What A Plant Based Diet Does To Your Body? 28 Days on a Vegan Diet

we are going to be talking about the first 28 days of eating a plant-based diet and to break it all down for us is dr alan desmond he is a gastroenterologist from across the pond and now the author for the first time a great new book called a plant-based diet revolution dr alan desmond welcome back to the exam room thanks for having me back chuck really and i spent time with you again thanks for having me good to join you man the pleasure is all mine my friend congratulations on this book let's just go ahead and dive right in the subtitle of the book is 28 days to a happier gut there it is a happier gut and a healthier you so a lot of people think man why even bother to make a change i can't do anything in a month but 28 days four weeks how much can happen oh a ton i mean the the reason i've written the book i mean chuck we talked before um about how important giving people evidence-based dietary advice is to my clinical practice and um i've seen my patients really optimize their results revolutionize their health and get the best possible outcomes from their medical treatment by making healthier changes and people hear about this all the time thanks to you and dr bernard and other doctors i guess daughters like me talking about this stuff and spreading the good word but they've also hear from heard from celebrities like maybe like lewis hamilton or torah washington or david beckham the footballer talking about why a healthy whole food plant-based diet can bring you so many health benefits and a lot of our focus is on the long-term health benefits and my book certainly breaks that all down in a digestible way but also in a very detailed way but i thought tonight it would be interesting to talk about those first 28 days because sometimes people don't realize that you can really kick start a lot of healthy changes in your body in just those first 28 days the research tells us that you can during those first 28 days of eating a healthy whole food plant-based diet you can kick-start healthy weight loss you can lower your cholesterol significantly you can improve diabetic control reduce intestinal inflammation even generate beneficial shifts within your gut microbiome and reduce your risk of gastrointestinal cancer now throughout my book i give i mean the book is over like 300 scientific references but for tonight's conversation i thought i would just choose six studies that i mentioned in the book that give us an idea of what we can do in 28 days so the first study chuck i'm going to give you was published by dr hans deal way back in 1998 when i was still in medical school so dr deal was had been an instructor at nathan pritikin's institute um where individuals would be calm and be hospitalized and learn about the benefits of a whole food plant-based diet of course famously dr michael greger's grandmother was a patient at the pritikin institute dr deal decided to find out if he could get the same benefits by going out into the community and having a community-based program that would teach individuals to eat what he described as the optimal diet and guess what the optimal diet was chuck can you guess i'm gonna go out on a limb here and say a plant-based diet a whole food plant-based diet so he got 300 residents from kalamazoo michigan and 70 of them were overweight one-third already at heart disease and one half had hypertension high blood pressure so these people needed uh they needed their own plant-based tire revolution so he got them to eat the optimal diet beans greens fruits vegetables legumes and whole grains and in just 28 days without any portion control or calorie counting they dropped an average of six pounds in body weight and we had people moving from obese into overweight and people moving from overweight into healthy body weight in just four weeks and those are big milestones for individuals to cross four uh dr diehl's volunteers way back in 1998 they also recorded significant drops in blood pressure and significant drops in cholesterol in just 28 days and in fact the results were so good chuck as you may know that dr deal went on to found the uh complete health improvement program and since then he and his colleagues have helped tens of thousands of people to make the change the whole food plant-based diet and improve their health and they've published over 40 research papers showing just how effective it is that's study number one just 28 days and and i'll tell you one of the key things just to me as a former overweight guy the fact that you said that these volunteers these participants did not have to count calories any longer i would go out i would go so far as to say that the majority of them had tried to diet previously and all of those diets included counting calories counting points watching your fat intake and that is so tiresome it it just taxes you mentally to the point where it breaks you and it makes the diet unsustainable and so that's when you yo-yo diet you put that weight back on so the fact that the matter is with these this group of individuals on that whole food plant-based diet they didn't have to do it right then and there i can tell you as a former overweight guy that sets them up for success exactly that's so important and that's one of the beauties of a whole food plant-based diet so for example if you're looking to improve your cholesterol and you're taking a different route your gp your doctor may have you only consuming wise meat and only having one chicken breast per day because it's supposedly lowering cholesterol now number one we know that approach doesn't work but number two you're having to measure everything because you don't want too much of that bad stuff whereas on whole food plant-based diet you know everything you're eating everything on your plate is beneficial to your body so that sort of portion control becomes a thing of a past let's uh sorry go ahead chuck sorry i'm just trying to steer the show man and you're doing a good job too let's go ahead and talk about that second study number two of six well actually this is just evidence drawn from my own personal experience because it was very much inspired by dr diehl's work all those years ago so we talked about this before chuck um earlier this year at the very start to 2020 before coronavirus when we were all still feeling optimistic and happy to be in a new decade my friends um local gps myself stephen and david flynn plant-based chefs recruited 150 health care professionals half of whom were doctor the doctors themselves but almost every one of them was eating a standard western diet a kind of standard british diet with meat and dairy and eggs and cream they all pretty much considered them healthy but i promised them with just 28 days of eating a whole food plant-based diet without portion control or calorie counting that they would experience significant health benefits and 28 days later just in those four first four weeks of eating a plant-based diet we saw pretty impressive benefits the individuals the healthcare professionals who were hypertensive so at a high blood pressure dropped their systolic by an average of 14 millimeters of mercury now anyone who's been prescribed blood pressure pills knows that to drop your systolic by that amount you need maybe one or two new pills each day we did it without pills chuck a drop of 13 mil or 14 millimeters mercury among the individuals who had a high harmful cholesterol that's the non-hdl the anthrogenic cholesterol the one that uh clogs up your arteries and causes heart disease and stroke in just 28 days we saw an average reduction of 26.5 so we had at the start of that study um we had about 70 we had about i think about 35 to 40 of individuals had erased or significantly raised harmful cholesterol by the end of just 28 days almost everybody in the group had gotten that number into the healthy range the there was two people who didn't and they were just above the healthy range and in fact one of those individuals was a lady with a class with a condition called familial hypercholesterolemia and she had been told there was nothing she could do about her genetics that she was going to have a very high cholesterol level for her entire life she was a woman in her 50s um so she'd been living with that advice for decades and after just 28 days on a whole food plant-based diet she had almost gotten that number into the healthy range alongside that in 28 days we saw an average weight loss of 3.2 kilos maximum weight loss 9.5 kilos so again we had people in just 28 days people who've been living with obesity for decades suddenly finding themselves far closer to a healthier healthier body weight i'm curious because these were healthcare professionals what were their hypotheses before this adventure began were they skeptical of what it was you were telling them or did they think oh my goodness we're really about to change some stuff here i gotta say many of them were quite skeptical but i'd been given a really um good opportunity i'd been invited to speak at two medical conferences that happened very quickly in a row just a few weeks before christmas last year and i was basically given an hour and a half chuck to speak to groups of senior family physicians and i was given an hour and a half on both occasions and i gave them a guided tour of all the evidence that we see that you and i are so familiar at looking at and hearing about dr bernard's papers the eat lancet report um the broad study from new zealand all of this weight of evidence that shows us how beneficial a whole food plant-based diet can be but which they've just never seen before so when you talk to family physicians about dropping blood pressure reversing hypertension helping people to lose weight and reverse their type 2 diabetes and they've never heard about this stuff before their jaws are on the floor and because they'd never heard about it before they were skeptical but having experienced the benefits for themselves i'm delighted to report that suddenly they most of them got tremendously enthusiastic and even now in the midst of this pandemic when it's become even more important to address these issues perhaps technically a little bit more difficult we still have patience with you know who are going through the same program that's outstanding i love i love the fact that the results continue on into this day and now are being implemented with their patients you know the proof is in the pudding as they say uh let's uh keep moving along so we've got six studies we've talked about two what's the third my friend well you know i love a microbiome study chuck it's my thing you know that love a good microbiome who doesn't love a good gut microbiome uh study particularly me um in fact the got microbial benefits of a healthy approach to food and how that affects our body in its totality is like a thread that runs through the entire book including the recipes we've got 80 beautiful fully illustrated plant-based recipes in there but let's talk a little bit about the gut microbiome now you may be familiar chuck your listeners may be familiar with the term metabolic syndrome now metabolic syndrome refers to three conditions obesity high blood pressure and high cholesterol these three conditions occur together so frequently that doctors call them the metabolic syndrome as if there's something wrong with the individual as if they've got some kind of genetic problem so they have this syndrome it makes it sound inevitable right it makes it fee it makes it sound like the person was born with a problem and the obesity high blood pressure and high cholesterol is just that problem expressing itself but we know that that is just not true in fact the so-called metabolic syndrome is driven by the standard american diet the standard western diet and the evidence showing that is clear so in 2013 a group of researchers in south korea decided to find out if the opposite was true if the standard western standard american diet drives metabolic syndrome could you reverse metabolic syndrome by putting individuals on a healthy whole food plant-based diet so they got a group of volunteers with obesity high blood pressure and high cholesterol and they made the switch from a standard western diet to a whole food plant-based diet these people were consuming about 42 grams of fiber per day they were getting three quarters of their calories from healthy whole carbohydrates again no portion control no calorie counting and what they noticed during those first 28 days was that these individuals lost an average of 10 percent body weight which is a significant amount of weight to lose they noted marked improvement in their blood sugar control and their cholesterol they're getting 70 to the calories from carbohydrates healthy whole carbohydrates and they're eating a cholesterol-free diet so they get improvements in their blood sugars and their cholesterol but even in those first 28 days they recorded changes in their volunteers gut microbiomes that helped to explain these benefits levels of the bacteria we call firm acute bacteria which are associated with obesity decreased while levels of bacteroides species associated with healthy body weight increased and what what they did in this study which was also really interesting was they measured baseline levels of gut inflammation fecal markers of inflammatory reactions in the lining of the gut and in those first 28 days again the baseline levels of inflammation within the gut that these individuals had on a standard western diet came right down so what these researchers had shown that not only are whole food plant-based menu items delicious and tasty and filling they can also help us to reverse them all aspects of the metabolic syndrome while simultaneously improving our gut microbiome and reducing baseline levels of gut inflammation so that's i mean that's a lot 28 days right yeah and and i'm still hung up on the fact that 10 of their body mass lost in those 28 days everybody wants to know how quickly will the weight come off well there you go that is no small amount right there ten percent that's enormous yes absolutely and for someone who's living with obesity or overweight that that can make a real difference and again that's just those first 28 days so it's it's pretty remarkable science right i love that man let's get some more remarkable science what's the fourth study you've got for us well the fourth study is another 28-day study because this is our theme but this is a 28-day study that did something really really interesting so a group of researchers were really interested in 2019 in looking at the effect of different diets on the human gut microbiome and they were specifically interested in tmao so when we eat meat which contains carnitine and eggs which contain choline um our gut microbiome metabolizes these into a substance called tma tma enters our bloodstream our liver turns into tmao and that's a pro atherogenic pro-inflammatory molecule that is known to promote atherosclerosis and heart disease and kidney disease so tmao you want to have low levels in your body you don't want the gut microbiome that makes a lot of tmao so they chose three popular weight loss diets they chose the high fat atkins diet so as you know there's like lots of meat and eggs very few fruits and vegetables people are eating like you know steak and eggs for breakfast they're having bacon wrapped up in more bacon for their dinner so that's the atkins plan right we know what that looks like the second diet that they took was the high protein south beach diet which is kind of like lean meats and fruits and veg and leafy greens but cuts down on the starchy carbohydrates and then the third popular diet that they chose was gladly a whole food plant-based diet so 26 volunteers three different dietary approaches and 28 days now importantly um every single volunteer in this study chuck did 28 days on every single one of those three different there's three different diets and during the 28 days they monitored their calories and body weight so they tweaked it every single day to try and prevent weight loss because they just wanted to look at the gut microbiome and guess what tmao on the atkins diet and the south beach diet the patients recorded rapid and significant boosts boosts in tmao production just one more reason why these diets increase your risk of cardiovascular disease and guess what on a whole food plant-based diet tmao levels dropped rapidly so in just 28 days these volunteers had harnessed the power of their gut microbiome to help protect them from from one of our most common diseases cardiovascular disease which kills 80 million people per year um so again a really fascinating study just 28 days yeah and it's it's really great when you get those head-to-head comparisons of the various diets so you can really weigh the pros and cons for yourself especially when they're these big popular diets like you were just talking about like the atkins diet everybody knows the atkins diet and so many people believe that that is the way to a healthier future but the fact of the matter is you may see short-term weight loss but is that setting you up for health down the line absolutely not as a matter of fact i would say it's setting you up for heartache no pun intended absolutely i agree um in the in the in the book chuck we talk about um within the plant-based diet revolution we talk about the importance of food we talk about healthy gut healthy heart healthy body but also healthy mind and the beneficial effects that eating more plants can have on your mental health so i thought today well during this conversation i should get some data about those first 28 days i mean we know that eating a whole food plant-based diet can benefit your mood and affect dr bernard and his team showed this back in 2007 as you may recall when they went into an auto insurance company and they educated the employees on eating a whole food plant-based diet with bean burritos and all that other good stuff and after i think that was a 12-week study um the uh employees who took part in dr bernard's program were happier and the company was happy too because they're happier employees were more productive employees so everyone was smiling but can you improve your happiness by eating more plants in um 28 days the science is emerging on this i will tell you that in 2019 a group of austrian researchers took a group of volunteers and rather than changing what they ate they gave them these very powerful probiotic mixes of gut friendly bacteria the same bacteria that you get in your microbiome when you eat lots of fiber and eat lots of plants and in just four weeks they were able to demonstrate that on an mri scan the volunteers brain activity changed on mri scan just by you know adding new um gut-friendly microbes to their tummy now in order to really convince you that a plant-based diet can improve your mood and generate what i call the happiness effect that we see all the time when people adopt a plant-based diet i don't have to extend the criteria to 12 weeks is that okay it's yeah man you know what it's all good 12 weeks 28 days the bottom line is it's still a pretty short time frame okay let's go 12 weeks then so in 2017 australian psychiatrists aware of all the studies showing that people who eat more plants tend to have better mental health and even showing improvements in individuals when they adopt a plant-based diet or a plant-predominant diet they recruited 67 adults who had a serious condition these were individuals who'd been diagnosed with clinical depression they randomized the group to either have intensive social support or to go on a healthy eating course so it was 12 weeks of a healthy whole food mediterranean diet emphasizing whole grains fruits vegetables nuts and legumes now after 12 weeks chuck among the individuals who had the social support eight percent had gained remission from their clinical depression among the people who had the healthy eating course 32 percent almost one third had achieved remission from the clinical depression so those psychiatrists um published a paper in the peer-reviewed literature saying if you have someone who's suffering from depression please look at the healthfulness of their diet please get them to eat more fruits and vegetables and whole grains and nuts and seeds because it will help them to recover did they look at what it was about that i mean was it 100 the microbiome or was it the fact that they're losing weight and they're feeling better about themselves overall and that may also be lifting some of the depressive fog that had been following them around you know that's a really good question chuck and the evidence is just emerging on this and those mechanisms are difficult to elucidate right now in detail we know that our brain is intimately connected with our gut through the gut brain axis we know that our microbes um interact with our brain i just told you about this study a few minutes ago we're just getting people to consume you know to change their gut microbiome change their neurological activity on mri but you're right maybe losing weight controlling your blood pressure reducing your risk of numerous cancers and reducing your personal carbon footprint just makes you feel happier but there's also a few other mechanisms which may be involved um when you get rid of the animal products you're get you're reducing your intake of things like advanced glycation end products and arachidonic acid so these are two substances that have been linked to chronic depression and inflammation within your body and you're also taking in a lot of antioxidants which may be helpful also interesting to interestingly chuck we've talked before about short chain fatty acids uh butyrate acetate proprionate these are substances that are made by your gut microbiome when you consume a lot of plants there's been studies done recently showing that these short chain fatty acids which we know get absorbed from the gut and enter the bloodstream are also detectable in our cerebro spinal fluid that's the liquid that bathes our brain and spinal cord so we don't know what those short chain fatty acids are doing in there yet but isn't it fascinating that this product that is made by our gut microbes when we eat plants is in our brain and in our spinal fluid and it's doing something and given that these are the same substances that help our body to maintain a healthy body weight control our blood sugars and reduce systemic inflammation we can only surmise that it is also helping with our neurological health as well as our physical health but that study those studies are in their infancy chuck so those mechanisms remain to be described yeah the younger me would never say that but i will say this loud and proud now science is awesome i love learning about this it is just fascinating um let's see here by my account i believe we've tackled five of the six studies is that where we are do we still have one to go yeah let's do one more so we talked before about colorectal cancer risk a really really important issue and something i'll be speaking um about at icnm2021 so coloretal cancer risk we know that choosing a diet built from a rich variety of plants offers significant protection against colorectal cancer and also against other cancers like breast stomach pancreas and a few others now when we talk about colorectal cancer this is a condition which you know here in the uk where i live and work um 42 000 people every year are diagnosed with colorectal cancer so it's extremely common cancer in the us in the u.s chuck one in 15 one and 15 african american adults may be affected by colorectal cancer during their lifetime whereas we know from good epidemiological data that the same condition colorectal cancer is almost unheard of among populations living in rural south africa and eating a traditional high fiber plant predominant rural south african diet and on a previous episode when we talked about colorectal cancer risk we talked about this study i'm sure you'll remember that where these researchers in pittsburgh took a group of rural south africans and a group of african americans and they looked at their colorectal cancer risk in great detail everyone had their microbiome analyzed everyone had a colonoscopy half of the americans already had pre-cancerous polyps in their bowel none of the african excuse me none of the africans had pre-cancerous polyps growing in their bowel and the americans had a high colorectal cancer risk profile with low production of short chain fatty acids and increased in a thing we call a mucosal proliferation rate and they had a lot of what we call secondary bile acids within their microbiome all of these things are risk factors for colorectal cancer in just 14 days of switching from standard american diet with bacon and roast beef and mashed potatoes and corned beef hash browns and all that stuff in just two weeks of switching to a high fiber traditional south african diet those uh those americans reduced their risk profile dramatically in fact after 14 days their risk profile was as low as the rural africans so there you go you can reduce your colorectal cancer risk profile in just 14 days you don't even have to wait till day 28. just amazing just amazing and i'd forgotten that we had spoken about that study and i remember being blown away then just two weeks yeah how much can change there it's just unbelievable unbelievable absolutely i i believe that paper is called fiber fat and cholera can colorectal cancer risk if anyone wants to google that up it makes fascinating reading we're going to do our best we'll find that and we'll put that in the episode notes we'll make that a one-click uh link there for you make it real easy speaking with dr alan desmond gastroenterologist and author of a plant-based diet revolution 28 days to a happier gut and a healthier you dr desmond do you still have time for a couple of questions oh yeah this is the good this is the best bit questions please let's open the mailbag the best bit uh let's start with the fun one it comes to us from julie she says is it true that changing your gut microbiome can also cause your taste buds to change oh this is interesting so this is kind of like the gut brain stuff that we talked about earlier chuck so can changing your gut microbes change your mind change your behavior change the foods that we consume the real answer to this question is maybe we don't know yet there's i spoke earlier about how the microbes may influence our brain activity we haven't seen any human studies proving that changing our food changes the food we like to eat directly by influencing our gut microbiome which changes our behavior there's been some animal studies done that have addressed this but i'm waiting for the human studies chuck and when i see those human studies i will be posting them on instagram don't you worry i look forward to it next question comes to us from michelle she wants to know what causes leaky gut and how can we avoid it so leaky gut so our gut lining is super important it absorbs all our nutrients it's the home of the human gut microbiome it is exposed to everything you eat all those foods bacteria potential toxins poisons bacteria viruses yeasts our gut lining is exposed to all of this stuff it needs to interact with it on a daily basis it needs to absorb the nutrients so in order to absorb these nutrients and in order to interact with the human gut microbiome which is really important thing that a healthy gut does your gut needs to have a certain amount of leakiness or permeability however when that permeability becomes excess when your gut becomes too permeable when your gut develops what people call leaky gut um then that can become a problem because if your gut is leaky then your immune system is getting over exposed to bacteria over exposed that have got microbiome and overexposed to certain substances and toxins etc that can cause inflammation in your body and we know i mean for example there was a study done earlier this year where we found out for the first time that among individuals are obesity there's microbes from the gut microbiome living in their fat living in their abdominal fat so that's probably um a pretty extreme example of what can happen when you have a super leaky gut now we see increased gut permeability in certain conditions like celiac disease crohn's disease colitis that sort of thing but we also see a little bit of excess leakiness in people who aren't known to have any of these conditions we spoke earlier about the um the study where individuals reversed their metabolic syndrome those individuals had a raised level of gut inflammation even though they didn't have a gut health diagnosis so two things we can do to help our gut to not be so leaky number one is get rid of the processed food get rid of the junk food chuck because things like emulsifiers maltodextrin carboxymethyl cellulose polysorbate 80 these chemicals emulsifiers and preservatives that are put in junk food have no business in the human gut microbiome and they have adverse effects they have two nasty effects they increase the growth of potentially harmful bacteria and they help those bacteria to adhere onto the lining of the gut and make the gut more permeable so get rid of the junk and then number two reducing the animal products things like heme iron the carnitine choline that promote the production of pro-inflammatory tma and also those high-fat foods that generate the production of bacteria that produce secondary bile acids which promote inflammation and even cancer in the lining of the gut are also doing your gut leakiness no favor so get rid of the processed foods cut down on the fats and cut down on the animal products all right one final question here's a question from rebecca and it's an interesting one because you were just talking about cutting down on fats well nuts are naturally high in fat i wouldn't necessarily put them in the junk food category so she's wondering can eating nuts create a healthy microbiome well you know nuts don't just contain fat and when we talk about um these foods any food it's really useful rather than just considering individual components like how much fat how much protein etc just to think about the whole food so if you're eating a few handfuls of nuts each day not only are you getting are you getting some saturated fats you're mostly getting healthy unsaturated and polyunsaturated fats so that's a good thing but you're also getting those fats wrapped up in phytonutrients and antioxidants and fiber and all this other good stuff that we get from plants that helps to keep your gut healthy but yes if you eat a very high fat plant-based diet there is a risk that you could mimic some of the adverse effects that we see from a high-fat animal-based diet now those studies need to be done chuck i haven't seen that evidence yet but i guess in theory if you're eating a very high-fat plant-based diet you might for example start to feed the bacteria that produce secondary bile acids which are carcinogenic so potentially yes but we haven't seen the studies yet but that but that's not a reason to avoid eating some nuts each day they're they're a healthy food they promote satiety they can help weight loss they're really good food so i have like maybe a couple of teaspoons of nut butter most days you know with my breakfast or whatever it's um they're not something to be avoided if you're having just a little bit each day there you go the book a plant-based diet revolution 28 days to a happier gut and a healthier you and dr desmond as you said you will be speaking at the 2021 edition of the international conference on nutrition and medicine and you know what that means sir you know what that means okay you are obligated to come back on this show i wouldn't have it any other way chuck you're a good man well look congratulations on the release of the book we have dropped a link for you to pick up a copy in the episode notes and dr desmond i cannot wait to speak to you again my friend oh youtube chuck it's been a pleasure absolute pleasure

Channel: PLANT BASED NEWS

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Keywords: What a plant based diet does to your body, dr alan desmond, pcrm, dr barnard, reverse disease, before and after, diet, vegan diet, plant based, whole food plant based, plant based news, what a plant based diet doens to your body, plant based nutrition, obesity, type 2 diabetes, waht a plant based diet does to your body, Waht a plant based diet doens to your body

Id: _-V0-hKyfY0

Length: 35min 3sec (2103 seconds)

Published: Sun May 09 2021