lowering effect as well but to tell you the truth for the metabolism boost any low-fat high-search food will help sweet potatoes great bananas great great snack uh no fat in there lots of healthy complex carbohydrate and that will give you a little bit of a metabolism boost for a couple hours after you eat it third category if cravings have got you you need something that will substitute for the craving so for all the cheese addicts in the world and there are like this is everybody's issue um go to the store get some nutritional yeast you know this already mary i'm sure a nutritional yeast on your pizza beats the socks off of cheese toppings virtually no fat virtually no calories you get that cheesy taste um another example uh chocolate calls your name it's 8 30 at night you're rating the refrigerator if a person gets the the cocoa powder you've probably seen this you make a little bit of a little sauce with it the fat has been gone but you dip the strawberry or the banana into that little sauce that you've made and you eat that and it's really kind of a delectable kind of sophisticated dessert you serve it to friends like i think you're really cool um but it gives you the taste with none of the none of those hidden calories so there are a few for you all right if somebody's listening to the show or watching us live for the very first time today they're going to be like you need to go back to that second thing he was talking about he said eat starchy foods starchy foods equal carbohydrates did he really just say eat carbohydrates to be at a healthy weight so when it comes to carbs and weight loss and maintaining a healthy weight where are the majority of us going wrong okay um let's take a trip to tokyo and let's go back in time to the 1960s that you had a country that was eating carbs like crazy it was a rice based diet with more rice and more rice and more rice some meat not very much really no dairy and not much oil and they were the thinnest healthiest people on the planet luckily they hadn't read the atkins book which says if you eat rice you're going to gain weight they ate huge amounts of it never gained weight until mcdonald's arrived in tokyo burger king uh dairy products came in and people ate less rice less rice less rice more fatty foods they started to gain weight how do i understand this fats have nine calories per gram carbohydrates have only four and the reason people blame bread or potatoes for weight gain is because when the bread comes out of the toaster the butter goes on when the potatoes come out of the oven and goes the ionic goes the sour cream and the butter and all the fatty toppings it's the fatty toppings that add the calories uh french fries potato chips you can call them carbs if you want but from a nutritional standpoint what it is is a sponge filled with grease and every gram of fat carries nine calories right down your esophagus a sponge filled with grease advertising that just sounds delectable um okay we haven't yet talked about a lot of the processed plant-based foods you know you go to the store these days especially in the frozen food aisle and the freezers are just lined floor-to-ceiling with a lot of plant-based options just because something is plant-based does that mean that it's a healthy option yeah you know you've got to hand it to industry they're so creative and they're jumping on the fact that everyone's going vegan nowadays uh and so so they're coming up with product and and they vary a lot um and some like the old veggie burgers that have been around for frankly decades were always pretty good um very low in fat just a couple of ingredients it might be a bean burger or it's made from soy or textured vegetable protein or something simple the past few years uh the manufacturers have decided they're going to use vegan foods to seduce the taste buds of meat eaters so they're taking that veggie burger and now they're adding a lot of stuff that was never in it before a lot of coconut fat for example and that fat will raise your cholesterol because coconuts and palm coconut oil palm oil those are really just about the two the only two vegetable foods that are vegetable fats that are really really high in saturated fat and every gram of the fat every gram of the fat that they packed in there has nine calories so so those foods are no longer slimming foods they still serve a purpose they for the person who's a diet and a little meat eater and who eats an impossible burger i mean it's marginally better than what he's eating before and it proves to him that he doesn't need meat that's good but if you're already following a healthy vegan diet what you really need is not that's processed stuff so much what you really need is simple foods the beans the grains and the vegetables and they can turn into wonderful foods but um they might be really better choices than some of the other things now now chuck really really quickly i don't want to have people feel like it's a terrible thing to ever have a processed food if it's you know your 14 year old kid is having a birthday and all the neighbor comes in don't serve them lentil loaf they're going to beat your kid up if you serve veggie hot dogs you know then that's going to be okay and yes they're a little processed but they're it's not a bad food it's not high in fat it's relatively simple we have time for just a couple of more uh we do have somebody right now dr barnard who's wondering about uh going plant-based for the very first time eating a plant-based diet but they're concerned because they've been on so many diets previously and none of them turned out to be sustainable the longest they say that they lasted was three months they had success for three months and then the wheels came off so when it comes to eating a plant-based diet and making sure not only you lose the weight but keep the weight off how does the plant-based diet actually benefit someone in that case oh what a great question so many people as you know try various kinds of diets and you try it for a while and you fall off the wagon the beauty of a vegan diet or a plant-based diet is that it doesn't rely on restricting calories or cutting out carbohydrates so what people very often find is after they've done it for a couple of weeks they've kind of lost their taste for chicken wings they found foods they like much better and you're never hungry you're not missing carbohydrate because you're having all the carbohydrates you want but people lose weight and then the weight loss rewards them and it seems really easy so they just kind of want to stick with it and then they discover something else they discover that there are cool products at the store and websites and books and movies and it it sort of draws you in and and you want to learn more about it but i have to say where i think people are are particularly vulnerable is if they are the lone ranger if you're the only person who's doing this and maybe you're in a family or a work group where other people are just not into healthy eating at all you might find that the temptations to go back are stronger than they would be if you've got a network that supports you so get the network that can mean going online that can be watching you know the exam room where whatever gives you a group to get that little bit of injection of support once a week or once a day or whatever it is listen to podcasts hook up with other people you're going to discover that a lot of people are there they're doing the same thing you are and and the feeling of being part of an important social group that can keep you going at any moment of doubt and you'll discover those moments of doubt just kind of stop coming after a while all right final question comes to us from mark goes back to what it was we were talking about at the top of the show and mark is wondering have there ever been any studies whatsoever showing that it is impossible to lose weight past a certain age what a question uh you know i guess everyone kind of thinks that but no no we in our research studies here we have had people come in at just about every age uh often with a lot of complications they may have diabetes or really serious joint problems and age is not a barrier to weight loss and dr dean ornish showed that age was not a barrier to the healing process that occurs in the arteries the key is a really healthy diet getting the animal products out keeping the grease out i don't care how old you are i also don't care how young you are it's a healthy way to go at any age basically what you just said is it's never too late never too late never too late uh here's the cool thing ladies and gentlemen uh if you feel like you could use a little boost with your health and you are struggling with your weight uh we do have a 12-week plant-based weight loss program program coming up with dr vinita vermont and our wonderful dietitian karen smith as well you can sign up for that at pcrm.org or if you want a little bit of one-on-one work you can work with our experts or doctors or dietitians on staff at the barnard medical center as well telemedicine visits are available in more than a quarter of the country like a pretty sizable area so to make your appointment today call 202-527-7500 or log on to barnardmedical.org insurance is accepted so barnardmedical.org 202-527-7500 it's kind of like modern medicine um with a twist on preventative medicine and sustained medicine that's a big thing that we talked about here today so we're not only going to get you on the right track we're going to keep you there and dr barnard i think that that then could be the best medicine of all yes it's been a really wonderful thing and i have to say the pandemic was not a friend to anybody but it did cause us to greatly ramp up the telemedicine that we've had so some people come in to see us uh here live and in person others come in by telemedicine some see a doctor some want to see the dietitian whatever it is we're glad to help there it is 202 527 7500 or barnardmedical.org for a full list of states where services are available dr barnard appreciate your time today my friend thank you chuck all right and if you feel like you've raised your health iq by a pointer to go ahead and like this video and subscribe to this channel we would greatly appreciate it and also i want to say a huge thank you to the gregory j writer memorial fund for their continued support of the exam room live and the physicians committee because it is it's helping all of us raise our health iqs today and the gregory j ryder memorial fund supports organizations just like the physicians committee that carry on the love that greg had for animals and they're doing it by promoting plant-based health and working to end animal abuse while emphasizing programs that promote systemic change and also benefit people and you can learn more about them on their website right now just hop on to gregoryriderfund.org that's gregory writer spelled r e i t e r fund dot org and for today my friends that is all the time that we have i want to say thank you again to dr neil barnard for being here really helping us out proving that weight gain does not have to be inevitable we always have more control than we give ourselves for so let's take that control let's eat that healthier diet let's shed those pounds and let's add some years to our life happy quality wonderful years at that and to the crew behind the scenes thank you guys so very much for making the magic happen and to you exam roomies thank you all for being here and making the show this wonderful thing that it is for everyone here at the physicians committee i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll we'll talk to you again soon but until then keep it plant-based

Channel: Physicians Committee

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Length: 35min 11sec (2111 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 01 2022