Unclogging Arteries: Surgery or Broccoli? | Dr. Ted Barnett on The Exam Room Podcast

[Music] welcome to the exam room podcast brought to you by the Physicians committee hi I am the weight loss Champion Chuck Carroll joined today by Dr veggie and I know you are who you claim to be because Dr veggie is not just your title Dr Ted Barnett it also happens to be your license plate man oh thanks it's good to be here you own it I mean seriously like this is this is cool right Dr Barnett from the rockchester lifestyle medicine Institute actually is the embodiment of everything that he talks about right down to his license plate you literally live breathe sleep Health man and that's why I'm excited that you're on the show today oh thanks I'm excited too yeah so repeat guest here on the show but one of the most talked about among the exam room is because of your exuberance your positivity the fact that you got the cool moniker you also have another moniker you're not just Dr veggie who are you the high-tech doctor with lowtech Solutions there it is high-tech doctor lowtech everybody got nicknames man but you know what I think that when you have a fun little title like that it helps people just retain the information a little bit more yeah thanks by the way you want to know what that refers to the high-tech part talk to me Doc yeah so I'm an Interventional radiologist so I can fix your arteries with a balloon angioplasty or put a stent in there or I could fix it with broccoli that's okay that's the lowtech version okay which one do you think makes a Better Living I think that the answer to that is quite clear however I will say me personally I'm going to go for broccoli every time doc sounds like plan yeah man oh man so when did Dr Ted Barnett morph into becoming Dr veggie ah interesting so my wife and I got married back in 1986 we started having children in 1987 in 1991 uh we decided to perform an experiment on our children well that could either be really awesome or really Cru man so you're going to have to finish that story doc sure sure so we became vegan we had two little girls at the time and Nathaniel was not yet born our our youngest and um so we decided to I figured you know for environmental reasons someone's going to have to figure out how to eat plants yeah because the planet's not going to be able to sustain this uh much longer and of course that was back in 1991 I think it's pretty clear now that that was a good plan um so I thought well somebody ought to figure this out but there were already people who were figuring this out like Dr Michael Clapper and Neil Barnard and John Robbins they were already writing about this so we felt like we actually had um Pioneers in front of us so we said well doesn't sound that dangerous but I want to just double check to make sure it's not less healthy than the diet we're eating now which was basically a healthier version of the standard American diet so I'm reading about it thinking wow this is not just okay or healthy it's actually way healthier and then I read you know Dean ornish's book on reversing heart disease and said game over uh we're gonna all medicine's going to completely change we all have to just become uh vegan go on a vegan diet and everything's going to be great and yeah it okay so let me ask you about that I mean the amount of research that was done I mean obviously you talk about the books and those profound studies but compared to the volume of research that we have today it was so scann what was it that made you trust so much the validity of those results so that's a really good question um part of it was just sort of common sense because you know I'm a biologist and understand how Evolution works and I'm thinking which is the experimental diet the diet that comes out of a can and a and you know uh and all this processed food is that the experimental diet or is it just eating a lot of plants right that's what our ancestors have been doing for Millennia and so uh there was the common sense and then there was something that Dr ornish said in his book which is he talks about how difficult is to get uh funding for research about lifestyle medicine because there's no money in it for anybody and that's when I had my sloping forehead moment I said ah I get it yeah right so how then do you do you balance a career in medicine versus the career in lifestyle medicine where you said like the funding just is not what it is for the traditional Health route like how how do you reconcile the two cuz clearly you're still in practice you're sitting here with me this is many years past 1991 right so how how have you been able to sustain here for three decades or longer so uh this was just a family a personal choice and a family choice this is not was not my medical practice for many many years uh I I'm an Interventional radiologist uh which is as I said before catheters and angioplasties and things like that lots of biopsies I've sort of morphed in the last five years to something that's doesn't care I don't have to carry a pager at night now so oh that's good yeah I'm not on call so I don't do the Interventional stuff anymore I uh I do women's imaging and do a lot of mammograms and a lot of breast biopsies um but I don't make my living and lifestyle medicine in fact I'm complete volunteer with Rochester lifestyle medicine Institute my wife and I both are full-time volunteers for that although we do have seven full-time staff that we do pay yeah Fair decent wage to so well let's just take a second to like talk about that you have now seven full-time staff members which means that there's an appetite in the community for lifestyle medicine right so the appetite I mean originally we were just doing this in Rochester New York and we um had been running several different programs including chip the complete Health Improvement program um but then we decided to develop our own program called the 15-day Whole Food plant-based jump start and that was in 2018 and uh I wanted to see if we could do it so we opened up a medical practice we had an office in outside of Rochester and uh every month we would bring 24 patients into our office and they were our patients which was really important because we were doing research and we wanted to actually have access to the to their labs and we were doing finger sticks on day number one and then two Saturdays later so the third Saturday they'd come in again and we would do finger sticks and get their labs and we found it's actually works it's amazing yeah people's cholesterol drops 50 100 150 points was our record at the time for two weeks somebody comes in with a total cholesterol of 299 and on day 15 it's 149 whoa yeah yeah talk about exceeding expectations yeah it was pretty exciting and then a guy with diabetes who came in with a hemoglobin A1c of 13.6 so if people don't know in the in the audience what that means is his average blood sugars were 350 for the last 3 months 350 which is totally abnormal and not on any medication as doctors are saying saying you know you you need to go on medication and he came to our office and said I'd like to try this first I said well you know okay give it a shot and by uh three months later his to hemoglobin aeny was 6.0 uh which is just just in the non-diabetic range and now it's 5.4 if he goes to a doctor now they would say you don't have diabetes and and he's been on that ever since that's five years ago now nice but in terms of that demand um that was just in the Rochester area m and we were people were around the country were interested in licensing our program I wasn't sure exactly how that was going to work and then the answer came in the form of a pandemic where we had to stop bringing 24 people at a time into our office and uh we that was March of 2020 and we pivoted now it's all on Zoom we uh used the Google Classroom so it meets seven times actually over 18 days because we have a day minus three for orientation and then they start the diet on day one and on day 15 it's the diet you know the programs over we have them get their Labs hopefully they'll continue with the diet because we basically follow an elone diet uh and then we talk about adding back into some high fat plant foods but yeah that's now because of the miracle of zoom and the Google Classroom we're International we've reached people in 44 States that's so cool man yeah look at you beyond borders with your health man ex we had somebody sign up from Egypt did you really yeah from for the current jump the current jump start man I get the big yeah man I know that feeling I see the Joy on your face because like whenever I look at where people are downloading or watching and it literally is more than 150 countries now around the world who have watched or listen to the show and it's like I've never been to that I didn't even know that that country existed but somehow it's reaching somebody there it is the most gratifying feeling in the world man just to know that it's making a difference yeah it's really fun yeah man uh so 15-day jumpstar most jump starts that we hear about are 28 days here at the Physicians committee we have our 21 day so how are you able to pack everything in in such a shorter amount of time you're talking like trimming almost a full week off of a 21 day we're doing this in 15 let's go I don't remember the exact Evolution because we were thinking about it as a team I can tell you there was one very scientific reason we chose 15 days which is that it begins and ends on the same day of the week so Saturday to Saturday if it was a 14-day jump start or 21 day jump start it would not begin and ending the same day of the week look at this see that's actually not bad that's actually not bad at all so do you find with with the uh virtual classes though that they are just as impactful as the inperson ones have there been any trials or tribulation yeah it's great that you can reach so many more people but are there any disadvantages and how do you overcome those obstacles so that's a really interesting question and actually we raised that question ourselves uh we because we've been doing virtually now for uh well since 2020 so you know almost three years um actually over three years at this point uh and we so we have a one of the members of our team actually is a Harvard MBA he's really interested in numbers so he does all our number crunching and we said can you go check the numbers pre jump uh preco and after covid and he did that and they came back almost exactly the same actually slightly better for the virtual groups get out yeah yeah so um I mean there's not everybody responds to our survey so we have we we knew we had more accurate data before the jump start before the uh pandemic because those people were captive they were our patients yeah now we have to depend on on people filling out surveys but the numbers came back exactly the same and it kind of makes sense because first of all we have more encounters uh used to be just four encounters it was Saturday Sunday Saturday and Saturday now we have the pre- jump start which is uh Wednesday usually day minus 3 and then if you add them all up there's actually seven encounters now and um for a total of 11 hours plus they have you know the Google Classroom people can interact with each other and there's a there's actually a forum like it's called The Stream So we have that being monitored all the time so people can ask questions and they get their questions answered pretty quickly so you know there's some advantages to being in person but overall in terms of having an impact on people's lives and especially reaching people around the planet that's that's we're so much more scalable now I like the idea that you're building with these jump starts that sense of community right so if you if you have this online form the Google Classroom where people can interact and then post their questions like do do you find that like if somebody posts a challenge that they're facing they're struggling with this or that it's not just you as the doctor or your support staff who can respond it's others who are actually going through the same thing and may have found success overcoming that same problem yeah no that's definitely true so it'll be either participants in that cohort um sometimes we'll have a volunteer who's done it already and they'll be in there and then often times we have people repeating the jump start cuz they liked it and they'll say well this is what what how I did it last time or some people a lot of people repeat it cuz they sort of need a refresher MH right yeah yeah so how okay I think one of the speakers at the conference this year was talking about recidivism when it comes to diets um for those that go through the lifestyle medicine intervention how do you think that compares to say my experience which I also talked about going on the cookie diet which clearly was not sustain how did the two really compare you know it's first of all it's really hard to gather that kind of data sure it's hard um but you know first of all we know it's not hurting them right it's not like it's not like a drug where there's going to be a negative side effect there's almost there are basically no negative side effects to doing this you can't owe Deon broccoli well anything's possible right um so how shall I answer that we don't really know uh and so I don't actually have the information but you know this is really a societ problem we're trying to change the culture at some point telling people to eat a plant-based diet they're going to say well what else would you eat right tou right and and that's what we're trying to do is and so the more information that people get about this whether it's through our they're going through our jump start or they know somebody who went through a jump start or they know somebody who knew somebody because you know there's all three degrees of separation you know the effects are go up uh and ripples on the pond in fact the guy I mentioned who who seem aany was 13.6 at the beginning his wife um just because she lived with him her dress size dropped from 22 to I don't know 12 or something you know in a couple of months not a couple months but when we met ran into him a few years later and so and who knows who she influenced so that's life-changing stuff it is it is and you know with with drugs you well people people there's recidivism on drugs too 100% right people stop taking their medications so um it's it's an interesting question but I don't think it's a reason to not try yeah no no and that wasn't yeah I'm not that was not a gotta question it was just honestly from my own experience much more positive doing the lifestyle medicine intervention than anything else and it's probably a bit like smoking I mean how many times do people quit smoking before they actually say you know took me right yeah three was it for me took three and God only knows how many food di I mean seriously it was well into the dozens of failed diets you know every wacky one the cookie diet of course but then you know just like the diet and exercise with no real guidance but then you know let's talk about this like reintroducing those Foods back into your system which I learned time and time and time again was not a good idea but somehow became a master it convincing myself it was okay and I could have just one no man like I there's a certain subset of the population that can't have just one I call that doc my one nacho Theory because the one time I had lost like 65 lbs just going to the gym working out like a fiend had cut out a lot of the fast food by no means was eating a healthy diet certainly not what I would consider healthy today but had been successful losing the weight and I thought like well I can have just one nacho then then another nacho dunked in nacho cheese and another after that and another after that and pretty soon you know the train was off the tracks once again so I call that my one nacho theory that there are people who just can't have one nacho right so when you talk about in your your program reintroducing some of those you know higher fat plant based foods you know how do you walk that line between you don't want to open up Pandora's Box toward unhealthy stuff but at the same time these fats are a little bit different but you don't want to promote weight regain either yeah so we actually I don't think there's a scientific answer to be perfectly honest and we tell people that at the end we teach the for the 15 days that they're on the jump start we basically teach the esselon plan Dr calwell Elon at the Cleveland Clinic and I know you know who he is uh and you know I tell people if you Google the words no oil you'll get Dr saying no oil right and uh there's always a little video and you know he's tall and intimidating so people do what he says um but uh I'm gonna isolate that and put that up on Instagram that's so good sure um anyway he people who have been through his program and have stuck with the eselon plan do fabulously well if they have heart disease and you know they were going to go under the knife they angen those people have done really well we don't know for sure whether they need to stand uh have to avoid the high fat plant Foods the whole no I'm talking about whole high fat plant Foods we never Advocate oil for our patients it's not part of a whole food plant-based diet but you can have a VF WF pbd or a very lowfat Whole Food plant-based diet which is the eleston diet or you can just have a wpbd you know a whole food plant-based diet and somewhere in there between having a you know no nuts seeds olives avocado um none of that versus having some we don't really know if there's an ideal I don't know I don't know if there really is an ideal spot right it' be really hard to do a randomize control trial yeah yeah I think so too but let me ask you this let's let's see if we can steer this another way that uh the exam roomies might find interesting all right we know that if you eat an entire jar of peanuts every day for a month you're going to gain some weight right but what's the difference between eating that entire jar of peanuts in terms of clogging your arteries say versus going to eat that same amount that fat and calorie equivalent of fast food how would the arteries treat those two Foods differently okay so um you know peanuts are a whole food right it's they have the fiber it's intact when you start to get into uh junk food fast food you're talking about stuff that's processed that your body does actually metabolize very differently it gets into your digestive system it affects your microbiome very differently in a negative way so you know I think there's actually good evidence that a small amount of nuts and seeds is probably healthy healthier and if you look at the blue zones which are the you know places around the planet where people tend to live a long time um they uh they had nuts and seeds in their diet mhm uh now they were doing it all their lives their children didn't grow up eating junk food and then suddenly decided to go healthy and at you know uh so we don't really know what it's like for people whose basically physiology already been damaged for the last 40 years by being on the standard American diet versus growing up with healthy food all their lives so um nut peanut the peanuts are always going to be better than the junk food right on right on and just one more point though about when people get to that the end of that two weeks they have their labs in their hand so they kind of know what's the best they can do if their cholest if cholesterol was their issue and they had a very dramatic drop in their cholesterol so say it was 200 now it's 135 or something um they'll know that that's they can do that if they want to so if they add back in some high-fat plant Foods nuts a avocado olives and their cholesterol shoots back up well those people may want to consider staying on the VFW fbd the the eslon program but if they can you know add those healthy fats back in and their Labs stay good then they can you know probably uh stay that way with a higher fat plant Foods so I'm thinking back you know to the 15 day they get to the end they add that but like also what what kind of value do you see also in making sure that people have a support system after those 15 days right because you're you're talking about changing for I'm assuming a lot of these individuals a lifestyle of habits in the span of a little over two weeks I would imagine that that a little bit of followup at the very least would be helpful for some of these people do you get the opportunity to hold their hand for a little bit beyond the 15 days yeah we do so we um they automatically get enrolled in our alumni program which is free it meets once a month uh that then the alumni group actually has its own Google Classroom nice and once a month we get together and and um we're going to be adding more into that so that it'll start to meet once a week uh because we have we've got so many people in the alumni program now and you know there's some people who need to have their handheld more than once a month we also do have a coaching program which of course that they have to pay for that because we have we do have coaches who use tella Health uh to meet with people so that's kind of a good way and then we of course always have the Google classroom or they can just go and enter questions into that even if they don't attend the monthly meetings they can at least get their questions answered in the in the Google Chat for sure yeah for sure I want to end with kind of a fun question right let's end with a fun question so you've been keeping an eye on this whole nutrition the plant-based thing since the late 80s and you know here we are in 2023 what research is coming out what research have you seen recently what research are you looking forward to that still excites you and gives you that same sense of oh wow that you had all those years ago yeah that is really interesting so I'm going to back up for a second and say that there's one word I really can't stand now when I hear it when I hear it from the medical experts or well not the experts the administrators the health systems of the insurance companies and they always use the word pilot well let's do a pilot program say how many more pilot programs we know we need we know that if people would do this diet they're going to get better why do we need another pilot program let's just do it so I think the research needs to be done not on whether this diet works or whether going to a whole food plant-based diet works the research needs to be done on how can we change individual Behavior so that people will actually do it and then how can we change the culture so that it's not the hard Choice anymore you know the Healthy Choice becomes the Easy Choice that's where we need to do the research let's get come up with programs that actually operationalize it so that's why we came up with our jump start it operationalizes it Dr Smith in Omaha Nebraska has one patient who could benefit from this he doesn't need to start his own lifestyle you know his own whole plant-based program he just tells them to go to this website our website Rochester lifesty medicine.org and click on here and enroll and the patient can do it themselves or he can actually refer just click on this and if he puts in that information with the patient's phone number we'll call the patient and get him enrolled so it needs to be operationalized um that's where the research needs to be done what are the best ways to do it there's lots of room for you know different people to experiment you know we've reached 2,000 people so far with our programs but there's 150 million people who need this yes sir right at least atast not all exactly exactly so um let's there's lots of room for all kinds of experimentation let's come up with some experiments and see which programs reach which people and let's use them but you know what I thought we were going to end with that but then you talking about this research we got to go back to the original research you were talking about in 1991 with your kids how did that experiment turn out well I mean they are kids so there were some bumps on the road of course but they've been basically vegan all their lives uh Nathaniel's been vegan since before birth I got an interesting he's 31 now about six or seven years ago I got a funny phone call from him uh he said uh dad the doctors are worried about me I said what is it because it's my cholesterol said what's wrong with your cholesterol it's my LDL what is it it's too low it's I said what's the number it's 15 you have an LDL of 15 he goes is that okay Dad and I said yeah I mean you're the healthiest person I know and I don't know anybody's been vegan since before birth so it must be okay so you know he graduated from Yale with he was a music Major he actually went he a little bragging here he actually has a Grammy uh go ahead dad brag away man pop that collar yeah so um he's in a professional choir called The Crossing in Philadelphia and uh their last album got a Grammy so I guess technically he got 124th of a Grammy because there's 24 people in the choir they sent out 24 Grammys he has one he has one exactly well done yeah so he's he's doing great our oldest is 36 now she's you know um teaches music at a Quaker School in Brooklyn our middle daughter is about 34 now she has her master's degree in musical theater composition I'm noticing a theme here yeah right and so they're all musicians I didn't get any doctors so in that sense maybe we didn't do as well as I would have liked but they're all musicians and they're they're enjy to be around and they're all very healthy so amazing yeah do you play anything at all I do I do okay yeah you were you were the inspiration uh my wife too I mean I play the Sachs and the piano a little bit and so also recorder when I'm in the in the the recorder I haven't seen a recorder since elementary school Dr bar at that little plastic no no no mine's a big wooden one oh you got a legit recorder oh yeah it's a tener yeah okay when I'm in a Baro mood I play that okay a Baro mood first time in 600 episodes or so between the video and the audio anybody has ever used the word Baroque that is outstanding and we have learned something we're going to put the definition in the show description for you guys uh what Baroque what what is this but just I mean I'm genuinely like word of the day like School me up doc well like back you know that's Baro considered Baroque music so you know uh yeah I mean t all right I'm gonna look that up Baro that's cool not Baro Baro Baro b a r o qu e okay all right we're learning today sure absolutely all right raising our health IQs and our regular IQ as well man yeah and and speaking of the saxophone which I know you weren't I absolutely was speaking of something we weren't talking about yeah right so I was at the vegetarian Summerfest in early July this year and I was up on stage actually noodling a little bit uh we did um James Brown tune shut the I feel good with Dr Milton Mills was up there he was the singer yeah I was doing the uh this is epic this is epic all right man we're going to form the we're going to form a band and you're just going to be like the traveling Rock docks that's what it's going to be man okay I love it so much dude thank you for your time congratulations on all of your success Dr that's Dr Ted Barnett love it so much if your health IQ was a couple of points higher than it was a few minutes ago go ahead and like this video or subscribe to the YouTube channel and to take it even higher head over to Apple podcast or wherever you get your favorite shows look for the exam room by The Physicians committee hit the Subscribe button there as well and help to make your world a healthier place

Channel: Physicians Committee

Views: 38,267

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Id: Vsu9UraiSmw

Length: 25min 50sec (1550 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 18 2023