Top Plant-Based Nutrition Hacks With Dr. Michael Greger, MD

[Applause] who's got a question i said something yesterday in a q a session about not over eating three types of greens spinach swiss chard and beet greens because of why exactly was the question and the answer was oxalates hydration very important and important for preventing kidney stones as well as well so if you are eating cups of greens a day as you should as everybody should i encourage you to diversify your greens and include other greens you can do cups of collard greens and and arugula and kale but shouldn't do cups a day of those high oxalate greens the question was i keep talking about this stuff called sulforaphane and broccoli what i don't get it um to paraphrase um okay no it's actually kind of complicated um and so i have a video called the second strategy for something about broccoli for eating broccoli cooking broccoli and it talks about various methods to maximize the compound within cruciferous vegetables that we think accounts for its near miraculous benefits i'm talking about cruciferous vegetables i'm talking about cabbage family vegetables like broccoli kale collards cabbage arugula these are cruciferous vegetables and the reason why they take a hallowed place within my daily dozen like i tell people to eat vegetables but the healthiest of healthy vegetables are cruciferous vegetables why because they are unique in that they have they contain within them these a class of precursor compounds called glucosinolates which when you cut them when you cut these vegetables the glucose satellites are transformed by an enzyme called morocinase into sulforaphane which is what we want that is what we think accounts for their benefits you say wait a second what benefits are we talking about oh what benefits are we not talking about look at typing broccoli into nutritionfacts.org and you see these remarkable studies about people eating broccoli broccoli sprouts etc so for example there was a study on autism found that you randomize uh young boys with autism to broccoli sprouts or not um and it was placebo-controlled studies so they can pack them in so you didn't even know who was in which group to the end the first and only intervention ever proven to actually improve the core symptoms of autism what was the magic drug wasn't a drug it was broccoli sprouts and why use broccoli sprouts broccoli sprouts are particularly concentrated in these sulforaphane precursor compounds so they don't actually contain sulforaphane they contain sulforaphane precursor compounds so you have to do something to the vegetables in order to get the benefits so glucosinolates but oh we could write it on the board here we go oh look at this we got a board glucosinolates okay and this is catalyzed by an enzyme called myrosinase okay so these this is what's inside broccoli uh cruciferous veggies okay but this is what we want and this is not what's in this is all that's in the vegetables this is what we want okay so if you uh in fact i just did this recently um you take a head of cauliflower if you have an instapot then these electronic pressure cookers you can put a whole head of cauliflower um which is a cruciferous vegetable um and three minutes later poof you have cooked whole cooked cauliflower and you can slice it like steaks and put over a wonderful like lemontini sauce whatever you want to do okay that is a terrible way to cook cauliflower and the reason is this enzyme is destroyed by heat destroyed by heat so you cook that cauliflower moroccan is completely killed and you don't get sulfur paint okay now you get a little bit of sulforaphane you do why because there's actually this enzyme is found in christopher's vegetables and some kinds of gut bacteria actually have morocinase in them and so depending on your gut flora you may actually be able to get a little bit of sulfur a vein eating even cauliflower cooked like that okay but what would have been a much better way to cook that cauliflower if how okay so how does this reaction happen burrosinase is activated actually what happens is like a chemical flare if you look at chemical flare it's two different chemicals in two different compartments and when you crack the flare open they mix they're like little glass tubes they mix and then the chemical reaction happens and so inside it's cool we could actually if we could actually show a cell of a broccoli leaf you'd see there's these little vacuoles these little these little spheres packed full of active enzyme packed full glucosinolates and they're separated and when that's disrupted when that chemical flare is broken for example when you cut it with a knife or you bite it with your teeth or which is the whole reason it evolved a bug nibbles on that leaf a bug nibbles on the leaf and all of a sudden those two little vacuums those two little spheres open up and they mix the enzyme mixes with glucosinolation poof sulforaphane is bored and sulforaphane tastes like broccoli and the bug goes ew this tastes like broccoli and goes bite some other plant okay so that i mean that's why it happened okay so if instead of cooking that whole um cauliflower hole if i first would have chopped it up then when it was raw then i would have been the bug nibbling that i would have been chopping it up spilling those contents mixing this up sulforaphane is created and sulforaphane is heat stable so are glucosinolates it's only the enzyme that's um knocked off by heat so you can cook the sulforaphane all you want and you would get um the benefits so if you're making broccoli soup how do you make broccoli soup you could imagine most people i think cook broccoli and then blend it in a blender right right so you you cook broccoli and water and then it heats up and then you put in a blender and make soup that's the wrong way to do it because you're killing off the enzyme what you do is you chop chop chop chop chop chop while it's raw and then you have to wait 45 minutes this takes 45 minutes to happen so that's what i call the hack and hold tip technique the hack and hold technique is you chop your greens your cruciferous vegetables you wait 45 minutes and then you cook them then you can cook all you want because we already created this but it takes 45 minutes so what do i do every morning where where is briege there she is my beloved can can attest that every morning i get up and i chop my collard greens or i chop my kale and say why is there all this chopped greens that's a weird breakfast it's not breakfast that's for lunch because i gotta hack and hold all right so but then i came out with this video called the second strategy for cooking broccoli or eating broccoli and that is what if you don't want to wait what if you forgot to chop your and you're hungry and you want to eat those collard grains and you don't want to wait 45 minutes aha well there's another cruciferous vegetable uh mustard greens are cruciferous vegetables what are mustard greens made out of mustard seeds you take a mustard seed it turns into mustard greens and what is powdered what is mustard powder it's just powdered mustard seeds so researchers had this idea maybe there's active enzyme in mustard powder that you buy on the shelf so they took a little mustard paste so they boiled greens without cutting it or they cut it and didn't wait 45 minutes and so the enzyme should have been destroyed no sulforaphane and then once it was cooked they sprinkled a little mustard powder which you can get anywhere at the store and it was teeny like a little pinch teeny little pinch of mustard powder poof sulforaphane was made right there magic that's the second strategy you don't want to wait sprinkle a little sprinkle of mustard powder so the only reason why you'd hack and hold is if you don't like mustard powder i mean it's a little bit but some dishes maybe if you're putting a mustard sauce on it well then who cares right also horseradish that's a cruciferous vegetable packed with merocinase packed with this enzyme so you can add it afterwards or you can hack it hold those are the two techniques for maximizing sulforaphane but that's why it's complicated because not actually in the vegetable you actually have to create it to get the benefits oh fantastic question okay what about what about frozen broccoli frozen broccoli the way anyway anyone knows their food processing what you have to do when you um freeze greens or freeze a vegetable like broccoli it'll rot unless you kill the enzymes off first so what they do is they blanch the vegetables before they freeze them kill off the enzymes so the the the the greens don't auto digest in the bag in the freezer anyone who's tried to like freeze their own greens it doesn't work you got to blanch them first so they kill off the brock they kill off the enzyme before they freeze it so if you're starting with frozen broccoli hack and hold too late what you need mustard powder that's where you whip out the mustard powder all right and then boom you get all the benefits or look you can eat raw you know obviously you can eat raw broccoli now your digestive enzymes kill off the enzyme too but it takes you have 45 minutes in your stomach so you're it so so you eat raw broccoli you eat broccoli sprouts um and you get all the benefits because in your stomach um the enzymes doing is magic and by the time it actually the enzyme gets destroyed it's too late it's done his business so you can get the benefits of raw um through cooking if you hack and hold or the mustard powder great question whoo yeah quick follow-up to that i know this whole session it's gonna be broccoli that's it oh yeah oh good question now you say wait a second the question is mustard powder what about just mustard maybe you don't have mustard powder in the house but hey you probably have a little mustard that's been sitting there from since the last july 4th or something okay so would mustard work i don't know how mustard is made the answer is it's never been tested so we don't know and it would depend on whether or not mustard is heated if you make your own mustard obviously you can make it without heating it but i it's not i don't know how mustard is made so we yeah unless there's a mustard maker in the yeah okay yeah so soy protein isolate is basically it's like the table sugar of the carbohydrate kingdom or the oil of the fat kingdom you take a whole food and like a how most table sugar comes from sugar beets these days you take a sugar beet you take a beet perfectly healthy food or you strip away all the nutrition you have sucrose table sugar no nutrition just calories empty calories that's table sugar right when you take a walnut you strip away as nutrition you're left with walnut oil still has a little vitamin e some fat soluble nutrients but basically most of the nutrition is gone you take a split pea when they talk about pea proteins you're not talking about garden peas they're talking about yellow split peas typically um so you take the split peas you make a nice split pea soup or something packed with nutrition you strip out everything except the protein you isolate the protein you're left with with p protein isolate okay so it has all the protein in fact more concentrated you know by weight or by volume but the nutrition's been removed so it's not a whole food it's the kind of antithesis of a whole food you're just getting the protein now it would be better to eat pea protein isolate than beef protein i said or whey protein i mean you're it's still a plant protein but it's just the protein and so you're missing out on the rest of the nutrition in fact for ubs which is some big financial services company in zurich i just actually wrote a thing comparing uh the beyond burger to impossible burger to the black bean burger in my how not to die cookbook actually which is made out of black beans like real like okay so um and so it's interesting to do kind of an additional breakdown um and and kind of compare um it's interesting and possible i didn't even know that it adds a lots of um they supple they fortify with also they add potassium interestingly that all sorts of things um to try to add back in so when you go from split peas to just pea protein nicely you take away all the potassium which is one of the wonderful things about legumes um so they're actually just appetizing back in kind of like you know white bread you know they enrich white flower with you know some of the b vitamins that have been stripped away when you make white flour um so so some of these key nutrients actually impossible comes out on pretty far ahead because they add kind of add it back in but of course there's lots of nutrients they're missing key of which is fiber right you move the fiber content yeah so i talk about the kind of environmental implications and the health implications that's all the protein infection has more protein because it's more concentrated i mean you know but they want to they want to match or actually exceed so i think um a quarter pound uh patty of burger if i remember correctly 18 grams of protein whereas impossible beyond have 20 grams protein uh approximately so they wanted to since kind of protein is the buzzword and it's like where am i going to get my protein they wanted to make a plant-based burger that equaled or was even more protein concentrated oh you want protein look at this look at that measly beef 18. we got 20 right how are you going to do that you're not going to do that with black beans black beans have fiber i mean they're they're they're they you're not going to need a burger this big right you want to eat a little concentrated right i mean that's why they're using an isolate it's because i want to pack a lot of protein in a small space because they want to compete on the same selling point right so why do people eat um nutritionally where they when the meat industry says we have nutrient-dense foods they're talking about basically three things we are a good source of protein iron and zinc and so these these plant-based burger companies wanted to match some head-to-head protein iron sink um in fact you know add zinc to may even even make it more zen than beef you know but the benefits of plant-based source of protein is they have those same because they have the protein iron plus they have all the plant-based nutrients like the fiber and the folate the potassium things missing from the animal sources it's a yellow light food is a processed plant food ingredient no worse coconut oil so it is a coconut oil so it's the worst well second worst process of palm would be more so impossible burger has the same amount of saturated fat as beef of course has no cholesterol by definition no plant-based product could have any cholesterol but same saturated fat um and uh and the the brown burger almost has the same amount of saturated fat they have cocoa butter and um coconut oil and ironically actually more sodium so beyond burger um has uh um 25 more sodium more salt um than a regular kind of seasoned beef burger so most of the uh gmo soy is actually used for feed crops most of the soy foods like soy milk i think are actually organic and by definition the u.s the 2002 usda organic standards there's no gmos allowed um but the the harms from gmos is not the actual gene construct itself but it's the fact that it allows for more herbicide application the whole point of being genetically modified soybeans is that it's roundup ready it's you can you can normally with soybean crop you have to wait till you actually harvest the soybeans before you kill off before you add herbicide because otherwise you'd kill off your soybean plants but if you make the soybean plants resistant to the herbicide um uh glyphosate then you can while the all the beans are on the plant you can just kill off all the weeds and so that's why gmo soybeans at the store have higher rates of this pesticide biphosate than non-gmo it's kind of an indirect effect and so the question then becomes how bad are gmos it depends on how bad glyphosate is um and the iarc has come out suggesting it may be a human carcinogen and so then that's the concern it's the higher levels of pesticides this herbicide glyphosate and not the gene construct itself that gives it that herbicide resistance yes me you so osteoarthritis there is um in fact i just um just scripted a new video on osteoarthritis i'm doing a fasting webinar next this month this month 27 29 late 20 26th i would have been a day late thank you why isn't anybody on the webinar yeah i know we've already had more than a thousand people signed up very cool there's actually going to be two fasting webinars this year um one this month on the 26th please remember um and uh and then september we're going to do another one on a separate set of fascinators just too massive and i wanted to keep them in three hours so there's a fasting osteoarthritis that showed benefits but it was probably because they switched them to a plant-based diet what can you do if you're already eating a plant-based diet um to decrease we tend to not think of osteoarthritis as an inflammatory disorder but it actually is the most important thing we can do is we can keep weight off our knees um and so losing weight can keep the weight off our knees so some of it is this kind of mechanical wear and tear in addition to the inflammatory component what can we do about the inflammatory component we can you know eat not just a plant-based diet but a plant-based diet packed with anti-inflammatory foods like um you know spices like turmeric and ginger etc so drinking chai tea or something that has all those spices together would be an excellent choice for somebody with osteoarthritis yes i script out a video but sometimes the video doesn't actually appear for myself i'm like i got a new video out and they're like i haven't seen this video it's because it's not it's like out the next week or something but i just did a video on daring cancer right or is it not up yet okay we could actually oh let me see if we can hold on maybe we will watch a video that no one's ever seen before what do you think uh wouldn't that be cool let's do it okay everybody want a wi-fi password that works [Laughter] s b oh here it is whoa let's see that's old what's the newest effects of hormones for hormones and milk no i think it's up already don't you think here we go dairy maybe maybe it's up durian cancer boom hello it's totally up all right well i mean i don't want i mean we can play it you want to play it here's the answer to your question studies comparing country by country cancer rates are human full variation in the incidence of prostate cancer worldwide with low rates in parts of asia and africa and high rates in north america australia new zealand and northern europe here's the map of prostate cancer mortality could dairy consumption have something to do with it given northern europeans americans australians drink a lot of milk whereas most non-caucasians in the world are lactose intolerant but just because a country drinks a lot of milking has a lot of cancer doesn't mean the individuals within that country that are drinking the milk are getting the cancer that's why we need cohort studies where you find out how much milk people drink and follow those individuals over time and see if those who drink more milk get more cancer there have been dozens of such studies done put them all together and intakes of total dairy products including low fat milk were indeed associated with increased prostate cancer risk the question is why maybe it's just all the calcium they found that the more calcium people consume the higher their risk of prostate cancer yeah but most people get their calcium from dairy so how do we know this isn't just a dairy effect before we start worrying about kale and other non-dairy sources of calcium it'd be nice to see dairy calcium teased out from non-dairy calcium intakes and that's exactly what they did yes the more calcium from dairy sources the higher the risk of cancer but non-dairy sources of calcium were found to be protected so it wasn't a calcium effect it was a dairy effect this suggests that other components of dairy may be to blame they suggest it's the animal protein boosting the levels of a cancer-promoting growth hormone called igf-1 insulin-like growth factor 1. if you look at 28 studies involving nearly 28 000 people this is what's called an albatross plot any study to the right of this line shows a link between igf-1 levels and dairy product milk specifically or dairy protein consumption and any study hitting this line or over shows a significant association with higher igf-1 levels this could also explain why plant-based diets can be so protective put watch and weight cancer patients on a whole food plant-based diet for a year no chemo no radiation lifestyle changes only and get a significant reduction in psa levels indicative of tumor shrinkage their bloodstream becoming nearly eight times better at suppressing the growth of cancer cells do biopsies and you can show changes in gene expression a down regulation of critical cancer genes effectively switching off cancer growth genes at a genetic level whereas if you instead eat lots of dairy after a prostate cancer diagnosis you may suffer a 76 percent higher risk of death overall and 141 percent increased risk of dying specifically from your cancer even without igf-1 the milk protein casein appears to be a cancer cell proliferation promoting factor increasing the growth of prostate cancer cells at least in a petri dish and the same thing with whey the other major animal protein in dairy see nearly 100 percent of advanced prostate cancers thrive by upregulating a growth enzyme called tor and dairy protein boosts tour signaling even higher which only makes sense right calves have to grow like 40 times faster than human babies and so cow's milk has to be packed with growth promoters not to mention the hormones in milk especially from cows who are already pregnant again this commercialized milk production by pregnant cows releases uncontrolled amounts of bovine steroid hormones into the human food chain and so the combination may well explain the observed association between high dairy consumption and increased risk of prostate cancer from an evolutionary perspective the persistent abuse of the growth promoting signaling system of bovine milk by humans over their entire lifespan not just drinking milk during infancy maintains the most important hallmark of cancer biology this sustained proliferative signaling to grow grow grow and so there's this interest in trying to define the safe upper limits of long-term milk and dairy intake for the prevention of the most common dairy promoted cancer in men but if you look at diet and cancer guideline recommendations yeah milk may increase risk of prostate cancer however no recommendation was provided for cutting down on dairy because the evidence for prostate cancer conflicted with decreased risk of colorectal cancer high dairy intake is associated with increased prostate cancer risk but decreased colon cancer risk so it's like you know alcohol may be an intoxicating carcinogen but policy makers hesitate to introduce you know effective alcohol policies or even to support the addition of cancer warning labels for fear they might undermine any possible health benefits of alcohol use now i've talked about how the purported benefits of alcohol appear to be evaporating is dairy really protective against colon cancer if you put all the cohort studies together where they measure dairy consumption then follow people for years to see who got cancer milk and total dairy consumption was indeed associated with a reduction in colorectal cancer risk one of our deadliest cancers now people who drink more milk just happen to tend to exercise more smoke less drink less eat less meat which could explain some of the association however many of the studies adjusted for these kinds of confounding factors more likely it was the protective effects of the calcium which may bind up pro-inflammatory bile acids in the gut though high-fat dairy products like cheese may actually increase bile acids explaining why the cheese appeared to cancel out the calcium benefit so might we be able to get the best of both worlds by consuming non-dairy calcium sources if you randomize people to calcium supplements you can get a significant reduction in recurring colon polyps which can otherwise turn into cancer though calcium pills have been associated with adverse cardiovascular effects and so the best of all worlds if you want to take a precautionary approach in terms of nutrition and cancer is to obtain calcium through low oxalate dark green leafy vegetables beans split peas chickpeas and lentils or if necessary calcium fortified foods such as soy almond milk okay okay so the bottom line right so dairy is associated with increased prostate cancer risk but decreased risk of colorectal cancer the second leading cancer killer of men and women combined and so that's why no one talks about the whole daring cancer thing because it's good for one bad for the other but in the prostate cancer risk it's not the calcium so we don't have to worry about non-dairy sources of calcium but in the protective effects of dairy was the calcium so you can get the benefits without the risks by eating non-dairy sources of calcium okay yes it's important to realize the kind of historical and i have video on this too a historical background of the entire field of dietetics and that is it evolved out of our understanding of deficiency states and so once we discovered diseases like scurvy vitamin c deficiency or berry berry or pellegra or kwashiorkor we realize that there are vitamins we discovered these vitamins there are certain nutrients that we don't get we die they're essential to human life and that's where the field of nutri of dietetics was born was finding out what we needed and so their whole they have this deficiency mindset or you got to make sure you get enough of your recommended daily allowance of all the various nutrients like that's the whole field okay but we're not dying of pellegra anymore we're not dying of quasi or what we're dying of diseases the opposite we're dying of excess nutrient diseases we're dying of excess um saturated fat and cholesterol and trans fats and sodium so actually what people are dying of these days is the opposite it's not are you getting enough of x y and z it's how are you not getting too much of x y and e that's what's going to kill you i mean how many people have ever heard of anybody with obesity or diabetes or heart disease or colorectal cancer i mean these are the diseases that people but the whole field of nutrition is just not geared that way and that's why when you hear dietitians talk it's like are you getting enough whereas if you hear you know kind of lifestyle medicine doctors start well what we're seeing um is we're seeing all these diseases of excess these chronic diseases from overly rich diets but that's just not in the kind of mentality of dietetics and so that's why you just see a kind of a different viewpoint in terms of some of these other like the functional medicine you see this in naturopathy you see in this bio individuality stuff these are ways for people to sell you supplements if you are a doctor you make tons of money it is one of the most lucrative professions now look if you just want to make money you go the stock market or something so people go into medicine they do have some kind of ideals right but what if you don't have an md how are you gonna make money when you can't do surgery that costs a hundred thousand dollars on people like you can't prescribe drugs and get all these kickbacks from drug companies what can you do you're not covered by insurance so someone comes sees you what are you only gonna treat rich people give you that how you sell them supplements you sell them right and so that's how these kind of more alternative um healthcare professionals actually make money how they send their kids to college how they buy their bmws so they have this oh well maybe that's a diet for other people but you particularly you need this or you're deficient in this or yeah but the soils are depleted so take my xyz supplements which hey i just so happened to sell check it out and suma and and the evidence base for so much of the supplementation is either not there at all or even worse shows they're actually can cause harm and so that's why you just see this this whole orientation of many of these professions towards the these you know it's a really problem with reimbursement um i think you know how can people make a living just telling people to eat fruits and vegetables and good things there's health coaches now and stuff but how do you get paid how do you get reimbursed it doesn't matter what the school you can go to whatever eat meat dairy and go on a keto diet school once you get out and have the credentials right you do whatever you want you can you can you can you can heal people the way you want to heal people and so it's just like keep your head down get through it get the credentials that allow you to enter the system and be able to make a living doing this so depending on the source of pain there's different kinds of pain there's neuropathic pain there's inflammatory pain typically when people are talking about pain like arthritis usually there's kind of inflammatory component of something like fibromyalgia and so we're talking about anti-inflammatory foods now in the case of uh you thought you mentioned are there foods that can make things worse about one in 20 people with joint pain unspecified joint pain feel better cutting nightshade vegetables out of their diet so there's tomatoes and peppers and eggplant um and so that's amazing that one simple little dietary tweak and all of a sudden your joint pain goes away so everybody i said with joint pain i said give it a try you know two weeks cut out nightshade vegetables see if it helps see if you're the lucky one in 20. and now 95 of the time they're not right they're the 19 out of the 20 group um and they there's no benefits so i said quick put all those wonderful vegetables back they're super healthy they have all sorts of other benefits so you don't want to cut healthy foods out of your diet unless you need to but look in those 120 people it really helps um so that's something you can give you have to try if um now that's tough so there's the studies that we have on nerve pain are only on diabetic nerve pain so we don't have studies on but we have some miraculous results with hopeful plant-based diets with diabetic nerve pain but we don't have i mean we have studies on other nerve disorders like multiple sclerosis but not pain like trigeminal pain or oh well sciatic pain may have to do with a disc degeneration there's good data showing that atherosclerosis in the vertebral arteries that feed your vertebral discs play a role in the disc degeneration our disc or vertebral discs the cushioning between uh our uh in our spine is the largest vascular tissue in the body meaning there's no blood vessels actually inside them so all the nutrients have to just kind of trickle and uh diffuse them from the outside all the waste products have to diffuse out you need a really rich blood flow to support your discs and if you have clogs you're vertebralizing do mris you can see clogs and they're all your arteries you have clogs in your heart you can get heart death clogs in your brain you have a stroke clogs your vertebral arteries you can degenerate your discs and get low back pain sciatic pain etc now in for uh the clogs in your heart you can really go on a plant base that you can actually reverse open up the arteries uh without drugs without surgery and have a reversal um the question is can we reverse low back pain one of the leading causes of disability by increasing blood flow or are the discs too far gone and they're just not gonna come back never been done never been treated love to see a trial on reversal of low back pain randomizing people to plant-based diet hasn't been done certainly worth a try so um you have uropathic bacteria in your rectum which is the the bladder infecting causing bacteria which is then creeping up and causing bladder infections some people with different anatomy are more susceptible than others and the question is there anything besides drugs that can prevent utis and actually cranberry products so i don't know if you have you tried cranberry juice unsweetened you can also obviously what's the best way to eat cranberries as cranberries right wait a second ooh how do you eat cranberries you make smoothies out of cranberries um in fact i have a drink my pink juice recipe what do they call it pink something um where's just cranberries and harmless sweetener and you whip it up and you're just drinking cranberries or you put cranberries in your oatmeal um with some like dates or raisins something sweet so it's not totally sour but i encourage you to do a trial of eating cranberries every day i'm gonna have videos on that in terms of the dose i forget the dust but it was a really reasonable amount of cranberries and see if that will allow you to the same relief without the antibiotics that would be my recommendation there are uh capsules that that contain cranberry extracts the concern is we're not sure still exactly what it is in the cranberry that is preventing utis there's all sorts of theories um there are certain compounds that prevent e coli from attaching to the bladder wall and but we're still not sure so when you extract out it's unclear whether you're extracting the right ingredients that's why i always try to default to the whole food because then you're getting everything yeah you're probably getting lots of things that aren't helping but they're all healthy stuff anyway um and so where do you get cranberries all year round frozen you have frozen cranberries stock up sometimes you can't even find frozen cranberries the rest of the euro when it comes uh thanksgiving i stock up my freezer uh with lots of cranberries because i'm afraid i'm not gonna be able to get them super healthy try those and then seven years later come back and say it wasn't the chicken it wasn't the cranberries yeah okay so d-mannose is a there's all sorts of different kinds of sugars and d-mannose can help reduce urinary tract infections um that follow intercourse and so for those who every time they have intercourse they get uh urinary tract infections um having a dose of d-mannose after in in addition to urinating immediately after and of course kind of flush anything out but the bruising of that area can increase your risk of getting infected that's the case d-mannose may help though it has not been shown to help with other kinds of chronic urinary tract infection problems so we used to think that nerve cells were born with a certain number and they just go down um that nerves are the one cell in the body that can't regenerate they don't divide they don't multiply you start with and you just lose them throughout your life and then a remarkable series of experiments were done with terminally ill cancer patients in this case who agreed to get injected with some nasty radioactive dye right before that bound to dna right before they died um as kind of a a as a gift to science that allowed us to actually to actually show that there is even late in life um uh reproduction of of of nerve cells they actually are able to divide and create new nerve cells we actually we can date nerve cells by certain radioactive elements that were released in these open-air neutron bomb tests back in the marshall islands we released so much of this crazy weird radiation at the time you can actually go back and kind of like growth rings on a tree find out when though that nerve was was born because we knew when those those bombs went off anyway that's fascinating science bottom line we can regenerate nerves that is why um dr dean ornish is doing this really amazing trial right now so we already conquered the killer number one heart disease reversing heart disease he was the one that just showed reversing prostate cancer reversing the progression of prostate cancer with the same plant-based diet so we now so he could do something wimpy like low back pain but no he's going against alzheimer's disease he's taking people with alzheimer's disease put him on a plant-based randomizing and see if he can actually not just stop but actually reverse the course of alzheimer's disease and he that's predicated on the fact that you can grow new nerves the trial is ongoing right now we don't know results yet uh but that's his uh that's what's going on right now okay so we know we can regenerate um parts of nerves but entire nerves can can regenerate so having said that there's obviously uh um cases in which nerves aren't regrowing in your particular case without a diagnosis without a cause we can't treat the cause whatever is happening that is compromising your nervous system if we don't know what it is if it's some environmental thing if some genetic thing is whatever then we don't know what to do about it so i would encourage you or encourage anyone with an undiagnosed health problem you said look i went to my doctor they didn't know what it was then you go to another doctor and not just the second opinion you go to the third opinion you go to fourth opinion and sometimes these crazy stories whereas like the 22nd person i went to they said oh well what was that amazing case with the lead oh oh yeah someone was uh was told to eat bone meal and they were getting lead poisoning and so someone eventually figured it out destroying their nerves they couldn't walk and then they stopped them anyway i would just keep going until we get and then once we have a diagnosis then i can look up i can say oh that particular disease these are the foods that are best so yeah the whole point is to kind of treat the cause without removing the cause presumably um it will continue to deteriorate if under the same conditions are deteriorating now you ready for that wi-fi password again why not because we don't see it yeah well that's why i say it don't say it because i can't see it i don't understand okay here we go s b v z you got ears right come on um we don't have to we don't have to play this yeah yeah yeah but there it is boom ta-dah so dr gundry's the plant paradox is wrong and then follow-up video how to avoid lectin poisoning and then the third video in the series is are lectins in food good or bad for you anyway so there's the video series i would um refer you to so dr gundry wrote this book saying that we shouldn't eat the lectins are bad for you i debunk it um the short version debunk it so that's where i send you right there it goes through all the and if you have any follow-up questions be able to talk about it um in terms of the acid base um there's this sense that some foods are acidic some foods are alkaline forming and so we should try to have more alkaline than acidic okay that makes essentially no sense when it comes to our bloodstream no matter what you eat your ph stays the same the only time your ph really changes is right in the icu right before you die you do what's called an abg you do arterial blood guys you see your ph is dropping you you you're the the the concern is that you're a goner at that point your ph stays the same regardless what you eat but your urine ph changes dramatically based on what you eat so you eat a lot of dark green leafy vegetables and your urine um becomes very basic you eat a lot of meat you get a lot of fine grains and then your urine becomes acidic and you do these simple ph uh you can pee on a ph strip and you can see it turn different colors depending on what you just ate and in fact you can use purple cabbage to create a ph solution that turns blue in one way turns turns blue and it's basic turns pink when it's and so i have this whole like you can just pour purple cabbage juice in your toilet and pee on it and also it's a really cool video you think i'm joking it's not purple purple okay where's my testing your diet with pea and purple cabbage there it is anyway why do we care the reason we care is because by alkalizing our urine has beneficial effects by preventing the formation of kidney stones as well as decreasing muscle loss with aging as we age we naturally lose something called sarcophage we can actually lose muscle mass i go into exactly why alkalizing our urine we actually lose less protein as we age um and that's another benefit um but beyond these kind of narrow mostly kidney-based benefits acid-base balance doesn't really make much sense though their recommendations their bottom line recommendations don't eat a lot of meat eat lots of dark green leafy vegetables spot on right so if someone came to you and said by my the aliens in my tinfoil hat say eat lots of greens don't eat a lot of meat i'm like i i don't like how you got there but the conclusion solid solid right and my concern is that they might spout that theory to someone in the know and they dismiss the whole thing oh well you're just against me because you have some crazy theory about physiology where it's like yeah but there's there's there's ways we can conclude to eat the same diet that don't make up um things in biochemistry that don't exist so what i used to get is i used to get cases of canned beans like bpa-free canned beans right um but now i can make my own beans dried beans are like the cheapest thing about it so instead of like 30 cents a cup it's like five cents a cup so now you can splurge and spend 30 cents a cup to get canned beans but i can make my beans so i can make hummus and you know a couple minutes i got chickpeas dried chickpeas all of a sudden boom hummus how cool is that i love pressure cookers right but it's not a lectin thing it's a convenience thing about you know making beans anytime you want it just sits there for a year i got hummus anytime so the question was is erythritol still okay and actually in my pink juice recipe with the frozen cranberries was frozen cranberries i think i put some fresh mint leaves add some greens in there and erythritol as the sweetener so i concluded that erythritol was the only harmless sweetener i could find a non-caloric sweetener or a low-calorie sweetener and the the two caloric sweeteners that were healthy blackstrap molasses and date sugar was just powdered pulverized dates and then talked about the harms associated with splenda and aspartame and other things but risk results seemed to escape all that i looked amongst fruit and allulose so monk food i think it's just a-l-o-u-l-o-s um and so allulose erythritol and monk fruit don't have the associated downsides of you know the aspartames and the splendas and the s of mk however all low calorie sweeteners suffer from the same problem which is this disconnect between what your taste buds are experiencing what your brain is experiencing so when you um put sugar in your mouth um your body knows when you taste sweet your body expects well there's only one sweet thing in the world basically there's fruit or honey and so pumps out insulin all sorts of things before sugar ever hits your system because it's smart it's what's called a cephalic phase a brain phase of digestion starts the moment it hits your tongue um and so your body is ready for this massive sugar load you can say that something's super sweet like a diet soda regardless of what it's sweetened with even something harmless so yeah something like i lost aristotle it's not gonna give you migraine headaches like uh aspartame but we get this disconnect we get this tremendous sweetness on our tongue our body reacts by saying all right sugar load here it comes and never arrives our brain's like whoa whoa whoa wait a second we had this thermostat this much sweetness equals this much sugar so i got to put this much insulin out and i got to do i got to ready the body for this load coming in um and so it says wow i must have been totally screwed up actually this much sugar this much sweetness doesn't mean this much sugar means this much i hardly got any sugar at all and so it messes up this thermostat in our brain so then all of a sudden when we actually eat something sweet like eat a banana or something our body says that yeah it tastes sweet there's no sugar in it i already know you taste sweet no sugar and your body's not ready for that banana um and you actually in a video about this you actually suffer bad physiological consequences so if for in the morning you um drink aspartame sweetened beverage or a monk fruit sweetened beverage you have higher blood sugars throughout the day higher average blood sugar throughout the day than if you drank straight sugar wait a second sugar-free higher blood sugars how is that possible is because you're messing with your your whole system is is not is not used there's no such thing as sweetness without calories there's no such thing evolutionarily there's just nothing millions of years no such thing sweetness without calories and it mucks with their physiology even though the allulose erythritol monk fruit don't have these associated negative side effects they still have this fundamental problem and so ideally we should eat you want something sweet sweet potatoes or cherries oh it's cherry seasoning or all that amazing watermelon over there or anything really whole food sources of sweetness really the best although look if you got to get cranberries in somewhere if the only way you're going to drink your green tea is sweetened the greens you know it could be a carrier for getting sneaking healthier food the only way you're going to eat a grapefruit you sprinkle something sweet on it well the grapefruit's really good for you if you're not gonna you know so i want you to eat that citrus um but you know it shouldn't be considered benign on its own even if it doesn't have all these associated side effects stevia is actually harmful beyond this effect um because of the your gut bacteria take this um stevia all um and create these stevia sides which are actually toxic but at high doses so two stevia sweetened beverages today should be considered harmless but if you sweetened everything with stevia at a typical american dose of sweetness you would actually exceed the world health organization recommendation for upper limit of stevia compounds again if it's if it's small enough dose it's harmless oh are we oh we're over time see everybody tomorrow night questions we have like lots of time let's do it however oh and for anyone i know there's all these live streaming people all over the world um if you want to have a question call me 240-252-8078 and it will ring and i will take your question in between questions here 240-252-8078 question yes yeah can you explain to me how romaine for example i got into this debate with a doctor that romaine was a complete protein because of course he asked me where do i get my protein okay and i told him as a complete protein and uh he didn't believe it so i looked it up on my phone and said it was 17 protein and it was a complete protein and he said it's impossible because it's 98 water and that's true as well and i didn't understand it oh that's a great question um if you didn't hear the question or i'll repeat it just for folks if you didn't hear it um if you look at so folks within the kind of plant-based movement love talking about how broccoli has more protein than steak and by a percentage of calories was really all that matters that's how your body digests it keeps count not by weight not by volume keeps count by calories so that's that's that's kind of the monetary you know that's how food comes in according to the body so that's legitimate to but what they don't realize so per calorie more protein right but the problem is or the benefit is plants are so calorically dilute have so few calories to actually yes they're presented by percentage they're packed with i mean if you think of broccoli or romaine lettuce what is it fat there's no fat in there is it um starch though i mean it's probably i mean that's what the thing's made out of right but there's so few calories even if a hundred percent of the calories of protein you'd have to eat like a wheel barrel of romaine every day now i'm all in favor of big salads i am you know the big mixing bowls that's my salad bowl absolutely big salad every day but um and so so you're kind of both right yes um uh you know uh but that they're high improv but what what's behind that question is this concern about getting enough protein and that that i mean and so that's the that i mean so when if you don't know how to get protein on a plant-based diet you don't know beans beans peas legumes right these are uh lentils i mean these are the plant superstar plant protein superstars i encourage people the language every day um and you get all the protein you don't have to worry about oh am i getting enough protein um so that i mean so even the so that it's not a concern unless one eats um lots of empty colored junk foods right you live off cotton candy right you can get enough calories to actually sustain life but you're not gonna get any protein not gonna get anything anything right so uh unless you're and look cotton candy that's a vegan right so i mean you can you can eat a vegan diet and not get enough protein by eating cotton candy uh only right so um so i encourage people not eat empty calorie junk foods um any variety foods but yeah legumes i'd love to see people eat lots of legumes i know i know but the thing is they all thought oh i must have beans every day and soy and i don't okay so i know there's not a worry for a shortage of protein but i just understand numerically how could it be 90 water and 17 protein oh so it's by so right right absolutely so by weight by weight it's but see the water disappears when you eat like romaine lettuce your body if it doesn't have enough water just absorb it in fact there's this there's this concept don't drink while you're eating don't drink water while you're eating because i said like i don't know dilutes whatever no you think your body's that stupid no your body if you if there's too much water in your stomach for proper digestion for all the enzymes and stuff it just sucks it right out it goes right through the stomach wall into your bloodstream right and if you eat without drinking water your body floods water into your stomach to get just the right it's called osmolarity just the right amount of liquid for proper digestion body's way too smart to be you know anyway so um so when you eat so if something's 90 so when you eat a whole bunch of romaine lettuce and it's 98 water um that it doesn't even kind of count your body's just like oh water yoink and then what's left is there's actually very little food but that's good in the united states of america where we have an epidemic of obesity where we know where it would be great to fill up your stomach and be like oh i'm full and have no calories in there it's like water fiber like you know so the calorie dilute nature of plant foods is actually a benefit with one exception and that's little kids little kids got really little dummies and when you have little tummies if you just gave them big salads they literally might become calorie melt they just might not be able to eat enough food so in that case you really they need to eat calorically dense foods so like you know nuts and dried fruits and smoothies and all sorts of eats you know and beans and whole grains to have you know enough calories to pack in um but for adults the fact that a huge salad is basically no calories unless you're putting bacon ranch on top is actually a good thing on a population scale yes thank you uh for your talk and also thank you for every all the work you've done facts.org you've converted me into a vegan oh great um i actually you know it's been a couple of months now and i have questions just in terms of balance you know obviously high nutrient density is important but also macronutrients are important as well so you know like some vegans i've seen kind of emphasize fats right like avocados and nuts and and even coconut and i see people using coconut oil as well can you speak a little bit about that sure no sure right now so this you know there's the 80 10 10 folks there's like people ask me what's the percentage of protein as if like we evolved for millions of years and with like internal calculate no like we never you think other animals think about this like no again our bodies way too smart the important thing is not macronutrient percentage is where you're getting that from right is protein good or bad well protein is kidney beans or or pork right you say carbs good and bad carbs can be a sweet potato or cotton candy right what what's fat it could be trans fat could be lard or it could be walnuts one of the healthiest foods right so it's meaningless to say well how much protein you're getting or how much carbohydrate it's what's the source and the most important is it whole or not is it a whole food source you're getting a whole food source of fat flax seeds walnuts great right getting a whole food source of carbohydrates right sweepstairs whole grains brown rice quinoa wonderful whole grain source of protein getting your legumes i mean that's that's what you should be thinking am i eating a whole food right or did the industry take out nutrients from the is it food as grown or was there some middle person that took out a whole bunch of stuff added a whole bunch of crap in to decrease the to make the price point such that they can make a big profit margin whole versus processed it's probably your best money thank you hi i was wondering if you could tell us what the benefits of being vegan are with infectious diseases like lyme oh interesting there um there is no data on diet and lyme disease either chronic or acute so there's just simply so people can speculate i'm not one for speculation there's no day when there's data i i know that is an issue that's important to people and so it's something it's in my pubmed alerts and if anybody's interested in this there's something called your taxpayer dollars go to help fund the national library of medicine which is the largest medical library in the world biking distance from my house and that's the reason i live there um and they have a service where you sign up so you go to pubmed.gov pubmed.gov and you search so what you want to do is you want to search for lime spell with a y because you don't want citrus articles a lime and diet you put lime diet right you press the search button and then there's a button says save search you click on save search and it offers to for free email you any time anywhere in the world an article is published on lime and diet because you'll see nothing comes up from your search because there's just there's no but that doesn't mean tomorrow there's not going to be an article so i have it i mean so that so i have lime and diet in my so i will get an email anytime and i'll make a video about it but it might take me a few weeks to get that video up whereas you'll know that morning and you can have them email you any time of the day you can even put it i want seven o'clock right right you really like avocados you can get emailed anytime a avocado article is published anywhere in the world it's the coolest thing and so of course i have hundreds of terms but for whatever you're interested in and look let's say an article comes through and you can't make heads or tail of it because it's written in techno speak right or it's written in another language or it's there's a pay wall where you can't actually get access to the article then email me email me i'll get you the article i i i can get any article because i'm near nlm and and i can try to interpret for you and it'd be actually doing me a favor maybe somehow i missed it uh people email me all the time and there are articles that i must have i only started my annual reviews volume one go to 2007. so pre-2007 literature there's new stuff all the time i've never even heard of just because i wasn't looking at the literature at the time um so pubmed.gov p-u-b-m-e-d dot g-o-v your taxpayer dollars hard at work should get your money's worth um and uh and so you're signing up for what are called pubmed alerts um and uh and i've got about 6 000 of them sitting in my inbox thank you has anybody told you you talk fast i do and i apologize but i wanted time for this right here i want to thank you for that and my name is john eagle and um i want to get back to the basics ann wigmore and dr georgia thomas co-authored a book called organic soil organic soil is the health of life now finland did a study they outlawed chemical fertilizers the disease rate was equal to the united states when they outlawed chemical fertilizers disease rate dropped to one tenth of what the united states was i think we need to get back to the basics and understand where life comes from organic sulfur is the another word for life and people should evaluate or maybe you can elaborate a little bit on organic sulfur um so uh in terms of i think this gets to uh uh something that's raised often this sense of crop nutrient decline that like you know fruits and vegetables ain't what they used to be here i go talking about fruits and vegetables but really you know we're not this is not your grandparents fruits and vegetables our soils are depleted um and so we're just not getting the nutrients that we used to um and so i was curious and so and that's often used by supplement manufacturers who are you know want to sell you their fancy you know mineral supplements saying even if you eat healthy you're not going to get what you need so here by my pills okay so i was interested in evaluating that claim and so there's a video on the website called crop nutrient decline you can actually see the graphs and stuff but a crop nutrient decline the video if you put in the word crop in the search box up there it'll pop right up um and what they found is it's true it's kind of true and false the true part yeah there has been a nutrient decline by about 15 so if you look at some of the major um you know vitamins maybe they have 15 so that means today you have to eat you know six florets of broccoli to get the same nutrition you got out of five florets of broccoli you know 50 years ago eat six flats of broccoli i mean no reason you have to take a pill i mean so yes there was but it didn't have this like oh my god our soils are bare and fruits and vegetables are nothing but water no i mean for a broccoli to grow it has to have a certain bare minimum or it just can't make the little broccoli you know it can't make stems it can't make leaves and there's a certain bare minimum now do we have should we buy organic absolutely for a wide variety of reasons but one should never let either concerns about pesticides or concerns about lack of nutrition to dissuade us from stuffing our faces with as many fruits and vegetables as possible in fact let me there's there's actually a there's a wonderful um there's a study uh well it's actually funded by the petrochemical industry let me just say that as a but fat but i mean it looked like a good works this modeling work this was in uh food and chemical toxicology last year that did this uh kind of complicated uh modeling to suggest that if if half of americans ate a single serving more of fruits and vegetables conventional fruits and vegetables we would prevent 20 000 cancer deaths every year 20 000 people that died of cancer would not have died of cancer if just half of americans ate one more serving of fruits and vegetables that's how powerful plants are okay but they did say okay because these are pesticide-laden conventional produce that eating that much that many pesticides would cause 10 cancer deaths so overall we would prevent 19 990 cancer deaths right but that just shows the difference so by eating fruits and vegetables you get this tremendous benefit okay yeah but we get a little risk eating conventional fruits and vegetables a little cancer risk a little bump in cancer risk right but so look why have any risk at all choose organic right get all benefit no risk but again because there's such a big difference again never even the most pesticide-laden produce the the chilean imported grapes and bell peppers and spinach and strawberries right even the worst of the worst it's still dramatically more i mean on average for our health by you know by almost 10 000 right or a thousand times more benefit than risk but hey if they have the organic strawberries right next door why not get those where am i yes over here hi can a vegan diet reverse osteoporosis in a person who already does weight bearing exercise can a vegan diet birth us can you reverse reverse just stop the oh stop the progression of osteoporosis or uh reverse it um uh you well it's a weight-bearing exercise right so you really now it's a weight barrier the way to stop the progression of bone loss um and strength and bones is a way bearing size just like your muscles when you don't use them they waste away you put your arm in a cast a couple weeks later you have no muscle mass because your body says why am i making my why am i continuing to keep your muscles up you're not even using them same thing with your bones why would your body keep your skeleton going if you're not putting any weight on it i mean we think of bones as like just like inanimate structure but that's because they're taken out of the body if any surgeon will tell you bone is living bleeding you know tissue constantly remodeling and why put any effort into it all if you're you know lying on the couch all day and so we need to jar our bones an hour a day an hour a day minimum seven days a week that's the most important thing before i put anybody on fosomax some of these bisphosphonates these other drugs um that's the most important thing we can do um and can we support um healthy bone growth and maintenance with a healthy diet absolutely with potassium and vitamin k boron all these other wonderful things um so i encourage people to eat two tablespoons of ground flax seeds every day and all sorts of other things that i talk about in all my bone videos but the most important thing use it or lose it and that says one five minutes you just go like this hi i'm uh john shank and i just have a comment uh i this is my first conference i've ever been to and uh i kind of chose this lifestyle two years ago at genesis anti-aging and healing center brenda lee spent a lot of time at hippocrates and among other places to kind of learn this lifestyle but i went through this huge dip in my weight for years i mean 20 30 years and i had trainers and nutritionists but i'd lose the weight always gain it back and within six months i lost 68 pounds over six inches off my waist today today is my 59th birthday but but with that with that said everything that you said here is so true no more high blood pressure medicine within five months no more anti-inflammatories i had this weird it would go from my knees to my hip to my ankles and the doctors kept saying well we think you have gout to the point where they drew out the fluid to look at the crystals there's no crystals i didn't have gout i think it was dairy it's hard to say what it was because when i went vegan i went to genesis i spent months there five months but i lost all that weight and came off all those medications from high blood pressure cholesterol um the anti-inflammatories nexium so the reflex is gone fantastic and i've never gained the weight back you know i've stayed within five pounds of of being around 200 205 pounds with moderate exercise and that was the amazing thing to me i had a personal trainer six days a week and i was like crying i was crying yeah my skin became just people didn't recognize me i would get on airplanes and walk by a friend of mine like hey and they're they're like john people do not recognize me including my mom even said i had more hair which i don't actually believe i can't attribute my health to this but i think what you're saying if people listen and live a lifestyle like that and do it and do it faithfully you won't gain the weight back my blood tests have never been better i mean i go let me go in the mayo clinic every year for a physical i i am an executive of a company in my own company and i have to go for a physical every year i've been taking the same blood test since 1992. my doctor called me and i'm like great after all this he's going to tell me something's wrong because i just want to see this for myself how did you do this i want to know how i get my other patients to do this your blood tests have never been better to the point where i got a a i had to go and get a a very large insurance policy which at 59 years old is very hard to do it's 5 million dollars whole life i got a premier select rate because of my contest and the agent said they've never seen anything like it so i just want to thank you right and and your extraordinary health is really normal like the human body shouldn't just fall apart right we have this sense that it's just kind of these are inevitable you know uh you know diseases of aging your ticker just kind of clunks out no that's not how we were built and that's what these studies show i was a bicycle racer for 17 i raised 17 years ago i went back to bicycle racing last year i rode 2 000 miles on my bicycle and i trained moderately i'm telling you i didn't train as hard as i used to with a trainer and i'd gain and lose the weight as soon as i get done with the training i'd gain all the weight back and it's all about what you put in and you know your body wanted to be this healthy all along right i mean it's just you just had to get out of its way i mean you just had to stop kind of why you know it's when it's like you know something that really struck me in medical school was learning that within eight years of stopping smoking your lifetime lung cancer risk approaches that of a lifelong non-smoker within eight years your body can clear out all that tar and crack so if you didn't get lung cancer already but um and and then it's almost as if you didn't smoke at all right i mean that's remarkable and so what that tells you is that every day your body wanted to have healthy lungs and dry but then you keep hitting it over and over and over again it did and then as soon as you stop finally it's been you know and same thing you whack your shin on the on the coffee table it hurts it gets better but if you whack your shin three times a day for breakfast lunch it'll never heal you go to your doctor and your doctor says no problem your shin hurts i've got painkillers take these pills right instead of saying maybe you should stop whacking yourself three times a day and let your body just take care of itself

Channel: PLANT BASED NEWS

Views: 122,907

Rating: 4.8881431 out of 5

Keywords: dr michael greger, nutrition facts, plant based news, q&a, best of, doctor, disease, health, diet, weight loss, dr. greger, how not to die, rich roll, how not to diet, why doctors don't recommend veganism

Id: 9gCxCVGB96w

Length: 72min 28sec (4348 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020